559 markers in the database — showing 361–420.
Halifax County, NC
On December 18, 1776, months after the Declaration of Independence, delegates meeting at Halifax adopted the first constitution of the independent state of North Carolina, together with a declaration of rights. It established the framework of state government for the newly sovereign state. Halifax was already a hotbed of Revolutionary sentiment, having earlier produced the Halifax Resolves calling for independence.
Raleigh, NC
In 1856, dentists gathered at the Guion Hotel that once stood on this site to organize the North Carolina Dental Society, choosing Dr. W. F. Bason of Haw River as its first president. It was among the early efforts in America to bring formal standards and professional identity to dentistry. The hotel is long gone, but the founding endured.
Charlotte, NC
Opened in 1859 with future Confederate general Daniel Harvey Hill as its first superintendent, this Charlotte military academy trained young men in the tense years before the Civil War. When war came, the campus was pressed into service as a Confederate hospital, and after the conflict the building served as a public school from 1883 to 1950. It stood near this spot.
Raleigh, NC
The collection that became the North Carolina Museum of History began with the artifacts gathered by Fred Olds, an avid collector of the state's relics. In 1902 his holdings merged with the state's own to form the Hall of History, a public keeper of North Carolina's past. The institution moved to its present home in 1994.
Burlington, NC
In 1857 the North Carolina Railroad built its maintenance and repair shops here, and the town that grew up around them took the name Company Shops — later renamed Burlington. The shops operated through the Civil War before closing in 1866.
Raleigh, NC
North Carolina's first State House rose on this square in 1796, only to burn in 1831, taking with it Canova's celebrated marble statue of George Washington. In its place the state built the Greek Revival capitol of 1833–40, designed by the noted architects Ithiel Town, Alexander Jackson Davis, and David Paton. It remains one of the best-preserved examples of a mid-19th-century American statehouse.
Wake County, NC
North Carolina launched its state agricultural fair in 1853, part of a wider antebellum movement to celebrate farming, showcase new tools and livestock, and knit rural communities together. After outgrowing two earlier sites, the fair settled at this west Raleigh location in 1928, where it has remained a fixture of the state's calendar. What began as a showcase for a farm economy grew into one of the region's great annual gatherings.
Raleigh, NC
The State Library of North Carolina traces its origin to 1812, established under Secretary of State William Hill, with James F. Taylor named the first state librarian in 1843. It gathered books and records for the use of the young state government. The library relocated to this site in 1968.
Raleigh, NC
Chartered in 1887 and opened in 1889 as a land-grant college, North Carolina State began as an institution devoted to agriculture and the mechanic arts under the federal Morrill Act. It became a campus of the Consolidated University of North Carolina in 1931 and grew into one of the nation's major research universities. Its founding reflected a national push to bring practical, scientific education to working people.
Wilkes County, NC
Carved out of the Wilkes County foothills, North Wilkesboro Speedway opened in 1946 as a dirt track and was paved in 1958, becoming one of stock-car racing's founding venues. It hosted sanctioned events from 1949 until 1996, spanning nearly the entire early history of NASCAR, a sport born in this region from the fast cars of Prohibition-era moonshine runners. The 5/8-mile oval was famous for its unusual layout, with one straightaway running uphill and the other down.
Eureka, NC
At the height of the Cold War, Strategic Air Command kept nuclear-armed bombers in the air around the clock. On a January night in 1961, one such B-52 broke apart in the skies over eastern North Carolina, releasing the two thermonuclear weapons it carried. Emergency safeguards and sheer luck kept a catastrophic detonation from ever occurring over the Carolina farmland, though three of the airmen aboard did not survive the disaster to the south.
Shelby, NC
Born at Shelby in 1882, O. Max Gardner served as governor of North Carolina from 1929 to 1933, steering the state through the depths of the Great Depression, and later became Under Secretary of the U.S. Treasury and, in 1946, ambassador-designate to Great Britain. He was a central figure in the "Shelby Dynasty" that dominated state politics and its textile economy; his birthplace stands here and his grave lies 300 yards north.
