559 markers in the database — showing 121–180.
Durham, NC
This is the country home where James Buchanan Duke and Benjamin Newton Duke were born, sons of a farmer who turned a postwar tobacco operation into an industrial empire. The brothers built fortunes in tobacco and hydroelectric power, then poured them back into philanthropy — endowing Duke University and creating the Duke Endowment.
Duplin County, NC
For more than four decades E. E. Smith led the State Colored Normal School in Fayetteville—today Fayetteville State University—shaping one of the South's key institutions for training Black teachers. He also served as U.S. minister to Liberia from 1888 to 1890, representing his country abroad. He was born about two and a half miles southeast of this marker.
Halifax, NC
In the decades after independence, taverns like Halifax's Eagle Tavern were the social and civic hubs of a market town—places to eat, sleep, trade news, and do business. Built in the 1790s, this one earned its place in memory when it hosted a banquet for the Marquis de Lafayette on February 27, 1825, during the aging Revolutionary hero's celebrated farewell tour of the United States. The building has since been moved a short distance from its original site to the northeast.
Edenton, NC
In October 1774 some fifty women of Edenton, led by Penelope Barker, signed a public pledge to boycott British tea and cloth in support of the colonial cause. Their coordinated stand — one of the earliest known political actions by American women — drew mockery in the British press but real admiration at home. It announced that women, too, would take sides in the coming Revolution.
Fletcher, NC
Edgar Wilson "Bill" Nye (1850-1896) was among the most popular American humorists of his day, a newspaperman whose comic essays and lectures delighted Gilded Age readers nationwide. He retired to North Carolina in 1891, living at "Buck Shoals," and is buried one mile north.
Hillsborough, NC
Edmund Fanning was a judge and colonial official in Hillsborough who became a lightning rod for backcountry anger. In 1770 the Regulators — farmers protesting corruption and unfair taxes — ransacked and destroyed his nearby home. His story sits at the heart of the unrest that shook North Carolina in the years just before the Revolution.
Raleigh, NC
Edward A. Johnson was a many-sided figure in turn-of-the-century Black America, working as a politician, businessman, philanthropist, author, and educator. He became the first Black author to publish a schoolbook in North Carolina, writing Black history into the classroom. His home stood on this site.
Chowan County, NC
Edward Vail was a colonial statesman who served as a brigadier general of the Edenton District militia and sat on North Carolina's Committee of Correspondence in 1768 and again in 1773-74. Those committees knit the colonies together in the years of mounting resistance to British rule, placing Vail among the local leaders who carried the Revolution forward. He lived about two miles southwest.
Columbia, NC
Born in Tyrrell County in 1828, Edward Warren rose to become Surgeon General of North Carolina during the Civil War, directing the state's overwhelmed military medical care from 1862 to 1865. His restless career carried him far beyond the South — a professorship of surgery in Maryland, service as chief surgeon to the ruler of Egypt, and a final chapter in Paris, where he died.
Asheville, NC
On February 1, 1889, Asheville opened North Carolina's first electric trolley system, an early adopter of a technology then transforming American cities. The line served the train depot a quarter mile southeast and helped knit the growing resort town together while boosting its tourist trade. Electric streetcars would shape Asheville's development for decades.
Elizabeth City, NC
Elizabeth City State University began in 1891 as a state-supported normal school to train Black teachers, part of the wave of institutions founded across the South after Reconstruction to educate a rising generation of African Americans. It grew into a four-year college by 1939 and attained university status in 1969, tracing the long arc from segregated teacher-training school to full public university.
Hillsborough, NC
Elizabeth Keckly was born into slavery around 1820 and, as a young woman, lived among the Burwell family in Hillsborough. A gifted seamstress, she eventually bought her own freedom in 1855 and rose to become a celebrated Washington dressmaker and confidante to First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Her 1868 memoir gave a rare, unflinching view from inside the Lincoln White House.
