SHELTER NECK UU CAMP

Shelter Neck School, also known as the Carolina Industrial School at Shelter Neck, includes a 39-acre parcel, of which nine acres around a group of buildings is cleared. The complex includes a chapel, the school building itself, a house, an outbuilding, and a gazebo.

Settlement schools like the one established at Shelter Neck were part of a social reform program inspired by the settlement movement that began in London in the late nineteenth century and spread to the United States in the early twentieth century with the founding of Hull House in Chicago. For the Alliance of Unitarian Women, the goal at Shelter Neck was to establish a school and church that would teach “the message of Jesus in all its simplicity and purity.”

For over twenty-five years, the Unitarian settlement school on the banks of the Northeast Cape Fear River enjoyed a stellar reputation for the education it offered local white children. Financial strains, changes in leadership among the Unitarians operating the school, and improvements in local public education and transportation led the Alliance of Unitarian Women to close the school in 1926. For a period, the Pender County Board of Education rented the school building for use as a public school.

In January 1932, the General Alliance of Unitarian and Other Liberal Christian Women, the successor name for the original organization, sold the four tracts making up the school property to the Universalist Convention of North Carolina. Since the 1930s, the Universalist Convention has used the property as a camp, retreat center, and meeting place.

Shelter Neck, was the location of the settlement school established by Boston Unitarians starting in 1900, acquired its name for its location on the “neck,” or dry land situated between the Northeast Cape Fear River and Holly Shelter Creek. The settlement school’s location nearly surrounded by swamps, rivers, and streams, has made it particularly susceptible to flooding for almost its entire history. The first significant inundation came in 1908. More recently, storms in 1999 and 2018 have sent water rushing onto the property. Hurricane Florence in September 2018 produced catastrophic flooding of the site.

While we rehabilitate from the flooding, please visit our website at:

https://shelterneckrecovery.weebly.com/