Southport tried to become a major shipping port and failed at it twice. The first attempt was the original name change: in 1887, the citizens of Smithville rebranded their town as Southport to attract trade away from Wilmington. The trade did not come. The second attempt was railroad-based and also fizzled. What did arrive, eventually, was something the founders never planned for. Filmmakers found the cypress-shaded streets and white-clapboard waterfront and never left. The North Carolina Fourth of July Festival now draws 40,000 to 50,000 visitors a year, ten times the population.
In 1744, Spanish privateers were raiding the Carolina coast and the British settlements lacked fortifications. Governor Gabriel Johnston appointed a committee to pick a site for a fort at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. France declared war on Britain the same year, intensifying the urgency. The North Carolina General Assembly authorized Johnston's Fort, soon known as Fort Johnston, in April 1745. Construction crawled. South Carolina lent ten small cannons. The legislature appropriated 2,000 pounds in 1748. The fort eventually anchored a settlement, and in 1792, Joshua Potts petitioned for a town next to it. The General Assembly formed a commission, and the new town was named Smithville after Benjamin Smith, a Continental Army colonel who later became governor of North Carolina.
Southport has a humid subtropical climate, with summers that are very hot and humid and winters that are mild even by coastal North Carolina standards. The yearly average temperature is 65.0 degrees Fahrenheit, more like coastal Georgia or the northern Gulf Coast of Florida than the rest of the state. This is the warmest place in North Carolina. The city sits on the northwest bank of the Cape Fear River, about two miles inland from the Atlantic Ocean, which moderates extremes year-round. The State Port Pilot, the local newspaper, has been documenting weather, hurricanes, and town gossip for generations. Live oaks line the historic streets, and Spanish moss hangs from limbs that have shaded sea captains, governors, and TV crews.
Cinespace Wilmington is up the road, and the proximity turned Southport into a recurring screen location. The TV series Revenge and Under the Dome filmed here. The films include I Know What You Did Last Summer, Summer Catch, Domestic Disturbance, Crimes of the Heart, Mary and Martha, Nights in Rodanthe, A Walk to Remember, Safe Haven, and Greedy People, which filmed between May 9 and June 11, 2022. The same waterfront that holds Old Baldy Lighthouse across the river also stands in for fictional small towns from Maine to the Outer Banks. Most production crews shoot the same row of cottages on Bay Street. Most viewers never know.
On the evening of September 27, 2025, a person opened fire from a boat in the Intracoastal Waterway at the American Fish Company in the Yacht Basin. Three people were killed. Six were injured. The suspect was detained at an Oak Island boat ramp shortly after 10 p.m. The shooting ruptured something in a town that had spent its modern life selling tranquility. Mayor Rich Alt and local aldermen demanded expanded mental health services. Governor Josh Stein visited the next day and pushed for a red flag gun law. Police Chief Todd Coring, whose grandfather and father had both held the same job, called it the darkest night of his career. The vigil at Southport Baptist Church drew more than a thousand people.
Southport's roster of native sons and daughters is unusually long for a city of fewer than 4,000 people. Margaret Craighill, born here in 1898, became the first female commissioned officer in the U.S. Army Medical Corps. Abraham Galloway, born here in 1837, escaped enslavement, worked as a Union spy during the Civil War, and was elected to the North Carolina Senate during Reconstruction. Bertha McNeill, born in 1887, became a civil rights and peace activist. Jean Heller, the AP reporter who broke the Tuskegee syphilis story in 1972, grew up here. Peter Hans, current president of the University of North Carolina system, is from Southport too. The city has had two stoplights for most of its modern existence. It has also had an outsized influence on the state.
Southport sits at 33.92 degrees N, 78.02 degrees W on the northwest bank of the Cape Fear River, two miles from the Atlantic. Cape Fear Regional Jetport (KSUT) on Oak Island is the nearest GA airport, about five miles west. Wilmington International (KILM) lies 25 miles northeast. From cruising altitude, look for the small grid of streets between the river and Highway 211, the ferry terminal at Deep Point Marina (Bald Head Island ferry), and the larger Southport-Fort Fisher ferry route across the river to New Hanover County. Old Baldy Lighthouse on Bald Head Island, the Brunswick Nuclear Plant to the north, and the wide brown estuary all serve as landmarks.