Stand at the Kelly landing long enough and you'll see someone lay on their horn, waiting for the Elwell Ferry to come back across the Cape Fear River. That's not impatience. It's how the crossing has worked since the Russ brothers started running it in 1905: no horn, no ferry. This year, more than a few of those horns have gone unanswered, and not always for the same reason.
The Elwell Ferry connects Carvers Creek and Kelly on a stretch of river close enough to Council that the crossing shows up in how people here plan their errands, their school runs, and their trips toward Wilmington. It's one of only three inland cable ferries still running in North Carolina, free to ride, and it has been closed three separate times so far in 2026. What's easy to miss, if you only catch the closure notices in passing, is that those three shutdowns weren't the same kind of problem. Two came from the river itself. One came from a road crew. Knowing which is which is the difference between a closure you can plan around and one you can't.
Two Kinds of Closed
The ferry has always operated under a simple rule: no service during high water or storm conditions. That's not a modern safety patch, it's baked into how the crossing has run for over a century, because a cable ferry pulling itself across a rising river is a different proposition than one crossing calm water. When the Cape Fear swells, the ferry sits idle until the water drops back down, and nobody, including the North Carolina Department of Transportation, can promise exactly when that will be.
Planned infrastructure work is a different animal entirely. When a crew needs to replace a crossline or repair the road leading to the landing, NCDOT and the Bladen County Sheriff's Office post the closure in advance, with a start date and a projected reopening down to the hour. You lose the crossing for a known window instead of an open-ended one.
This Year, So Far
Here's how 2026 has actually broken down:
- February 14 to 18 — closed due to high water, reopening at 8 a.m.
- March 12 to 19 — closed a second time, less than a month after the first shutdown lifted
- July 27 to 30 — closed for crossline replacement between Baltimore Road and Figure 9 Road, with NCDOT projecting reopening for Thursday, July 30 at 5 p.m.
The first two sit inside the same late-winter stretch when the river typically runs highest. The third sits in the middle of summer and has nothing to do with weather at all. If you only remember "the ferry keeps closing," you're flattening two different problems into one, and missing that one of them comes with a schedule you can actually check ahead of time.
What Twenty-Three Minutes Buys You
When it's running, the Elwell Ferry covers about 110 yards of river in a few minutes, a trip so short that longtime riders talk about it more like a shortcut than a commute. Take the ferry out of the equation and an NCDOT district engineer has put the road detour at 23 minutes. That's not a rounding difference. It's the gap between an errand and a drive.
For anyone living on the Council side of that crossing with regular business toward Kelly or Carvers Creek, that 23-minute swing is the real cost of a closure, not an inconvenience so much as a recalculation of the afternoon. It's also the number that explains why residents pay closer attention to ferry status than they might to most other pieces of county infrastructure. A bridge closure on a four-lane highway might add a few minutes. Losing this ferry adds a fixed, predictable chunk of time to a trip that's supposed to take almost none.
A Ferry That Outlasted a Hurricane, and Still Isn't Getting Replaced
The Elwell Ferry has been down for long stretches before, and worse than a few days at a time. After Hurricanes Matthew and Florence hit in 2016 and 2018, the crossing was closed for roughly a year, then hit again by flood damage in January 2020 that pushed the vessel out for repair. It didn't fully resume regular service until October 2022. NCDOT district engineer Ken Clark, describing that outage at the time, put it plainly: "This is the first time we've gone for an extended period of time without it running." For a crossing that had operated continuously since 1905, that gap registered.
None of that history has translated into plans for a bridge. The state's position has been that a bridge would cost more than the secondary road it would serve could justify, which means the ferry keeps getting patched rather than replaced. That's part of why crossline work like July's project keeps happening: it's cheaper to maintain a century-old cable ferry piece by piece than to build a permanent crossing for a road that carries this much traffic and no more.
It also explains why locals treat the ferry the way they do. One regional magazine called it a "local celebrity," and that's not an exaggeration for a crossing people missed enough to notice the exact month it came back.
How to Not Get Caught Out
A few habits make the difference between planning around the Elwell Ferry and getting stuck by it:
- Sign up for NCDOT's ferry alerts. The department's Ferry Information Notification System sends text and email updates when a ferry's schedule changes, which beats finding out at the landing.
- Watch the calendar in late winter and early spring. Both of this year's weather closures landed in that window, which lines up with when the Cape Fear typically runs highest.
- Check for posted end times on planned work. Road and crossline projects, like July's closure, come with a specific reopening date and hour from NCDOT and the Sheriff's Office, so there's no need to guess.
- Remember the seasonal hours. The ferry runs 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. in spring and summer, and sunrise to sunset in fall and winter, with no service on Christmas Day regardless of water conditions.
None of this makes the ferry more predictable. It just means the unpredictability has a shape, and that shape is worth knowing if this crossing is part of your week.
The Elwell Ferry isn't going anywhere, and neither is the river it depends on to keep running. For the people who live near it, that's less a problem to solve than a rhythm to work around, one honk at a time.
If you're spending enough time in Council to care whether the ferry's running today, you already know this stretch of Bladen County better than most listing sites ever will. Talk to a Local Agent Today with Tatum Realty when you're ready to talk about what else that local knowledge can do for you.
