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Wooster Street on the south to Campbell Street on
the north, and from the river east to Fifth Avenue.
This page Clockwise from top: St. Andrews-on-the-Sound Episcopal Church. Shell Road leading to Wrightsville Sound, showing second
toll house, circa 1900. Early tarring of county roads in the late teens or early twenties by a process developed by Mr. Dick Burnett,
Superintendent of County Roads Construction. Courtesy of New Hanover Public Library.
continued to expand. The development of
better roadways and railroads, largely built
to support war efforts, made travel in the
county easier and led to the increased development
of neighboring communities. In an
www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM
1886 map of the county, the area around
present day Monkey Junction appears as
Masonboro Township, Ogden is called
Harnette Township, and Castle Hayne is
Cape Fear Township.
The number of significant roads is
triple that of any preceding map, with
major named roads including Tobacco
Plank Road, which follows Market Street;
Wrightsville Road, which appears to
be what is now Wrightsville Avenue;
Masonboro Road; Duplin Road; and
Federal Point Road, now Carolina Beach
Road.
By the early 1900s, Wilmington
had expanded its city limits, and communities
like Winter Park, Wrightsville
Beach, Carolina Beach, Kure Beach and
Wilmington Beach were rapidly expanding.
The old rowboat-drawn river ferries were
replaced with a gasoline-powered ferry in
1907, marking a transition into the modern
era. In the following years, roads were paved
— some with asphalt, others with macadam,
and one, famously, with oyster shells — and
a trolley line began to service downtown
Wilmington to Wrightsville Beach.
The 20th century saw New Hanover
County’s roads become truly modernized.
The first major development was in 1929
when two bridges across the Cape Fear
River and Northeast Cape Fear River were
dedicated. These two toll bridges were
christened during Prohibition, not with
champagne, but with bottles of river water.
The Twin Bridges, as they were called, put
an end to nearly 200 years of ferry service
into Brunswick County and filled in the
last gap in the Atlantic Coastal Highway
connecting Maine with Florida.
As the county grew, so did the need for
another, larger, bridge across the river. In
1969 construction was completed on the