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The NC History Center On The Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction in Fayetteville is bringing an open house of sorts to two Fayetteville-area churches in October. The Center will have panels that will outline the plans that historians and the North Carolina...

Opening:   Mac Healy, Chair, Board of Directors Dr. James Leutze, Co-Chair, Board of Advisors Written remarks from Representative John Szoka Dr. James A. Anderson, Co-Chair, Board of Advisors, introduces guest speaker Dr. Spencer Crew, Emeritus Director of the...

News Release:  November 19, 2021 Toward A More Perfect Union North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center included in state budget for $59.6 million FAYETTEVILLE NC – Gov. Roy Cooper on Thursday signed into law a state budget that invests $59.6 million...

Dear Friends: By any measure, 2020 has been a challenging year:  A global pandemic.  Racial division and strife.   Economic turmoil. Many of you have asked what this means for the future of the North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center. The answer...

Phase 1 is finished as of September 2020! While covid-19 has slowed our progress, we now have our certificates of occupancy for the 3 houses in History Village. Landscaping and sidewalks are complete. The 6-minute-long video at the end of this post walks you through...

Always nice to share good news. Even in the throes of the virus, the History Center is pressing ahead with completion of Phase 1. Progress is great! We are still on course to have Phase 1 complete by the end of April. Stay tuned for the ribbon cutting and...

The North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center sponsored a presentation by Philip Gerard, author of the book The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina on Thursday, March 28, 2019 in Fayetteville, NC. Watch the entire presentation...

Our Speakers From The North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center Groundbreaking Ceremony in Fayetteville, NC on April 18, 2018. Chancellor James A. Anderson The Honorable Patricia Timmons Goodson Senator Tony Rand Commissioner Michael C. Boose Mayor...

Louis Leon is not, like many famous generals of the Civil War, a household name. That’s because he wasn’t one of them…

March 2017 Dear Friends, The North Carolina Civil War History Center has been making great progress! In this newsletter are some of our recent and upcoming activities. We thank you for your continued support and, as always, we encourage you to contact us if you have...

My great-grandfather's youngest sister has been dead for more than 130 years, but she's still driving me crazy. In fairness, she's had a lot of help. Janie Smith, who was living in the house I now occupy when William T. Sherman and William J. Hardee literally brought...

Lee. Grant. Appomattox. The three names have become almost shorthand for an end to four ghastly years of a war, all of whose casualties were Americans turned against one another. It is worth revisiting the correspondence and other documents of April 8, 9, and 10,...

Near the end of the 19th century, author-journalist Cornelia Ann Phillips Spencer lost patience with what she considered Yankee revisionist history and decided to set the record straight. The result was a North Carolina history textbook that offered a full-throated...

Snippets from a war story:      Being outnumbered and flanked on our right (Sherman’s left), we fell back in good order to Line No. 3, hundreds of yards from Line No. 2, and there Hardee’s entire corps, so far as I could tell, held the enemy in check until night.    ...

Thousands of North Carolina boys and men began their Confederate service as members of local militias, some of which had colorful names such as “Scotch Tigers” and “Cumberland Plough Boys.” The names, and the men, were sometimes lost to view as those units disappeared...

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) was in the front rank of this country’s landscape architects, and many consider him the best. But he was other things, as well – farmer, journalist, public works administrator – and he approached all his work with the same vision,...

“Why are you so interested in history?" Oh, for a dollar for each time I've been asked that. My initial answer went something like this: "I was bitten by the bug when my grandparents took me to an old battlefield close to home." Later, I changed it to, "The people of...

A few days ago, I finished reading an outstanding book about the battle of Waterloo. Titled “WATERLOO: The History of Four Days, Three Armies and Three Battles,” it was written by Bernard Cornwell. If you know anything about historical fiction, you've probably...

He was only 19. Fate or plain bad luck had brought him to a fight at Big Bethel Church in Virginia, in June of 1861. The young man had enlisted back in April, less than a week after the bombardment of Fort Sumter. The Tar Heel State had not initially joined...

For more than nine months, some 50,000 troops in the Army of Northern Virginia were dug in at Petersburg, in a situation that none other than Robert E. Lee had early on described, in writing, as “untenable.” During the long face-off, their contributions to the war...

