all depended on the strong backs and hands of the Africans who built the houses and outbuildings, tapped the longleaf trunks to collect their valuable sap and tended the fragile young rice plants that became the bedrock of the Cape Fear’s plantation economy. By the 1660s slavery was big business. Records show John Vassall dealt in slaves, evidenced by a bond between Vassall and his son-in-law, Nicholas Ware of Virginia, for the services of four Africans. It is almost incon-ceivable that such men, used to a world in which chattel slavery was an integral part, would have come to a virgin wil-derness like the Cape Fear in the mid-17th century without slaves to help with the heavy lifting of founding a colony. By the Revolutionary War, Cape Fear plantations provided some of the most ardent patriots of the struggle for inde-pendence. Cornelius Harnett, dubbed the Samuel Adams of the South, was master of Maynard (later Hilton) Plantation, where the City of Wilmington’s main water treatment plant is located today. Major General Robert Howe, a hard-drinking, womanizing, Cape Fear patriot became the highest ranking Southern officer in Washington’s Continental Army, made his home at Howe Point on the west bank of the river below Brunswick Town. When redcoats occupied the city in 1781, they came armed with blanket pardons for locals who would swear fealty to King George III. The only exceptions: Harnett and Howe, whose zeal for rebellion made them most-wanted men. Greenfield Park, with its lake and plentiful azaleas, is the 37 Top: Orton Plantation as it looked in 1895. Bottom: Carolina rice field in 1895. www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM PHOTO COURTESY OF JACK FRYAR IMAGE COURTESY OF NEW HANOVER COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY
2014-11
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