Littleton, NC
Ella Baker spent decades as a strategist behind the civil rights movement, and in April 1960 she helped young activists found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Shaw University in Raleigh. Preferring grassroots, participatory leadership to charismatic figureheads, she mentored a generation of organizers. Her childhood home stands a quarter mile east of this marker.
Bryson City, NC
Ellen Black Winston built a career reshaping how America cared for its most vulnerable. From 1944 to 1963 she led North Carolina's Board of Public Welfare, then broke new ground as the first Commissioner of Welfare for the United States, a federal post created in the era of expanding social programs. A trained social worker, she brought professional rigor to public assistance at the national level.
Bladen County, NC
Since 1905 the Elwell Ferry has carried travelers across the Cape Fear River in rural Bladen County, pulled along a cable strung from bank to bank. Once dozens of such ferries stitched together eastern North Carolina, where bridges were scarce and the rivers wide. Today it is among the last inland cable ferries still running in the state.
Blowing Rock, NC
Emily Prudden left New England to spend her later years founding schools across the mountains of western North Carolina, establishing some fifteen institutions—several serving Black and Appalachian students who otherwise had little access to learning. Her Skyland Institute once stood on this site at Blowing Rock, and one of her foundations became a forerunner of Pfeiffer College.
Fayetteville, NC
Ezekiel Ezra Smith (1852–1933) rose from the era of emancipation to become one of North Carolina's most influential Black educators, leading the state's normal school for training African American teachers in Fayetteville during the hard decades after Reconstruction. His life braided together many callings at once—teacher and school administrator, U.S. diplomat posted to Liberia, militia officer, and ordained minister—at a time when such doors rarely opened to Black Americans. The marker's phrase 'apostle of interracial goodwill' captures a man who spent his career building institutions and understanding across the color line in the Jim Crow South.
Wake County, NC
After 1928, this half-mile dirt oval near the state fairgrounds helped popularize Indy-style automobile racing in North Carolina. It earned a footnote in motorsport history in 1970, when it hosted the last NASCAR premier-series race run on a dirt track. The site captures the moment stock car racing left its rural dirt roots behind.
Nash County, NC
Constituted in 1757 as a Particular (Calvinist) Baptist congregation, this church took root in the colonial backcountry along the Tar River, served in its early years by ministers including John Moore and Joshua Lawrence. Over time it became a Primitive Baptist congregation, part of the movement that resisted the missionary and organizational innovations of the 19th century.
Raleigh, NC
From this house, Fannie E. S. Heck emerged as a leading social activist and writer in turn-of-the-century North Carolina. She led the Baptist Woman's Missionary Union after 1892, organizing women for religious and charitable work on a broad scale, and became a benefactor of what is now Meredith College. Her career shows the growing public leadership of women in the era before suffrage.
Stanly County, NC
In July 1780, Patriot militia under Colonel William Lee Davidson defeated a Loyalist force led by Colonel Samuel Bryan a few miles southeast of here, at Colson's on the Pee Dee. The clash was part of the bitter civil war between Whig and Tory neighbors that raged across the Carolina backcountry during the Revolution. Such small, savage fights did much to determine who controlled the region.
Ahoskie, NC
In 1909 the first 4-H club in North Carolina was organized at Ahoskie as a Corn Club, part of a national movement to bring modern agricultural science to farm youth. Boys and girls competed to raise better crops, spreading new methods from the young generation back to their families' fields. From that Corn Club grew the state's vast organization of rural youth.
Dare County, NC
English explorers reached these shores in 1584, and from 1585 to 1587 the area became the site of the first English attempts to settle in the New World, the ventures remembered today as the Roanoke colonies. It was here that Virginia Dare was born, the first child of English parents born in America. The final colony famously vanished, leaving one of the nation's enduring mysteries.
