On the second Saturday of September, the quiet riverfront town of Belville, North Carolina, will be overrun. From ten in the morning until four in the afternoon, the Brunswick Riverwalk Park at 580 River Road will fill with eyepatches, cutlasses, and jolly rogers as the Feast of the Pirates returns for a full day of swashbuckling mischief along the banks of the Brunswick River. Admission is a modest five dollars per group, and the organizers promise a day built for families: pirate games for all ages, interactive sword-fighting demonstrations, food trucks and artisan vendors, historic pirate encampments, sea battle reenactments, and a "Most Wanted Pirate" hunt that sends young buccaneers scouring the vendor booths for their quarry.
The invasion is the work of the Wilmington Harbor Enhancement Trust, a nonprofit that has been staging pirate events in downtown Wilmington since 2005. In 2017, the organization decided to bring the fun across the river. "We decided this year to bring it across the bridge so that the Brunswick County communities could enjoy some pirate fun and entertainment, and it's a great family event," Stephanie Fornes of WHET told WWAY at the time. The town of Belville was so pleased with the result that it immediately asked WHET to return the following year, and the Feast of the Pirates has been an annual fixture on the Belville riverfront ever since.
The modern festival is a revival of a much older and wilder tradition. The original Feast of Pirates was a spectacle staged in Wilmington in the late 1920s, a Roaring Twenties tourist lure dreamed up by a Wilmingtonian named Francis P. O'Crowley and given its name by James Owen Reilly, an officer of all three feasts. In 1928, some twenty thousand visitors joined nearly every able-bodied citizen of the port city for the celebration, a crowd so large that one participant remarked there had not been so many people in Wilmington since refugees filled the city after Fort Fisher fell during the Civil War. The festivities were a strange and wonderful blend of history and hokum. "George Washington" rode down Market Street to reenact his actual 1791 entry into the city, and an hour later pirates marched up the same street to City Hall, where they clapped local dignitaries in irons and declared three days of "mindless merriment." Buccaneers sailed in from the Sprunt Wharf and fought hand-to-hand with the city's "defenders" — local Coast Guardsmen and sailors — using grappling hooks and smoke bombs in a staged battle. Decorated cars formed a motorcade that traveled as far as Asheville to herald the festival, and Hollywood visitors filmed the proceedings, though none of their footage has ever surfaced.
The original Feast of Pirates burned brightly and briefly. The festival vanished, remembered mostly in photographs and the recollections of old-timers. It was WHET that resurrected the name and the spirit of the thing, first in downtown Wilmington and then, in 2017, on the Brunswick County side of the river.
The Belville edition has grown into a beloved local tradition with a loyal following. By 2023, the event was running from ten in the morning until six at night, packed with vendors designed for the whole family.
The setting is part of the charm. The event takes place at the Brunswick Riverwalk Park along the Brunswick River. WHET, which also hosts a pirate festival in Southport, brings the event to Belville each year.
For the 2026 edition, the organizers have kept the formula that has made the event a hit: a full day of riverfront shenanigans, from the opening of the gates at ten in the morning to four in the afternoon. The "Most Wanted Pirate" hunt sends families on a treasure-style quest through the vendor stalls, while the historic pirate encampments and sea battle reenactments give the day a sense of living history. The five-dollar-per-group admission keeps it accessible, and the food trucks and artisan vendors ensure that even landlubbers have plenty to enjoy.
The Feast of the Pirates is, in the end, a story of resurrection. A festival that burned out nearly a century ago has found a second life on a quiet riverfront park in a small Brunswick County town. It is smaller than the roaring spectacle of 1928, to be sure. But the spirit is the same: a day when the ordinary rules are suspended, when the riverfront is briefly ruled by pirates, and when families can hoist the colors, plunder the booty, and see whether "a pirate's life for me" holds true. On September 12, the pirates will come ashore at Belville once again, and for six hours the Brunswick River will belong to them.