Raleigh, NC
Oakwood Cemetery, a few blocks east, holds some of North Carolina's most consequential dead, including governors Aycock, Bragg, Fowle, Holden, Swain, and Worth, alongside Confederate soldiers and other notables. Established in the Civil War era, it became a resting place for the state's political and military figures. Its grounds read like a roll call of North Carolina history.
Orange County, NC
Around 1680 to 1710, a village of the Occaneechi people stood a half mile east of here, astride the Great Trading Path that carried commerce deep into the Carolina interior. In 1701 the explorer John Lawson passed through and recorded his impressions of the community. The Occaneechi were influential traders whose position on the path made them a hub of exchange between Native nations and colonists.
Hyde County, NC
Erected in 1823 to guide vessels through the busy trade route at Ocracoke Inlet, this 75-foot whitewashed tower is the oldest lighthouse still in service in North Carolina. For two centuries its beacon has marked one of the most treacherous stretches of the Atlantic coast.
Goldsboro, NC
Opened in 1892, the Odd Fellows Home in Goldsboro served as an orphanage and school run by the fraternal order, caring for and educating children until it closed in 1971. Over its lifetime it provided for some 960 young people. The original 20-acre tract has since become a city park.
Raleigh, NC
In 1863, by order of Governor Zebulon Vance, earthen breastworks were thrown up around Raleigh to guard the capital against Federal cavalry raids during the Civil War. The fortifications ringed the city as the tide of war turned against the Confederacy. Remnants of these earthworks survive a third of a mile to the west.
Beaufort, NC
Deeded to the town of Beaufort in 1731 by Nathanael Taylor, this seaside cemetery holds generations of the coastal community's dead. Among them is Captain Otway Burns, a celebrated privateer of the War of 1812, alongside soldiers of the Revolution and the Civil War. Its weathered stones trace more than a century of American conflict and coastal life.
Lexington, NC
Completed in 1858, this Classical Revival courthouse anchored Lexington through the Civil War. Its interior burned in 1865 as the conflict reached the Carolina Piedmont, and it was rebuilt about 1867 during the early years of Reconstruction. The restored building remains a fine example of the antebellum public architecture that once dominated Southern county seats.
Winfall, NC
Quakers established the Old Neck Friends Meeting in the Albemarle region by 1680, making it one of the earliest organized religious communities in the North Carolina colony. From 1698 to 1785 it hosted the Society of Friends' Yearly Meeting, a central gathering for Quakers across the region, before the meeting was discontinued in 1797. The meeting house stood about a mile to the southeast.
Asheville, NC
Olive Tilford Dargan was a poet and novelist who made her home near Asheville from 1925 until her death in 1968. Writing fiction under the pen name "Fielding Burke," she produced Call Home the Heart, a novel drawn from the Gastonia textile-mill strikes, as well as her Appalachian sketches in Highland Annals. Her work gave literary voice to the mountain people and mill workers of the modern South.
Nash County, NC
In 1946 Black "leaf house" workers who graded and processed tobacco in eastern North Carolina organized to demand better pay and conditions, casting the region's first pro-union vote at a factory just west of here. The drive was part of Operation Dixie, the postwar labor campaign to unionize the South. Historians see these worker mobilizations as an early seedbed for the civil rights movement that followed.
Winston-Salem, NC
In the summer of 1937, Vernon Rudolph rented a building on South Main Street in Winston-Salem and began selling hot glazed doughnuts to local grocery stores — and soon, drawn by the smell, to passersby who knocked on the back door. That modest Depression-era storefront grew into Krispy Kreme, one of the most recognizable names in American baking. Winston-Salem, already a tobacco-and-textile boomtown, gave the company its first home and its enduring identity.
Cabarrus County, NC
This marker identifies the original site of Rocky River Presbyterian Church, established in the North Carolina Piedmont around 1751. Congregations like this one were founded largely by Scots-Irish settlers who streamed into the Carolina backcountry in the mid-1700s, making the Presbyterian meetinghouse a center of both faith and community life. The 1751–1776 span marks its earliest years at this location.
