North Carolina

The Newbold-White House is one of the earliest extant buildings in North Carolina. Located two and a half miles southeast of Hertford, the Newbold-White House faces east on the west bank of the Perquimans River, ten miles upriver from the Albemarle Sound. This part of Perquimans County was once the heart of a Quaker settlement. Recent dendrochronology reveals the house was erected around 1730, when Quakers Abraham and Judith Pricklove Sanders owned the property.

This temple-form brick courthouse is the chef d’oeuvre of regional brick builder John Berry (1798–1870) of Hillsborough, combining strongly executed classical elements with his signature fine brickwork.

The Old Stone House, the homestead for the Michael Braun family, sits on the Great Wagon Road, a key migration path of German settlers from Pennsylvania. Much like the houses that are seen forty miles north in Old Salem, the house pieces together remnants of Moravian building techniques and North Carolina vernacular. It is one of the oldest houses in the North Carolina Piedmont.

Spencer Shops underscores the importance of commerce and railways in the early-twentieth-century United States. The town of Spencer, North Carolina, located roughly three miles north of downtown Salisbury in Rowan County, is the midpoint between Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, Georgia, and was selected by railroad financier J. Pierpont Morgan as the site of the Southern Railway’s largest steam locomotive repair facility. Now a transportation museum, it is one of the nation’s few intact twentieth-century railway facilities.

The Edwards-Franklin House reflects the influence of the plantation economy in early republican North Carolina. Originally built in the 1790s by state senator Gideon Edwards, the house was remodeled in the Federal style by his son-in-law, Meshack Franklin, in the 1820s. The two-story frame plantation house has a stone foundation and gable roof. Sitting atop a small knoll, the south-facing house has a single-story front porch that runs the length of the facade; the porch’s shed roof is supported by six chamfered posts.

The Mountain Farm Museum is an assortment of late-nineteenth-century southern Appalachia farm buildings relocated to Cherokee, North Carolina, on the banks of the Oconaluftee River in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

The open-air Cherokee Mountainside Theatre is nestled into the side of a ridge within the Eastern Cherokee Reservation. Here, the story of the Cherokee people has been presented by the Cherokee Historical Association in the play Unto These Hills for more than half a century.

The Allison-Deaver House is one of the oldest standing frame houses in western North Carolina. In 1815, Benjamin Allison built this house for his family in the mountainous region of Transylvania County. In an area where log cabins were typical, this two-story frame structure was unusual for the time. Allison sold the house in 1830 to William Deaver, an unusually prosperous landowner with approximately 5,117 acres of property to his name. Most residents of this area, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, were subsistence farmers.

The North Carolina State Capitol is one of the state’s prime architectural landmarks and one of the country’s finest and best-preserved Greek Revival public buildings. This classical edifice with its massive Doric porticoes and stunning interior spaces might suggest a single, sophisticated architectural vision, and its scale and quality might suggest that it was built for a prosperous state with a tradition of monumental stone construction, yet nothing could be further from the saga of its construction.

The Executive Mansion, the official residence of the North Carolina governor, is one of the earliest Queen Anne structures in the state and its design represented a modernizing South. It was first occupied in 1891.