While North Carolina was still a colony, we were—technically—British subjects. Our homes were built—technically again—by subjects of King George. And some of these Georgian homes remain, despite fire and flood and the whims of change. There are thirteen mostly-English houses in New Bern. The Patrick Gordon House, built in 1771, is one of the most unchanged Georgian houses. Though the house was originally built to overlook the Trent River, the east-facing eighteenth-century Fl

The basement kitchen is a New Bern oddity well worth checking out. Not every house here had a basement kitchen. Most were built in before 1815, and the grandest homes on the largest lots had full buildings dedicated to food preparation. Many homes with basement kitchens also had outbuildings as summer kitchens, however, to keep heat from being added to the main house in the hottest weather. But in milder weather, the basement kitchen kept food preparation conveniently inside

You know, of course, that North Carolinians are called tarheels. But you may not know that the nickname comes largely from New Bernian activities. Vast forests of Longleaf Pine flourished in this part of Eastern North Carolina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Wound faces were cut in the bark, allowing early settlers to collect pine pitch and sap to make pine tar. Pine tar made wooden ships watertight, and was essential to the British Navy. By the late eighteenth c

Did you know that older structures are hidden inside some of our historic homes? Over the centuries a number of New Bern’s homes have been remodeled and enlarged. Sometimes, the Colonial-era frames were kept in place and reused, along with existing woodwork and staircases. So now, that earlier house is hidden within its newer—though still historic—architectural wrapper. For example, the George H. White House at 519 Johnson Street, above, was enlarged around a small four-bay h