You can’t send any letters to them, but since the 1970s the Carolina Coast has been home to several mailboxes dotted along beaches. The most famous of them is The Kindred Spirit Mailbox on Sunset Beach, featured in several books including the recent Nicholas Sparks’ book Every Breath. However, that isn’t the only mailbox.
There are three mailboxes on Holden Beach, and one located at the end of Wrightsville Beach.
The three on Holden Beach, go by the name the Holden Golden Memory Mailboxes. There is one on the west end, one on the east end, and one in Sailfish Park.
The one in Sailfish park is the easiest to get to as you can drive right up to it. The other two are a little bit of a beach walk, and the one on the west end is located in a gated community.
Wrightsville Beach has its own mailbox. The box was put in place by Bernie and Sydney Nykanen in 2003 along with a bench for mailbox visitors to perch on. The mailbox was vandalized in 2014 and taken out of commission and put in The Wrightsville Beach Museum of History along with over 100 notebooks worth of entries.
A UNCW student group has replaced the original mailbox with another one and it still stands today. The students collect the notebooks and they are archived in the UNCW Library. The mailbox is located at the tip of Wrightsville Beach, near to the inlet that overlooks Figure Eight Island.
While we can’t be sure, we haven’t heard of any other mailboxes outside of the Carolina Coast. It seems this is a tradition that only belongs to the Carolinas.
