site of Dr. Samuel Green’s colonial plantation of the same name. The lake’s spillway along Carolina Beach Road marks the spot where, until the 20th century, the plantation’s mill existed. Wild rice still grows along the railroad tracks west of the lake, evidence that the plantation stretched all the way to the river. Wild rice grows all over the lower Cape Fear, from Wilmington and Bellville to Southport. To passersby on Eagles Island, travel-ing A e between Wilmington and Leland, the remnants of the old rice fields probably resemble marsh grass or cattails. It was on Eagles Island that first Joseph Eagles, then later the state, grew the grain. Eagles’ plantation earned the island its name. The State of North Carolina operated the prison plantations Bleak House and Osawatomie on the island by the turn of the 20th century, using convicts to harvest the crop that was still profitable as long as cheap labor was available. Slavery ended in the Cape Fear in 1865, but prison work gangs made up for the absence on Eagles Island until such modes of punishment and rehabilitation went out of vogue. The planter class formed an oligarchy that ruled the Cape Fear from the very beginning. Wilmington’s rise might be attributable, in part, to the fact that controversial colonial governor George Burrington lost his bid to acquire property, north of the city near Castle Hayne, to the Moore family (who already owned 115,000 acres of the Cape Fear by 1735). In a fit of pique, the governor eventu-ally voided all of the Moore family land patents on the east side of the river and declared that court proceedings would be held at New Town (later Wilmington) rather than Brunswick. The move marked the beginning of Brunswick Town’s 50-year decline seeing the first permanent settlement on the Cape Fear become a ghost town by the time British troops landed there in 1776. A century later, a new war threatened the way of life embraced by the planters of the Cape Fear. Plantations along the river saw soldiers in gray erecting great earthworks to protect the port city that would become so vital to the Confederacy’s hopes between 1861 and 1865. Slaves who normally worked area rice fields and tar kilns were diverted by military edict to shovel sand at Fort Fisher, Fort Anderson and other military constructions in the Cape Fear District. The planters did not like it, but they had little choice in the matter. When Admiral David Dixon Porter’s great Union fleet first assembled off New Inlet on Christmas Eve in 1864 and began the bombardment of Fort Fisher, Sarah Chaffee “Daisy” Lamb, the Rhode Island-born wife of Fort Fisher commander Col. William Lamb, watched transfixed with fear from the back lawn at Orton Plantation. Daisy wrote of watching the shells burst over the sand fort downriver while her husband made his stand with an undermanned garrison. After Fort Fisher fell, a month later, blue-jacketed federals began the march up both banks of the river to capture Wilmington. Along the way, they put many of the region’s plantations to the torch. Orton survived because Yankee doctors chose it to serve as a hospital for their wounded. Fort Anderson as seen from the Cape Fear River during the Civil War. 38 WBM november 2014 e When slavery ended, so too did the business model that made plantation agriculture possible. ... The Civil War ended not just slavery, but also the society it supported. IMAGE COURTESY OF JACK FRYAR
2014-11
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