Much is written about Wilson’s political career, but his younger years included living for several years in Wilmington, NC, where his father, Dr. Joseph Ruggles Wilson, was installed as pastor of the city’s First Presbyterian Church. His experience may well have helped to shape the future president’s personality, views, and character. ​

Pastor Joseph Wilson joined First Presbyterian on November 1, 1874, when his son Thomas was 18. At the time, the prestigious church had about 300 members and among the most prominent were Mrs. Eliza Bellamy, wife of Dr. John Dillard Bellamy, and her family. When the Wilsons moved to Wilmington they were a source of interest and curiosity. Dr. Wilson, reputedly a brilliant preacher, was described as a “man’s man,” who was usually wreathed in smoke from his old fashioned long stemmed clay pipe and who was known to indulge in a toddy from time to time. In 1861 he had been one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church of the United States as the Civil War caused a schism in that denomination. He had also been a minister in Augusta, Georgia and a professor in the Columbia Theological Seminary in South Carolina before moving to Wilmington.

In 1875, according to one biographer, “He [Woodrow Wilson] spent a year at home studying Greek, and living a rather sedentary though not secluded life. He found the circle limited in which he could move with satisfaction. The South was sending few boys to college in those days of the seventies. Their fathers had perished in the war and many of their elder brothers. Much of their property was gone and young men in their teens were needed at home. Tommy fell in with young John Bellamy … And such a friendship sprang up between the two as inevitably arises when boys of like tastes have leisure to devote themselves to each other. It was their habit to take books and go out in the pine woods and read — sometimes aloud to each other, sometimes sprawling on their backs, flipping the pages, chasing the story. So they read through half a dozen of Sir Walter Scott’s novels. They called their excursions ‘reading raids,’ which were really high old intellectual times, and in them the boys went through ‘The Bride of Lammermoor,’ ‘Old Morality,’ ‘Quentin Durwood,’ ‘The Pirate,’ and a few other of Scott’s stories.

Wilson’s official biographer, Ray Stannard Baker, elaborated on the reading outings: “The one friend was John D. Bellamy, a little older than young Wilson, one of the few men in town who had any intellectual interests. Mr. Bellamy recalls vividly reading along Scott’s ‘The Pirate’ with young Wilson. They would walk over to what then was called in those days Delgado Mills, which had been a camp for Confederate troops during the war. There were fine trees about, and the young men would lie on mounds which had been formerly covered by ammunition magazines and take turns in reading aloud.

“Mr. Bellamy says that Wilson was never content with the mere reading of a story. He wanted to discuss it at great length. He wanted to compare characters and make up his mind which he liked best ... Bellamy also remembers the eagerness with which young Wilson discussed various famous men. He admired Cromwell and Gladstone, Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, and questioned why it was that they were great.”

David Bryant, a Black butler who served the Wilson family while they were in Wilmington, also recalled the close relationship of Bellamy and Wilson: “When I wanted to find Mr. Tommy…I would go to his room, and generally he would be sitting with his elbows on his knees and his nose in a book. He just had two friends in those days — John Bellamy and the old Doctor. If he wasn’t reading a book with one, he was talking about the book with another.”

The two young men “haunted each others’ houses” during the summer of 1875 and at times considered their conversation with the girls made them “raging social lions.”
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John Bellamy Jr. also idolized Tom’s father, the Rev. Wilson, but neither he, his sisters, nor his mother had much time for Mrs. Wilson. One time when both the Wilsons and the Bellamys were on a Cape Fear River steamer excursion, Mrs. Bellamy graciously offered to share some of her cake, since everyone on board the boat, except the Wilsons, was enjoying a picnic lunch. Mrs. Wilson almost recoiled in horror and said to Mrs. Bellamy, “I couldn’t eat it for anything — not here on deck!” Mrs. Bellamy took Mrs. Wilson’s response as a personal criticism of her manners and was deeply offended.

