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 the, museum, cape, fear, historical and/or complex:

    “I have no connections here; only gusty collisions,
    rootless seedlings forced into bloom, that collapse.
    ...
    I am the Visiting Poet: a real unicorn,
    a wind-up plush dodo, a wax museum of the Movement.
    People want to push the buttons and see me glow.”
    —Marge Piercy (b. 1936)

    “[A] Dada exhibition. Another one! What’s the matter with everyone wanting to make a museum piece out of Dada? Dada was a bomb ... can you imagine anyone, around half a century after a bomb explodes, wanting to collect the pieces, sticking it together and displaying it?”
    —Max Ernst (1891–1976)

    “A solitary traveler whom we saw perambulating in the distance loomed like a giant. He appeared to walk slouchingly, as if held up from above by straps under his shoulders, as much as supported by the plain below. Men and boys would have appeared alike at a little distance, there being no object by which to measure them. Indeed, to an inlander, the Cape landscape is a constant mirage.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Men’s minds tend to fear more keenly those things that are absent.”
    —Julius Caesar [Gaius Julius Caesar] (100–44 B.C.)

    “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)

    “In ordinary speech the words perception and sensation tend to be used interchangeably, but the psychologist distinguishes. Sensations are the items of consciousness—a color, a weight, a texture—that we tend to think of as simple and single. Perceptions are complex affairs that embrace sensation together with other, associated or revived contents of the mind, including emotions.”
    —Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)