Press Releases

Experience history come alive at the Bentonville Battlefield State Historic Site 160th anniversary program March 15-16. Thousands of living historians from across the country will descend on Bentonville Battlefield for one of the nation’s largest battle reenactments.     

On Saturday, March 8, Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site will host the North Carolina Rice Festival. The festival celebrates how rice and Gullah-Geechee culture shaped the North Carolina Lowcountry.

Fort Dobbs State Historic Site will offer a glimpse of the harrowing days of the Anglo-Cherokee War on March 1 with a living-history commemoration.

On Saturday, Feb. 15 at 2 p.m., Bennett Place State Historic Site will host a free lecture with local historian Ernest Dollar entitled “Jublio: Moments of Freedom, 1865.”Dollar, who serves as director of the Museums Section for the City of Raleigh, will highlight how enslaved people found and claimed freedom for themselves in the final days of the Civil War in North Carolina. This program will explore perspectives of African American men and women’s first moments of freedom as part of the site’s Black History Month programming.

Historic Halifax State Historic Site will mark the 200th anniversary of the Marquis de Lafayette’s historic visit to the town with special programming on Thursday, Feb. 27.

On Saturday, Feb. 15, Brunswick Town/Fort Anderson State Historic Site will commemorate the 160th anniversary of Fort Anderson's capture by U.S. forces in 1865. The site will host two public events, starting with a free day of living history. This will be followed by a ticketed nighttime reenactment of the bombardment and evacuation of the fort.

The State Capitol will bring back a popular walking tour series centered on protest and civil rights in downtown Raleigh to commemorate Black History Month. The "We've Always Been Out There" tour will be a short (0.5 mile) walking tour that discusses the lengthy history of protest and civil rights demonstrations in Raleigh. The tour covers events from the early 19th century to the 1980s, and includes the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, women's suffrage, Prohibition, the anti-Vietnam War movement, and the city’s first ever Pride parade.

Opening Nov. 16 at Historic Stagville, Maya Freelon: Whippersnappers will premiere large-scale sculptures, archival photographs, paintings, and collages that transform the former plantation.

KURE BEACH, NC—A lot can happen in half a century. For that matter, a lot can happen in a year. At the end of calendar year 2021, Fort Fisher State Historic Site achieved its goal of more than one million visitors annually, a first for Fort Fisher or any historic site within the NC Division of State Historic Sites. When the turnstiles stopped at year’s end, total onsite visitation for calendar year 2021 reached 1,052,270.