St. Helena, NC

St. Helena is a Pender County village in the Wilmington metropolitan area, developed by Hugh MacRae and first settled in 1903 by immigrants from northern Italy. The community was named for an Italian queen, and other immigrant families followed the first settlers. St. Helena incorporated in 1988, becoming the largest town geographically in Pender County. The village’s history therefore reaches beyond a simple road name: it preserves a planned rural community shaped by migration and land development on the coastal plain.

Today St. Helena remains a small municipality with its own mayor and council, while Pender County provides the wider network of roads, schools, emergency services, and agricultural connections. Large lots and horse properties remain part of the village’s built landscape, and the surrounding county continues to depend on farming, woodland, and coastal-plain roads. St. Helena is a North Carolina village where an Italian immigrant beginning, a late-20th-century incorporation, and a broad rural footprint still define the local map today.