52 Best Sights in Central North Carolina, North Carolina

A Gothic-style gem built in the early 1930s, this chapel is the centerpiece of Duke University. Modeled after England's Canterbury Cathedral, it has a 210-foot-tall bell tower. Weekly services are held here Sunday at 11 am. The chapel is a popular wedding spot, so check the website before trying to visit on Saturday.

Wander through the 1786 John Haley House and the 1801 Hoggatt House, where rotating exhibits highlight Piedmont history and Quaker heritage with local artifacts. On Saturdays, costumed reenactors demonstrate trades like traditional blacksmithing. The museum is home to native son John Coltrane's childhood piano and a school bus cab with operational lights that's fun for kids.

Set in a wooded 183-acre wildlife preserve, this was the site of the first Moravian settlement in North Carolina. The reconstructed village showcasing the mid-18th-century community includes the original 1788 Gemeinhaus congregation house, a colonial homestead, and well-maintained medicinal gardens. God's Acre, the first colony cemetery, is a short walk away. Children love the reconstructed fort from the French and Indian War, and hiking trails head off into the hills around the settlement. Brochures for self-guided walking tours are available year-round at the visitor center, where interpreters in period attire help bring this bygone era to life.

Part of the University of North Carolina, this tribute to native plants includes wildflowers, shrubs, trees, ferns, and grasses of the Southeast. Other highlights include nature trails that wind through a 300-acre Piedmont forest, a green education center, and an impressive collection of herbs and carnivorous plants.

On the west side of Raleigh, the NCMA houses more than 5,000 years of artistic heritage, including one of the nation's largest collections of Jewish ceremonial art. The museum hosts touring exhibitions of works by such artists as Caravaggio and Rodin. There are gallery tours offered daily, and on Saturdays at 10:30 you can catch a guided tour of the surrounding park. The 164-acre park features nine monumental works of art, which visitors can view on foot or by bike.

With seven floors of immersive exhibits spread across two buildings connected via sky bridge, this museum is the largest of its kind in the Southeast. Exhibits and dioramas celebrate the incredible diversity of species in the state's various regions. There are enough live animals and insects—including butterflies, snakes, and a two-toed sloth—to qualify as a midsize zoo. Massive and rare whale skeletons hang from the ceiling. The pièce de résistance, however, is the Terror of the South exhibit, featuring the dinosaur skeleton of "Acro," a giant carnivore that lived in the region 110 million years ago. The impressive bones are the world's most complete Acrocanthosaurus dinosaur skeleton. In the Nature Research Center, visitors can have live conversations with scientists.

Founded in 1766 as a backcountry trading center, Old Salem is one of the nation's most well-documented colonial sites. This living-history museum, a few blocks from downtown Winston-Salem, is filled with dozens of original and reconstructed buildings. Costumed guides demonstrate trades and household activities common in the late-18th- and early-19th-century Moravian communities, and an interactive audio tour tells the stories of the Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and European settlers that lived here. The preserved streets and buildings of the old town are still a functioning community that includes the campus of Salem College. Be sure to stop at Winkler Bakery, where you can buy bread, the pillowy, best-selling sugar cakes, and scrumptious Moravian ginger cookies, baked in traditional brick ovens.

Don't miss "America's largest coffee pot," a 12-foot-tall vessel built by Julius Mickey in 1858 to advertise his tinsmith shop. After surviving two separate car collisions, it was moved to its present location at the edge of Old Salem in 1959.

A wisteria-draped gazebo, the Carnivorous Plant Collection, and a Japanese garden with a lily pond teeming with fat goldfish are a few of the highlights of these 55 acres in Duke University's West Campus. More than 5 miles of pathways meander through formal plantings and woodlands. The Terrace Café serves lunch weekdays and brunch Saturday and Sunday seasonally.

These two public gardens offer a relaxing retreat along a stream that runs between two busy roads. The Bicentennial Garden houses sculptures (including large-scale interactive wind chimes), a Sensory Garden, a pétanque court, and a reconstructed mill and waterwheel. The Bog Garden includes wooden walkways that meander over water and wetlands.

With an unflinching eye, this museum documents the beauty and horror of America's civil rights movement of the 1960s. The star attraction is the actual Woolworth's lunch counter where countless African Americans staged sit-ins to protest segregation for more than six months in 1960. A guided tour shows viewers how this act of defiance spread to more than 50 cities throughout the South and helped finally bring segregation to an end. Other exhibits uncover the brutality of America's racism throughout the South.

Many of the museum's graphic images of historical violence may be too intense for young eyes.

The permanent holdings at this impressive museum include 19,000 works, with one of the Southeast's strongest collections of Asian art. There's an outstanding selection of drawings, prints, and photographs as well as Old Master paintings and sculptures. The museum hosts regular lunch panels, film forums, and guest lectures. Be sure to say hello to the museum's namesake, William Hayes Ackland, whose modernist tomb is on-site.

This complex, adjacent to the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, houses apartments, offices, a theater, bars, and restaurants in a series of beautifully refurbished warehouses left over from the city's cigarette-rolling past. Free summer concerts are staged on a central lawn, in the shadow of a Lucky Strike water tower, and the place comes alive with lights and decorations during the holidays. It's a great place to stroll around and take in the scenery. Despite the history, it's a nonsmoking development. Burt's Bees is also headquartered here, and you can tour Burt's intact original cabin, brought here from Maine. Don't miss the tucked-away bee mural behind the office building.

