Most historic house tours march you through the front door, past the parlor and the antique settee, and usher you out before you can touch anything. The Back Door Kitchen Tour does the opposite. On October 10, 2026, a handful of privately owned homes in Wilmington's historic downtown will open their back doors and invite visitors straight into the rooms where people actually live — the kitchens, the pantries, the mudrooms, the messy, working heart of the house.
The premise is simple and a little subversive. Rather than admiring a home as a museum piece, you enter the way the family does, through the service entrance, and get a closer look at cooking and living arrangements across a wide variety of settings. Docents stationed in each home explain its history, its architectural features, its renovations, and the odd quirks that only a resident would know. They also tell the story of each kitchen — how it was designed, why it was laid out that way, and what it took to make a 19th-century space function for a 21st-century family.
The homes on the tour span a range of architectural styles, from Italianate and Victorian to Queen Anne, Georgian, and even mail-order bungalows. Though all have been renovated over the years, many retain original features: heart-of-pine floors, fireplaces, exposed brickwork, and period moldings. The tour runs rain or shine, and it is a walk-up affair rather than a reserved-seat event. Visitors who buy through Eventbrite show their printed or electronic receipt at any tour home to collect a physical ticket and map; those paying cash go to 307 S. 5th Ave to purchase theirs.
What makes the tour unusual is not just the back-door conceit but the organization behind it. The Residents of Old Wilmington, known as ROW, was founded in 1973 by a group of roughly 40 activists who wanted to focus on the problems and opportunities facing people who actually lived downtown. It is a volunteer-based nonprofit composed of residents living between Red Cross and Queen Street, bounded by the Cape Fear River and 8th Street — a membership defined by geography and by the simple fact of living there, not by wealth or pedigree.
ROW's mission has always been twofold: build neighborliness and work for historic preservation and a better quality of life in the historic districts. Over the decades the group has played a visible role in shaping downtown Wilmington, at times sharing costs with the Historic Wilmington Foundation and the city on preservation efforts. It also gives back, providing grant funding to organizations such as the Salvation Army Cape Fear and others in the community.
The Back Door Kitchen Tour is the engine that funds much of that work. ROW launched the tour in 2006, and it grew into the organization's biggest annual fundraiser, supporting its historic preservation grants and neighborhood improvement efforts. Then came the pandemic. The tour went on hiatus, and it did not return until 2023 — the same year ROW marked its 50th anniversary with a golden celebration. When the tour came back, it came back to a neighborhood that had spent three years waiting for it.
That 2023 revival was a homecoming of sorts. ROW president Denis McGarry, known around the organization as "the mayor of ROW," told WilmingtonBiz that the milestone felt like a moment worth celebrating. "It's been 50 years, and we couldn't be happier to be a part of Wilmington and what the Residents of Old Wilmington are doing during this time," he said. McGarry and his wife were not Wilmington natives; they moved downtown as empty nesters, drawn by the ability to walk to restaurants and events. Dave Hendrickson, who chaired the 2023 tour, admitted his wife Eileen "first had to drag me to a Residents of Old Wilmington meeting, but now I am so glad she did." That is the ROW story in miniature: people who arrive as newcomers, get pulled into a meeting, and end up running the thing.
The homes themselves carry the weight of the city's history. In 2024, the tour featured nine homes, including the Smith-Sternberger House at 624 Dock Street, a Neoclassical Revival built in 1891 and restored with unusual care. Its owner, Josh Adams, restored the front porch in 2022, rebuilding a column that had foundation issues and hanging a swing salvaged from his grandparents' home. Seven gas lanterns were installed in 2023 to light the home's three entrances, and the brick walkway was replaced in 2021, leading to a backyard reimagined as an outdoor living room with a patio, firepit, hot tub, and dining area. That blend of reverence and reinvention is exactly what the tour is meant to show: a house is not a relic, it is a place where somebody hangs a swing from their grandparents' porch and then grills dinner under it.
That same year the tour also included the home of Leping and Dan Beck, who felt an instant attraction to Wilmington on their first visit in 2009 — another pair of transplants who came for a weekend and stayed for a life. The tour has consistently featured nine kitchens and, at least once, an award-winning garden, threading visitors through the streets of a district that nearly lost much of what it now celebrates.
There is a quiet argument embedded in all of this. Historic preservation is often framed as a matter of facades — keeping the front of a building looking correct for the people passing by. ROW's tour makes the case that preservation is really about use. A kitchen renovated to cook in, a porch rebuilt to sit on, a backyard turned into a place where neighbors gather: these are the signs that a historic district is alive rather than embalmed. The back door is the proof.
On October 10, 2026, that proof will be on display again, in homes scattered around Front and Market Streets and the blocks beyond. Visitors will step through service entrances into rooms that smell like dinner, listen to docents explain why a kitchen was built the way it was, and walk out the way they came in. Rain or shine. No velvet ropes, no roped-off parlors — just a neighborhood that decided, more than 50 years ago, that the people who live somewhere ought to have a say in what it becomes, and a tour that has been funding that idea one kitchen at a time since 2006.