Tryon Palace

Tryon Palace was built to be the finest government house in the colonies — the Georgian mansion John Hawks designed for Royal Governor William Tryon in 1767, on the Trent River in New Bern, at a cost the colonial Assembly funded by borrowing the school money and taxing rum. It was the first permanent capitol of North Carolina and the governor's residence in one: symmetrical brick, wings for the offices, the whole argument that the colony deserved a building that rivaled the English country houses. It opened with a gala in December 1770 — fireworks over the river — and Tryon left for New York the next year.

The palace's two political lives fit in thirty years. The second royal governor, Josiah Martin, fled it in 1775 ahead of the Revolution; the patriots took it, and the first sessions of the independent state General Assembly met in the rooms the crown had built. Four state governors used it. Then, in February 1798, a fire that started in the cellar hay burned the main building to the ground — the wings survived, the house didn't, and the palace was a ruin for a hundred and fifty years.

The rebuilding is the second story — Maude Moore Latham, who had played in the ruins as a New Bern child, put up the money and pushed the state into the restoration; Hawks's original plans were tracked down, the Williamsburg restoration firm was brought in, and the palace was reconstructed on the surviving foundations brick by documented brick. It opened in 1959 — the palace that had been gone for a century and a half, rebuilt as the state's most-visited historic site.

Tryon Palace is the archive's reconstruction file — the governor's mansion that burned to its cellar in 1798 and was built back from its own plans, the building that is simultaneously the original colonial capitol and a twentieth-century argument about what preservation is for.