Beaufort, NC — Historic Waterfront, Working Harbor, Wild Horses Across the Water

What Actually Makes Beaufort Different

Beaufort is not a beach town in the usual sense this site covers -- it has no ocean-facing strand of its own. It's a working waterfront town on Taylor's Creek, a tidal sound-side channel that separates the historic downtown from the Rachel Carson Reserve, a cluster of undeveloped marsh islands managed by the North Carolina Coastal Reserve program. The town was settled in 1709 and incorporated by an act of the North Carolina General Assembly in 1723, making it the third-oldest town in the state after Bath and Edenton. Its historic core -- laid out in 1713 on the site of a former Native American village -- is a genuine 12-block National Register Historic District, listed May 6, 1974, with more than 100 contributing 18th- and 19th-century structures. The oldest of them, the Hammock House on Front Street, dates to around 1698 and carries a local legend connecting it to the pirate Blackbeard, whose flagship Queen Anne's Revenge famously ran aground at Beaufort Inlet on June 10, 1718. The wreck sat undiscovered until 1996, when it was located by the private survey firm Intersal, Inc., and it is now itself listed on the National Register of Historic Places, with recovered artifacts on permanent display at the North Carolina Maritime Museum on Front Street -- a museum whose admission is free.

Directly across Taylor's Creek from the downtown boardwalk sits the Rachel Carson Reserve, a complex of small islands between the mouths of the Newport and North Rivers. It has its own small herd of feral horses, introduced to the site by a local physician in the 1940s -- genetically and administratively a separate population from the more famous herd on Shackleford Banks. Water taxis leave from Front Street for the roughly 10-minute ride out, with departures as frequent as every 15 minutes in peak summer months. A short ferry ride farther out reaches Shackleford Banks itself, a 9-mile undeveloped barrier island forming the southern end of Cape Lookout National Seashore, part of the National Park Service system. Shackleford's herd -- 119 horses as of the 2024 count, against a legislated target range of 120 to 130 -- is federally protected under the Shackleford Banks Wild Horses Protection Act of 1998 and jointly managed by the National Park Service and the nonprofit Foundation for Shackleford Horses; visitors are required to stay at least 50 feet away. The island was inhabited until 1899, when the San Ciriaco hurricane -- a Category 3 storm with gusts reported near 140 mph and a storm surge near 10 feet -- swept away nearly every house in the fishing village of Diamond City, and residents relocated their homes by barge to Harkers Island, Salter Path, and Morehead City over the following few years.

Beaufort's economy and civic life still run through the water in ways that are unusually concrete for a town this size. Pivers Island, just off the Beaufort waterfront, hosts two real federal- and university-affiliated research institutions: the NOAA Beaufort Laboratory, whose predecessor began as a U.S. Fish Commission field station in 1899 before relocating to Pivers Island in 1902, and the Duke University Marine Laboratory, founded there in the 1930s by Dr. A. S. Pearse. Downtown, Beaufort Town Docks and Town Creek Marina both handle serious transient boat traffic -- Beaufort Town Docks alone offers 42 floating slips plus more than 850 linear feet of side-tie dockage for vessels up to 250 feet, with in-slip fuel service, reflecting the town's real role as an Intracoastal Waterway stopover rather than a purely local marina. Front Street's restaurant row includes Clawson's 1905, operating out of a building that has functioned as a grocery store and then a restaurant for more than a century, and Blue Moon Bistro, housed in the historic Dill House built around 1827 -- both real, long-standing local institutions rather than recent openings.

The town's finances shifted meaningfully in 2025. Carteret County completed a general property reappraisal effective January 1, 2025 -- its first since 2020, consistent with the county's four-year reassessment cycle -- and county reporting described assessed values rising roughly 80 to 90 percent countywide. In response, the Town of Beaufort's Board of Commissioners approved a revenue-neutral municipal tax rate of 28.84 cents per $100 of assessed value for fiscal year 2026 (July 2025 through June 2026), down from a prior rate reported at 46 cents. Carteret County's own FY2025-26 rate is 22.5 cents per $100. Combined, that puts town-plus-county property tax at roughly 51.34 cents per $100 as an approximate sum of two separately confirmed rates -- this page does not treat that sum as an official combined figure, and it excludes any fire district or other special-district levy that might also apply to a specific parcel. Confirm the exact bill for any address with the Carteret County Tax Office.

Several things this research could not pin down with the confidence this page requires to state as settled fact: a clean, Beaufort-town-specific waterfront-versus-inland price premium (available waterfront listing data found in searches was Beaufort County-wide, not town-specific, and Beaufort town and Beaufort County are two entirely different geographies that this page is careful not to conflate); a Beaufort-specific windstorm or flood insurance premium, as opposed to general North Carolina coastal ranges; and the literal ordinance text behind Carteret County's short-term rental occupancy tax rate, cited elsewhere as 6% by a regulation-tracking site but not confirmed from a primary county source. Anyone evaluating a purchase or move here should confirm current numbers directly with the Carteret County Tax Office, the Town of Beaufort's Planning and Inspections Department, a licensed NC insurance broker, and Carteret County Public Schools rather than assuming a figure found online is current.