A nonprofit visual-arts center, Artspace offers open studios, where artists are happy to talk to you about their work. The gift shop showcases the work of the resident artists.

The place bustles with visitors during the seasonal Stroll & Roll art walks, when galleries and museums throughout the city host public receptions to show off new work.

Located in the hometown of the legendary movie star, this museum has an extensive collection of memorabilia tracing Gardner's life, from childhood on the farm to her Hollywood glory days. It's about 30 miles southeast of Raleigh in downtown Smithfield.

Modeled after an Italian villa, this stately winery provides both an atmosphere and a level of quality on par with vineyards in more lauded wine regions. Created by NASCAR driver and team owner Richard Childress, the winery offers more than 30 varieties, including its popular Reserve Chardonnay and Signature Meritage. Within its opulent 35,000-square-foot building, visitors can witness wine making firsthand or have lunch at the Bistro, which overlooks the vineyards.

Washington Duke, patriarch of the now famous Duke family, moved into this house in 1852. It wasn't until he heard how the Union soldiers were enjoying smoking his tobacco that he decided to market his "golden weed." Explore the family's humble beginnings at this State Historic Site, which includes the first ramshackle "factory" as well as the world's largest spittoon collection. Guided tours demonstrate early manufacturing processes; the visitor center exhibits early tobacco advertising.

A stroll along the tree-lined streets of this campus, founded in 1924, is a lovely way to spend a few hours. Tours of the campus, known for its Georgian and Gothic revival architecture, are available during the academic year and can be arranged in advance.

This Greensboro original—a combination art museum, studio, theater, and school—brings complete sensory overload via an astounding explosion of art and artifacts collected over several decades by its former owner, Sylvia Gray, who ran it as a thrift store. Today, a colorful cast of resident artists creates new work from this treasure trove. Expect colorful plumes of fabric hanging from the walls and toys, books, jewelry, and so much more stuffed into every corner of this large space. You can't buy anything here, but you can touch it all.

A great time to visit is during First Friday, when galleries and shops throughout downtown host an open house and art walk. Check out the scene every first Friday of the month, 6–9 pm.

Since 1891, this 37,500-square-foot brick Queen Anne–style structure, made entirely from materials from the Tar Heel State, with elaborate gingerbread trim and manicured lawns, has been the home of the state's governors. Encompassing an entire city block, the brick-walled gardens explode with color during the spring. Reservations for tours must be made at least two weeks in advance.

The exhibits at this fun museum are designed for children under 12, who can tour an airplane cockpit, explore a fire truck or police car, scale a climbing wall, create crafts out of recycled materials, or learn about buildings in the construction zone.

Admission is reduced to $5 Friday 5–8.

Set in a Romanesque church dating from 1892, the museum has displays about the city's own O. Henry and Dolley Madison, plus a detailed timeline about the city's textile boom as the country's largest producer of denim. There's also an exploration of the Woolworth sit-in, which launched the civil rights movement's struggle to desegregate eating establishments. Permanent exhibits include a horse-drawn 1886 steam fire engine, an original Cadillac, and collections of Confederate weapons and Jugtown pottery. Behind the museum are an 18th-century homestead and the graves of several Revolutionary War soldiers.

At this expansive park designed to fascinate children at every turn, you can roam through a room filled with dinosaurs, see tigers and red pandas in the 24-acre zoo, meet a penguin or shark in the aquarium, and soar through the treetops on the SKYWILD high ropes course. The grounds include a petting zoo, a reptile and amphibian house, a carousel, and a 3-D theater.

One of Durham's oldest houses of worship houses this center for African American art and culture. In addition to local theater productions and exhibitions of traditional and contemporary art by regional and national artists, the center hosts events like the Bull Durham Blues Festival and the Hayti Heritage Film Festival.

Owned by the Bennehan and Cameron families, Stagville was one of the largest plantations in antebellum North Carolina, at 30,000 acres. Over 900 people were enslaved here, and the story of their struggle for freedom and independence, even after Emancipation, is told through exhibits that include four original two-story slave cabins. The plantation today sits on 71 acres and has many original buildings, including the Bennehans' two-story wood-frame home, built in the late 1700s; the Great Barn, built by enslaved workers; and the family cemetery. Call for guided tour times.

The university's working, research, and teaching 10-acre garden holds the most diverse collection of hardy temperate-zone plants in the southeastern United States. There's also a garden featuring plants with white flowers and foliage and a 300-foot-long perennial border.

Dating to 1769, the oldest dwelling in Raleigh was the home of Joel Lane, known as the "Father of Raleigh" because he sold 1,000 acres of his property to the state of North Carolina on which the beginnings of the capital city were built. Costumed docents lead tours of the restored house and beautiful period gardens. The last tour starts an hour before closing: 1 pm Wednesday through Friday, and 3 on Saturday.

This interactive science museum has 45,000 square feet of hands-on exhibits designed to engage kids of all ages, from a hurricane simulator to an indoor scooter racetrack. There's also a 120-seat planetarium and a 15-acre environmental park with a children's garden and paved walking trails.