In the fall of 1875, Tom Wilson went to Princeton. When he returned to Wilmington during breaks he seemed to have developed a somewhat condescending attitude to the local boys who weren’t a part of the Ivy League picture. He began spending more time with local Princeton graduates and his private shorthand notebook contained disparaging comments about former friends including Alex Sprunt, Jr. and John Bellamy, Jr. He also had changed his tastes while he was in the North and returned to Wilmington as a person who no longer enjoyed Sir Walter Scott’s fiction but preferred Thomas Macaulay’s history. Although he had once been devoted to the Confederacy and its heroes, he now convinced his father not to speak at the Ladies’ Memorial Association Confederate Memorial Day program at Oakdale Cemetery because he had decided secession was wrong. All of these changes in attitudes probably cut into the bonds of what had once been a significant friendship.

Although Wilson still dropped by to see John Jr., he seemed resentful that Bellamy had become a practicing lawyer while Wilson was still in college. Or perhaps Bellamy felt that he had outgrown the highly opinionated Princeton student. We can't know the factors that went into winding down the friendship, but it is interesting to note that when Wilson went off to law school, it was to Bellamy’s alma mater, the University of Virginia.

Wilson’s biographers consulted with the Bellamy family to piece together the life of the President when he was an adolescent in Wilmington. There is little doubt that in the formative summer of 1875, the future president spent a significant amount of time within the bosom of the Bellamy family at the Bellamy Mansion. 

As the Northern anti-slavery movement gained momentum in the 1830s, many of its supporters questioned traditional Independence Day celebrations. Leading abolitionists organized events on the Fourth of July, or the Fifth, to reflect and remind people that, for African Americans, the Revolution’s promise of liberty had not been fulfilled.​ Black communities in the North also began celebrating other dates of significance to the abolitionist cause, such as August 1, 1834, when Great Britain abolished slavery in the British West Indies.

At the invitation of the Rochester Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, he spoke before a crowd of some 600 people at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, NY. In his fiery remarks, he questions the crowd as to why they have asked him, a Black man, to speak on this occasion celebrating freedom in a country where his people are not free, his oration demands acknowledgement of slavery, “the great sin and shame of America.”​

He set about building a mile-long coastal defense with 30-foot sandhill traverses, a 9-foot fence, buried munition chambers, almost 50 major artillery pieces covering land and sea, and as many as 2000 defenders by 1865. As the largest Confederate fort built, it would become known as the 'Gibraltar of the South'. To do this, Lamb used Confederate troops, coopted native Americans, and as many as 500 enslaved workers from the many nearby plantations. ​​

It was not until the end of the war that the Black population, particularly the enslaved, would be afforded the unalienable rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence. Emancipation and Reconstruction enabled Black communities to publicly celebrate their liberty, which they commemorated on both the Fourth of July and Emancipation Day. In most southern cities, they almost exclusively organized Independence Day celebrations while white citizens generally observed the holiday bitterly and without joy.

Of course we’ve all heard those words before, perhaps countless times from the back seats and typically as we head out for summer vacation. It’s a phrase that’s been around for as long as there have been children and cars. But let’s imagine what summer vacations were like for the Bellamy children long before paved roads, let alone cars, even existed.

Grovely and points north and south

“By the time Ellen and John D. Bellamy, Jr. were old enough to appreciate Grovely’s bounty, their family had formulated a set lifestyle geared to the season,” according to local historian Diane Cobb Cashman. “May and June found them at Grovely [a plantation in Brunswick County purchased by their father in 1842]. Then, as the oppressive heat that spawned ‘the sickly season’ [Yellow Fever], as well as the horrible stench that came from neighboring plantations’ flooded rice fields, came upon them, they moved to higher ground at Salem, Red Springs, and Laurinburg or caught the salt breeze at Smithville [Southport] or the Sound for the duration of the summer.” Pittsboro in Chatham County was also “a favorite summer residence for many of Wilmington’s old families.”​

Meanwhile, back in Wilmington...