Roanoke Rapids, NC
In 1909 the Roanoke Rapids Paper Manufacturing Company made the first kraft, or sulphate-process, wood pulp in the United States here, using the abundant southern pine of the region. The kraft process, which produced exceptionally strong paper, would go on to transform American papermaking and turn the pine forests of the South into the heart of the nation's pulp-and-paper industry.
Gates County, NC
By 1738 a post road stretched from New England all the way to Charleston, and along this route mail began moving on a regular schedule through North Carolina for the first time. Riders carrying letters and news passed near this spot, knitting the far-flung colonies a little more tightly together. It was a lifeline of communication in an age before railroads or the telegraph.
Raleigh, NC
Organized in 1816, this Raleigh congregation became a stage for the young state's public life. It hosted the Constitutional Convention of 1835, a landmark gathering that reshaped North Carolina's charter, and sheltered the State Supreme Court from 1831 to 1840 after fire gutted the Capitol. The present building was completed in 1900 on the same historic ground.
New Bern, NC
In 1749 James Davis established North Carolina's first printing press near this spot, publishing the colony's earliest book and its first newspaper. In a young colony where information traveled slowly, a working press was a powerful new tool for law, commerce, and public debate. Davis went on to serve as the colony's public printer for decades.
New Bern, NC
In this town on August 25–27, 1774, seventy-one delegates gathered for the first provincial congress in America convened in open defiance of British colonial orders. Meeting despite the royal governor's objections, they chose delegates to the Continental Congress and voiced colonial grievances. It was a bold step toward organized resistance in North Carolina.
Dare County, NC
The USS Minnesota, a wooden steam frigate launched in 1855, served as flagship of the Atlantic Blockading Squadron under Flag Officer Silas H. Stringham. On August 28–29, 1861, she led seven Union warships in bombarding Forts Hatteras and Clark on the North Carolina coast, an early amphibious victory that tightened the naval blockade of the Confederacy.
Asheville, NC
In July 1916, torrential rains sent catastrophic floods through western North Carolina and the western Piedmont, sweeping away homes, crops, mills, and bridges. Four lives were lost near the main gate of the Biltmore Estate on July 16. The disaster reshaped the region's rivers and its communities in a matter of days.
Robeson County, NC
Chartered in 1841, Floral College was one of the earliest colleges for women in the South, operating until 1878. It offered higher education to young women decades before most American institutions would admit them at all. The former college chapel survives as Centre Presbyterian Church a short distance north.
Ayden, NC
The small town of Ayden once hosted two church-affiliated schools. Carolina Christian College, founded by the Disciples of Christ, operated from 1893 to 1903 and was a predecessor of today's Barton College in Wilson. Nearby, Free Will Baptists founded Ayden Seminary in 1896; later renamed Eureka College, it closed in 1929, and in 1951 the denomination established Mount Olive College instead.
Asheville, NC
Forster A. Sondley (1857-1931) was an Asheville lawyer, historian, and passionate book collector whose personal library became the foundation of the Sondley Reference Library, a gift to the city. His home stood 2.7 miles north.
Martin County, NC
On the bluffs at Rainbow Banks above the Roanoke River, Confederate forces raised the earthen fortifications of Fort Branch between 1862 and 1863. Its guns guarded the vital railroad crossings and the upper Roanoke valley against Union gunboats probing inland from the coast. The well-preserved earthworks still crown the ridge three miles to the northeast.
Dare County, NC
In the opening months of the Civil War, the sandy barrier islands of North Carolina's Outer Banks guarded the shallow sounds behind them — and the shipping that fed the Confederacy. Forts Clark and Hatteras were thrown up to hold Hatteras Inlet, the deep-water gateway to those inland waterways. In August 1861 a Union fleet and landing force captured both forts, handing the North one of its first victories of the war and an early foothold on the Southern coast.
Iredell County, NC
Built by the colony in 1756, Fort Dobbs guarded North Carolina's western frontier during the French and Indian War. Garrisoned by provincial troops until 1762, it offered settlers refuge from raids and anchored the colony's defenses in a contested backcountry. Its site lies a mile north of this marker.