Burnsville, NC
Otway Burns (1775–1850) of coastal North Carolina made his name as a privateer captain in the War of 1812, harrying British merchant shipping along the Atlantic seaboard, and later served in the state legislature. Generations after his death, this mountain town of Burnsville was named in his honor, carrying a seafaring hero's name from the coast into the Appalachian highlands.
Wilson, NC
Owen L. W. Smith, born into slavery, rose to serve as U.S. minister to Liberia from 1898 to 1902 and as pastor of St. John A.M.E. Zion Church in Wilson. His life carried him from bondage to the highest ranks of American diplomacy and the ministry. He lived just north of this marker.
Oxford, NC
Opened by Baptists in 1851, Oxford Female College offered higher education to young women at a time when such opportunities were rare. Under president Franklin P. Hobgood, who led it from 1880 to 1924, the school flourished for decades before closing in 1925. Its campus stood two blocks south of this marker.
Oxford, NC
In 1873, Oxford's Masons opened an orphanage in the buildings of St. John's College, a school they had run before the Civil War from 1858 to 1861. With John H. Mills as its first superintendent, the institution offered shelter and schooling to children orphaned in an era of war and hardship. It reflected the postwar impulse to rebuild through charity and education.
Wilson, NC
P. D. Gold (1833–1920) was a prominent Primitive Baptist leader who, for fifty years, edited 'Zion's Landmark,' an influential religious newspaper published from Wilson. His long editorship made him a leading voice of the Primitive Baptist movement across the region. His office and home stood a half-block northeast of this marker.
Grover, NC
On October 4–5, 1780, the Loyalist force commanded by Colonel Patrick Ferguson camped near this site as it moved through the Carolina backcountry. Two days later Ferguson was killed and his command shattered at the Battle of Kings Mountain, a few miles to the southeast.
Chatham County, NC
Playwright, teacher, and humanitarian Paul Green won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 and went on to pioneer the American outdoor drama. His sixteen such works included The Lost Colony (1937), the pageant staged on North Carolina's coast that helped invent a whole genre of historical theater. From his home a mile east, Green shaped how Americans dramatize their own past.
Durham, NC
Pauli Murray grew up in Durham, in a childhood home a quarter mile south of here, and went on to break barrier after barrier. A lawyer, activist, poet, and writer of the memoir Proud Shoes (1956), Murray helped shape the legal arguments behind the civil rights and women's movements, and in later life became the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal priest. Few Americans left a mark across so many fields.
Dare County, NC
This marker recalls the Pea Island Life-Saving Station, the only U.S. Life-Saving Service station ever crewed entirely by Black surfmen. Under keeper Richard Etheridge, appointed in 1880, the station's men patrolled the treacherous Outer Banks and rowed into storms to rescue shipwrecked sailors during an era of deep racial segregation. Etheridge, born enslaved and a Civil War veteran, ran one of the most disciplined and effective crews on the coast, and his surfmen carried out daring rescues that saved countless lives. Their station stood as a rare place where Black Americans held recognized, life-and-death authority.
Raleigh, NC
Founded in 1857 by Presbyterian elder William Peace as a school for women, the college's opening was delayed by the Civil War, during which its main building served as a Confederate hospital and later housed the Freedmen's Bureau. Classes finally began in 1872. Its early history reflects the upheaval and reordering of the wartime and Reconstruction South.
Richmond County, NC
Organized in 1755, the Pee Dee Meeting was an early Quaker community on the Carolina frontier, gathering Friends for worship in a region far from the colony's coastal centers. As families moved westward in search of new land, the meeting dwindled and had faded by the 1840s, leaving its cemetery a mile and a half to the west.
Littleton, NC
An "ordinary" was the colonial term for a tavern offering meals and lodging at a fixed rate, and this one was in operation by 1770 as a stagecoach stop on a well-traveled route. Through the Revolutionary era it served travelers along the road and took its name from the family of Thomas Person, a prominent Revolutionary patriot for whom Person County is named. It was later restored by the Littleton Woman's Club.
