Qualla: Figure Eight Island

Figure Eight Island: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Original uploader was Clh288 at en.wikipedia, Public domain. There is one way onto Figure Eight Island that doesn't involve a boat: a guarded causeway and swing bridge, the only private bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway in the American Southeast. A uniformed gatekeeper checks your name against a list. If your name isn't there, you don't drive on. Thirteen hundred acres of sand, marsh, and oceanfront house sit on the other side, and the people who own those houses include former vice presidents, Wall Street executives, and Hollywood actors who needed a place to live during the months they were filming in Wilmington. In July 2024, an oceanfront house here sold for $13.9 million, the highest residential sale ever recorded in North Carolina.

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Image: Original uploader was Clh288 at en.wikipedia | Public domain

Figure Eight Island: Phantom and Wild Dayrell

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Willthacheerleader18, CC BY-SA 4.0. Before the gated bridge, before The Hamptons of the South nickname, the waters around Figure Eight were where Confederate blockade runners died. On September 21, 1863, a Confederate screw steamer called Phantom, slipping toward Wilmington with rifle muskets, cannons, lead, whiske...

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Image: Willthacheerleader18 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Figure Eight Island: From Royal Grant to Foy Island

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Steven Cofer, CC BY-SA 4.0. Figure Eight first appears in the colonial record in 1762, during the reign of George III, when the British Crown granted it as part of a larger tract to James Moore Jr., brother of Roger Moore of Orton Plantation. In 1775 it passed to American revolutionary Cornelius Harnett, wh...

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Image: Steven Cofer | CC BY-SA 4.0

Figure Eight Island: How It Became Exclusive

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Indy beetle, CC BY-SA 4.0. Development started in earnest in the 1960s, with the first bridge built on top of a surplus landing ship tank. The island grew slowly, with no commercial buildings, no hotels, no restaurants. Just houses. After Dino De Laurentiis opened his film studio in Wilmington in 1984, a l...

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Image: Indy beetle | CC BY-SA 4.0

Figure Eight Island: Birds, Plovers, Whales

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Indy beetle, CC BY-SA 4.0. For all the wealth piled onto it, Figure Eight is still a barrier island ecology. The National Audubon Society has recorded 104 bird species here. Rich Inlet on the north end is considered the southernmost nesting area for the critically endangered Great Lakes piping plover, a po...

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Image: Indy beetle | CC BY-SA 4.0