Beaufort County, NC
Fort Hill was the site of Confederate batteries overlooking the Pamlico River, positioned to help besiege the Union-held town of Washington in the spring of 1863. From these works, Gen. D. H. Hill's forces pressed the Federal garrison during the campaign for the town. The site lies about five miles east.
Morganton, NC
In 1567 the Spanish captain Juan Pardo built Fort San Juan at Joara, a major native town, planting one of the earliest European outposts in the interior of what is now the United States—decades before Jamestown. The garrison lasted barely a year before the surrounding Indians destroyed it in 1568, ending Spain's bid to hold the Carolina backcountry.
Plymouth, NC
Fort Williams was the principal Union stronghold at Plymouth, named for General Thomas Williams. As the Confederate assault of April 1864 collapsed the surrounding works, the garrison fell back to this fort, which held out until it too surrendered on April 20. Its capitulation ended the battle and handed the town to Confederate forces.
Goldsboro, NC
On December 17, 1862, Union troops under General John G. Foster struck Goldsboro during a raid from their base at New Bern, aiming to cut the vital Wilmington and Weldon Railroad. The attack was part of the wider Union effort to control eastern North Carolina's rivers and rail lines. The raiders damaged the railroad bridge before withdrawing.
Asheville, NC
On April 16, 1792, in the mountains of western North Carolina, an act of the General Assembly creating Buncombe County took effect near a place called Gum Spring. Carved from a rugged, sparsely settled frontier that would later cradle Asheville, the new county extended orderly government into a remote corner of the young republic. The Colonial Dames of America placed this monument in 1922 to fix the founding site in public memory.
Statesville, NC
Established around 1750 and settled on this site by 1756, Fourth Creek Meeting House was a Presbyterian congregation gathered by the Scots-Irish settlers who filled the North Carolina backcountry. The Rev. James Hall, a noted frontier educator and minister, served as its first regular pastor. The meeting house became a spiritual and civic heart of the early Statesville community.
Edenton, NC
Francis Corbin served as an agent for Lord Granville, collecting quitrents and granting lands in the proprietor's sprawling North Carolina district, and also sat as a jurist and legislator. His heavy-handed land dealings helped provoke the 'Enfield Riot' of 1759, when angry settlers seized him over grievances about fraudulent fees and titles. His home was the elegant Cupola House, still standing two blocks south in Edenton.
Rowan County, NC
Colonel Francis Locke commanded the Patriot militia that routed a large Loyalist force at the Battle of Ramsour's Mill on June 20, 1780. Fought largely by neighbors on both sides, the battle broke Tory strength in the western Piedmont at a critical moment of the Revolution's Southern campaign. Locke's home stood nearby in Rowan County.
Raleigh, NC
From September 29 to October 3, 1865, just months after the Civil War ended, Black delegates met one block north to chart the future of North Carolina's newly freed people. They resolved to seek equal rights, education, and fair treatment at the very dawn of Reconstruction. It was among the first organized political voices of freedom in the postwar South.
Princeville, NC
In 1865, as the Civil War ended, freed African Americans established a community here on low ground near the Tar River known as Freedom Hill. In 1885 it was incorporated as Princeville, recognized as one of the oldest towns chartered by African Americans in the United States. The settlement grew from the hopes of emancipation into a self-governing town.
Williamston, NC
For 32 days in June and July of 1963, Green Memorial Church in Williamston rang with mass meetings as the local Black community organized for their rights. Out of those gatherings came waves of nonviolent marches that pressed against segregation in the town's public life. The sustained campaign forced the desegregation of local public facilities.
Raleigh, NC
Joseph Gales founded the Raleigh Register in 1799, one of the young state capital's early newspapers, while his wife Winifred wrote fiction in an age when few American women published at all. Their sons Joseph and Weston carried on as editors, making the Gales name a fixture of early North Carolina print culture. In the Early Republic, a partisan press like theirs shaped how citizens argued and voted.
