The Cape Fear Indians lived in this place from at least 8000 BC. By the time European ships arrived, theirs was already an old culture braided with the Waccamaw Siouan. The first European to see the coast was the Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano in 1524, sailing for France; he noted favorable findings and France did nothing with them. In 1526 the Spanish navigator Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon wrecked a ship in the area and moved on. In 1662 a New England expedition under Captain William Hilton arrived seeking land warm enough for a Puritan colony - they named it Cape Fear, settled briefly, and left for reasons no record explains. The Cape Fear Indians themselves, weakened by war and disease, were eventually forced out. The coast sat empty for another sixty years before, in 1726, the first permanent European settlement finally took hold.

The county was formed in 1729 as New Hanover Precinct, named for the German royal house then ruling Great Britain. By the 18th century the Port of Brunswick was the most important harbor in colonial North Carolina, soon overtaken by Wilmington just upriver. The economy was rice, then naval stores - turpentine, pitch, and tar tapped from longleaf pine forests by enslaved African Americans whose labor built the city. The plantation system in New Hanover never matched the scale of Charleston or Savannah - the soil was thin, the swamps too vast - but the trade in human beings ran through the Wilmington waterfront for nearly a century and a half. Enslaved men, women, and children were sold from the foot of Market Street, in sight of the courthouse and the Episcopal church, until February 1865, when Union forces took the city in the closing weeks of the Civil War.

Wilmington in the 1890s was something almost no other Southern city was - majority Black and prospering. A Fusion coalition of Black Republicans and white Populists controlled the city. Three of ten aldermen were Black. The county coroner, the deputy court clerk, the city jailer - Black men holding office. The state's white Democrats organized a violent campaign to end it. On November 10, 1898, a mob of around two thousand white men burned the offices of Alex Manly's Daily Record, the only Black daily newspaper in the United States, then marched through Brooklyn, the Black neighborhood north of downtown, killing as many as sixty Black citizens by the most careful estimates - and possibly far more. By nightfall the elected mayor, the police chief, and the aldermen had been forced to sign prepared resignation letters at gunpoint. New white officials were sworn in within hours. Within two years, a state constitutional amendment had stripped almost all Black North Carolinians of the vote. Wilmington's Black population, once a majority, would never be one again.

Wilmington's economy spent most of the 20th century looking for a new identity. The cotton trade collapsed during Reconstruction. World War I brought brief work in shipbuilding. World War II brought more, and the post-war boom started filling out the suburbs. The University of North Carolina Wilmington, which had opened in 1947 as a tiny junior college for returning GIs, was granted university status in 1969 and now contributes billions to the regional economy. In the 1980s, Dino De Laurentiis built a movie studio in the city. Blue Velvet, Sleeping with the Enemy, Dawson's Creek, One Tree Hill, and dozens of other productions followed. Wilmington became known as Hollywood East. Interstate 40 reached the city in 1990, connecting it for the first time to the interstate system, and the population began to climb in earnest. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated everything - remote workers and retirees flooded in. The county now ranks among North Carolina's top ten for GDP growth and is, geographically, nearly built out.

The county's coast is its identity. Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach, and Kure Beach front the Atlantic. Masonboro Island, an undeveloped barrier strand, is a state reserve. Pleasure Island, Figure Eight Island, and Zeke's Island all sit within county lines. Fort Fisher, at the southern tip, was the last major Confederate stronghold to fall in the Civil War - its capture in January 1865 cut the South's final supply line. The USS North Carolina, a 1941 battleship that earned fifteen battle stars in the Pacific, has been moored across the Cape Fear from downtown Wilmington since 1961, a museum and a memorial. Airlie Gardens, sixty-seven acres of formal gardens around a freshwater lake, dates to 1901 and still draws visitors for camellias in winter and azaleas in spring. The county is small. It is also full.