Pender County Museum

Description

The Pender County Museum occupies the Burton-Noel House, the first brick home built in Burgaw, dating to about 1917. Daughters of Kate Buck Noel donated the house to the Pender County Historical Society in 1979 in her memory. The society restored it, dedicated the museum in 1982, and still runs it today. Admission is free and donations are accepted.

Rooms are arranged by theme, which keeps a visit moving for kids. A military room holds uniforms, medals, and Camp Davis photographs from World War II. Others cover medicine with period instruments, a furnished historic bedroom, decades of wedding gowns, and early communications down to a vintage telephone and a 1956 phone directory. The Mattie Bloodworth Room displays her portrait and the typewriter she used for her 1947 county history. Photographs of segregated schools document the Jim Crow era.

The barn tends to hold children longest: antique farming tools, displays on the turpentine, tobacco, and blueberry industries that shaped the county, a non-functioning whiskey still, and working blacksmithing demonstrations on Saturdays.

Researchers get an extensive genealogy collection of wills, deeds, obituaries, slave records, maps, war bonds, and family photographs. The museum reopened in February 2024 after renovations, adding exhibits on the steamboat era and the Canetuck Rosenwald School. It stands about two tenths of a mile from the Historic Burgaw Train Depot, so the two pair well on one downtown trip.