The house Noah rebuilds was never a wreck. The crew went looking for a genuinely run-down place they could renovate on camera as the story moved along, gave the idea up, and used a sound private house on Wadmalaw Island instead. The dereliction was added with special effects.
15
places on the route
Nearly all of it stands within forty kilometres of Charleston. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Where was The Notebook filmed? In and around Charleston, South Carolina, over the winter of 2002 into 2003, with one outlying house ninety kilometres up the coast near Georgetown. The producers came to scout, liked the Lowcountry and moved the story here from New Bern, North Carolina, where Nicholas Sparks had set the novel. The Notebook filming locations sit close enough together to be covered in a day: almost all of it stands inside a box about forty kilometres across, with Charleston in the middle.
What is complicated is not the driving. Hardly anything in this film is playing itself. The summer house is two buildings twenty kilometres apart. The college is standing in for one in New York. The traffic light was trucked in and hung for the shot. And the setting of The Notebook is a 1940s summer in a town called Seabrook, which is the part that takes explaining.
The houses
The Notebook house scenes are shared out among six buildings. The one everybody means is the one nobody can get near.
Wadmalaw Island, Charleston County. A private residence.
The notebook house location is Martin's Point Plantation on Wadmalaw Island, south-west of Charleston. It was Bears Bluff Plantation before that. Now it is the notebook house.
The notebook house movie audiences know is a private home The Notebook borrowed for a winter. It is lived in, and there is nothing to visit. The notebook house picture people go looking for is of a ruin, and the ruin was never there.
The film gives each of its two leads a house, Allie the summer place at Boone Hall and Noah the notebook house out here, and only one of those is open to anyone.
One thing the film says about this ground is wrong. The dialogue puts the Revolutionary War commander Francis Marion at or near the house; his plantation was north-west of Charleston, on the far side of the city from Wadmalaw.
Boone Hall Plantation
The Avenue of Oaks at Boone Hall, the drive Noah comes up to the Hamilton summer house. The oaks were planted, by tradition, in 1743.
Noah's car comes up the avenue of oaks and does not stop in time. The gates at the top were supposed to be open. Ryan Gosling missed the brake, the car hit them, and the crash stayed in the film.
The Boone Hall Plantation Notebook viewers recognise is all outside: that oak drive, the front porch Allie runs up, the back lawn where the family dinner is laid.
The oaks were planted, by tradition, in 1743. In The Notebook Boone Hall Plantation is a summer house and nothing else. The place itself is a former slave plantation: nine eighteenth-century brick dwellings built by enslaved people still stand on the property, and the site was named one of South Carolina's African American Historic Places in 2009. The estate has been criticised for selling weddings without telling that part, and it now runs education programmes about it.
Other productions have worked these grounds: the mini-series North and South, Alex Haley's Queen and Scarlett; Days of Our Lives in 1984; the 1972 series America; the documentary The Price of Freedom; and Bin Yah in 2008.
Williams Mansion
16 Meeting Street in 2007, when it was still known as the Calhoun Mansion. The Independent puts Allie's interiors inside this house.
Inside Boone Hall Plantation the Notebook crew could not film at all: photography is not allowed in the house. The Independent puts everything an audience reads as the inside of Allie's family home here instead, twenty kilometres away on the peninsula. The Williams Mansion The Notebook used was known for years as the Calhoun Mansion, and George Walton Williams was still putting it up in 1875. It has been a private house, a hotel and a tourist attraction since.
The house from The Notebook is two houses: a plantation across the Cooper River for everything outdoors, a Victorian mansion on Meeting Street for everything in.
The Admiral's House
The Admiral's House on the old Charleston Navy Yard, built in 1905 — the white house with the porch that wraps the whole building, which is what Allie says she wants.
Allie says what she wants out loud: a white house with blue shutters, a room looking over the river, a big old porch that wraps all the way round. The notebook white house is this one, built in 1905 for the commanding admiral of the Charleston Navy Yard, and she paints on its balcony. Several interiors were shot inside it.
The film worked at several places on the base, this house and the chapel among them. The city of North Charleston now rents both out for weddings, two hundred metres apart.
Black River Plantation House
Black River Plantation House, the nursing home of the framing story, seen from the closed gate at the end of its drive — which is as close as a visitor gets.
