Kure Beach is a sliver of place: less than a square mile, stretched along three and a half miles of Atlantic shoreline, narrowing in the middle to a few hundred yards of sand between ocean and Intracoastal. The town sits on Pleasure Island, the barrier strip running south from Wilmington, with Wilmington Beach and Carolina Beach to the north and the Civil War earthworks of Fort Fisher just to the south. The population at the 2020 census was 2,191, which makes summer weekends, when day-trippers from Wilmington pour onto the island, feel like an annual invasion. The town was named for a settler family. The post office has been operating under that name since 1942.

The Kure Beach Fishing Pier is one of the oldest on the Atlantic coast. The first version went up in 1923, four years before Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic, and it has been rebuilt and patched and rebuilt again every time a storm has taken a bite out of it. Surviving a century on this coast is not a passive achievement. Hurricanes Hazel in 1954, Fran in 1996, Florence in 2018, all came through, and each time the pier came back. Locals tend to know which boards are oldest, where the new pilings start, who lost what to which storm. The smell at dawn is the same as it has always been: salt, creosote, bait, and coffee from the pier-house.

In 1934, Dow Chemical and the Ethyl Corporation built a plant just north of what is now Kure Beach to extract bromine from seawater. Bromine compounds were used as an additive in leaded aviation gasoline, the high-octane fuel that powered Allied fighters and bombers. At its peak, the plant employed about 250 workers, and during World War II its output became strategically significant enough that the rumor of a U-boat shelling it never sounded implausible. The plant operated only about fifteen years. Most of the complex was demolished or destroyed in the late 1940s. Some concrete ruins are still findable in the woods, half-eaten by vines, a vanished piece of war industry hidden in plain sight.

Kure Beach is the quieter of Pleasure Island's two beach towns. Carolina Beach to the north keeps the boardwalk and the seasonal noise. Kure keeps the pier, the surf, and a residential calm that is easy to underestimate from a car window. Surfers paddle out at first light. Families with folding chairs and umbrellas claim a few square yards of sand by mid-morning. By late afternoon a long offshore wind starts to push the umbrellas around, and people pack up and walk back to short streets named for trees and old families. The Kure Beach Progressive Association, founded in 1945, brought water, electricity, and a firetruck to a community that had been doing without. Incorporation followed in 1947, and not much has changed in feel since.