Dow Chemical Plant Ruins
Warning: Government property, no trespassing, area patrolled by military police!
Location: Dow Roads Woods along the Cape Fear River on 'Pleasure Island'
Original Purpose: In 1934 Dow Chemical began extracting bromine from salt water.
There's tales of spirits and spooks and creepy creatures all through the Cape Fear region, but the woods on the west side of Pleasure Island seem to have something extra that makes them magic.
On Dow Road somewhere between Carolina Beach and Kure Beach 'Alice' and her friend parked in a sandy parking area with a wooden sign for Federal Point Methodist Church Cemetery. No cemetery was visible from the road, all they could see was a mossy, sandy path into the dark woods. There was a large yellow barrier blocking any vehicle traffic, which anyone wanting to mourn at the cemetery would need to go over, under, or around. The temperature seemed cooler as soon as they began walking the path. The air smelled of earth. Something ran off through the woods as they approached. It was big. They decided it was a dear. The first signs of the cemetery became visible, the girls see a cracked concrete table sitting crooked in the sand and a rusted and damaged chain link fence. They slowed and became skeptical. They were looking for a historic site. They saw newer tombstones adorned with shabby fake flowers and tattered miniature flags. It was not well taken care of but it didn't seem historic. Disappointment was adding to the gloom of the day. It began to sprinkle and the girls were just about to go back to there car when they saw it. Just to the back of the modern cemetery was a historic plaque, they ran towards it. Alice tripped over an exposed root but landed in the sand with some amount of laughter. They joked about horror movie cliches.
The girls started googling on their phones. The Newton Home site and Graveyard at Federal Point is the oldest archaeological home site of Europeans on North Carolina's islands. Artifacts dating from the 1700's and 1800's have been found there. The graveyard contains markers with well known local names of early settling families. Many tombstones are missing or destroyed. The graveyard is surrounded by woods. The oral history of the area says there was a grave site for people of color as well, today it remains unmarked.
There is a doghouse sized replica of one of the structures that burned in a fire that destroyed buildings and took lives in the early settlement.
Beside the chain link fence between the modern cemetery an the historic one are two graves decorated in seashells and coins and other strange collected things. They are paupers' graves. Donated to those who had no means for a burial. One was a vagabond who ended up in the area and was well loved by the community and the other was a legend,
The Fort Fisher Hermit, a man who'd lived on the island in the middle of the 1900's alone as a hermit. People would pilgrimage to meet with him and hear his philosophical take on the perils of the modern world. (
Click HERE for a post on the Hermit) From the back of the old grave yard there is a sandy path going off into the woods. Knowing the river was nearby, the girls decided to follow the path hoping it would lead to the water. It was still sprinkling every now and then but it was warm and not to much of a bother. The moisture increased the smell of earth in the air.
The River
The girls saw the sunlight before they saw the water. It was shining still to the west. They came to a clearing and saw that they were on a bluff above the river bank. It was about four or five feet and sandy so they jumped down the embankment. The sun was shining off the river. There was a little beach there and they walked along it taking in the sun and beautiful scenery. No other humans anywhere to be seen.
It was so beautiful they got a little carried away and walked a long ways down the beach. Taking pictures of the river and the trees along its shore. They walked along for sometime until they came to a place where they could not go any further. There was an old structure, rusted metal and wooded pilings. It was a retaining wall of some kind. Alice climbed atop and announced that there was water, black and deep on the other side. It was not cross able. There was smoke on the horizon across the water. The girls used Google maps to see what was there.
Sunny Point Military Terminal. They joked about the men in black. They Googled some more.
Dow Chemical. They had heard of the ruins in the woods and the legend of how they came to be. They scurried up the ridge to see if they could see anything else. Nothing but dark woods, the smell of earth, and rustling of some small animal in the underbrush.
More Google.
Into the Woods
They found a picture of the old site. Dow had chosen it because a nearby Carolina Bay made a perfect natural holding reservoir and there was already a trench that had been dug during the Civil War as part of the defenses along the Cape Fear. Using the picture of the old site they decided they'd need to venture into the woods a bit and try to find a way around or over the trench. The woods were dark and dense. The smell again was strong. Earth. Enough smell of earth in the air to almost choke a person. Alice swore she saw a dog. Her friend wondered if it was a coyote. They went into the woods anyway. They were on an adventure and they were determined.
They peered out into the forest, looking for any signs of structures or creatures like the big cats they'd heard prowled these woods. Reassuring each other that it was just legend. Something caught Alice's eye. She tried to use her phone's camera to see what it was without going closer. The picture didn't really help. They decided to cautiously approach. As they got closer they could smell the odor of death. It was a bird. A large bird. To their surprise it was a hawk. It was hanging from an odd low limb of a tree. It had the claws of one foot deep into the wood. Nothing about its position in the woods looked natural. This beautiful bird hanging there to decay and be eaten. Needless to say the creep factor was rising. The rain started back.
The girls were not going to give up. They went deeper into the woods following along the trench.
That's when Alice screamed. A pile of bones were in the path and off to the side was a skull!
The bones were real but the skull, thankfully was a cheap plastic Halloween decoration. It wasn't even close to Halloween. The girls had theories about what they had come across. Maybe it was a ritual of some kind. Witchcraft. Maybe it was just the killing field of a predator animal and the skull was dragged there by mistake. Whatever it was they had finally found the way across the trench just past the bones. It was like a land bridge across the trench. Once across the girls saw thick woods and something colorful. It was their first glance at the graffiti that adorns the ruins.
The girls walked through the tunnels. It was surprisingly colorful. Graffiti covers everything and some mischievous people have created a fairy land with pink and green fiberglass and plastic wands over a bed of bricks, broken and splattered with red paint. The wall above scrawled with a plea to jump in, lay down and get comfy. It started raining harder and the girls sat in one of the tunnels listening to the silence and the rain.
More time to Google. What exactly did they make here? Bromine, used for photography and chemical warfare!? What happened to this place? Officially: It was decommissioned in 1946 when a plant opened in Texas. But ask a local and you might hear the legend about what happened there during WWII. There is very little information about the chemical plant during the war years and the decommissioning and destruction of the structure isn't well documented. A media black out surrounding certain events led to the wide spread belief that there had been a cover up. Locals say that at the end of the war the Nazi's desperate to stop production of chemical agents drove a submarine up the Cape Fear to the site of the chemical plant and fired on the structure, damaging it beyond repair. The area became a part of the Sunny Point Military Terminal's buffer zone after the war. An area protected and patrolled by the military to insure security and safety surrounding the nations largest marine terminal for munitions. Any person wanting to see the ruins for themselves does so at some risk. There are wild animals of course, and there could be some
sketchy people, as well as the military police on atv's and carrying guns. There are also bugs. Lots of bugs. Mosquitoes are everywhere because the ruins have a lot of standing water in low spots. People have come out of these woods covered in hundreds of baby ticks, like specks of dirt crawling up their legs. In the summer there are spiders that build giant webs across the trail at face height, they can be as large as a human hand. This is not a place for the weak or easily frightened.
