On Memorial Day: NC’s Rich Military History

I’m a bit of a military history buff, got it from my father. Though he spent 27 years serving the country in the U.S. Navy and participated in both WW-II and Korea, he never wanted to talk much about his own experiences. He was big on Civil War history - we often spent our summer vacations touring battlefields from Gettysburg to Wilderness-Fredricksburg-Chancelorsville, Shiloh to Bull Run to Antietam, Fort Sumter to Vicksburg and lots of places in between. We’d stand on the hills where the generals plotted their strategies and ordered their troops, we’d walk the fieldstone walls that still bear the bullet and cannon scars, we traced the trenches and fortifications, imagined we could still feel the ghosts who snuck through the thick woods to flank the enemy by early morning, traced the names of the fallen in cemeteries formal and overgrown.

The other half of the summers we mostly spent touring Revolutionary sites. Valley Forge, Frontier, more Charleston and the banks of the Potomac that stayed war-torn year after year. People my generation and younger tend to think of America’s wars as blood shed on foreign soil, but our own ground has been amply watered with blood over the centuries. And of all the states of the now-50 whose stars grace our flag, North Carolina has the distinction of being “the most military-friendly state in America” (by declaration of Governor Mike Easley).

For visitors who enjoy military history as much as I do, North Carolina hosts bases and museums and battlefields and attractions that can fill weeks with knowledge and photo opportunities and memories and material covering the whole history of this nation and its military ventures that collectors, history buffs and diverse descendants of warriors will treasure.

The coastal town of Wilmington hosts the Battleship North Carolina anchored in the famous Cape Fear River as a World War 2 memorial. It hosts a museum for all ships to bear the name North Carolina, beginning with a wooden ship-of-the-line in the 1820s, a Confederate ironclad, the WW-I armored cruiser, a never-finished battleship for that same war, and the WW-II battleship visitors can tour. The ship was deployed to the Pacific theatre where it e arned 15 battle stars, and hosts collections of many artifacts, documents, photographs and works of art.
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Valdese, NC: The Waldensian Stronghold

Way back in the middle ages - 1174 to be exact - a French businessman from Lyons caught the radical gist of Jesus’ teachings in the gospels and committed himself to a life of voluntary poverty and itinerant preaching. His name was Valdes. He renounced his previous business practices, threw all his money into the street, and started a soup kitchen during the famine of 1176. He traveled the countryside preaching the gospel of Jesus and eventually creating a rift with the dominant Catholic Church.

Valdes inspired other wandering preachers including Peter Waldo, who established the Poor Men of Lyons sect that preached apostolic poverty as the way to perfection. They traveled to Rome around 1177 and received the blessing of Pope Alexander III, who at the same time forbade their preaching without authorization from local clergy. The Waldensias (as they became known) of course disobeyed the papal edict, and were formally declared heretics by Pope Lucius III in 1184 and by the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215.

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A Family-Oriented Gold Mine of Knowledge

Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Area

Visitors to North Carolina’s capital city of Raleigh, or to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill triangle have a number of excellent museums to explore. Whether your family’s interests tend toward great works of art, natural science, wildlife and ecology or history, the area has institutions that offer just what you want to see or know.

The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh is free to the public and offers a unique view of the world through the lens of North Carolina’s diverse geography, geology, plants and animals. Beginning on October 27and running through March 2, 2008, the museum will be hosting an innovative dinosaur exhibit featuring a 60-food model of an apatosaurus, a full-sized T. Rex skeleton as well as a robotic version that boasts of being the most accurate three-dimensional representation of a dinosaur in motion ever created.

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Charlotte: Sports Lover’s Paradise

Football season is upon us, and North Carolina’s Panthers soundly defeated the Rams in St. Louis, the first time since the franchise began that their opener was an away game. Charlotte is the city the Panthers call home, and is also the home town of NASCAR. For sports lovers, you just can’t beat it!

The home schedule for the Panthers at the beautiful downtown Bank of America Stadium and events schedule for Lowe’s Motor Speedway are below, and there are several overlapping weekends that sports lovers could take advantage of for booking a multi-purpose get-away in the Charlotte environs.

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