Edited from Preservation North Carolina's Fall 1998 quarterly magazine 

​In 1998 Preservation NC printed a newsletter and it ran the story, “An Unsolved History Mystery.” The staff-written piece examined what was known and not known of the design and function of the Bellamy's carriage house, which was likely built alongside the slave quarters around 1859 and was demolished by the City due to disrepair in 1946. An accurate understanding of the structure’s exterior elevation and fenestration has always been hampered by a marked lack of photographic evidence. While the “magic “ image that shows the structure clearly and in its entirety has not yet surfaced, researchers have found some other enlightening photographic evidence. This imagery coupled with archeological finds gave us a much better idea of how the building looked and worked.

​In reviews of visual information, only obscured bits and pieces of the building peeked out from behind a wall shrubbery and trees. By enlarging and enhancing the contrast of these images, we could accurately project the location of a few windows and doors. Another photograph indicated that the structure was slightly shorter than the existing slave quarters. Based on this general information and the existing 18’x 65’ foundation walls, we assembled the equivalent of a pretty good police sketch of the structure. Some details remained unknown.

Other photographs that surfaced briefly in the 1990s did answer some lingering questions. A descendent of a property owner immediately north of the carriage house was visiting from New Orleans and just happened to have some old photographs taken in the back yard next door. They, unfortunately, did not leave the image for our archive but it showed the back of the building and that its roofline was symmetrical, with parapet steps on the back wall on both the east and west ends. Staff previously assumed that the carriage house was a mirror image of the slave quarters, which is a building with a parapet back wall on one end and flat on the opposite. Another image showed that the second floor of the structure had arched windows, a feature that was assumed, but previously had no evidence to support. Additionally, a lattice fence was apparent in this image. It ran parallel to the face of the entire structure.

It seems possible that in its early years enslaved workers Tony Bellamy and Guy Nixon may have stayed in this building from time to time with the animals and supplies. While we may never learn everything about this structure, staff in the 1990s certainly knew much more than when PNC took on the project. Using this limited but helpful historical information, Preservation NC raised funds for building’s reconstruction as an interpretive/educational center for the site. Costing over $300,000 it was completed in 2001 and still serves as our visitor center. It retains the footprint of the original building, the parapet walls on the roof, and a fake door on the western end mimics what would have existed on 5th St. Unlike the original, we do not keep horses, a carriage, or a cow inside. The current museum restrooms between the carriage house and slave quarters were originally the site of a poultry shed. The back yard featured an herb garden, fig tree, coal chute, cistern and well. It was very much a working space. The back wall between carriage house and slave quarters was rebuilt during the 2001 project. The original wall was partly to keep the compound sealed in. This had obvious implications for enslaved workers on site in the early 1860s as the carriage house, the wall, and the slave quarters had no windows, gates, or doors facing north. That fact prevented unseen escape and, along with those parapet walls on the buildings' roofs, also acted as a firebreak.

The reconstruction of the carriage house on the original footprint in 2001.

In her will, Lina left Bessie her gold necklace set with diamonds and gave $10 to each of her other nieces and nephews. She died on April 6, 1950; her obituary ran the next day in the Wilmington Morning Star.

Preserving the Mansion
After Ellen’s death, there was talk of selling the house to the United Daughters of the Confederacy, but the deal never happened. By then, the carriage house had been condemned by the city and demolished. Most of the furnishings were divided among family members. Serious renovations were needed across the site.

In 1951, Ellen’s nephew Emmett Bellamy and niece Eliza Bellamy Williamson arranged an auction that transferred the property to the next generation — Lillian Maxwell Bellamy and Emma Bellamy Williamson. Decades of preservation work and fundraising followed, culminating in April 1994 when the Bellamy site opened to the public — physically much as Ellen wanted, but reimagined as a museum dedicated to telling the complete story of its past through the main house and adjacent slave quarters.

A Recurring Problem
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​​In a 1947 Wilmington Morning Star article reminiscing on his 42-year medical career, Dr. John B. Cranmer remembers the state of city sanitation. "In 1905 Wilmington was far from a clean city. The surface of the ground was literally one big cesspool. There were 7,000 surface closets in the corporate limits ... When the scavenger carts came around at night to clean these closets, the stench was horrible for blocks around. The water supply of the city - from the Northeast River - was untreated, unfiltered and often contaminated."

​The 'closets' were privies and outhouse toilets, and the doctor further remembers how animals were kept in yards and how flies swarmed in the days before a sewer system or window screens. Unsurprisingly, disease was rife. Cranmer noted, "When Dr. Charles T. Nesbitt, County Health officer, made the bold published statement that 'any one who had typhoid fever had taken something into their mouths that had passed through someone else's bowels,' the town went wild with indignation but they held out their arms by the hundreds for typhoid inoculation." As well as typhoid, hookworm, tuberculosis, malaria, and much else were common.

Historic tunnels were drains
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The 1769 CJ Saulthier map below shows early Wilmington and many of the streams that run from the ridge that is now 5th Avenue down to the Cape Fear River.

