11 Best Sights in Central North Carolina, North Carolina

A Gothic-style gem built in the early 1930s, this chapel is the centerpiece of Duke University. Modeled after England's Canterbury Cathedral, it has a 210-foot-tall bell tower. Weekly services are held here Sunday at 11 am. The chapel is a popular wedding spot, so check the website before trying to visit on Saturday.

Wander through the 1786 John Haley House and the 1801 Hoggatt House, where rotating exhibits highlight Piedmont history and Quaker heritage with local artifacts. On Saturdays, costumed reenactors demonstrate trades like traditional blacksmithing. The museum is home to native son John Coltrane's childhood piano and a school bus cab with operational lights that's fun for kids.

Set in a wooded 183-acre wildlife preserve, this was the site of the first Moravian settlement in North Carolina. The reconstructed village showcasing the mid-18th-century community includes the original 1788 Gemeinhaus congregation house, a colonial homestead, and well-maintained medicinal gardens. God's Acre, the first colony cemetery, is a short walk away. Children love the reconstructed fort from the French and Indian War, and hiking trails head off into the hills around the settlement. Brochures for self-guided walking tours are available year-round at the visitor center, where interpreters in period attire help bring this bygone era to life.

Part of the University of North Carolina, this tribute to native plants includes wildflowers, shrubs, trees, ferns, and grasses of the Southeast. Other highlights include nature trails that wind through a 300-acre Piedmont forest, a green education center, and an impressive collection of herbs and carnivorous plants.

On the west side of Raleigh, the NCMA houses more than 5,000 years of artistic heritage, including one of the nation's largest collections of Jewish ceremonial art. The museum hosts touring exhibitions of works by such artists as Caravaggio and Rodin. There are gallery tours offered daily, and on Saturdays at 10:30 you can catch a guided tour of the surrounding park. The 164-acre park features nine monumental works of art, which visitors can view on foot or by bike.

With seven floors of immersive exhibits spread across two buildings connected via sky bridge, this museum is the largest of its kind in the Southeast. Exhibits and dioramas celebrate the incredible diversity of species in the state's various regions. There are enough live animals and insects—including butterflies, snakes, and a two-toed sloth—to qualify as a midsize zoo. Massive and rare whale skeletons hang from the ceiling. The pièce de résistance, however, is the Terror of the South exhibit, featuring the dinosaur skeleton of "Acro," a giant carnivore that lived in the region 110 million years ago. The impressive bones are the world's most complete Acrocanthosaurus dinosaur skeleton. In the Nature Research Center, visitors can have live conversations with scientists.

Founded in 1766 as a backcountry trading center, Old Salem is one of the nation's most well-documented colonial sites. This living-history museum, a few blocks from downtown Winston-Salem, is filled with dozens of original and reconstructed buildings. Costumed guides demonstrate trades and household activities common in the late-18th- and early-19th-century Moravian communities, and an interactive audio tour tells the stories of the Native Americans, enslaved Africans, and European settlers that lived here. The preserved streets and buildings of the old town are still a functioning community that includes the campus of Salem College. Be sure to stop at Winkler Bakery, where you can buy bread, the pillowy, best-selling sugar cakes, and scrumptious Moravian ginger cookies, baked in traditional brick ovens.

Don't miss "America's largest coffee pot," a 12-foot-tall vessel built by Julius Mickey in 1858 to advertise his tinsmith shop. After surviving two separate car collisions, it was moved to its present location at the edge of Old Salem in 1959.

A wisteria-draped gazebo, the Carnivorous Plant Collection, and a Japanese garden with a lily pond teeming with fat goldfish are a few of the highlights of these 55 acres in Duke University's West Campus. More than 5 miles of pathways meander through formal plantings and woodlands. The Terrace Café serves lunch weekdays and brunch Saturday and Sunday seasonally.

These two public gardens offer a relaxing retreat along a stream that runs between two busy roads. The Bicentennial Garden houses sculptures (including large-scale interactive wind chimes), a Sensory Garden, a pétanque court, and a reconstructed mill and waterwheel. The Bog Garden includes wooden walkways that meander over water and wetlands.

With an unflinching eye, this museum documents the beauty and horror of America's civil rights movement of the 1960s. The star attraction is the actual Woolworth's lunch counter where countless African Americans staged sit-ins to protest segregation for more than six months in 1960. A guided tour shows viewers how this act of defiance spread to more than 50 cities throughout the South and helped finally bring segregation to an end. Other exhibits uncover the brutality of America's racism throughout the South.

Many of the museum's graphic images of historical violence may be too intense for young eyes.