History with ‘Hud’: How Wilmington’s public transportation evolved from initial horse-drawn street cars

WILMINGTON, NC (WWAY) — Thousands of people use Wilmington’s WAVE transit buses or trolleys each day to get from place to place around the city. But today’s modern transportation vehicles have changed dramatically from the original street cars people relied on for decades in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

Well before the arrival of automobiles or widespread electricity, Wilmington was home to a horse-drawn system of street cars. The Wilmington Street Railway Company launched in 1888 with nearly five miles of track.

But the horse-drawn system didn’t last long, as the Wilmington Electric Street Railway company arrived in 1892, with the assistance of northern financiers. Despite the improvement, the company didn’t keep up with the times, as ten years later no new track had been built, even with Wilmington being the largest city in the state with nearly 21,000 people.

Eventually the Wilmington Electric Street Railway Company merged with the Ocean View Railroad to Wrightsville Beach in 1902 creating a steam line between the two communities. The cars were painted bright mustard yellow and made a clanking noise as they moved along the tracks, with 20 stops along the way to the coast.

The line to Wrightsville Beach was in addition to the tracks which transported passengers around downtown, with more than 1 million passengers using the system the first year. That number grew to 2 million people just five years later after developer Hugh MacRae took over the system.

MacRae moved the main boarding location from one mile outside of Wilmington to the intersection of Front Street and Princess Street in downtown, where the Wilmington Cigar Store was located. MacRae also helped transition the old steam engine to an electric one for the one hour journey to Wrightsville Beach.

When the Carolina Shipyard opened in 1918 to build ships for World War One, the lines were extended again, this time to the ship plant to give builders a way to come and go from downtown.

While the street cars were extremely popular, automobiles began to hurt the business as the 20th century progressed. To offset the loss in passengers, fares increased from 7 cents to 7.5 cents for city fares and 8 cents to 10 cents for Wrightsville Beach fares in 1925.

The street cars would last another 15 years, with one of its most frequent drivers being W.R. ‘Tuck’ Savage, who operated Wilmington’s first street car and would go on to operate one of the last in 1939. But the breakout of World War Two made the steel tracks necessary for the war effort, which were torn up, essentially putting an end to the transportation option.

In the years to follow, small buses with a seating capacity of 16 passengers eventually arrived. They were used for transportation around the city, with a Dodge engine and bodies built by the Stratton-Bliss Company.

But the main public transportation in use today didn’t arrive until 1974 with the launch of the Wilmington Transit Authority. The modern Wave Transit name was adopted nearly three decades later in 2002, which it has remained ever since.

While the early street cars running on tracks built into the roadways are long gone, public transportation remains as important as ever. The history of those early street cars isn’t completely lost, as many of the 16 modern routes follow the same streets they once frequented.