Elizabeth City, NC
Born into slavery in 1859, Peter Weddick Moore became an educator and, from 1891 to 1923, the founding head of the state normal school that grew into Elizabeth City State University. Over three decades he built an institution devoted to training Black teachers for eastern North Carolina. His grave lies about a third of a mile southeast.
Misenheimer, NC
Pfeiffer University began in the 1880s as the Oberlin Home & School near Lenoir, a Methodist mission effort in the North Carolina mountains. In 1910 it moved to Misenheimer in Stanly County, and in the 1930s it was renamed to honor the Pfeiffer family, whose philanthropy helped secure its future. From humble mission-school roots it grew into a lasting institution of higher education.
Mint Hill, NC
Philadelphia Presbyterian Church was organized in 1770, on the eve of the Revolution, by the Scots-Irish settlers who filled the Mecklenburg County backcountry. David Barr served as its first pastor, ministering to a community known for its independent spirit. The congregation's brick sanctuary, a quarter-mile east, was completed in 1826.
Greensboro, NC
Built between 1862 and 1864 to serve the Confederacy, the Piedmont Railroad closed a crucial gap between Greensboro and Danville, Virginia. In the war's final years the line became a vital supply artery for Confederate armies—and in 1865 the route taken by Jefferson Davis's fleeing government as the Confederacy collapsed. Its terminus stood nearby.
Carthage, NC
In the years before the Civil War, North Carolina invested heavily in "plank roads" — highways surfaced with sawn timber to lift wagons out of the Piedmont mud. The Fayetteville-to-Salem line ran some 129 miles and was the longest of its kind in the state, a toll road built between 1849 and 1854 to move farm goods and manufactured wares between the Cape Fear market and the Moravian towns of the interior.
Asheboro, NC
This stretch of street once carried the Fayetteville-to-Salem plank road, a 129-mile timber-surfaced toll highway built between 1849 and 1854. Passing through Randolph County, it linked the Cape Fear trade to the Moravian settlements of the north-central Piedmont, letting loaded wagons roll over sawn boards instead of miring in clay.
Beaufort County, NC
Incorporated on March 8, 1705, Bath was North Carolina's very first town, a small but ambitious settlement on the Pamlico River. In 1716 it became home to a customs port of entry, shipping out the tar, pitch, and turpentine — the naval stores — that the region's pine forests yielded in abundance. For a time it was the colony's commercial front door.
Burlington, NC
In February 1781, a body of Loyalist militia marching to join Cornwallis's army was surprised and destroyed by Henry 'Light-Horse Harry' Lee's Legion on Colonel Michael Holt's land near here. The one-sided fight, sometimes called Pyle's Massacre, shattered Tory recruitment in the region on the eve of the Battle of Guilford Courthouse.
Jackson County, NC
The Qualla Boundary is the homeland of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, descendants of those who remained in the mountains after the removals of the 1830s. This marker notes Soco Gap as the starting point of the 1876 U.S. survey of the reservation, secured largely through the earlier efforts of W.H. Thomas, a white man adopted by the Cherokee who served as their chief and advocate.
Charlotte, NC
Founded in 1857 as the Charlotte Female Institute, this Presbyterian school was one of many Southern academies established to educate young women in an era when higher learning was largely closed to them. It relocated to this Myers Park campus in 1915 as Charlotte grew into a regional hub, and opened its doors to men in 1987. The institution's long arc traces the changing place of women and church-founded colleges in American education.
Dare County, NC
In 1901 and 1902, inventor Reginald A. Fessenden ran pioneering wireless experiments from a station on this stretch of the Outer Banks, some 600 yards to the southwest. A relentless tinkerer, Fessenden pushed radio beyond simple Morse dots toward the transmission of voice and sound itself. The windswept Carolina coast became one of the proving grounds for a technology that would soon reshape the world.
Gastonia, NC
R. Gregg Cherry served as governor of North Carolina from 1945 to 1949, guiding the state through the transition from World War II to peacetime. A former legislator, he championed better roads and rural electrification that modernized life for farm families across the state. His grave lies three miles southeast.
