Especially during the summers, the family mostly stayed inside. We know that the eldest son went off to Davidson College, a good Presbyterian school back then, and Mrs. Bellamy was a staunch Presbyterian. But there were children in the home in the 1860s, and the home was confiscated by the Union General Alfred Terry, who used it as his headquarters for some months. It must be remembered that Wilmington was the last Confederate port to fall to the Union, and... Read more

The Bellamy mansion was built with tin roofs, which was rather standard for that period… but also noisy when there was hail or a hard rain, never mind a hurricane. The climate in the late Spring through the early Fall was steamy, hot and humid, and so like in Charleston and Savannah you have trees with Spanish moss, as well as lots of crepe myrtles….. Needless to say, in that climate, there was a need for lots of bathing….here’s the... Read more

Much of the work in building the Bellamy mansion (which did lack one thing—- a wine cellar, as Dr. Bellamy was an ardent Methodist teetotaler– which of course means they totally drank tea all the time), was done by African American artisans, who were good at creating crown molding and fancy ceiling work of all sorts, inside and on the porches. Some of them were free blacks who lived in Wilmington, some of them were slaves. Here is the tool... Read more

The tour of the inside of the house is well worth the climbing of four flights of stairs from the basement to the cupola or widow’s watch. While the mansion was designed by a local architect and a designer from New England, the actual building of the house was mainly undertaken by slave labor and some free black artisans, some of them very skilled in creating ornate plaster in the ceilings of the downstairs rooms….. But let’s start in the... Read more

As the name of these posts suggests…. it was about 100F and 100 humidity in Wilmington when were there at the beginning of July. Undaunted we braved the weather and went and visited one of the original inventive homes in Wilmington— the Bellamy mansion, finished in 1861, as the Civil War broke out. Here is a portrait of Dr. Bellamy (a medical doctor, who studied in Philadelphia, but owned a tar, pitch, and turpentine farm near Wilmington by which he... Read more

Wilmington N.C. is the hometown of my mother, Joyce Witherington. And we go every summer to visit her— after all she’s 92 and still hanging in there! My sister Laura also lives there as well. On this trip to that coastal and truly old Southern port city, much like Charleston and Savannah, it still has many beautiful antebellum houses and places to visit. So we decided to take a carriage ride in the old historic district, and eventually end up... Read more

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