When in Wilmington, John Bellamy Jr. recalled that as a boy, "my companions and I would go down [to the riverfront] ...where vessels loaded with naval stores would sail to New England, and they would return with shiploads of ice, in large blocks! These were unloaded on elevated platforms and run into ice-houses especially made for that purpose; the boys would eagerly pick up the broken lumps of ice and use it—greatly relished in hot weather!"

Bellamy's assistant architect Rufus Bunnell helps us envision summertime in antebellum Wilmington in several of his diary entries: “Everything droops,” he wrote. “Up climbs the mercury, the heat mastering the old town.”

Summers by the seaside

​Returning to Bunnell’s diary entries, he observed that many Wilmingtonians summered at the Sound “out on the Atlantic coast.” From the early part of the 19th century, well-to-do North Carolinians came to the ocean to escape the summer heat, breathe the salt air, and bathe in the ocean. It was widely believed that the supposedly healthy beach environment protected residents and visitors from the ravages of such diseases as malaria.
The Sounds, including Greenville, Masonboro and Wrightsville, were popular summer colonies for Wilmington residents, according to Historic Architecture of New Hanover County, North Carolina. “Originally intended to be used for rice culture and the manufacture of salt in the 18th and early 19th century, these plantations along the marshes had, by the mid-19th century, become retreats away from Wilmington. 

​"The area near Wrightsville, above the north bank of Bradley’s Creek, was especially desirable. It was away from the swarms of mosquitoes that populated the adjacent regions, and the views across the Hammocks (later renamed Harbor island) and Banks Channel to Wrightsville Beach were as dramatic then as today.” In 1886, Bradley’s Creek was the perfect setting for a new home belonging to Sarah Green and Pembroke Jones to be named Airlie in honor of Pembroke’s family home in Scotland; Sarah dubbed it Airlie-on-the-Sound.
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Meanwhile, just a few miles south in Masonboro, lumber magnate and one of Wilmington’s richest citizens Oscar Parsley purchased a home known as Finian in 1852 (later destroyed by fire in 1931). We know O.G. Parsley as a friend of John D. Bellamy, who encouraged the doctor and his family to join him in Floral College with other families taking refuge from the war. Ellen wrote that “the Parsleys and our family lived most pleasantly together, my two older sisters being devoted friends of the Parsley girls."

Masonboro was also the summer retreat of William White Harriss, Wilmington physician, businessman, and civic leader, as well as his son George. William was Eliza Bellamy’s brother and George her nephew.

By the end of the 1880s, Wilmington and the coastal communities of Wrightsville and Wrightsville Beach had been linked by rail, affording residents of the City access to the ocean and a style of life rare in other areas of the nation. With the construction of Lumina pavilion by Tidewater Power Company president Hugh MacRae in 1905, a day at the beach ended with music and dancing every night on the huge dance floor overlooked by a spectator balcony, and movies once a week.

​“Out of the darkness, the lights at Lumina were dazzling,” recalled Lillian Bellamy Boney, a great granddaughter of Dr. Bellamy, in a 2009 Wrightsville Beach Magazine article. In its heyday, Lumina pavilion was a hot spot for big bands like Paul Whiteman, Cab Calloway, and Jimmy Dorsey [sadly, it was demolished in 1973].
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By the first decades of the 20th century, the automobile had become widespread, and bridges spanned the waterways along the major routes across Hanover County.

Ellen Bellamy certainly witnessed much progress in her lifetime (1852-1946), from travel by horse and carriage, ferries, steamboats, trains and trolleys to cars, buses and airplanes. She said it herself as she wrote later in life: “It is such a pleasure to have [my brother John] during the summer to take his mid-day meal while his family are summering on Wrightsville Beach only a short distance away in these days of fast travel.”

