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NCGrowth Partners with Community Members to Preserve local Gullah Geechee Heritage

Community members in northern Brunswick County have come together in recent years to preserve and celebrate local Gullah Geechee heritage through an annual Rice Festival event and the restoration or re-creation of key historical sites. Three organizations are partnering on these initiatives, The North Carolina Rice Festival, The Cedar Hill/West Bank Heritage Foundation, and The African-American Heritage Museum of Southeastern North Carolina. Together these organizations have developed a comprehensive vision for a new historic site that will draw tourists into the northern Brunswick County area from the surrounding southeastern North Carolina region, including nearby Wilmington.
The focus site is the Reaves Chapel Church, a church built in 1866 by the newly freed, formerly enslaved people from the Prospect/Cedar Hill rice plantation. Originally built on the river for access by boat, the church was moved to its current roadside location in the early 1900s, rolled on logs by a team of oxen. The church will be restored to its 1911 condition, with the help of the Coastal Land Trust who is stewarding the property and its restoration. In addition, the group hopes to build a replica of a Rosenwald school on the same site, to serve as the permanent home of The African-American Heritage Museum of Southeastern North Carolina.
This site will then be linked to regional parks and other historical sites via greenways and blueways, allowing visitors to spend a day visiting sites and cultural events, and exploring the marshy landscape and its deep history. The annual NC Rice Festival will be held again starting in 2021 and will activate the area with programming and events.
NCGrowth will be providing market research and analysis to help leverage these assets into cultural tourism opportunities that generate wealth for local communities and preserve the region’s history.

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