North Carolina’s long-awaited Civil War & Reconstruction history center will open in Fayetteville in spring 2028, project advocates said on Friday.
Construction of the 60,000-square-foot museum building is about to begin, museum board Chair Mac Healy told about 50 people gathered Friday for a ceremony on the construction site.
“This is a turning point. We’re done planning. It’s ready to roll,” Healy said. “Now comes the fun part: You can drive by here, and instead of seeing an empty lot … you can see construction. You’ll begin to see it go up.”
The North Carolina Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction will be built in the Haymount area of Fayetteville at the end of Arsenal Avenue and along the Martin Luther King Jr. Freeway between Hay Street and Branson Street, near the MLK Freeway’s Hay Street interchange. This is where stone remnants of the Civil War-era Fayetteville Arsenal are still visible, across the highway from the Museum of the Cape Fear.
The $85 million center “is going to present for us a unique opportunity to tell multiple stories,” said Pamela Brewington Cashwell, the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. Cashwell grew up in Fayetteville.
“This will be the first and only museum in North Carolina focusing on an important part of our history — important, but frankly, overlooked at this point in time — and that’s reconstruction,” she said. “It’s the story of our state putting itself back together after the Civil War.”
The museum will have 16,000 square feet of exhibition space, classrooms, a library, a 2,000-square-foot community meeting room, a lobby with space to hold events, a cafe, gift shop and rotating exhibit gallery.
“The history center will be a place where people come not to learn about the great battles of the Civil War, but about the stories of the very diverse people living in North Carolina during this tumultuous time, and what they experienced,” said Andy Brakenbury of the Vines Architecture firm that designed the building. “It will also be a place where friends can meet for a cup of coffee, or perhaps an iced tea on a day like today, or bring their kids to play in the park.”
Other portions of the project have been put in place over the past several years. An outdoor pavilion is complete, and three Civil War-era homes were moved on site to create an area called the VanStory History Village.
The United States has a $2 billion Civil War tourism industry, Healy said. He predicts the history center will tap into that, citing a study that estimated 200,000 people will visit annually.
Healy said the project is being paid for with $7.5 million in money and land from the City of Fayetteville, $7.5 million from Cumberland County, $71 million from the state of North Carolina, about $18 million to $19 million in donations, and $3 million from foundations.
These exceed the $85 million construction estimate.
Healy said the project has been spending money on other expenses, including an outreach program to high school teachers.
Teachers told the museum advocates, “We’re scared to say the wrong thing,” so they don’t teach this part of North Carolina and American history, Healy said.
Complaints that the history center will say “the wrong thing” have dogged it since its conception in the early 2000s when advocates for the Museum of the Cape Fear in Fayetteville wanted to make it more relevant, CityView and The Assembly previously reported. The regionally focused Museum of the Cape Fear sits just across a pedestrian bridge over the MLK Freeway from the site of the new history center.
Some critics predicted it would be another “Lost Cause” edifice that romanticizes and erases the ugly realities of slavery in the antebellum South. Critics were assured that no Confederate flag would fly over the site — and that attracted complaints from the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a consultant said.
To address those concerned that the center would portray a whitewashed Civil War history — some of whom were on the Fayetteville City Council — the originally proposed name was also changed over the years.
It had been “The North Carolina Civil War History Center.” It eventually became “The North Carolina Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction.”
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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