Topics Related to Historical Resources

A man whose photographs of the North Carolina mountains played a crucial role in the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park soon will be recognized with a new North Carolina Highway Historical Marker in Asheville.

The marker commemorates George Masa, who some have called the Ansel Adams of the Smokies. His photographs captured the unique beauty and majesty of the Smokies' mountains and valleys, persuading many that the Great Smoky Mountains were worth protecting as a national park.

A new Highway Historical Marker soon will commemorate North Carolina’s oldest State Historic Site.

The North Carolina State Capitol will host the traveling exhibit “Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina” from April 1 to May 31. Visitors to the Capitol can see this exhibit Monday-Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. and Saturdays 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Over 10 panels, this exhibit features a four-century timeline of Jewish history in North Carolina, focusing on topics such as family, being southern, commerce, immigration, community, learning, and more.

The end of the Civil War brought several firsts for African Americans, .most notably the election to local, state, and federal offices. From the North Carolina state legislature to the United States Congress, African American North Carolinians served their nation in political positions.

The Town of Swansboro and the Swansboro Historic Preservation Commission have been awarded a 2021 federal Historic Preservation Fund grant for Certified Local Governments from the National Park Service, administered through the State Historic Preservation Office (HPO) of the North Carolina Office of Archives and History. The project is to conduct an architectural survey update within the boundaries of both the National Register-listed Swansboro Historic District (NR 1990) and the locally designated Swansboro Historic District.

A free online program hosted by the Western Office of the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources will examine the formation of the Ku Klux Klan. Historian Steven Nash will present an in-depth look at the rise of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction and its terroristic campaign against the biracial Republican political coalition that emerged in the late 1860s.

Montgomery County has been chosen as the subject of a comprehensive survey of historic buildings and landscapes planned from 2022-23. Funding for this architectural survey comes from the Emergency Supplemental Historic Preservation Fund (ESHPF), administered by the National Park Service, for hurricanes Florence and Michael.

The North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources and the State Historic Preservation Office (HPO) seek to conduct oral history interviews with persons active in the Civil Rights Movement between the years 1941 to 1976 in northeastern North Carolina.

Reconstruction remains one of the most misunderstood periods in our nation’s history. Broadly, it was about the meaning of citizenship as African American enslaved people seized their freedom and the restoration of the former Confederate states to the Union. At the local or regional level within the American South, however, these broad issues played out very differently.   

The North Carolina African American Heritage Commission and the State Archives of North Carolina are partnering with the WeGOJA Foundation on a new initiative, Black Carolinians Speak: Portraits of a Pandemic, to capture the experiences of African Americans in the Carolinas during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project will gather first-person testimonies, letters, music, images, art and other documents that will be part of a physical and virtual exhibit.