The Historic Wilmington Foundation celebrated its 50 years on Thursday at the Coastline Conference and Events Center with a fundraiser lunch and a trip down memory lane.
 
More accurately it was a trip down memory plantation, as in the famed Orton Plantation.
 
Nick Dawson has been working at the Orton Plantation in Brunswick County since 2010, as its landscape architect and design manager, and was the luncheon’s keynote speaker. Dawson began work at Orton after Raleigh native and conservation philanthropist hedge-fund manager Louis Moore Bacon bought the property in 2010. Bacon is a direct descendent of Roger Moore, who established the plantation in 1725. He closed on the property in December 2010, for $45 million. It included the plantation home and 8,525 acres.
 
In 1973, the Orton Plantation was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
 
“We are developing a new identity for Orton, one of environmental stewardship,” Dawson, a native of Scotland, explained as he addressed an audience of at least 150 people.
 
As just about anyone who grew up in the Cape Fear region knows, the gardens of the plantation were open to the public for decades, since the previous owner, the Sprunt family, opened them up in the 1930s. In addition, the gardens were available for weddings, private parties, and dozens of films and TV shows that used the property for location shoots.
 
When Louis Moore Bacon purchased the property in 2010, it was closed.
 
Since then, Bacon has spent millions of dollars renovating the area, much of which had been neglected and was badly overgrown. It is Dawson’s job to make Bacon's vision a reality. That includes restoring the massive rice fields and thousands of acres of longleaf pine forest.
 
“We cleared up the rice fields, the forests, and the gardens,” Dawson said, as he showed slides of the dramatic improvements.
 
Much of the land around the plantation now sits with the N.C. Coastal Land Trust, through a perpetual conservation easement. Bacon donated the easement of 6,440 acres in 2014.
 
However, once all the restoration is complete, the gates will not be open to the public the way they once were.
 
“Yes, that question gets asked a lot,” Dawson said after the event.
 
“We still intend to open the gardens to the public, but it has to be for a specific, organized event,” Dawson said. “So it could be a charity open day, we just don’t know. It would have to be a ticketed event. Only after we finish with all the construction, and all the heavy equipment is gone.”
 
Dawson said he wasn’t sure if another bride and groom would ever exchange vows on the property again.
 
Since it’s founding in 1966, the Historic Wilmington Foundation has saved more than 100 historic buildings and estimates that it has educated more than 18,000 third-grade schoolchildren through the Tar Heels Go Walking partnership with public schools.
 
“Wilmington has eight National Register of Historic Places districts and the Historic Wilmington Foundation has played a pivotal role in the creation and designation of all of them,” added foundation executive director George Edwards.
 
Prior to Nick Dawson’s update on the Orton Plantation, local filmmaker Claudia Stack discussed her latest project, Sharecrop, a film focused on the South’s forgotten farmers.

Correction: This version of the story corrects the amount of acreage first purchased by Mr. Bacon in 2010. He purchased 8,525 acres and not 8,300 as originally listed.