North Carolina

New Chapel Baptist Church was established in 1867 as a congregation of freedmen organized by Abraham Mabens. Located in the heart of eastern North Carolina’s Cotton Kingdom, it is a landmark of the historically African American southeast quadrant of town.

Somerset Place, nestled on Lake Phelps near the Scuppernong River in Creswell, is an example of an atypically large antebellum plantation in North Carolina. In 1785, three businessmen, Josiah Collins I, Nathaniel Allen, and Dr. Samuel Dickinson, purchased 100,000 swampy acres along the lake with plans to develop the area into more suitable farmland—a major endeavor since the area was mostly under water during the growing months.

Clingmans Dome Observation Tower is located at the highest point in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park (GSMNP) on the Tennessee–North Carolina border. The 1959 reinforced concrete structure was a precedent-setting design for the Mission 66 project, a decade-long effort to upgrade National Park Service (NPS) facilities before the agency’s 50th anniversary in 1966. The design philosophy of Mission 66 was distinctly modern and prioritized visitor experience over blending in with the landscape or deferring to a park’s history or traditions.

The Rehoboth Methodist Church is small, simple, yet dignified example of a Greek Revival Protestant church form.

The Matsumoto House was designed by George Matsumoto, a Japanese-American architect from California who was an original faculty member at North Carolina State University’s School of Design.

The Canetuck Rosenwald School is one of 5,000 institutional buildings for African Americans funded by Sears, Roebuck and Company president Julius Rosenwald during the era of segregation. The Rosenwald Fund School Building Program (1917–1932) was a joint initiative of Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington intended to improve the quality of public education for rural African American children in the Jim Crow South by providing the guidance and means to build modern schoolhouses.

Calvary Episcopal Church is an excellent example of antebellum Gothic Revival church architecture in a picturesque landscape setting.

The Davidson County Courthouse, with its refined scale and proportion, is one of the finest Classical Revival courthouses in North Carolina.

The Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station is one of the over two dozen such stations up and down the North Carolina coast. It was of the earliest built in the Tar Heel State and is, today, the most intact.

Cape Hatteras Lighthouse overlooks Diamond Shoals, historically one of the most dangerous areas of the so-called Graveyard of the Atlantic. The tallest brick lighthouse in the United States, its black and white spiral marking makes it one of the most iconic buildings on the Outer Banks of North Carolina.