Raleigh, Purpose-Built

In seventeen ninety-two, the state of North Carolina did not have a permanent capital. The legislature had been meeting in various coastal towns, and no coastal town could agree to let another one host the government permanently. Every city that wanted the capital was also a city its rivals did not trust with it.

The solution was to build a capital from nothing, in a place that belonged to no existing city, at the geographic center of the state.

In April seventeen ninety-two, a commission purchased one thousand acres of land from a planter named Joel Lane for one thousand three hundred seventy-eight pounds. A surveyor named William Christmas laid out the plan: a one-square-mile grid of perpendicular streets centered on a public square he designated Union Square, with four major roads radiating outward toward Hillsborough, Fayetteville, New Bern, and Halifax. The design borrowed from William Penn's plan for Philadelphia. The square at the center was designated as the site of the State House.

In November seventeen ninety-two, the General Assembly named the new city Raleigh, after Sir Walter Raleigh, the Elizabethan courtier and explorer who had sponsored the Roanoke Colony a century before and who had never set foot in North Carolina.

The General Assembly first met in Raleigh in December seventeen ninety-four. The State House completed then burned in eighteen thirty-one. The current North Carolina State Capitol, the domed Greek Revival building that stands on Capitol Square today, was completed in eighteen forty. It has been in continuous use as a working legislative building ever since, one of the few antebellum capitols in the South that was not destroyed in the Civil War.