North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office GIS Map

Want to see what historic properties are located near you? Check out this very cool map produced by the State of North Carolina’s State Historic Preservation Office:

http://gis.ncdcr.gov/hpoweb/

You can zoom to street level detail to see if there is anything near you. I did it for my parents’ house in Davie County–and found out that a seemingly dilapidated house on their road has actually been identified as a historic structure.

For more information on the map, see the following article from Directions Magazine:

State Historic Preservation Office launches Web site with virtual view of historic landmarks

A most untraditional Confederate ‘colonel’

“Through the agency of a white lawyer, the Petteys purchased a resort in rural Alexander County, North Carolina, across the mountain from the Wilkes County homeplace where Charles Pettey had been born in slavery in 1849…. The Petteys now owned All Healing Spring, a premier ‘Health Resort and Pleasure Retreat’….  The resort’s patrons had always been and would remain white — always….

“The surrounding community discovered that the Petteys were the new owners in short order. A local white woman dutifully recorded each of the spring’s proprietors in her scrap book from 1892 until 1912. Next to Charles Pettey’s name, she wrote ‘Col.’

“What was clear to contemporaries became shrouded in legend in subsequent years, and local folklore transformed Pettey from an African American into a white Confederate colonel.”

— From “Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920″ by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore (1996)