I Was Here: The Wrightsville Beach Mailbox Exhibit

I Was Here is a pop-up exhibit built from the letters, notes, and artifacts collected over the years from the Wrightsville Beach Mailbox at Shell Island, the mailbox on the north end of the island where visitors have left personal messages since 2003. The journals, letters to lost loved ones, confessions, goals, gratitude, some heartbreaking and some deeply funny, are periodically collected and archived by the Wrightsville Beach Museum of History, and this exhibit brings them together with the history of the site itself. The opening reception and family-friendly cookout runs 5:00 to 8:00 PM on Tuesday, August 4, and the exhibit is on view August 5 and 6 by RSVP time slot, arrive anytime within your slot, with walk-ins accepted unless fully booked.

A centerpiece of the exhibit, curated with the UNCW Public History program, connects the mailbox to Shell Island's deeper past. Between 1923 and 1926, Shell Island was home to a resort developed as a destination for Black beachgoers during segregation, a key piece of the history of Black tourism on the Carolina coast, and the exhibit explores the site as a place of memory and complex emotion, connecting past to present. After visiting, the mailbox itself still stands on the north end of Wrightsville Beach, where anyone can add their own note to be preserved.