Blast from the past: Lost roads to nowhere

The stretch of Independence Boulevard between Carolina Beach and River roads was long known to locals as Titanium Road, named for an industrial project that failed to materialize. (Photo by Miriah Hamrick)

Editor’s Note: Blast from the Past is a recurring feature where stories from the Cape Fear region’s history are shared. This installment recalls a renamed pair of Wilmington streets, long ago planned in service of industrial ambitions never realized. Today, they mark the entrance to one of the city’s fast-growing master planned communities.   

Independence Boulevard between Carolina Beach Road and River Road is dotted with new businesses and homes, with more on the way. Although the growth along the almost oddly straight, mile-long stretch is recent, the road’s existence goes back decades. It also harkens back to a monumental moment in Wilmington’s history, a moment that had a potentially huge impact that never materialized. 

Decades before Riverlights was built, local leaders had other big plans for River Road. By the mid-1950s, the World War II boom was over for Wilmington, which had seen its population nearly double in just a few years in the early 1940s. The main driver of that growth had been the N.C. Shipbuilding Company, which turned out 243 vessels during its five years of operation and, at its peak, employed 21,000 workers.  When the war ended in 1945, local leaders pushed to keep the shipyard open. With those hopes soon dashed, the Wilmington-based Atlantic Coast Line railroad remained the area’s largest employer and biggest economic engine. The Port City, no doubt, was a railroad town through and through. 

In 1956, however, the city took a huge hit when the railroad announced it was moving its headquarters from Wilmington to Jacksonville, Florida.

But there soon was good news on the horizon. In June 1957 — less than a year after the Atlantic Coast Line announced its pending departure — Wilmington was chosen as the location for a massive facility that would produce products from titanium and employ as many as 4,000 workers. 

A joint venture of industrial giants Allied Chemical and Kennecott Copper, the plant was to occupy a large swath of land along the Cape Fear River, extending from what is now Independence Boulevard four miles south to what is now Sanders Road. 

A banner headline on the front page of the June 11, 1957 issue of the StarNews announced, “Wilmington selected for titanium plant; construction to be started this summer.” A photo showed workers using a drilling rig to take ground samples in preparation for the site’s construction.

In 1957, there was scant development along the seldom-traveled River Road and access was limited. In the wake of the titanium plant announcement, the state highway department built two direct routes from Carolina Beach Road to River Road — one just north of the plant location and one to its south. 

Both were crude, unpaved roads and, interestingly, both were called Titanium Road, even though they had different state road designations. 

In the early 1980s, the southern Titanium Road was paved as part of the construction of Bellamy Elementary and the corridor was renamed Sanders Road in honor of the family that had donated land to the state for the road’s original construction. 

The other Titanium Road would keep its name and remain mostly unpaved and undeveloped until around 2000, when it became the western terminus of the newly extended Independence Boulevard.

Although the road had the unique, seemingly out-of-place name for 40 years, that was the extent of the plant’s legacy. As the hot titanium market cooled, plans for the plant were delayed and eventually dropped completely. It would become perhaps the biggest thing never to happen in Wilmington. And its demise was consequential. The plant likely would have forever changed that section of River Road, making it a heavy-industry corridor rather than home to thousands of new houses and popular places such as the tranquil boardwalk and other entities at Marina Village in Riverlights. 

The roads’ mysterious-sounding twin name long outlasted its original purpose and dropping it was a logical decision. But Wilmington old-timers will likely always remember Titanium Road.