Brunswick Town, North Carolina: The Colonial Port That Burned and Was Never Rebuilt

01Why Was Brunswick Town Laid Out in 1726?

Maurice Moore, the son of a former South Carolina governor, founded the town. He received a 1,500-acre grant from the Lords Proprietors in 1725 and laid out the town the following year, naming it for King George I, who was also the duke of Brunswick. The land came first and the town plan second.

The purpose was commerce. Brunswick Town became the colony's chief port for exporting naval stores and lumber, the tar, pitch and timber that British ships needed. The county survey says the naval stores trade, supported by British bounties, was vital to the town's founding. The place existed to move pine products from the Carolina interior onto ships bound overseas.

02Governors, Ballast Stones and a Church Slow to Rise

For a time Brunswick Town carried real weight in the colony. Royal governors Arthur Dobbs and William Tryon both lived there. In 1754 the town began building St. Philip's Church, but "public apathy, monetary problems, and natural disaster" delayed the work, and the church was not finished until 1768. Between 1768 and 1770 the Swiss surveyor Claude Joseph Sauthier mapped the town. His map survives in the British Library and remains one of the best records of the town's layout.

Accounts of the town's size on the eve of the Revolution disagree. One source says it had at least 120 buildings, including 50 or 60 houses, many of them two stories and built with ship ballast stones. That source is a single secondary account, and it adds that the town was already eclipsed by New Bern and Wilmington. In 1775 the visitor Janet Schaw called Brunswick "the best sea port in the province" but "very poor," with "a few scattered houses on the edge of the woods." The two descriptions need not contradict each other, since one is an inventory and the other a traveler's impression. Either way, the town was already losing ground.

03Spanish Ships and Stamp Act Muskets

Brunswick Town's best-documented moments came in the middle of its short life. In September 1748, two Spanish ships anchored off the town and the colonists fled into the woods. Port Collector William Dry III then led 67 men in a counterattack, and one of the Spanish ships blew up.

The town resisted British authority in 1765 and 1766. When the ship Diligence arrived carrying stamps under the Stamp Act, citizens met it with muskets. Several hundred men, at least 500 of them armed, marched to Governor Tryon's residence at Russellborough and demanded the resignation of stamp master Pennington. NCpedia adds that armed colonists seized the customs house in Brunswick Town. The size of the crowd varies by source. One think-tank account puts it at 1,000 marchers, led by George Moore and Cornelius Harnett. In July 1775, according to one account, 500 men gathered in Brunswick Town before marching to burn Fort Johnston.

04What Happened to Brunswick Town?

No single catastrophe ended the town. Disease was one factor, and the county survey cites malaria. A hurricane struck in 1761, and trade shifted toward Wilmington. That rival port was first laid out as Newton and incorporated as Wilmington in 1760, and it quickly outpaced Brunswick Town.

The final collapse came with the Revolution. In 1775, an exodus to Wilmington accelerated amid rumors that the British would burn the town. The "final blow" came in February 1776, when British forces burned it. The town was "razed by British troops in 1776 and never rebuilt," a mostly deserted community that was abandoned after the fire.

The ruins were not entirely empty afterward. Archaeology shows that two or three houses were built on the ruins after the Revolution. When Francis Asbury passed through in 1804, he recorded that four houses remained entire. Abandoned Brunswick Town never became a place people returned to.

05Fort Anderson and the Rediscovery of Brunswick Town

The site had one more chapter as a military position. During the Civil War, Confederate engineers built Fort Anderson over the town ruins as part of the Cape Fear River defenses below Wilmington. It was first called Fort St. Philip and was later renamed for Col. George B. Anderson. The earthworks were dug directly into the colonial town.

For nearly two centuries, the town lay mostly forgotten. In the late 1950s, historian Lawrence Lee located foundations. Archaeologist Stanley South then excavated the site, with work dated from the late 1950s into the 1960s and by one archaeological document to 1958–1968. The digging continues in new forms. A 2019 East Carolina University field school excavated a possible colonial tavern on Lot 29. St. Philip's Church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 26, 1970, and the Brunswick Town Historic District followed on September 6, 1978.

06What Remains of Brunswick Town Today

Today the excavated ruins can be seen at Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site in Brunswick County. The most prominent survivor is St. Philip's Church, whose brick walls are 3 feet thick and 25 feet high. The roof and floors are gone. The site also preserves the remains of other businesses and homes, the excavated foundations that show the original street plan, and the Civil War earthworks of Fort Anderson. Colonial town and Confederate fort occupy the same ground, so the two eras are readable together.

Visitors should expect a place with few intact buildings and much exposed brick. The Brunswick Town ghost town is best understood as an excavated landscape where foundations and walls mark what stood there.