New Bern Avenue Walking Tour Calls Attention To History

North Central CAC Sponsors Project

To travel down New Bern Avenue is to glimpse the history of Raleigh. The street is one of the original gateways into the city, and its landmarks reflect the changes that have taken place over more than 200 years.

Now residents of the area are calling attention to the corridor's historical significance with a self-guided walking tour. The tour follows a 1.5-mile section of New Bern Avenue and Edenton Street east of the state Capitol.

"The purpose of the tour is to create awareness and to educate," says Octavia Rainey, chair of the North Central Citizens Advisory Council (CAC). "A lot of the corridor tells the history of what was going on in Raleigh dating back centuries ago." The CAC is sponsoring the tour and paid for a glossy brochure that includes a map of the notable sites.

A series of highway signs and granite markers commemorate significant events and locations, including the city's original eastern boundary, the Oakwood historic district and the early African-American neighborhoods of Idlewild and College Park. The tour takes in sites such as the location of an experimental railroad, which ran from Union Square to a state quarry on Rock Quarry Road; City Cemetery with its designated plots for "strangers" and blacks; and the former location of the city's baseball field.

The City of Raleigh placed the granite markers at sidewalk level in 1991 as part of a streetscape plan for the New Bern Avenue-Edenton Street corridor.

"The markers were placed to provide historical facts about the area with little public advertising," says Martin Stankus, senior planner with the City of Raleigh. The idea was for people to happen across the markers and become curious. "Someone walking down the sidewalk would discover one and say, ‘Oh, look, here is a marker,' and it would talk about the area. The viewer would experience a sense of discovery and surprise at finding something new."

But over time, the markers became overgrown and nearly forgotten, just as the New Bern Avenue corridor itself was showing signs of neglect. When the City of Raleigh began developing plans to revitalize the corridor, Rainey pressed the City to focus on the area's historical significance.

"I wanted to look at a project we could accomplish to begin to focus on the culture of the corridor," she says. "The markers were already there, and I thought that would be the perfect project. All we had to do was clean them up and market them."