Cape Fear Museum of History and Science in downtown Wilmington, North Carolina, is the state’s oldest history museum, founded in 1898 to preserve Civil War artifacts and later broadened to cover the history, science, and cultures of the Lower Cape Fear region. Now operated by New Hanover County, it occupies its current site in a building that blends a 1930s Works Progress Administration armory with a 1990s addition. Its collection includes more than 52,000 artifacts, with exhibits on local ecosystems, regional natural and human history, and Wilmington’s past, including the Civil War, segregation, and the racial violence of 1898.