Henson interviewed residents and friends, reviewed old phone book Yellow Pages, vintage post cards, newspaper reports and the collections of Wrightsville Beach Museum of History, the New Hanover County Public Library and histo-rians Bill Creasy and Bill Reaves. Henson found the first dining room and every one that followed. Fussy menus, formal dress and difficult travel for the sake of dining are just some of the surprises Henson dishes up. “It wasn’t like it is today,” Henson says, raising her eye-brows over her reading glasses. “Not at all.” The area’s first restaurants, like most early eateries in what would become the town of Wrightsville Beach, were dining rooms inside two hotels: Sea Side Park and Pine Grove House. They debuted in 1884 not on the beach but on the Wrightsville Sound mainland, Henson points out, because at the time, boats were the only way to reach Ocean View Beach, Wrightsville’s original name. In the late 1880s when Wilmington Seacoast Railroad Co. ran the Beach Car Line from downtown Wilmington’s Front Street to the Hammocks, now Harbor Island, and tracks were extended across Banks Channel to the beach a year later, dining rooms emerged to serve an expanding market. At least four hotel dining rooms dotted the Wrightsville shoreline by the late 1800s. The first was Hinton’s Café at the circa 1892 Ocean View hotel, Henson says. A September 1892 Wilmington Messenger article congratulates owners E.L. and J.H. Hinton for having the summer season’s most successful res-taurant. Henson says the Hintons also ran accommodations in Wilmington and Carolina Beach. The article extolls, “the unrivaled manner in which soft shell crabs, deviled crabs, picked crabs, shrimps, pigfish, clam chowder, etc., has been served to the delegation of epicurean visitors to the seashore.” Significant is the article’s mention of the Ocean View man-ager — not a man, as might be expected in the period’s male-dominated working world, but a woman, “Mrs. W.E. Mayo, proprietress,” Henson says. Wrightsville Beach Museum executive director Madeline Flagler agrees. 78 WBM july 2014 Women not only managed hotel restaurants. They owned and operated popular early and mid-1900s guest houses, where lodgers slept upstairs and took dinner downstairs. “It was one of the things a woman could do with a family if her husband passed away,” Flagler says. “It was something you could do and do well and still have a real life.” Guest cottages were common, but grand hotels clustered near the Banks Channel bridge garnered attention for elite menus and dining events. Whether tour-ists lodged in the hotels or came just for the day, it was the norm to dine at hotel restaurants, Henson says. Two hundred people attended the 1897 Seashore Hotel debut dinner featuring 32 selections including Broiled Summer Trout with Parsley Sauce, Pommes Parisienne, Lemon Pie and Macaroons. An American history-themed 1912 Independence Day menu offered Plymouth Rockfish with Lexington Sauce, Calf Brains à la George IV and Saltines with Young American Cheese. A pack of 10 meal tickets for $5 entitled Hotel Tarrymoore guests to “cuisine unsurpassed,” according to a 1905 advertise-ment. Tarrymoore opened that year, was later renovated and then reintroduced in spring 1911 as the magnificent peaked and electric-light-strung Oceanic. Bills of fare reflected elegant French cuisine that characterized the area’s menus. Still, humble, local favorites (broiled Spanish mackerel, clam fritters, candied sweet potatoes, corn on the cob) were served, too. Despite tony cuisine and posh dining rooms, restaurants suf-fered behind-the-scenes challenges. Fresh food was not trendy, as today, but mandatory. Lack of refrigeration required frequent train and, after 1902, trolley deliv-eries of ice and provisions. On August 11, 1897, the Wilmington Messenger reports “there is no more popular place” as Hinton’s Café serving “soft shell crabs, deviled crabs, picked crabs, shrimps, pig fish, clam chowder, etc.” in the Ocean View House at Ocean View Beach. The Landis, centrally located on the oceanfront, advertising “spic and span accommodations, completely equipped with beauty rests, serving cuisine to the queen’s taste,” was owned and operated by Mrs. C. M. Landis, Wrightsville Beach, NC.
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