​​Wilmington has a series of tunnels, dating from its earliest years. The largest is named Jacob's Run and passes not far from the Bellamy site (read about Jacob's Run in the Star News here). These tunnels run across downtown to the river and have been mythologized as routes for escaping slaves or hideaways for smugglers (visit another Star News story here). More prosaically, however, they were actually culverts for the streams and rudimentary drains.

Hiring out was a common practice that could result in free and enslaved Black workers, including those hired out, appearing together on many types of work in antebellum Wilmington. In fact, enslaved artisans were central to the construction of much of the architecture of the antebellum South across the building trades. A large proportion of these men were hired out as part of an economic system that operated in most slaveholding states. Using North Carolina as an example, the following article explores their work, their experiences, and their often overlooked importance in building American towns. 

The article Hiring Out: Enslaved Black Building Artisans in North Carolina is shared by kind permission from its author, architectural historian Catherine Bishir, and publisher, the University of Minnesota Press. The press publishes Building & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum. 

The article is available for free until the end of August 2025 and can be read through this link: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/911886. After that, should you be interested in reading more from Buildings & Landscapes, or if you want to learn about the Vernacular Architecture Forum, click here for more information: https://www.upress.umn.edu/journals/buildings-and-landscapes/

​​Actual progress happened more than two years later, on June 19, 1865, when U.S. Army troops led by Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston Bay, Texas, where Granger announced and enforced federal orders proclaiming that all enslaved people were now free in Texas -- the last state of the Confederacy with institutional slavery.

Despite its expansive wording, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. While it did apply to enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union, North Carolina did not officially recognize it. And like Texas, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.

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​In Wilmington, NC, with its easy and safe access via the Cape Fear River, the port city was a popular destination for slave ships. Wilmington was actively engaged in slave trading and slave auctions were regularly held on the steps of the county courthouse. Although it lacked the large slave market of cities such as Richmond and Charleston, it still conducted a noteworthy interstate slave trade, according to James Redpath's Roving Editor: Or Talks with Slaves in the Southern States. The firm of D.J. Southerland and James C. Coleman, with a second office in Mobile, AL, was the leading slave trading company in Wilmington in the 1850s and early 60s. The 1860-61 city directory identifies the firm as a "negro mart."

​One of Wilmington's wealthiest citizens, John Dillard Bellamy, was among the largest slaveholders in North Carolina with 115 enslaved men, women and children spread across three eastern counties -- Brunswick, New Hanover and Columbus. His townhome on Market Street was built primarily by enslaved Black artisans and served mainly by enslaved women and children.​​ Bellamy's turpentine operation thrived from the back-breaking work of young enslaved Black men and boys, and his sprawling Grovely plantation on the banks of Town Creek were tended by some 80 enslaved workers. As with other slaveholders across the Confederate states, not a single Bellamy slave was freed as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation. (And, by the way, the proclamation did not apply to slaveholders in the states that remained loyal to the Union!)  ​​

By the end of the Civil War in 1865, over 360,000 enslaved people in North Carolina were freed, thanks to the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified in North Carolina later that year on December 4.​

Interestingly, this was a memory Eliza shared with her family. Ellen wrote: "The Gallows Hill was where the Old Ladies’ Home now is, corner 9th and Princess [there was more than one Gallows Hill over time]; when the sheriff asked what crimes the woman had committed, replied; "'Nothing but killing old Mrs. Bradley' (her mistress). But as the town began to build up, the gallows was moved down to South Front Street, Dry Pond.” ​​

Following these violent events, John Jr. took his seat in Congress. In 1900 a North Carolina constitutional amendment creating a literacy test was passed. It was part a series of so-called Black Codes that disenfranchised Black voters and ended an era of Black political participation. Like most others among Wilmington's social and economic White leadership, members of the Bellamy family believed that life had been returned to "a reign of justice and peace," as daughter Ellen put it, at last.  

Only a few years later, in ​October 1907, the Wilmington Messenger reported the death of Mrs. Eliza Bellamy, age 87, "the oldest living white resident of Wilmington."

In Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, the presence of this tree sets a scene of beauty and tension, “The night was still. I could hear his heavy breathing, and I could smell the heavy sweetness of the magnolia blossoms.” William Faulkner's novels, often set in Mississippi, bring more beauty but often with elements of decay. Flora often sets a scene, such as, “The air was full of the smell of honeysuckle and magnolia and sweet shrub” in The Sound and the Fury. His 1841 essay, The Magnolia at Lake Pontchartrain, is direct, "Nothing at the south had affected me like the Magnolia ... I stood astonished as might a lover of music." In Eudora Welty's The Optimist's Daughter, the blooms become a metaphor, “The magnolia’s white flowers were like ghosts of summer in the tree.” For Zora Neale Hurston in Their Eyes Were Watching God, it's a reflection on femininity and resilience, “She was a wind on the ocean. She had come back with the sun and the magnolia trees.”
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Magnolia grandiflora have also been linked to the interesting idea of witness trees — living trees that have stood through significant historical events. The White House grounds have a number of these. For example, the Andrew Jackson magnolia stood for nearly 200 years until it was removed for safety reasons on April 7, 2025. Another magnolia from a seedling replaced it the next day. Jackson is reputed to have planted the original in memory of his late wife, Rachel, and the tree appears on the back of the $20 bill. 

