New Bern

The town served as North Carolina's colonial capital and briefly its state one, earning the period nickname 'the Athens of the South.' Four patriot governors — Caswell, Nash, Martin, Spaight — used the Palace after the royal governor Josiah Martin fled in 1775; the main building burned to the ground in 1798 and stood reconstructed only in 1959, an exact replica on the original foundations.

The Civil War made the town a different kind of file. On March 14, 1862, Ambrose Burnside's roughly 11,000 Federals broke a Confederate force of about 4,000 south of town, and New Bern surrendered into flames — the retreating Confederates had fired their own warehouses. The Union stayed three years, the longest continuous occupation of any North Carolina city, quartering hospitals in the Academy, prisoners in the Jones House, and freedom in the making: the First North Carolina Colored Volunteers held their first parade on the city green in 1863, and the freedmen's Trent River Settlement became James City.

The 1798 fire that took the main palace started in the basement; the two flanking wings survived and now hold the museum's period rooms. The main building was reconstructed from Hawks's original plans in the 1950s — the state's first great restoration — and the file treats the replica the way the town does: as an argument, won, about whether documentation can rebuild a building.

The record keeps a softer line too: in 1893 a pharmacist named Caleb Bradham mixed a digestive tonic at his drugstore on Middle Street, called it Brad's Drink, and renamed it Pepsi-Cola in 1898 — born, as the city reminds everyone, in New Bern.

The Athens Theater and the Masonic Temple still stand downtown, part of a historic district that advertises itself as one of the most beautiful in the South and does not get much argument.

New Bern's ghost file is thick enough to sustain an annual ghostwalk: reports attached to Tryon Palace's replica halls, the Attmore-Oliver House, and the buildings that served as wartime hospitals — figures in period dress, voices in rooms that held the wounded of 1862, the usual residue of a town that has been burned, occupied, and rebuilt in sequence.

The register separates cleanly: documented — a palace built on borrowed school money, a three-year occupation, a soda invented at a soda fountain. Reported — whatever still walks the point where the Tuscarora's village stood first.