Cape Fear Museum of History and Science

History and science museum covering Wilmington's complex past

The Cape Fear Museum of History and Science is the primary museum of Wilmington's history, with collections covering the region from its pre-colonial past through the 20th century. The natural history section covers the ecosystems of the Cape Fear region — the longleaf pine forests, the salt marshes, the river estuary — with particular strength in the paleontology of the region's marine deposits.

The history galleries are thoughtfully assembled. The exhibit on the Civil War covers Fort Fisher, the massive Confederate earthwork at the mouth of the Cape Fear River whose fall in January 1865 closed the Confederacy's last major supply line. There is also material on the city's significant role in the colonial era — Wilmington was the largest city in North Carolina throughout most of the 18th century. The exhibit on the 1898 coup is the most important and honest account of a traumatic event that the museum addresses without equivocation. Allow two hours.

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The museum's most sobering exhibit covers the Wilmington massacre of November 10, 1898 — the only successful coup d'état in American history. A white supremacist mob overthrew Wilmington's legitimately elected biracial government, killed an estimated 60 to 300 Black residents, and expelled the mayor, aldermen, and prominent Black citizens from the city. The perpetrators were never prosecuted. For decades the event was referred to in North Carolina as the "Wilmington Race Riot" — a framing that obscured its nature as an organised overthrow of a democratic government.