How has dining culture evolved in Wrightsville Beach and Wrightsville Sound over a century? That was the question Wrightsville Beach Museum of History director Madeline Flagler and historical researcher Elaine Henson wanted to answer.
Henson said during her research, she found the dining scene around Wrightsville Beach began in the late 19th century with hotel cafes along Wrightsville Sound.
“In the beginning, everything was on Wrightsville Sound and Bradley Creek in the late 1800s; that is where people gathered,” Henson said. “In the beginning there were no restaurants; if you ate out, you ate at a hotel.”
Those early hotels with restaurants included the Sea Side Park and Pine Grove House, which emerged in 1884. It was not until 1892, after trolley car tracks extended to the Wrightsville Beach strand, that eateries popped up in hotels like the Hinton Café at the Ocean View hotel. Other hotels on the Wrightsville Beach strand that featured restaurants were the circa 1897 Seashore Hotel and the Hotel Tarrymore, which would later be renamed the Oceanic Hotel in 1911.
One of the many surprises Henson found in the countless newspaper articles, advertisements and other documents she scoured was an unfavorable report on the Oceanic’s sanitation by a North Carolina Board of Health inspector. Henson said the Oceanic received a score of 51 out of 100 after the inspector found the hotel’s water pressure insufficient to flush the toilet on second and third floors, a single communal glass for the water cooler in the lobby, flies in the kitchen and spoiled fish along with a dead fly in his water glass at dinner.
“It has been a lot of fun and a window into what life was like back then,” Henson said.
For research materials, Henson turned to her collection of vintage Wrightsville Beach postcards, newspaper archives from the North Carolina Room at the New Hanover County Library and firsthand accounts from longtime residents like Bill Creasy.
“It has taken a lot of digging and a lot of research,” she said. “My postcard collection has been a tremendous help but, especially with the old places, I had to do a lot of research at the library.”
Henson plans to reveal all of her findings during a presentation at the North Carolina Coastal Federation’s Fred and Alice Stanback Coastal Education Center on Salisbury Street, Thursday, July 24, at 7 p.m. There will also be a reception held that evening across the parking lot at the Wrightsville Beach Museum of History where there will be refreshments and artifacts from some of Wrightsville’s historic restaurants.
Although she has completed an extensive amount of research, Henson said she hopes the presentation will attract more people with firsthand accounts of Wrightsville’s dining history.
“I hope some people will come that have memories of dining experiences that they can share with the group,” Henson said. “I have tried to cover all the restaurants I have information on, but even with that I am sure there are a lot of things I did not include.”
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