Bellamy Mansion Museum — Attraction in Wilmington

The Bellamy Mansion offers self-guided tours on your smartphone and QR codes so you can tour at any time rather than on the hour like the other historical houses. This house does have a free parking lot so that makes it convenient to visit. Again, the house is not handicap accessible for tours but they do offer a video of the history for those who cannot use the stairs, and there are a lot of stairs.

The antebellum house was built in 1861 and is the largest of the three homes at 10,000 sq feet. It has a few architectural styles, from Greek Revival to Neoclassical to Italianate. The buildings you can tour are the carriage house, urban slave quarters, and the 22-room mansion.

I preferred the guided tours over this self-guided one as I like the interaction and hearing the docent explain the history. The self-guided tour did provide some of that and hearing the stories of the black craftsman who built the house and seeing the deplorable conditions they lived. I'm glad this aspect was included instead of trying to be covered up.

I did enjoy going up to the Belvedere as that wasn't a feature I've seen before and it had great views.

Dr. Bellamy's money did not come as a physician but from his plantations, where they made tar, pitch, and turpentine. One year's profit paid for the Bellamy Mansion. The upper floors do not have much if any, furnishings.

The gardens that surround the house are nice. The mansion provides a good bit of history, but I'd take the guided...

Magnificent antebellum house built on the eve of the Civil War by primarily African American artisans. The house, though in the middle of town, has the feel of a grand plantation house with a full Corinthian colonnade. The house can be fully toured from basement through attic and has many beautiful and interesting features. The building is in very original condition and will be of interest to anyone who admires historic architecture. The brick slave quarters are fully intact behind the house. It is interesting that while the house is frame, the slave quarters and reconstructed stables are of brick. The tour of the slave quarters building and the history explained is equally interesting in many ways to that of the main house. It is a rare surviving urban slave quarters and almost unique in being fully restored and open to the public. Dr. John Bellamy was one of the wealthiest men in Wilmington, NC when he had the house constructed. It is interesting that his daughter Belle was involved with the design and concept for the house. The home stayed in the family until the mid twentieth century. Definitely a site well...

The Bellamy Mansion Museum is rather unique in that it is an urban slave plantation with brick slave quarters that are in the process of a full restoration (currently the ground floors are open to visitors). I have visited the Mansion many times; more than a museum, it is a venue for history lectures, banquets, music and so forth. Although it was constructed just a couple of years before the Civil War, tour guides do not shy away from the fact that it was built using wealth accumulated by slaves, and in fact has some incredible plaster work created by slaves. This is "hands on" history at its best - the mansion encompasses a period of incredible upheaval - you can still see cigar burns in the marble fireplace mantles from federal troops housed there during the war. Kids may not remember the whole history lesson but they'll love climbing all the stairs and looking over downtown Wilmington if they make it all the...