In the 1800s English folksong "Are You Going to Scarborough Fair," made famous in 1966 by Simon and Garfunkel's version, each herb represents a virtue. Parsley=Comfort. Sage=Strength. Rosemary=Love. Thyme=Courage. These four herbs, native to the Mediterranean basin, were used for centuries to treat a variety of afflictions. Parsley was thought to cure digestive disorders, bronchitis, and cure urinary tract problems. Sage was taken for ulcers, a sore throat, and to stop bleeding. Rosemary was seen as a memory enhancer, relieved migraine headaches, and thwarted nervousness. Thyme was a pain reliever, an antidote for poison, and had antiseptic properties. Even today, thymol, the active ingredient in thyme, is used in mouthwashes, toothpaste, and hand sanitizers.

Nineteenth century Americans relied on herbs for culinary purposes in backyard kitchen gardens, but also as cure-alls because current knowledge of medicine was only in relative infancy. An influential early book on the subject was American Medical Botany by Jacob Bigelow, published between 1817 and 1820. Throughout the 20th century advances in medicine skyrocketed. Penicillin, the first naturally occurring antibiotic drug, became available in limited quantities in 1928. Erythromycin, a sulfa drug combating bacteria, was developed in Germany in 1935. Jonas Salk (in 1955) and Albert Sabin (in 1961) introduced their polio vaccines to Americans. The first measles vaccine was licensed for public use in 1963. Smallpox, one of the world's deadliest infectious diseases, was first vaccinated against by Englishman Edward Jenner in 1796. It persisted, killing some 300 million people in the 20th century alone, but was declared eradicated in the United States in 1980 thanks to the widespread adoption of the smallpox vaccine.

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Dill: Chewing the seed of this herb was said to freshen breath, and the green of the plant was prescribed for new mothers to increase the flow of breast milk.
Hops: We associate this traditional herb with beer making, but it too was considered a medicine. A tea made from hops was used commonly for relaxation and considered helpful for insomnia.
Butterfly Weed: The plant, though not thought of today as an herb by most people, was considered to have a curative use for diarrhea and rheumatism. Its benefit came from the root of the plant.
Lavender: It was used to treat insomnia and as a relaxing agent. Crushed leaves and flower heads were tucked in bed pillows or oil of lavender was applied directly to the specific locations on the head, arms, and feet.

The Wizard’s advertisement lists supposed curative qualities. Active ingredients included: alcohol, camphor, sassafras oil, clove oil, turpentine, ammonia, and chloroform. The company even went so far as to promote its use for cancer. A case was brought against Hamlin’s in Illinois for that cancer 'treatment.' The company was found guilty of false claims and fined $200.

In the beginning, PNC decided that this site should be more of a "museum in a house" than a traditional house museum, which was innovative at the time. Instead of filling space with Victorian ephemera, some rooms are set up as historic vignettes, while others are galleries for rotating art and history exhibits. As a result, the space is dynamic rather than static, and the art shows, family days, lectures, and jazz concerts we host give the community a reason to keep coming back.

Through the years, we've adapted to changing audiences. These days, we offer an accessible, virtual on-site tour as well as neighborhood walking tours. Our self-guided tour features smartphone narration, and written versions are multilingual. Our guided tours use Bluetooth headsets to make sure everyone is able to the hear the guide. We collaborate with teachers across New Hanover County to align our school tours with changing curriculums, and work with neighboring museums on cross-disciplinary programs for the community.

However, the innovation I'm most proud of is the fact that we continually strive to be honest about history. We talk about the history and legacy of both white supremacy and Black achievement. Our daily tours begin the slave quarters and integrate the stories of everyone who lived and worked in the site. We host talks about charged topics like slavery, the Wilmington 10, and the 1898 massacre in the parlor of a house built by enslaved craftsmen for 1898 leaders in front of descendants from all sides of those events. Our volunteers and staff engage in direct discussions about these topics every day, because truthful stories are the most interesting and useful.

Museums like this one provide people with a nuanced, layered understanding of our shared history, which in turn helps to inform our future. We do not and cannot always get the scope and language of social history right. But I am confident that we give it our best shot on a daily basis. We find that almost all our visitors respond positively to a complicated story, truthfully told. One of my favorite quotes is attributed to American anthropologist Margaret Mead. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

For more visuals, including many before and after photos, check out Our Story on our website here.

Below are two video discussions on the 1859, interpreted, urban slave quarters. One describes the building and its restoration. The other highlights urban and rural enslavement and details the builders and workers originally at the site.