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
Twelve of the fifteen stand 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: twelve of the fifteen below stand inside a box about forty kilometres across.
What is complicated is not the driving. Hardly anything here 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. No street address on this page.
The notebook house location is Martin's Point Plantation on Wadmalaw Island, south-west of Charleston. Older records call it Bears Bluff Plantation. Seabrook Island's website calls it the notebook house, and that name has stuck.
The notebook house movie audiences know is a private home The Notebook borrowed for a winter, and every source that names it says the same thing in the same breath: privately owned, nothing to visit. Time magazine named it in a 2009 travel piece and sent readers off to other locations in the same sentence. 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.
The one photograph this page does not have is the notebook house picture. The pin on the map stops at a public road on the right corner of the island, because a family lives at the end of it.
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.
Boone Hall's brick slave quarters, photographed for the Historic American Buildings Survey in April 1940. Nine of these 18th-century dwellings still stand on the property.
Photo: C.O. Greene, Photographer · Public domain · Wikimedia Commons
1235 Long Point Road, Mount Pleasant
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; two sources say Ryan Gosling missed the brake, the car hit them, and the crash was kept in.
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. What each of them pointed a camera at is not recorded anywhere we found.
Williams Mansion
16 Meeting Street in 2007, when it was still known as the Calhoun Mansion. One 2024 report puts Allie's interiors inside this house; no other source mentions the building.
Inside Boone Hall Plantation the Notebook crew could not film at all: photography is not allowed in the house. So everything an audience reads as the inside of Allie's family home is 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 when a guide to Charleston printed an engraving of it 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.
One source puts those rooms here, a reported piece from 2024 that went round the locations with a camera. SCIWAY does not mention the building, and neither does the Seabrook Island page. Everything anyone knows about where Allie's drawing room stands rests on one reporter.
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.
New Line's production notes put filming on the base at numerous sites and stop there. The Admiral's House and the chapel two hundred metres away are the two buildings anyone names, so that is what we take the phrase to cover. The city of North Charleston books both of them for weddings now, and neither its venue page nor its tourism page mentions this film.
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. The only free photograph of it is taken through the closed gate at the bottom of the drive, with the house small and white at the far end, and that is the view a visitor gets.
The Independent puts one nursing-home scene somewhere else entirely: a downstairs blue room in the Admiral's House. Both could be true, since splitting interiors between two buildings is exactly what happened to the summer house. No source says so.
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 is precise in a way that helps and then stops: the house used is not the main house at Sunnyside but one standing on the drive that leads up to it. Which building on the drive, nobody says.
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. Nothing we read says whether any of it can be visited.
SCIWAY is also the only source that connects Sunnyside to this film. New Line's notes put filming on Edisto Island and name no house at all, and the Independent does not mention Edisto.
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 gets asked about it so often that its own website carries a page headed with the question, and the answer is no. Nothing was shot there, not the streets, not the house in The Notebook.
Which Carolina the invented Seabrook sits in is unsettled. SCIWAY and the Independent say South. New Line's own production notes say North, in a synopsis about a young woman coming to the coastal town of Seabrook, North Carolina in the 1940s. That reads like the novel showing through, but it is the studio's own copy, and the two have 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 keeps having to tell people it was not in the movie.
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, and nothing we read puts a camera inside any of the nine.
People live here. The streets are public and there is nothing to go into.
The ice-cream date. 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. Of everything on this page, this and the restaurant on East Bay Street are the two that still do their own job.
One source names the shop, the same 2024 piece. The Pitt Street Pharmacy The Notebook used is the address behind the vaguer Mt. Pleasant and Old Village that everyone else gives.
College of Charleston
Randolph Hall at the College of Charleston, the campus that plays Sarah Lawrence College in New York.
Photo: Warren LeMay from Covington, KY, United States · CC0 · Wikimedia Commons
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. No source says which building was used, and the college runs over several downtown blocks, so the pin is a campus rather than a door.
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 on their first date. 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. It is the rare location here that did not have to be dressed for the period.
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.
A 1942 cinema on King Street is the kind of building crews come back to. The Notebook American Theater date is the only credit we could find for it.
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 a small argument. SCIWAY says it went up in front of the American Theater; Seabrook Island's page 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.
Both sources that describe the scene say a restaurant manager was cast as the maître d', and they name two different restaurants, so there is no name here.
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 that can be repeated 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 were brought in. They were not native to the place, and how they were got is told two ways: trained to follow boats in the weeks before the shoot, or bought as chicks and raised on a lake nearby. Seabrook Island's page calls them swans in one sentence and geese in the next.
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 county's own list runs through The Patriot, Cold Mountain, The Yearling, The Tempest, the mini-series North and South and, much later, Outer Banks. North and South also appears on Boone Hall's list, so one 1985 mini-series worked both of the plantations this film would come back for.
One disagreement is worth flagging. The Independent puts a water scene in the creek behind Boone Hall; every other source puts the boats and the birds up here, forty kilometres north. The Notebook Cypress Gardens scene and whatever was shot in that creek may be two different scenes.
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.
Photo: North Charleston from North Charleston, SC, United States · CC BY-SA 2.0 · Wikimedia Commons
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 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.
Naming the building takes three sources and not one of them says everything at once. The two that describe the redressed interior do not name the chapel. The local paper that names the chapel and the film says only that it can be seen in the background. It stands two hundred and twenty metres from the Admiral's House, which fits the only description anyone gives of where it was. We think it is the same building. We cannot point at one sentence that says so.
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 was standing on when the cameras ran is a mile south, somewhere on the old southern section of the base, and nothing we read pins it down.
The scenes that are not on the map
Noah sees Allie for the first time at a carnival, while she is going round in the bumper cars. New Line's production notes set that scene down in detail and give no address for it, and no other source we found names one. The mill where Noah works is in the same position, written into the story and matched to nothing on the ground.
The same notes name two cities the film worked in and around, Charleston and Georgetown. Only one building in Georgetown County is named by any source we found, the house on the Black River above, and it stands outside the town. Nothing we read says what the crew did inside the town itself.
Those notes also call it a film shot almost entirely on location, and no source we read records any studio work at all. So the carnival stood on ground that exists. It is a place we can describe and cannot point to.
