History with ‘Hud’: How three Cape Fear beach towns exploded into popular tourist destinations
(WWAY) –Summer officially kicked off on Wednesday, marking the start of more than three months of outdoor activities to come. As the weather turns even warmer, tens of thousands of people are expected to flock to local beach towns to enjoy time by the ocean.
But the most populated beach community in each of the three coastal Cape Fear counties (Carolina Beach in New Hanover County, Surf City in Pender County and Oak Island in Brunswick County) didn’t start off that way.
The area making up present-day Carolina Beach was mostly uninhabited until the mid-18th century. When the Civil War rolled around, the region had just 72 people living there. But the popularity of the area began to soar in the decades to follow, when Captain John Harper began a ferry service to and from the beach town in 1880. A train route was constructed in 1886 to provide easier beach access, with cottages slowly beginning to dot the shoreline.
At the time, the town was known as St. Joseph, named after Joseph Winner, who planned the streets of the 108-acre beach property. Electricity arrived in 1915, allowing seaside amusement rides to pop up during the 1920s near the boardwalk, both of which remain major draws today. As the area grew, the town was officially renamed Carolina Beach in 1925.
Through the 1940s, the population began to explode, until Hurricane Hazel destroyed part of the town in 1954, temporarily halting development. In the decades to come, the area took a downhill turn, with vacant and run down areas. But that began to change in the 1990s, when the boardwalk was renovated, bringing a boom in visitors and turning Carolina Beach into the vacation spot it is today.
Up the coast in Pender County, another beach town has seen major growth since it was first established in 1949. Present-day Surf City was initially developed as a small fishing village with only a few residents. It remained relatively unpopulated through World War II, when the island was used for training purposes. But it was purchased shortly after the war ended and slowly converted into a beach resort.
Access to the island began with a 1941 pontoon bridge built by the military, but was replaced by a steel swing bridge in 1954 as the population increased. That bridge remained in place until the most recent bridge was finished in late 2018. Spanning 3,800 feet, the fixed-span high rise bridge has a vertical clearance of 65 feet, allowing thousands of visitors to descend into Surf City each year.
Oak Island is one of the area’s most recently incorporated beach towns, being established in 1999 from the combining of Long Beach and Yaupon Beach. But the area began with initial settlement by Europeans in the early 1800s. Development kicked off in 1826, with Fort Caswell popping up in 1838.
But Oak Island wasn’t always an island. The 12-mile strip of land was disconnected from the rest of Brunswick County in the 1930s with the completion of the Intracoastal Waterway. The region became popular for fox hunting as the population grew. But Hurricane Hazel destroyed all but five buildings in 1954, washing away 350 cottages that had popped up in the previous decades.
A swing bridge was installed to allow easy access on to the island, but it was destroyed by a barge strike in 1971. A high rise replacement began to be built and opened to traffic in 1975, with a second high rise structure completed in 2010 — allowing for two ways into town.
Oak Island is now visited by 10,000’s of people each year – making it one of the most popular of the Cape Fear’s many thriving beach communities.