They're making this easy for me. The week ended with distant artillery at Fort Bragg jarring the foundations of this old house. Then, on Sunday, gunners in the reenactment at the Averasboro Battlefield Museum a few hundred yards south let go a couple of rounds with...

The day after I became a teenager in 1960, Look magazine published a piece by American novelist MacKinlay Kantor, titled, "If the South Had Won the Civil War." At the time I found the title intriguing, but the substance eluded me. Having had more than half a century...

As the summer of 1864 gave way to autumn, Maj. Gen.William T. Sherman was restless. What remained of Atlanta was under Union control. Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood had by Sherman's reckoning lost his enthusiasm for head-to-head fighting. Instead, Hood busied himself...

If a 19th-century Time magazine had picked a Person of the Year for any of the war years, Abraham Lincoln would have been impossible to ignore. The mere fact of his election in 1860 stirred South Carolina to declare the Union dissolved and begin expropriating U.S....

Monroe is in the Hospital somewhere sick. Our 1st Lieut. is now Capt. and myself 1st Lieut. J.D. Currie 2nd Lieut. and Toler holds 2nd Lieut.'s place though he is not with us. He is at home, has hemorage (sic) of the lungs. Bill Davis died on his way to the Co. with...

Laws, Ian Fleming's villainous Goldfinger scoffed to James Bond, are merely "the crystallized prejudices of the community." That's harsh, and not entirely accurate. But it makes the useful point that our code of laws, no matter what the credits and credentials of...

Have you hit a dead end in trying to piece together your ancestors’ stories? Has an old cemetery gone missing? Can't find the will, birth or death certificate, or tax record you want? You could be looking in the wrong place. Maybe a county jumped out from under you....

Not quite two years after the Civil War ended, John C. Smith of Cumberland County found himself in the same predicament as other planters suddenly confronted by the prospect of having to pay the help. The land that had made his grandfather, his father and John himself...

Some call the endless fascination with the Civil War puzzling -- silly, even. They should rethink that. There are no reliable figures for those who were wounded or maimed, or those whose health was wrecked. No one can quantify the grief and privation of families...

A good shake of the family tree often brings down a hail of Civil War soldiers, each good for at least one war story pieced together from unit records or one personal anecdote preserved in a letter or diary entry. But what did it mean to belong, as did several of my...

Come join us on August 15.     Click here for Tour Details! Want To Work With Us? Get involved with our exciting project. Phone: 910-491-0602 Email: info@nccivilwarcenter.org 824 Branson Street Post Office Box 53865...

My Civil War commemoration began four years ago, on April 12, 2011. I watched from The Battery at Charleston Harbor as a giant spotlight sent a beam into the night sky above Fort Sumter. At 4:30 a.m. that beam split in two, signifying the moment the first shot of the...

"The cloud of war is darkening and threatens to burst over our heads. Wilmington has fallen, Charleston and Columbia. Sherman is still making his onward march. Our own town is threatened and all is dismay and uncertainty." So wrote Jane Elliot from her plantation home...

If you want to know how one of the nation's premiere military installations got its name, don't expect to find the answer in the Civil War service record of Braxton Bragg, who has been called "the North's favorite Southern general." Want To Work With Us? Get involved...

There's no shortage of innocent assumptions, sneering one-liners, pseudohistory, off-topic diversions and mindless loops regarding the causes and conduct of the Civil War. If you've had enough of that cheap beer, then buy, borrow or check out Daniel A. Farber's...

A Texas soldier stationed in Arkansas, one of eight Reb brothers born and reared on the same Cape Fear River plantation, was reservedly optimistic as the Civil War passed its first anniversary."If I am still blessed with good health," Jimmie Smith wrote his future...

On Thursday, May 8, from 7:30 – 9:30 PM, the History Center will launch its Friends program at a special gathering at SkyView on Hay in downtown Fayetteville.  We will be premiering a special video about the History Center plans and we will be hearing from one of the...

Leaders of Cumberland Community Foundation announced a major gift to the proposed North Carolina Civil War History Center. Plans call for the education center to be built on the grounds of the existing State-supported Museum of the Cape Fear, directly adjacent to the...

Abolish the unthinkable and you can have no more wars. Is there even a remote chance that Alexander McRae, a U.S. Army officer from Fayetteville, idly wondered during his time as a West Point cadet if he would die in New Mexico Territory battling rebels led by his...