How this is organized

Every page here is built from a small set of things and the ties between them.

Markers

A marker is the state's own record: its number, title, inscription, the location the state gives, its county and the year it was cast. The number's letter is the marker program's district. Civil War battlefields come from the National Park Service, and state historic sites from NC Historic Sites.

Counties

A marker's county is the county its map point falls in.

Eras

Each marker takes its era from the earliest year its inscription names. A marker about a person, with a lifespan in its title, takes the years of that person's working life instead.

• Before 1585
• Colonial North Carolina, 1585-1774
• Revolution and founding, 1775-1789
• The young state, 1790-1860
• Civil War and Reconstruction, 1861-1877
• The New South, 1878-1929
• Modern North Carolina, 1930 on

Themes

A marker can carry several themes. Each theme is a rule about the words in the title and inscription, read against what it catches and what it misses: "minister to Brazil" is diplomacy, not faith, and Pilot Mountain is not aviation.

• Native nations. The Cherokee, Tuscarora, Catawba, Lumbee and the other nations of North Carolina, their towns, wars and removal.
• The Revolution. Battles, camps, congresses and the people of the war for independence, 1775-1783.
• The Civil War. Battles, raids, regiments, hospitals, prisons and the people of the war, 1861-1865.
• African American history. Slavery and freedom, Black schools, churches and towns, Reconstruction, and the civil rights movement.
• Faith and congregations. Churches, meeting houses, missions and the people who led them.
• Schools and colleges. Academies, colleges, universities and schoolhouses, and the teachers who founded them.
• Government and law. Governors, legislators, judges, courthouses, conventions and constitutions.
• Work and industry. Mills, mines, furnaces, farms, fisheries, factories and the people who built them.
• Roads, rivers and rails. Trading paths, wagon roads, ferries, canals, railroads, ports and lighthouses.
• Writers, artists and musicians. Novelists, poets, journalists, painters, architects and musicians.
• Medicine and science. Physicians, hospitals, naturalists, engineers and scientists.
• Flight. From Kitty Hawk in 1903 to the pilots and astronauts who trained here.
• Women's history. Women who led, wrote, taught, founded and voted, and the schools and causes they built.
• Forts and the armed forces. Forts, camps and bases, and North Carolinians in the wars from 1812 to Vietnam.
• Exploration and settlement. Explorers, land grants and boundary lines, and where towns, counties, inns and resorts began.
• Mountains, rivers and coast. Peaks, gorges, rivers, sounds, inlets and islands, and the parks that keep them.

People and quotations

Where a marker is about someone in Carolina Quotes, its page links to them, and the quotation is theirs. Every other stop carries the words of someone with a recorded tie to a nearby town, with the tie and the distance stated.

Photographs

A marker page shows a photograph of the marker where one has been released to the public domain, otherwise a public domain portrait of the person it is about, otherwise a Library of Congress photograph from its county. Each one carries its source and rights statement.

Drives

Drive times come from OpenStreetMap roads at posted speeds, ferries included. Each loop is solved with LKH-3 and checked against a lower bound, so the page can say how close to the shortest possible loop it is.