Gethsemane Seventh-Day Adventist Church at 501 South Person Street was the first SDA church, black or white, established in Raleigh. Many of Gethsemane’s elders and pastors went on to become influential leaders in the black SDA movement, most…

Leonard Medical Hospital was erected in 1912 to support the neighboring Leonard Medical School in the education of black physicians at Shaw University. The hospital initially opened in an 1885 frame building behind the medical school. It provided…

St. Matthews is one of just five remaining Rosenwald schools in Wake County; twenty-one were built in the early twentieth century. Julius Rosenwald, an owner of Sears, Roebuck, and Company, established a charitable fund to open schools for African…

A church is built on the strength—and often gumption—of its congregation. In the early 1920s, after a year or so of tent meetings, a growing group of Seventh Day Adventists managed to erect a sanctuary, the first of its denomination in Raleigh.…

The picturesque appearance of this late Gothic Revival church stems from the combination of three square towers and two gable-roof blocks -- the result of six remodelings between 1881 and 1909. Raleigh architect James Matthew Kennedy, who designed…

This two-story red-brick building was the first of several erected in the Methodist Orphanage complex. Designed by architect Charles Pearson, it is a hybrid of Queen Anne and Colonial Revival styles and imparts a feeling of domesticity not usually…

Located at the southwest corner of the Capitol facing Union Square, the church addresses its corner site with an angled entry and tower. The irregularly shaped red-brick building exhibits characteristics of the Romanesque Revival style with its…

African American members of the N. Salisbury Street First Baptist Church requested separation in 1868 to form their own church. At diagonal corners of Union Square, the two Baptist churches represent two different phases of the Gothic Revival style.…

Resembling a Lorraine cross to maximize the interior space, the Neoclassical Revival auditorium is ornamented with classical motifs, rusticated piers, cast-iron Corinthian columns, and heavy window cornices that add interest and animation to the…

This three-story brick building with Italianate details housed commercial space on the first floor, a meeting hall on the second floor, and the Masonic Hall on the third floor. It was built in 1907 by Raleigh's earliest African American…

Charles McMillan designed the Masonic Temple building, Raleigh's oldest surviving steel-reinforced concrete structure, in the Sullivanesque-style. In addition to its design and construction, the building is significant as a major landmark in…

Fire severely damaged the original 1895 building, which housed a nurse training center. Under the direction of Rev. Henry Beard Delany, the first African American Episcopal bishop in North Carolina, students quarried the stone and started the…

The church building is an example of high Victorian Gothic Revival architecture with its abundance of ornamental and visual complexity. Founding members withdrew from Edenton Street Methodist Church in 1849 to establish the first separate African…

This Gothic Revival church, erected in 1910 to replace an 1873 wood-frame chapel, is the earliest and most prominent surviving institutional building in the once-rural freedman's community of Oberlin. The church sustained heavy damage from…

This fine carousel, produced by Gustav A. Dentzel's Pennsylvania Carousel Company, originally operated at Bloomsbury Park; it was moved to Pullen Park in 1915. The carousel animals are thought to be the work of Salvatore Cernigliaro, master…

Dr. Henry Martin Tupper founded the church in 1866 as Second Baptist Church, providing religious services and classes for African Americans, including theological training for preachers, adult education, and eventually high school and grade school…

Charles E. Hartage designed this building in a symmetrical Classical Revival style. The two-story, E-plan, brick structure with a central entrance pavilion features a colossal wooden portico with Tuscan-columns. Hartage was also the architect for…

Designed by architect James M. Kennedy, this three-story classically inspired brick building is the oldest standing public school building in Raleigh and one of the few remaining examples of this academic style. Murphey School played a significant…

Mary Elizabeth Hospital, established in 1914 as Raleigh's first private hospital, erected this building in 1920 to house forty-nine beds in a modern facility. Designed by hospital founder Dr. Harold Glascock, the building met the established…

Designed by the Raleigh architects G. Murray Nelson and Thomas W. Cooper, this Neoclassical Revival building imparts a feeling of governmental strength with its Ionic colonnade on raised, striated basement. Both the south and east sides serve as…