The framing story, the old man reading to the woman who no longer knows him, is set in a nursing home, and the nursing home is a house on the Black River ninety kilometres up the coast. It was built in 1919, two and a half storeys, Neo-Classical Revival, and went on the National Register in 1994. The International Paper Company bought it in 1942 and ran it as a resort for staff and guests, which is where one of its other names comes from: on paper it is also Rice Hope Plantation and the International Paper Company House.
It is a private residence. There is a gate at the bottom of the drive, and from the gate the house is small and white at the far end of it. That is the view.
The Independent puts one nursing-home scene somewhere else entirely, in a downstairs blue room at the Admiral's House, ninety kilometres back down the coast.
Sunnyside
Sunnyside on Edisto Island, photographed for the Historic American Buildings Survey in the late 1970s. Its mansard roof and cupola date from about 1875.
Noah's father's homestead. SCIWAY, the South Carolina information portal, puts it on the drive leading up to the main house at Sunnyside rather than in the house itself.
The main house dates from about 1875 and carries a mansard roof and a cupola; it was listed in 1986, and the foreman's house on the same property is older, around 1867. Which building on the drive, nobody says.
Seabrook is three places wearing one name
Seabrook is where the story happens, and Seabrook is not there. Sparks set the novel in New Bern, North Carolina, a real city. The film invented a coastal town called Seabrook and built it out of Mount Pleasant and Charleston.
The catch is that Seabrook Island is real: an incorporated town on a sea island thirty-two kilometres south-west of Charleston, and no part of it appears in this film. The island says so itself, with an apology to its residents: the town of Seabrook is the Old Village of Mount Pleasant. Nothing on the island was used, not its streets and not the house in The Notebook.
Which Carolina the invented Seabrook sits in is unsettled. SCIWAY and The Independent say South. New Line's production notes say North, in the synopsis the studio wrote for its own film. That reads like the novel showing through, and it has never been squared.
The Notebook setting, then, is a real city in North Carolina that the book used, an invented town the film wrote, and a real town that shares the name and has no part in either.
Old Village, Mount Pleasant
200 Bank Street, one of the nine listed buildings of the Old Village in Mount Pleasant — the neighbourhood that plays the town of Seabrook.
Mount Pleasant Historic District, east bank of the harbour
The Seabrook on screen is this neighbourhood: a nineteenth-century summer-resort village fifteen minutes from downtown Charleston. Streets, shopfronts, picket fences, live oaks, a working pharmacy on a corner. Nine buildings in the district are listed. What the film used is the streets.
People live here. The streets are public and there is nothing to go into.
The ice-cream date, which The Independent puts in this shop. The Pitt Street Pharmacy The Notebook used is a corner drugstore with a soda fountain, playing a corner drugstore with a soda fountain, and it is still one: you can walk in and order a scoop.
College of Charleston
Randolph Hall at the College of Charleston, the campus that plays Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
Allie's college is named on screen as Sarah Lawrence, which is a real place in Yonkers, New York, eleven hundred kilometres from the campus the audience is actually looking at. That campus is the College of Charleston: public, founded in 1770, thirteenth-oldest university in the country.
That is the second name in this film that belongs to somewhere else. Which building the camera was pointed at, nobody says; the college runs over several blocks of downtown.
Downtown, dressed back to the 1940s
Three of The Notebook film locations stand within a hundred and fifty metres of each other on King Street: a cinema, a junction and a house. Along those blocks the production swapped the parking meters for period ones and altered the shop signs, which took a written contract with each owner.
The American Theater
The American Theater at 446 King Street. It opened in 1942 and no longer shows films; the marquee now carries messages rather than screenings.
The Notebook movie house is the American Theater, where Noah and Allie watch Lil' Abner. The Notebook American Theater date is the film's first, and afterwards the two of them walk. The American Theater The Notebook found was already the right age: it opened in 1942, Art Deco front, curved marquee, chrome script over the door, and nothing on it had to be aged for the camera.
It stopped showing films. The board that once listed screenings now carries messages, and people come to propose under it. The inside is open only to people attending a booked event.
King Street at Mary Street
King Street looking north on a postcard of about 1906 — the street the production dressed back to the 1940s with period meters and shop signs.