Boiling Springs, NC
Gardner-Webb began in 1905 as Boiling Springs High School, a Baptist institution founded to bring education to the rural North Carolina foothills. It grew into a junior college in 1928 and achieved university status in 1993.
Farmville, NC
Allen Hal Turnage (1891–1971), born in Farmville, rose to command the U.S. Marine Corps Third Division in the Pacific during World War II. He led its assaults on Bougainville and Guam in 1943–44 and was awarded the Navy Cross for his leadership. He was born just southeast of this marker.
Goldsboro, NC
On October 18, 1867, Black Baptists from across North Carolina gathered to organize the General Baptist State Convention, a statewide association founded at Goldsboro's First African Baptist Church. Coming just two years after emancipation, it gave newly freed African Americans an independent religious institution of their own. The founding church then stood about two-tenths of a mile west of this marker.
Hillsborough, NC
Francis Nash of Hillsborough rose to become a patriot general in the American Revolution, leading North Carolina Continentals in the fight for independence. He was mortally wounded at the Battle of Germantown in 1777 and died of his wounds days later. His home stood just west of here, grounding a Revolutionary hero in the streets of this small town.
Flat Rock, NC
George A. Trenholm was a Charleston cotton broker and financier who served as the Confederate Secretary of the Treasury in the war's final year, 1864–65, struggling to sustain a collapsing wartime economy. A South Carolina legislator and one of the South's wealthiest men, he summered at "Solitude," an estate that once stood near this marker in the cool mountain air of Flat Rock. He is often cited as a possible model for the character Rhett Butler.
New Bern, NC
George E. Badger, born near this spot, rose to become United States Secretary of the Navy in 1841 and a U.S. Senator from 1846 to 1855. A superior court judge and staunch nationalist, he was one of antebellum North Carolina's most prominent statesmen. His career spanned the courtroom, the cabinet, and the Senate in the decades before the Civil War.
New Bern, NC
Born into slavery in 1852, George H. White became a lawyer and served in the North Carolina legislature in 1881 and 1885 before winning election to the U.S. Congress, where he served from 1897 to 1901. He was the last African American to serve in Congress before the full weight of Jim Crow disenfranchisement took hold. His home still stands two blocks from this marker.
Tarboro, NC
George H. White represented North Carolina's majority-Black "Second District" in the U.S. House from 1897 to 1901, a seat carved out during Reconstruction that sent several Black congressmen to Washington. When White left office, no Black Southerner would sit in Congress again for 72 years, as disfranchisement and Jim Crow closed the door. He lived two blocks east of this spot.
Goldsboro, NC
Gertrude Weil (1879–1971) of Goldsboro was a tireless reformer who campaigned for extending the vote to women, achieved nationally in 1920, and remained active in labor, racial-justice, and Jewish causes throughout her long life. She brought the energy of Progressive reform to eastern North Carolina for decades. Her home once stood at this site.
Boone, NC
Wild American ginseng, prized in China as medicine, grew thick in the Blue Ridge, and mountain families dug the root for generations to earn scarce cash. Boone became a hub of the trade, where firms like Wilcox Drug—established in 1900—bought and shipped the harvest to distant markets.
Wilmington, NC
Gold Star Families Memorial Monuments like this one belong to a nationwide effort to honor the families of American service members who died in the line of duty. The "Gold Star" tradition reaches back to World War I, when households hung service banners bearing a blue star for a loved one in uniform—and a gold star when that loved one never came home. Standing in Wilmington, this monument gives those families a permanent place of recognition, turning private grief into public remembrance.
Elkin, NC
Gold Star Families Memorial Monuments honor the families of American service members who died in the line of duty, a tradition of remembrance rooted in the service flags families displayed during wartime. This monument in Elkin joins a nationwide network of such memorials dedicated to those who gave their lives for the country. It stands as a gathering place for reflection on sacrifice that reaches across generations of American conflicts.