The Museum of the Cape Fear Historical Complex is a museum about the history and cultural heritage of southern North Carolina. Opened in 1988 and located in Fayetteville, the museum is a regional branch of the North Carolina Museum of History in Raleigh. The complex includes the main history museum, the 1897 Poe House, and Arsenal Park.
Exhibits at the museum include Native Americans, European explorers and settlers, slavery, transportation by plank roads and steamboat, local industries including the textile industry and naval stores industry, the history of Fayetteville during the American Civil War, natural history and folk pottery. An early twentieth century general store with period merchandise is on display.
The 1897 Poe House is a historic house museum that has been furnished for the late Victorian period. Docent-led tours discuss the changes in the era's social, cultural and family history.
Arsenal Park, located behind the museum, is a four and a half acre park that features the remains of the Fayetteville Confederate arsenal that was destroyed by Gen. William T. Sherman and his 60,000-man army in March 1865. The museum maintains the park.
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—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Wishing to get a better view than I had yet had of the ocean, which, we are told, covers more than two thirds of the globe, but of which a man who lives a few miles inland may never see any trace, more than of another world, I made a visit to Cape Cod.... But having come so fresh to the sea, I have got but little salted.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
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—Catharine R. Stimpson (b. 1936)