The traffic light Noah and Allie lie down under is not there, and was not there then. The crew trucked one in and hung it for the scene.
Where exactly it hung is disputed. SCIWAY has it going up in front of the American Theater; Seabrook Island puts the scene at King and Mary. The two spots are a hundred and seventy metres apart, one block, and both cannot be exactly right.
The walk the two of them take before they lie down runs about three blocks. It is a busy junction now, and nobody should be lying down in it.
William Aiken House
The William Aiken House at 456 King Street in 2021, where Allie is fitted for her wedding dress. It stands two doors from the cinema.
Two doors from the cinema. Allie is being fitted for the dress she will wear to marry Lon, sees Noah's photograph in the newspaper, and faints. That room is in here.
The house sits at the centre of a National Historic Landmark district declared in 1963, and the district is really about railways: William Aiken founded the South Carolina Canal and Railroad Company, and the depot buildings around his house are one of the largest surviving collections of pre-Civil War railway structures in the United States. The film wanted a drawing room.
Do not confuse it with the Gov. William Aiken House, also called the Aiken-Rhett House, a museum on Elizabeth Street a kilometre and a half away. Different building, no connection to this film.
Noah on the pavement, looking in through the window at Allie greeting her fiancé. The High Cotton The Notebook used was a working restaurant then. It is a working restaurant now. The maître d' in the scene was a real restaurant manager, cast off the floor.
The water
Cypress Gardens
Cypress Gardens in April 2022. The blackwater channels Noah rows Allie through are the same water the county's self-guided boats use now.
3030 Cypress Gardens Road, Moncks Corner, Berkeley County
Noah rows Allie into a blackwater channel under bald cypress and the water fills with birds. Of all The Notebook locations this is the one a visitor can repeat almost exactly: Berkeley County runs self-guided flat-bottomed boats through the same channels, and the walking tour goes past the spot. A postcard printed in 1937 shows rowing boats tied along the same dock, sixty-seven years before the film.
The birds in The Notebook Cypress Gardens scene were brought in and were not native to the place. How they got there depends on who is telling it: SCIWAY has them trained to follow boats in the weeks before the shoot, The Independent has them bought as chicks and raised on a lake nearby. The same paper puts the scene where Noah goes into the water in a creek behind Boone Hall rather than in these channels.
The Cypress Gardens Notebook viewers remember is high summer. Filming The Notebook here in January was a decision about alligators, which hibernate then, and the boats went out in the cold.
Crews have been coming since Swamp Thing in 1982, so the Cypress Gardens The Notebook came to had been a film location for twenty years: The Patriot, Cold Mountain, The Yearling, The Tempest, the mini-series North and South, and Outer Banks long after. North and South used Boone Hall as well, so one 1985 mini-series had already worked both of the plantations this film would come to.
The chapel
Eternal Father of the Sea Chapel
The Eternal Father of the Sea Chapel at its rededication in September 2016, after the city moved it about a mile from the spot where the film used it.
Riverfront Park, former Charleston Navy Yard, North Charleston. Where it stands now, which is not where it was filmed.
Four of the film's wartime rooms are one room. The interior of a desanctified chapel on the Navy base was redressed in turn as the USO dance hall, the infirmary, the room where the physicals are done and the recruiting hall. The chapel itself can be spotted in the background of the film as well.
The chapel went up on the yard in 1942 and was finished in 1944, non-denominational, built so that Catholic, Protestant and Jewish sailors and their families could all use it. Sailors married in it before they shipped out. Then a film borrowed it for goodbyes it had made up.
In 2006 the city of North Charleston and the Charleston Naval Redevelopment Authority moved the chapel about a mile north, to the historic officers' housing, because a railway line was planned across the ground it stood on. It was rededicated in 2016 and the city rents it out for weddings.
So the room survived and the address did not. You can stand inside the space the film worked in. The ground it stood on when the cameras ran is a mile south, on the old southern section of the base.
The scenes with no address
Noah sees Allie for the first time at a carnival, while she is going round in the bumper cars. The mill where Noah works stands the same way: written into the story, matched to nothing on the ground.
Almost all of this film was shot on location, in and around Charleston and Georgetown, and its invented places are real ones redressed: a chapel playing four rooms, a sound house made derelict by effects. So the bumper cars turned on ground that exists. Nobody has written down where.
