Cape Fear River · Brunswick County, North Carolina
From an 1840s railroad yard to a guano warehouse the size of a city block, a naval-stores row, and a graveyard of abandoned hulls, Eagles Island quietly supported Wilmington's industrial economy for more than a century. This map, photographic record, and timeline document that history through archival photographs, maps, archaeological evidence, and the research of Sami Kay Seeb and Robert J. Minford.
Research foundation
This project is deeply indebted to two East Carolina University master’s theses that established the essential documentary framework for understanding Eagles Island. Their research provides much of the foundation for the map, timeline, and interpretation presented here.
2007 · East Carolina University
Cape Fear’s Forgotten Fleet: The Eagles Island Ships’ Graveyard, Wilmington, North Carolina
Seeb documented the island’s abandoned vessels, marine railways, shipyards, and maritime archaeological sites. Her thesis remains the principal research source for the Eagles Island ships’ graveyard and its industrial shoreline.
Read the Seeb thesis2012 · East Carolina University
For the Love of Profit: Examining Traditional Capitalism on Eagles Island, North Carolina
Minford traced the island’s broader economic history, including rice plantations, naval stores, cotton facilities, transportation, shipbuilding, land use, and the succession of businesses that operated there.
Read the Minford thesisThe site supplements their scholarship with archival maps, museum and library collections, archaeological reports, contemporary newspaper accounts, and more recent field research. Interpretive errors remain the responsibility of this project, not the thesis authors.
Where the story happened
Eagles Island lies directly across the Cape Fear River from downtown Wilmington, bounded on the west by the Brunswick River. Its position connected rice fields and inland transportation routes with Wilmington’s working waterfront.
How to read the maps: the locator establishes the island’s present-day geography. The 1798 chart shows how an early surveyor understood the Cape Fear River system, but its shoreline and channel positions should not be transferred directly onto a modern map.
A road joined by two ferries
For generations, travel between Wilmington and Brunswick County was a three-part journey: a ferry across the Cape Fear River, the causeway across Eagles Island, and a second ferry—or later a bridge—across the Brunswick River. The route made the island a transportation corridor long before it became an industrial waterfront.
Colonial authorities commissioned Col. William Dry to build a road across Eagles Island in 1764. After Dry’s death, his son-in-law Benjamin Smith completed the causeway in 1791. Minford reports that approximately 200 enslaved people performed most of the labor. The road was about 16 feet wide and two feet above high water, built from logs, ballast stone, sand, clay, and earth, with small wooden bridges over island creeks.
Darby Eagan was operating the Cape Fear crossing by 1769. Travelers reached Eagles Island on a flatboat, crossed the causeway, and boarded the Brunswick River ferry. Postal surveyor Hugh Finlay found the log road badly broken in 1774; difficult ground and irregular maintenance remained persistent problems.
The Brunswick Bridge and Ferry Company was incorporated in 1873 to operate the ferries, maintain the causeway, build toll bridges, and collect tolls. A permanent Brunswick River bridge opened in 1890, eliminating the western ferry leg. After a 1900 fire, the company rebuilt waiting rooms and stables, added safer roofs and an electric call bell, and replaced the oar-powered arrangement with gasoline propulsion in 1907.
New Hanover and Brunswick counties purchased the company on October 1, 1919. The steam-powered John Knox entered service in 1920, followed by Menantic in 1924. The larger vessels transformed an old local crossing into an important automobile route.
The Twin Bridges opened north of downtown on December 10, 1929, crossing the Northeast Cape Fear River to Point Peter and then the Cape Fear River toward Eagles Island. Because the bridges initially charged tolls, the counties continued reduced ferry service. When the bridge tolls ended, John Knox made the final Market Street crossing at 1:15 p.m. on February 6, 1935.
John Knox sank near the former landing in 1937; its remains are archaeological site 0016CFR. The Cape Fear Memorial Bridge opened in 1969, and a new Brunswick River bridge and bypass followed in 1977, leaving the old causeway as a surviving fragment of the island’s transportation landscape.
Sources: Robert J. Minford, For the Love of Profit (2012), pp. 63–71; Claude V. Jackson III, A Maritime History and Survey of the Cape Fear and Northeast Cape Fear Rivers, Wilmington, North Carolina; Cape Fear Museum, “Bridging the Cape Fear River”; and the Town of Leland history.
Before the industrial shoreline
The canals and embankments crossing Eagles Island are not simply drainage features. They are the surviving framework of a rice landscape created through African knowledge, forced labor, and generations of adaptation before and after emancipation.
Tidal rice cultivation depended upon controlling when river water entered and left each field. Enslaved workers cleared wetlands, raised banks, cut canals and ditches, and built and maintained gates and other wooden water-control structures. The resulting system could flood fields and drain them again as the crop required.
