beachbites 19 Grand Hotel Golden Years By MEGHAN BARNES Photography courtesy of the BLOCKADE RUNNER BEACH RESORT John F. Kennedy Jr. slept here. Jerry Seinfeld joked here. Kentucky Fried Chicken icon Colonel Sanders dined here. They’ve all been hotel guests at the Blockade Runner Beach Resort in Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina, which celebrates the big five-o, its golden anniversary, this year. It’s the preferred layover for Hollywood stars while filming movies in Wilmington, but this hotel’s reputation is built on the ordinary stories of repeat guests. On her first day behind the front desk, marketing manager Jenny Yarborough says she overheard a man in his 50s saying something about being separated from his brother as a child in Russia and how any minute his brother, whom he hadn’t seen in forty-some years, would come walk-ing through the doors. This is the place he chose to meet his brother. “The Blockade Runner is more than a hotel,” Yarborough says. “It’s the place where people meet for the first time and fall in love. It’s where they come to grieve after 57 years of marriage, after their husband passes away. For so many people, this is the place where they see the ocean for the first time and realize, just by looking at the horizon, that the world is vast. And each year, they come back to remember and to reconnect with their memories. There aren’t that many places where, in 150 rooms, there is such an array of emotions.” The original Blockade Runner built 50 years ago contained 120 guest rooms, all with a view of either the Atlantic Ocean or Banks Channel, and an elaborate main dining hall, dubbed the Robert E. Lee Ballroom, named after the infamous blockade-runner. All of the hotel’s meeting rooms are named for blockade-running ships that steamed past this part of the North Carolina coast en route to the Cape Fear River and the Port of Wilmington. In an archived Star News article from March 22, 1964 (Vol. 34, No. 30), A Blockade Runner sales brochure from 1971. Note the Lawrence Lewis Jr. writes, “The Blockade Runner is well worth the pride of difference between the shoreline then and now — prior to every citizen. Not only for the influence it will have as a tourist attraction beach renourishment. to our fine beach, but for the teamwork by our business and professional people, by our elected officials and by many other individuals that have made it possible.” One year after it opened, the hotel was upgraded and expanded adding more guest rooms, a coffee shop, convention halls and other mod-ern amenities. In 1971, the property was sold to Four Seasons Management Services, Inc. — owned by a group of doctors led by Dr. Joseph Baggett of Fayetteville and Dr. John Dennis of Maryland. The family business is now owned by their heirs and is operated by Bill Baggett and his sister, Mary Baggett Martin. The rooms, once appointed with mid-century modern décor, have evolved continuously. “Generally, we rehab two floors a year, by changing the furniture, televisions and the styling of the room,” Bill Baggett explains. “We haven’t had to make any structural changes — the structure is and has been completely sound.” www.wrightsvillebeachmagazine.com WBM
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