Millions of people who watched the teen television drama Dawson’s Creek in the late 1990s and early 2000s are familiar with the screened front porch of Margaret Hummel’s house in Wilmington, North Carolina.
It was featured in many episodes of the show, as was the nearby pier and dock where the show’s characters — Dawson, Joey, Pacey and Jen (played by James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and Michelle Williams) — spent much of their time. Viewers also know the window that Joey climbed through to reach Dawson’s bedroom.
Hummel passed away earlier this year, and her son and daughter are selling the four-bedroom property at 6424 Head Road for $3.25 million. Jill Sabourin of Coldwell Banker Sea Coast Advantage is the listing agent.
While the show brought a degree of fame to her childhood home, Hummel also took great pride in the fact that the house had been in her family since her grandfather built it in 1880. Fans of the show knew it as a home in the fictional Massachusetts town of Capeside. Hummel knew it as “The Pines,” named in honor of the many trees in the yard.
In his younger years, Hummel’s son would often take a boat out from the dock on Hewletts Creek to Masonboro Island, a barrier island between the Intracoastal Waterway and the Atlantic Ocean, as he recounted to Sabourin.
“You’ve got to go back in time 50 years — life wasn’t the way it is today, and these kids had free rein of the whole area,” Sabourin told Homes.com. “There weren’t all the houses there are now. It was like a natural playground.”
As a small child in the early 1940s, Hummel recalled in an account her daughter recorded and shared with Sabourin, she and her siblings would go down to the pier on summer days to catch crabs. Back at the house, her mother would boil them and serve them as part of Sunday dinner.
The property was originally a summer house, and it wasn’t until 1923 that Hummel’s parents made it livable year-round. Hummel installed air conditioning when she became the owner in 1980. Sabourin said the house is considered to be in the “Wilmington Plain” style, which refers to modest, unornamented homes built for the general population rather than the wealthy.
“The prevailing winds come from the southwest, which gives our side of the creek a constant cooling breeze,” Hummel remembered. “On humid summer Sundays, aunts and uncles and cousins would often come out from town to enjoy those breezes. We did a lot of porch sitting and still do to this day.”
Sometime in the mid-1990s, scouts for a new television drama came up the creek, spotted the house and asked Hummel whether they could film the show there. Hummel was able to live there throughout the program’s six years, since a film set elsewhere in Wilmington was used for scenes inside the house.
“The actors were kids; they were unknown when the show first aired. She was out there with them, and they had a good time,” Sabourin said.
The producers also filmed some scenes around the adjacent house, which was Jen’s home in the show.
Aside from the house itself, a few items that viewers might have seen on the show are still present, such as the crab trap transformed into a coffee table on the front porch. The show’s producers rebuilt the dock, which had been destroyed during Hurricane Fran in 1996.
But the ladder Joey clambered up to reach Dawson’s window? That was only in the show.
In more recent years, the property has become a draw for enthusiasts of the show, and Hummel would often give them quick tours. She and her family didn’t discourage these visits until the pandemic.
The ideal buyer, Sabourin said Hummel’s children told her, will be “a steward of the place” who recognizes the house is “far from a teardown.”
The "Dawson’s Creek" memories aside, Sabourin said she wants to share with potential buyers how the house represented an important part of one family’s legacy, as well as that of Wilmington.
“I try to give buyers a sense of the true history of the house,” she said.