Raleigh, the capital of North Carolina

A capital that followed the governor

For most of the colonial era North Carolina had no fixed capital. The seat of government followed the governor, and the Assembly met in several towns, among them Edenton, where it met often from 1725 to 1736, Bath, Wilmington, Brunswick and New Bern. In 1766 New Bern became the permanent colonial capital, home of Tryon Palace.

Revolution and rotation

The Revolution unsettled things again. The Assembly still met at New Bern in 1777 and 1778, but from then until 1794 it rotated among New Bern, Hillsborough, Halifax, Smithfield, Wake Court House, Fayetteville and Tarboro. Hillsborough was chosen as the permanent capital in 1781, but a Loyalist raid that year convinced legislators it was not safe.

Choosing Wake County

In 1788 the convention that met at Hillsborough to consider the US Constitution also directed that a permanent capital be placed within ten miles of Isaac Hunter’s plantation in Wake County, a central location. Backers of Fayetteville used delaying tactics, and a vote in 1790 ended in a tie, but the legislature finally approved the Wake County site.

Laying out Raleigh

Commissioners bought 1,000 acres from Joel Lane, and in 1792 state senator William Christmas laid out the new city, named for Sir Walter Raleigh, with a central square, Union Square, reserved for the statehouse. The General Assembly first met in Raleigh in its 1794–95 session.

The State Capitol

Raleigh’s first statehouse burned in 1831, destroying among other things the state’s statue of George Washington by the sculptor Antonio Canova. Its replacement, finished in 1840, is a Greek Revival building with a domed rotunda and Doric columns modeled on those of the Parthenon. Its designers included Ithiel Town and Alexander Jackson Davis, William Nichols Jr. and William Strickland, and David Paton supervised construction. It cost more than $532,000.

The Capitol housed all of state government until 1888. The General Assembly moved to the State Legislative Building in 1963, but the governor’s office is still in the Capitol, and a replica of Canova’s Washington stands in the rotunda.

The Civil War

The capital did not move during the Civil War. Governor Zebulon Vance left Raleigh on April 12, 1865, just before General William T. Sherman’s troops occupied the city, but the state government was back in Raleigh by May 1865 under the provisional governor, William W. Holden.

Visiting

The State Capitol is a state historic site, open for free self-guided tours Monday through Saturday. See N.C. Historic Sites for details.