Halifax County, NC
Chartered in 1835 and completed in 1840, the Raleigh and Gaston Railroad was one of North Carolina's earliest rail lines, linking the state capital to the Roanoke River. Its northern terminus, the town of Gaston, thrived briefly before fading away entirely into a ghost town. The line helped pull a largely rural state into the railroad age.
Raleigh, NC
Chartered in 1835 and completed in 1840, the eighty-five-mile Raleigh and Gaston Railroad linked the state capital to the Roanoke River and the wider rail network beyond. It was among North Carolina's earliest railroads, built when the state was still overwhelmingly rural and road-bound. Its southern terminus lay just west of this spot.
Halifax, NC
The Confederate ironclad ram CSS Albemarle was fitted with its machinery and guns at Halifax before steaming down the Roanoke River into action in 1864. Ironclads like the Albemarle briefly challenged Union control of North Carolina's rivers and sounds during the Civil War. This marker recalls the inland shipyard work that sent her into battle.
Stanly County, NC
Around 1785, the pioneering Methodist preachers Jesse Lee and Bishop Francis Asbury held some of the earliest services in this area in the home of John Randle. Their visits were part of the sweeping circuit-riding ministry that carried Methodism across the young republic's rural frontier. The congregation has since built repeatedly, raising its fifth building in 1974 about three-quarters of a mile east.
Liberty, NC
In Randolph County, in North Carolina's central Piedmont, a local high school has been recognized as a cultural heritage site—a sign of how central schools were to the identity of Southern rural communities. For generations a county high school was far more than a classroom; it was where a community gathered for games, graduations, and civic life. Preserving it as heritage acknowledges the shared history bound up in the building.
Plymouth, NC
During the final Confederate push at the Battle of Plymouth on April 20, 1864, General Matt Ransom's North Carolina brigade formed its line of battle near this spot. Ransom's men were part of the broad assault that overwhelmed the Union defenses guarding the Roanoke River port. Within hours the entire garrison capitulated.
Concord, NC
Red Hill was the home and tavern of John and Martin Pheifer, a hospitable stop in the Cabarrus County backcountry where travelers of note broke their journeys. Its guests reportedly included royal Governor William Tryon and, later, President George Washington during his 1791 Southern Tour. Taverns like Red Hill were the inns, courtrooms, and news exchanges of their day.
Franklinville, NC
Rednap Howell was the balladeer of the Regulator movement, writing satirical songs that mocked corrupt officials and rallied backcountry farmers to their cause in the years before 1771. He fought at the Battle of Alamance, where the Regulators were defeated, and lived near this spot until his death in 1787.
Hillsborough, NC
In 1771 backcountry North Carolinians known as Regulators rose up against corrupt colonial officials and crushing fees, a rebellion put down by the royal governor's militia at the Battle of Alamance. In its aftermath several Regulators were tried and hanged at Hillsborough that June. This monument, placed by the Colonial Dames in 1963, marks the reputed spot where these men were executed for defying colonial authority.
Hillsborough, NC
After Royal Governor William Tryon crushed the Regulators at the Battle of Alamance on May 16, 1771, retribution followed swiftly. Six of the captured Regulators were hanged a quarter mile east of here on June 19, 1771. Their execution marked the grim end of the War of the Regulation, a farmers' uprising against colonial corruption and taxation.
Louisburg, NC
Born near here around 1777, Richard Warfington served as a corporal on the Lewis and Clark Expedition of 1804-1806. Entrusted by the captains, he led the crucial return party from the Mandan villages back toward St. Louis, safely delivering specimens, reports, and dispatches gathered in the expedition's first year. His steady leadership helped preserve the Corps of Discovery's early findings.
Yadkin County, NC
Richmond Pearson served as Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1859 to 1878, guiding the state's highest bench through the turmoil of the Civil War and Reconstruction. At his home, Richmond Hill, he ran a private law school that trained a great many of the state's future lawyers and judges. His influence on North Carolina jurisprudence was profound.