A Different Kind of Summer

​Even after the era of enslavement ended, beach vacations were not necessarily common among Blacks in the south. In fact, Jim Crow laws barred Blacks from visiting the beaches frequented by Whites. That is until 1922 when two African Americans - Rowland and Nathan Freeman - developed a resort called Seabreeze (also known as Sea Breeze or Freeman’s Beach) on the east side of U.S. 421 just north of Snow’s Cut and Carolina Beach.

​Also in the early 1930s, the town of Atlantic Beach - known to some as the ‘Black Pearl' - was formed as a vacation getaway for black families. This small coastal area in South Carolina grew to become a popular vacation destination, and black-owned businesses thrived in this close-knit community nestled in the heart of North Myrtle Beach. Many Atlantic Beach residents are descendants of the Gullah-Geechee people, former slaves from the West Coast of Africa who lived and worked in the coastal area from around Jacksonville, Florida to as far north as Wilmington. You can read much more on Gullah-Geechee heritage here.

There is genius in simplicity and the cistern system is simply genius. In Wilmington, before city water was supplied, the water that fell off your roof mainly fed the wells of your neighbors - and hand dug wells were not very deep, comparatively speaking. The well at Bellamy, for example, was probably no more than 40-50 feet deep, just enough to tap the water table. The water at this depth is not completely free of contaminants and may have even stained pots and pans - especially porcelain. Therefore, clean rainwater would be a great secondary source of drinking and bathing water, as well as irrigation for the plants and hydration for animals on the property.

The Bellamy cistern stored water that flowed from the roof of the house by a system of channels and downspouts on both sides of the house. Catch basins at ground level helped to filter out debris, and the water then traveled through underground drains directly into the cistern. A tightly fitted cover over the top kept out animals, bugs, surface water, and other contaminants.

In her memoirs, Ellen Bellamy identifies “Guy, our butler” as the enslaved worker who pumped the water from the cistern into the large zinc-lined oak tank on the top floor, where the children spent much of their time. A gravity-fed pipe system carried the cold water down into the original bathroom on the floor below for use in bathing. According to architectural historian, Catherine Bishir, to provide hot water, pipes led from the tank to the kitchen boiler in the basement and back up to the bathroom. The flow of water was controlled so that water descending into the boiler forced the heated water to run up to the bathroom as needed. We do not know if the Bellamy cistern had a charcoal filter on it, but some homes in Wilmington did. 

​For the next 50 years, the site operated solely on the well and cistern. The first attempt at a centralized water source in Wilmington was in 1881, at what was called the Clarendon Water Works, but it was intended for firefighting rather than drinking water. It wasn't until 1910-11 that the Bellamy House got city water, when the Hilton Pumping Station was put into operation at the site of the pre-revolutionary Hilton House built by Cornelius Harnett. Currently that site is the Sweeney Water Plant, Wilmington's main pumping station to this day. 

"We had to install a suction line and put in a permanent well pump. We then connected all the irrigation lines to another pump outside the cistern located near the North rear scullery window next to the downspout. This allowed water to be pumped out of the cistern and then pumped again to the individual sprinkler stations."

In addition to saving money on monthly water bills and reusing rainwater for everyday use, cisterns also help decrease flooding and protect our waterways by reducing polluted stormwater runoff. Although the introduction of city-wide plumbing led to decline of these ingenious systems, the city of Wilmington now encourages their use again due to these broader environmental benefits. They offer free resources about using rain barrels and cisterns as stormwater solutions. There is also a city-led “Heal Our Waterways” that provides funding to private property owners for installation of larger cisterns that would benefit Bradley Creek and Hewletts Creek. You can read more about the program at https://www.wilmingtonnc.gov/Services/Stormwater/Heal-Our-Waterways.

Imagine maintaining a home with 112 windows! The majority of those at the Bellamy site are double-hung windows with separate upper and lower sashes raised and lowered by heavy weights inside the window casings on each side. And, they were installed 165 years ago! Over time, wear and tear has caused the sash cords on some of the windows to snap.  

