Hotels have been a staple of vacations on the North Carolina coast for over a century. Today, there are hundreds of them along the coast, from the Corolla Village Inn near Virginia to the Continental Motel in Sunset Beach, over 200 miles to the south.
Some of North Carolina’s first famous hotels, all of which opened in the early 1900s, included the Lumina Pavilion in Wrightsville Beach, the Atlantic Hotel in Morehead City, and the First Colony Inn in Nags Head. These hotels attracted thousands of tourists each year and shaped the landscape around them. The Lumina gave its name to one of Wrightsville Beach’s main thoroughfares.
But one of the most popular hotels of the early 20th century is all but forgotten. No ancient ruins remain of the Bayview Hotel in the tiny unincorporated community of Bayview in Beaufort County, and no historical markers remain except for an illustration on a small wooden sign.
The Bayview was a unique hotel, a riverside lighthouse that helped establish a tourist center in an area now known primarily for agriculture and fishing.
The tourist hotel boom began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. North Carolina’s beaches had been visited since the early years of the colony, but it was not until the late 19th century that the construction of the railroad and growing industrial prosperity provided a steady flow of tourists. Once they had the money and the ability to reach the state’s beaches, residents of North Carolina and other states came in droves.
In 1921, a travel writer for the New York Tribune noted, “In Wrightsville there is one of the finest white sand beaches I know,” and went on to praise the city’s Lumina Pavilion in the rest of a long article.
Tourism in eastern North Carolina during this period, as it does today, was centered on beach travel, but there were many other scenic areas near the coast that could become tourist destinations. This thought inspired the founders of the Bayview Hotel, a group that included businessmen from Washington, Wilson, and other eastern cities. These men had ties to a variety of industries, especially coastal businesses such as seafood processing.
They spent about half a million dollars to build their hotel on the Pamlico River, 19 miles below Washington and 3 miles south of Bath. The area was largely untouched until then and known more for hunting than other recreational activities. But it had beautiful water views and was a perfect place to sunbathe, swim and relax away from crowds and cities.
Planners made every effort to make the Bayview Hotel an attractive tourist destination. They laid out a large boardwalk with food stalls and a golf course. Steamboats made regular trips between Washington and Bayview. Upon arrival, guests enjoyed modern plumbing, electric lights, and regular dances in a spacious pavilion. A 1927 newspaper advertisement presented Bayview as a center for “bathing, boating, dancing, fishing, and many other amusements.”
The Bayview Hotel thrived for nearly two decades, hosting a number of dignitaries, including longtime Congressman Lindsay Warren, Senate Leader Furnifold Simmons, and then-former Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, the well-known newspaperman and white supremacist.
However, the Bayview faced the same dangers as other hotels of the era, most notably fire. Although extensive masonry was used in the hotel’s construction, it burned down in 1943, just as the famous Atlantic Hotel in Morehead City did in 1933. The loss hit the region hard as the country was in the midst of World War II and there were no funds to rebuild a hotel as large as the Bayview.
After the war, the tourism industry forgot about Bayview and other river towns in favor of the beach. Bayview was bypassed during the construction of interstate highways and could only be reached by the two-lane NC Highway 92, which runs entirely through Beaufort County.
The only significant connection Bayview has today, the ferry across the Pamlico River to Aurora, was not built for tourism but for the employees of the Texas Gulf Sulfur phosphate mine that opened in Aurora in the 1960s. The hotel was never rebuilt. In the decades that followed, the land on which it stood became home to a community called Bayview Townes, whose sign features a painting of the original hotel.
The Bayview Hotel is a symbol of an earlier time, before the era of highways, roadside motels and the state’s mountain-beach dichotomy. It was a time when new business ventures could turn swamps and forests into tourist centers. Thanks to railroads and early automobile travel, the Bayview Hotel was able to play a role in the state’s tourism history that today’s fans of North Carolina’s waterways should remember.
