The Port City's Oldest Museum: Cape Fear History at 814 Market Street

The Cape Fear Museum of History and Science was founded in eighteen ninety-eight, the same year as the massacre and coup. The timing is not a footnote. The museum was established by the local chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, and its early collecting and interpretation reflected that origin.

That history matters because museums are not neutral. The stories a community chooses to preserve, the artifacts it collects, the narratives it frames around them, reveal what that community believes about itself.

For most of the twentieth century, the story of the eighteen ninety-eight coup was not part of the official civic memory that museums and textbooks maintained. The event was called a riot, downplayed as disorder, or simply omitted. Only in recent decades, following the two thousand six state report and growing public reckoning, did that history begin to be integrated into institutions like this one.

The museum today spans more than fifty-two thousand artifacts and tells the region's history from the first Paleo-Indian inhabitants through the twenty-first century. The records grow thin, as they always do, around the violence done to those who left the fewest written accounts. But the interpretive arc has shifted. A substantial exhibit now addresses the eighteen ninety-eight coup directly. Segregation and civil rights receive attention they once lacked.

The museum also holds a gallery dedicated to Michael Jordan, who grew up in Wilmington, attended Laney High School, and was famously cut from his junior varsity basketball team before becoming the most decorated player in NBA history. That story is also Wilmington's story. The city produces more history than it sometimes gets credit for.