The job of fixing the windows is no easy task. Last year, six windows were targeted for restoration. In the photos shown here, Bellamy Museum volunteer handymen Angelo Cimini and Steve Long carefully removed the exterior window trim in order to take out the original windows. Once the windows were removed, they opened the access panel deliberately built into the window frame that houses the window weights. This system allows the windows to open smoothly and easily by counterbalancing the weight of the sash via a rope over a pulley. When the window goes up, the weight goes down.

The word ambrotype comes from the Greek ambrotos, meaning “immortal,” and typos, meaning “impression.” The name is fitting. These fragile photographs—made on glass and easily broken—were intended to preserve a likeness forever. In their quiet, ghostly beauty, ambrotypes represent a pivotal moment in the history of photography and in how people chose to remember themselves and their loved ones.

Popularity and Historical Context
​The ambrotype was introduced around 1854, when James Ambrose Cutting patented a version of the process in the United States. It quickly gained popularity and remained widely used throughout the 1850s and 1860s. During this period, ambrotypes filled the gap between the earlier daguerreotype and later photographic formats such as tintypes and paper prints.
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By the 1870s, ambrotypes fell out of favor. Newer photographic methods were cheaper, faster, and more durable, making them more convenient for both photographers and consumers. Despite their relatively brief period of popularity, ambrotypes played a crucial role in expanding photography beyond elite circles.

Who Owned Ambrotypes?
​By the mid-nineteenth century, photography was no longer reserved solely for the wealthy elite. Ambrotypes were less expensive than daguerreotypes, making them accessible to working- and middle-class families. For many people, an ambrotype was the only photograph they would ever own.

Farmers, laborers, and their families often commissioned a single portrait to document themselves or their household. Soldiers departing for the American Civil War frequently had ambrotypes taken to leave behind with loved ones, while sweethearts and engaged couples exchanged them as tokens of affection. Children’s portraits were also common, commissioned by parents who wanted to preserve an image of a child at a particular stage in life.

Wealthier individuals also embraced ambrotypes, particularly in the 1850s when the format was considered modern and fashionable. For them, ambrotypes served as both status symbols and tools of legacy, preserving family lineage in a tangible form.

Enslaved People and Ambrotypes
​Enslaved individuals were photographed during the ambrotype era, but they rarely owned these images. Most ambrotypes depicting enslaved people were commissioned by enslavers, often to document what they considered property or to portray enslaved individuals in carefully staged, sentimentalized roles.

Some ambrotypes were created for abolitionist purposes, intended to humanize enslaved people and support anti-slavery efforts, particularly in the North. After emancipation, formerly enslaved people increasingly sought portraits of themselves and their families. These images served as powerful assertions of dignity, identity, and belonging in a society that had long denied them those rights.
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Before the Civil War, enslaved individuals generally lacked the money and legal standing to commission their own photographs. Even when portraits existed, ownership usually rested with the person who paid the photographer. Rare exceptions may have occurred in urban areas, but they were not typical.

Ellen noted "as my father was contemplating this house [on Market Street] she made a drawing of it and assisted Mr. Rufus Bunnell, the architect, in modeling this after that manner." Belle's brother John also noted in his memoirs that her "plan of the building was turned over by my father to James F. Post, contractor and builder." The final design of the Bellamy Mansion, aside from being stylistically similar, is in no way an exact duplicate of the Clarkson home, which fell victim to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman's fiery Civil War march through the South. ​

Belle also had some input into the interior decor of the new house. In 1860, nearing her 20th birthday, she accompanied her parents and infant brother Chesley on their trip to New York City to look at samples of building materials and select furnishings for their soon-to-be completed 22-room mansion on Market Street. Her sense of style may well have figured into the selection of their fashionable new furniture and fabrics.