West and Central Africans brought experience with rice cultivation and wetland environments to the Americas. Enslavers exploited that knowledge as well as their labor. The wealth produced by rice therefore rested on both specialized African expertise and a system of coercion.
01
Rice work was physically punishing and was performed in wet, mosquito-filled environments. Across the coastal rice region, enslaved people planted, weeded, flooded, drained, harvested, threshed, and processed the crop. The regional “task system” assigned a defined amount of work, but it remained forced labor enforced by violence and the power of enslavers.
02
Minford’s research identifies three island plantations in the second half of the nineteenth century: Hallett, Bleak House, and Osawatomie. Their precise boundaries remain uncertain. Other rice holdings crossed the Brunswick River or formed parts of larger properties, including Belleville Plantation and land acquired by the Navassa Guano Company.
03
Emancipation ended legal slavery, not exploitation. Hallett continued operating for roughly two decades after the Civil War. Black farmers leased part of Daniel L. Russell’s Eagles Island land in the 1890s. In 1902, the Cape Fear Rice Company leased Bleak House and Osawatomie and used incarcerated laborers to harvest rice.
04
Gullah Geechee heritage encompasses far more than agricultural labor. Language, foodways, spirituality, crafts, family life, and community traditions carried African knowledge forward under enslavement and afterward. On Eagles Island, the clearest surviving local evidence is the engineered landscape itself.
The archaeological survey
Mark U. Wilde-Ramsing and Joni Thomas “Osku” Backstrom concentrated on the northern third of Eagles Island, where much of the historic field-and-canal pattern remains intact. They designated this study area the Eagles Island Rice District. It was a focused investigation of the surviving rice landscape—not a systematic survey of the island’s entire 6,000 acres or of the industrial waterfront near the Battleship.
The team followed shallow canals and waterways within the northern rice fields and examined exposed features along their banks and entrances. These confined, tidal passages preserve the remains of the system that once moved water through the fields.
They combined visual inspection from kayaks and other non-motorized vessels with a customized side-scan sonar system designed for very shallow water. Low-tide observations recorded exposed timbers; sonar revealed structures obscured by dark, sediment-filled water.
The two-year project recorded 45 rice-related archaeological structures, including wooden water-control gates, structural supports, bulkheads, levee repairs and possible boat landings. The survey also located a nineteenth-century watercraft.
The surviving timbers and earthworks provide physical evidence of a sophisticated tidal engineering system. Their documentation connects the visible landscape to the knowledge and labor of enslaved Africans and later African American rice workers associated with the Gullah Geechee tradition.
The survey establishes the former fields as both a cultural landscape and an engineering record—not empty marshland awaiting another use. It also provides a documented baseline for preservation and for future archaeological work elsewhere on Eagles Island.
Sources: Robert J. Minford, For the Love of Profit (2012), pp. 37–40; Mark U. Wilde-Ramsing and Joni Thomas “Osku” Backstrom, “Locating and Mapping Archaeological Rice Cultivation Artifacts Associated with the Gullah Geechee Tradition Using Visual Observations and Side Scan Sonar,” Journal of Maritime Archaeology 19 (2024); UNCW, “Excavating Evidence of Early Agricultural Engineering”; National Park Service, “Gullah Geechee Culture”.
The documentary record
These are historical source images—not reconstructed scenes. Each caption identifies the best-supported date, subject, and holding institution; uncertain details are stated as such.
Interactive map
This rebuilt map includes only locations that can be tied to a published site plan, historical alignment, documented landscape area, or confirmed modern reference point. Click a marker to see its location basis and sources.
1730s – 2026
Filter by theme to trace one thread at a time — the railroad's rise and burning, the naval-stores boom and bust, or the slow accumulation of the ships' graveyard.
Goods & trade
Eagles Island's economy was never a single industry. Its warehouses held the largest guano store in North Carolina, its naval-stores row processed the tar, pitch, and turpentine that once made the state the nation's dominant supplier, and its general merchants sold everything from glue and molasses to cotton gins. Cotton moved by rail to the compress warehouses; ships rotted quietly in the shallows once their working lives ended.
"Warehouses, distilleries, railroad shops and sheds, naval stores and other property" — a 1871 petition for a fire engine, describing the density of industry already crowding the island's shore. Cited via East Carolina Digital Collections research memoranda
The naval-stores trade tells its own story of extraction and decline: North Carolina supplied 96.7% of the nation's naval stores in 1870, a share that had collapsed to roughly 21% by 1890 as the longleaf pine forests that fed it were exhausted. By 1913, the industry had consolidated enough to draw a federal antitrust suit against the American Naval Stores Company — organized from two firms that had operated directly on this shoreline.
Methodology & sources
Every site and date above is drawn from the sources below. Historical coordinates are schematic reconstructions, not survey data — see the note at the end of this section.