Brunswick County careers

Brunswick County was created on March 9, 1764, carved out of New Hanover and Bladen Counties and named for Brunswick Town, which itself honored King George I, Duke of Brunswick and Lunenberg. That makes this coastal North Carolina county a dozen years older than the country it sits in.

Its county seat has wandered. It started at Brunswick Town on the west bank of the Cape Fear River, moved to Lockwood Folly in 1779, then to Smithville, today's Southport, in 1808, where it stayed for 167 years. A referendum on July 19, 1975 moved it to the current government center just below the Town of Bolivia, which is where the county's workforce reports today. The modern operation looks nothing like the colonial one: Brunswick County runs water and wastewater utilities, a landfill and recycling operation, parks and recreation, a library system with a bookmobile, elections, and the tax office, and it manages the growth pressures of a beach-adjacent county through projects like its Northwest Water Treatment Plant expansion. County work here is utility and service work first, courthouse work second, and the seat's long road from Brunswick Town to Bolivia says this government has been reshaping itself for 262 years.