February 1861: Moving Into the Mansion

Elevation drawn April 20th, 1860 by Rufus Bunnell, assistant architect.

John Dillard Bellamy.

Eliza McIlhenny Harriss Bellamy.

​In February 1861, Dr. John D. Bellamy, his wife Eliza, and their eight children (with another on the way) moved into their new five-story home at 503 Market Street, Wilmington, NC. The Bellamy household was a large and labor-intensive one, with nine enslaved workers living on the site to attend to the family.

Ellen Bellamy, age 8.

Mary Elizabeth "Belle" Bellamy.

John and Eliza’s daughter Ellen, just eight years old at the time, remembered the new house vividly in her memoirs, which were written many decades later. She noted that the house was “complete in every detail and furnished from basement to attic,” including the dining room, kitchen, and other service rooms on the bottom floor to the four high-ceilinged formal rooms on the main floor, four large bedchambers above, and attic chambers and playroom above that. A belvedere atop the roof completed the structure.​​

​Although the family brought with them possessions from their old home a few blocks away, much of the furniture and decorations had come from New York following John and Eliza’s shopping trip to the city in 1860. Ellen tells us that her parents took teenage sister Mary Elizabeth, known as 'Belle', and baby brother Chesley on that trip, “carrying to nurse him, Aunt Betsy Kedar, an old freed mulatto woman, thinking it unwise to take our regular slave nurse as the country was so excited just then on the slavery question.” [The Bellamy’s enslaved “nurse” Joan served as nanny and wet nurse. The term wet nurse in this context means lactating, enslaved women who cared for and nourished babies for a family.]
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​The main rooms glowed with color — flowered carpets in the parlors, mahogany furniture “done up in red silk damask,” and at the immense windows, brass cornices, lace curtains, and heavy silk draperies of red, green, or gold. White marble and black slate mantels framed the fireplaces, and mirrors in gilded frames reflected the gas light of brass chandeliers.

​A complex water system allowed water captured from trough roof gutters to be pumped from a cistern under the back yard to supply running water within the house. The careful arrangement of doors and windows and vents brought cooling breezes from the shaded porch up through the house and out through the belvedere. Separate service zones and a back porch service staircase gave discreet access to the work yard, carriage house, and slave quarters at the rear.

Although free Black and enslaved artisans built much of Wilmington’s architecture at the time, the Bellamy house was singled out by observers as having been constructed principally, if not entirely, by local Black workmen, including carpenters, masons, plasterers and interior finishers. Moreover, to a degree unusual in antebellum construction projects, the names of many of them have been identified. Among them were William Gould, Henry Taylor, George Price Sr. and Jr., Elvin Artis, Alfred and Anthony Howe, and members of the Sadgwar and Kellogg families.

Built on the eve of the Civil War, the Bellamy mansion evoked an image of the archetypal columned southern home, a full-scale rendition of the moonlight-and-magnolia myth. It featured Greek Revival and Italianate styles and was occupied, in Ellen’s words, by the family of a “Southern Gentleman, A Rebel, and a large Slave Owner.”

Ironically, just four years later with the surrender of Wilmington to Union troops on February 22nd, 1865, it became the temporary home to Union generals and their military staffs for the next six months. 
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Sources: The Bellamy Mansion by Catherine W. Bishir and Back With The Tide by Ellen Bellamy.