Museum of The Cape Fear Historical Complex

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.

Famous quotes containing the words museum of, museum, cape, fear, historical and/or complex:

    “A Museum of fetishes would give special attention to the history of underwear.”
    —Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    “One can think of life after the fish is in the canoe.”
    —Hawaiian saying no. 23, ‘lelo No’Eau, collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui, Bishop Museum Press, Hawaii (1983)

    “A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “I stand in awe of my body, this matter to which I am bound has become so strange to me. I fear not spirits, ghosts, of which I am one,—that my body might,—but I fear bodies, I tremble to meet them. What is this Titan that has possession of me? Talk of mysteries! Think of our life in nature,—daily to be shown matter, to come in contact with it,—rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world! the common sense! Contact! Contact! Who are we? where are we?”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Religion means goal and way, politics implies end and means. The political end is recognizable by the fact that it may be attained—in success—and its attainment is historically recorded. The religious goal remains, even in man’s highest experiences, that which simply provides direction on the mortal way; it never enters into historical consummation.”
    —Martin Buber (1878–1965)

    “All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly deconstructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.”
    —Terry Eagleton (b. 1943)