Latest News
“Fayetteville Museum Aims to Right the Record on Civil War History.” – The Assembly
The Assembly NC has recently published an article highlighting the efforts the North Carolina History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction has made these last two years with the NC Educators' Symposium program. Under the leadership of the...
2024 Year End Update
Dear Friends: We’re delighted to update you on our progress this past year! We hope you will continue to support our efforts to complete Phase 3, and we have a new and very exciting challenge … and challenge is the operative word. But first: The Cumberland...
Enjoy Civil War Era Cuisine with Culinary Civil War Tales, Episode 2!
Don’t miss this exciting opportunity to watch and learn more about the resourcefulness of Civil War era cuisine! In this episode we are delving into the history of Johnny cakes, from its inception with American Indian communities to being well known among southern...
Leesa Jones Delivers Outstanding Performance to a Crowd at the 6th Annual Hari Jones Memorial Lecture
On Monday June 17, 2024 Leesa Jones co-founder and Executive Director of the Washington Underground Railroad Museum in Washington, North Carolina spoke at Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church in Fayetteville on behalf of the North Carolina History Center on the Civil...
Leesa Jones Presents the 2024 Hari Jones Memorial Lecture
Save the Date! Please join us on Monday, June 17, 2024, at 7:00 p.m. at Mt. Sinai Missionary Baptist Church, 1217 Murchison Road (across the street from Fayetteville State University) for our annual Hari Jones Memorial Juneteenth Lecture. This event is free of...
2024 Spring Construction Update
We are reaching the final stages of phase 2, which includes the construction of a Pavilion and Boardwalk along the arsenal ruins. To ensure the safety of those working within the work zone and those who want to visit the park, a silt fence has been installed around...
2023 Year End Update
Dear Friends of the History Center: We are most grateful for all you are doing to help us with this worthy project! This has been a year of successes, beginning with 2022’s GivingTuesday programs and ending with this year’s. We were very excited that the Cumberland...
November 2022 Year End Update
Dear Friends: We are pleased to announce officially our new name—The NC History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction—and that we have secured the necessary funding from Cumberland County and the City of Fayetteville to almost complete our...
Media Advisory: October 3, 2022
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...
Videos from the June 2nd ground-breaking for Phase 3
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...
December 2021 Year End Update
Dear Friends: I hope you have heard the great news that our Civil War & Reconstruction History Center has received a $59.6 million grant from the State of North Carolina! These funds, payable over the next two years, will help create construction documents for the...
History Center included in state budget for $59.6 million
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...
December 2020 Year End Update
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 September 2020, and Phase 2 is in progress!
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...
June 8 2020 Statement by the Board of Directors
It is with great sadness for the families and friends of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor—and for where we are as a state and as a nation—that we at the North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center issue this statement. The unjust and...
North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center – Phase 1
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...
Public Hearings and Meetings
The North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center is not something we just dreamed up last year and decided to build. In fact, we have held numerous public hearings and meetings with public officials, etc. Click the links below to download a list of the...
Prominent African American Scholars and Academics Advising the History Center
Prominent African American Scholars and Academics Advising the North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center: Dr. James Anderson, retired Chancellor and faculty, Fayetteville State University, member of our Board of Advisors Dr. Spencer Crew, former...
Questions and Answers
You've got questions. We've got answers... Q.We don’t like the name A: Change it. The N.C. Civil War & Reconstruction History Center was chosen by the N.C. Civil War & Reconstruction History Center Foundation to refer to the proposed facility and...
Former NC Governor Jim Hunt on WIDU
An interview today with Governor James B. Hunt, Jr. asking for the community’s support for creation of the Civil War & Reconstruction History Center in Fayetteville. Click below to listen...
NCCWRHC receives $6.5 million painting…
N.C. Civil War & Reconstruction History Center receives $6.5 million painting, completes local funding requirement for $5 million state appropriation For immediate release: June 4, 2019 (For a video of the painting donated to the N.C. Civil War &...
The Last Battleground: The Civil War Comes to North Carolina.
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...
December 2018 Newsletter
Dear History Center Friend and Supporter: We have a lot to tell you about our 2018 progress! Please click on the title above and then the link that follows this sentence to read our most recent update: December 2018 Newsletter
North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center: The Journey from Disunion toward Reunion
By Philip Gerard Prologue The Civil War breaks over North Carolina with the fury of a natural disaster. Yet it is a man-made calamity with roots going back to the founding of the state. The state is the last to secede, in fact votes against even holding a secession...
History Center’s 2018 Progress to Date
Our latest newsletter: History Center's 2018 Progress to Date! There's much to tell you! We're proud of the progress we've made in the first five months of 2018. Dear Friend of the History Center: There's much to tell you! We're proud of the progress we've made in the...
N.C. Civil War & Reconstruction History Center To Sponsor ‘Juneteenth’ Presentation by Historian Hari Jones
The North Carolina Civil War & Reconstruction History Center is sponsoring a presentation by Hari Jones, one of the foremost authorities on the role of African Americans in the Civil War, who will speak on the topic: “How the Civil War Made America Great.” The...
Groundbreaking Ceremony Speeches
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...
Making history, one march at a time
Louis Leon is not, like many famous generals of the Civil War, a household name. That’s because he wasn’t one of them…
Update on the History Center’s 2017 Progress
If things have seemed quiet at the History Center, there’s been a reason: We’ve been busy! Since we wrote you last year, we’ve raised more than $20 million in new, firm commitments…
Uniting a divided history
From the robust public discussion about North Carolina’s legacy of Civil War monuments, it’s clear that — a century and a half after its close — we’re still sorting out how to make sense of that war…
Where did all the treason trials go?
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless…
A summer of change, a long winter of resistance
As hopes and honeysuckle bloomed, a century and a half ago, forces were massing to ensure that the dreams of newly liberated slaves and their white supporters would never take root. At the federal level, slavery had been abolished by constitutional amendment. But...
Our Latest Newsletter!
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...
Reconstruction: the insurgency that followed the war
This is the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction, an ugly but historically important period in which the Union, having won a long and ghastly Civil War, lost the peace to the same set of antagonists. That realization arrived in different places at different times....
Aunt Janie vs. the Yankees — and me
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...
What Lee and Grant didn’t bother to debate
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,...
A few Southern perspectives on the Civil War
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...
Every good story deserves an audience
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. ...
Have a boxful of history? Share the wealth!
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...
Olmsted cast New Eyes on the Old South
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,...
To Make Them Live Again
“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...
Waterloo and The Civil War
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...
The first to fall for North Carolina
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...
The long road ends at Durham
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...
Averasboro, and a civilian view
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...
Old myths frustrate modern hopes
If you grew up white, Southern and embedded in the successor class to the Antebellum gentry, you've likely heard it -- more than once: "I was always told that they treated them like family." "Them" meaning slaves. It wasn't a lie; that was in fact what they -- the...
The Day Joe Johnston Stopped the War
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...
Gen. Sherman’s critical turn of events
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...
Matters of time and timing
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....
Hard times on the home front
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...