The Market House and Its Contradictions

The building at the center of downtown Fayetteville has always been a source of civic pride and, increasingly, of civic reckoning.

The Market House was built in eighteen thirty-two and eighteen thirty-three, after the Great Fire wiped out its predecessor, the original State House. It was designed to serve as the town's commercial hub, a covered open-air marketplace where farmers and merchants could trade goods. And it did exactly that, for generations.

The building itself is architecturally striking, a two-story brick structure with arched openings on the ground floor and a cupola on top. It stands alone in the center of a traffic rotary where four major streets converge, unmissable and intentional, a civic anchor.

But the Market House was also a place where enslaved people were bought and sold. The building was not designed as a slave market, and the records show trade in goods, cotton, and livestock as the primary commercial activity. Enslaved people were sold here too, though a study found such sales were infrequent and usually involved few people. Those transactions ended only with emancipation in eighteen sixty-five.

In the summer of twenty twenty, during protests following the death of George Floyd, protesters tried to set fire to the Market House. The fire was quickly put out and caused only minor damage. The city has since debated how the building should be used going forward.

No single building in Fayetteville holds more of the city's history, or more of its unresolved tension, in one place. It is a remarkable structure, and a complicated one.