Why 300 Miles of North Carolina Never Got a Harbor

North Carolina has 301 miles of Atlantic coastline and not one natural deep-water harbor. Its biggest port, Wilmington, sits 26 miles up the Cape Fear River instead of on the ocean. Here is why. Look at a map of the East Coast and every big state has its great harbor city: Boston, New York, Baltimore, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah. North Carolina has a gap. A thin chain of barrier islands, the Outer Banks, walls off almost the entire coast. Behind them sit shallow sounds a ship can barely float in. In front of them sit the Diamond Shoals off Cape Hatteras, where more than 5,000 ships have gone down since the 1500s. The Graveyard of the Atlantic. In this video we follow the coast from the Virginia line to Cape Fear and find out why the sand keeps moving, why the inlets open and close with every big storm, how Virginia and South Carolina ended up with North Carolina’s trade, and why the state had to dig its ports out by hand: Wilmington up the Cape Fear River and Morehead City through Beaufort Inlet. SOURCES NCpedia, Port of Wilmington Congressional Research Service RS21729, citing NOAA, “The Coastline of the United States” (1975) Graveyard of the Atlantic (Wikipedia, citing East Carolina University maritime research) If you like finding the places the map left blank, subscribe to The Missing Map. Next stop: why Houston’s port sits 50 miles inland. Did you grow up on the Outer Banks or around Wilmington? Tell us what we missed in the comments. #NorthCarolina #OuterBanks #Geography