Brunswick Beacon
newspaper in Shallotte, North Carolina
The Brunswick Beacon is a newspaper serving Shallotte, North Carolina, the islands of Holden Beach, Ocean Isle Beach and Sunset Beach and other communities in southwestern Brunswick County including Carolina Shores, Calabash, Ash, Supply and Bolivia. With a circulation of about 15,000, the Beacon primarily focuses it coverage on local government, local businesses and events, crime, public schools and local sports. Because of the area's allure to tourists and retirees insistent on keeping up with Brunswick County's burgeoning real estate market, the Beacon boasts paid circulation in 49 states.
History
The Brunswick Beacon was founded by Brunswick County native Robert B. Stanley, Sr. in 1962, following a series of ill-fated publications that served the area dating back to the 1930s. The first publication of what would become The Brunswick Beacon was called Shallotte Press and was dated November 1, 1962. A contest held to name the paper was won by Shallotte businesswoman, JoAnn Simmons.
With the islands nearly vacant in the early 1960s and small pockets of population in the fishing-dominated surrounding communities, front-page news from that period included a local man being stung by a bee, a raid on a local still, and a jailbreak in a neighboring town.
The Beacon was purchased in 1970 by Edward Sweatt, then a partner in Community Newspapers Inc. out of Spartanburg, S.C. Sweatt and his wife, Carolyn, staved off competition from several groups intent on starting a second newspaper in the market and skillfully guided the Beacon through the area's population explosion in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“Brunswick Beacon” enters the record as newspaper in Shallotte, North Carolina. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Brunswick, Beacon and newspaper can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 13, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4979486. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1962 and 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “Brunswick Beacon” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.