The story of Wilmington's most popular history tour begins, improbably, with a hole in the ground. In 2017, Hunter Ingram was a staff writer at the Wilmington StarNews when a sinkhole opened at the corner of Second and Market Streets. His editors wanted a quick explainer about what lay beneath the pavement. What lay beneath, it turned out, was Jacob's Run, the most famous of the old drainage tunnels that thread under downtown Wilmington, and readers could not get enough of it.
That short article set off a chain of events that has reshaped how the region tells its own story. Ingram went on to create and host "Cape Fear Unearthed," an award-winning local history podcast for the StarNews, and later moved to the Burgwin-Wright House and Gardens, where he now serves as assistant director. There he launched "Burgwin-Wright Presents...," a podcast that has since been listened to in every American state and dozens of countries. Its second season, "Cape Fear Legends & Lore," is the direct ancestor of the walking tour that now bears the same name.
The tour departs from the Burgwin-Wright House at 224 Market Street, a site that is itself something of a legend. The house was built in 1770 atop Wilmington's first city jail, which dates to about 1744, as a townhouse for John Burgwin, a merchant and planter who served as private secretary to the last two royal governors of North Carolina and as treasurer for the colony. Burgwin was a Loyalist; after breaking his leg in 1775 he returned to England, and his properties were confiscated until he secured a pardon under the Treaty of Paris of 1783. He sold the house in 1799 to Joshua Grainger Wright, whose mother had rented it during the war.
That wartime chapter gave the house its most persistent nickname. Near the end of the Revolution, the British captured Wilmington, and in 1781 Lord Cornwallis occupied the town for three weeks. During that stay he used the house one evening to entertain his officers, drawn by its size, location, and prestige. From that single evening came the name "The Cornwallis House" -- a label the site has carried for centuries. Whether Cornwallis actually headquartered there is exactly the kind of question the tour exists to untangle, and the podcast devoted an episode to it, "Wilmington in the Time of Cornwallis," featuring historian Bert Dunkerly, author of "Redcoats on the Cape Fear."
The season took its structure from a 1956 book, Louis T. Moore's "Stories Old and New of the Cape Fear Region," a seminal collection of local legends and traditions that has shaped how generations of residents understand their past. Each episode revisited a chapter of Moore's book to sort fact from fiction. Moore, described as a tenacious civic leader, preservationist, lecturer, journalist, and local historian, is the guiding spirit of the whole enterprise; the podcast's prologue episode introduced listeners to him and to why his dogged preservation work inspired the season.
The tunnels are the marquee attraction. Jacob's Run and its connecting passages were early means of carrying runoff and sewage from the city into the Cape Fear River, and in the 1800s a growing Wilmington bricked over the primitive drainage systems before eventually replacing them with piping. The arched corridors have long attracted rumors: that they were escape routes for criminals, a passage on the Underground Railroad, or a smuggler's route for pirates reaching back to the Revolutionary War. As the StarNews has reported, none of those claims has ever been proven. The tunnels are not merely lore, either. Part of Jacob's Run collapsed in 1928, again in 1951, and once more in 2017, when a wall gave way after years of being battered by a water pipe, forcing crews to descend and rebuild it before the road could be fixed.
The tour also reaches into corners of the past that are darker and stranger than pirate tales. The podcast season covered the Yellow Fever outbreaks that turned the city into a ghost town, the rebellious age of Prohibition, and a John Canoe Christmas, an episode examining what the holiday looked like for the enslaved people of Colonial Wilmington. The event listing promises a duel over post-Revolutionary War tension among its stories, alongside the tunnels and Cornwallis.
What makes the format unusual is that it is a walking tour built from a podcast rather than the other way around. Ingram's path to it ran through the Old Baldy Lighthouse and Smith Island Museum of History on Bald Head Island, where he worked as an educator after leaving the newspaper, and through years of hosting tours, events, and speaking engagements tied to his reporting. He has described the Burgwin-Wright House as Wilmington's oldest and largest historic site, a 1744 jailhouse serving as the foundation of a 1770s house -- a fitting base camp for a walk through three centuries.
The house itself nearly vanished. By 1930 it was in disrepair and up for sale, and Standard Oil immediately expressed interest in the lot for a gas station. The community and the North Carolina chapter of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America campaigned for seven years and bought the property in 1937, saving one of the oldest structures in the city. It was restored and opened to the public as a museum house in 1951, and since 1952 every fourth-grader in the New Hanover County school system has taken a free annual field trip there.
The "Cape Fear Legends & Lore" walking tour runs ninety minutes and departs from the Burgwin-Wright House at 224 Market Street. Tickets are $25 plus tax, and because the tour is popular, the house asks that guests call 910-762-0570 to reserve a spot. Comfortable shoes and a bottle of water are recommended. The house schedules the walk on select dates through 2026, with an October 9 departure among them.
For anyone who has ever wondered what is really buried under Market Street, or whether a British general actually slept in the old house on the corner, the answer is a short walk away -- and, as often as not, the truth turns out to be more interesting than the legend.