The next time you pass the former Capitol department store on Hay Street in downtown Fayetteville, imagine the U.S. Army gleefully burning down The Fayetteville Observer offices in that vicinity.
It happened. The event took place 146 years ago in the concluding days of the Civil War.
Fayetteville, Fort Bragg and south-central North Carolina are replete with Civil War history.
This year, the United States marks the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War. The war came to a close four years later in the spring of 1865 in our own backyard. The year 2015 will mark the sesquicentennial of local events.
Author Jim Wise in "On Sherman's Trail" describes how the combatants may have surveyed the surrounding fields from the belfry of Old Laurel Hill Presbyterian Church in Scotland County. Fort Bragg itself was the site of the Battle of Monroe's Crossroads. There's a driving tour and information about the Union army's pontoon bridge over the Cape Fear River in Mark A. Smith and Wade Sokolosky's highly regarded "No Such Army Since the Days of Julius Caesar: Sherman's Carolinas Campaign from Fayetteville to Averasboro."
Union troops of Gen. William T. Sherman had laid waste to the secessionist hotbeds of Georgia and South Carolina and were supposed to go easier on North Carolina, which was late to join the exodus. However, they had been keeping track of the Confederate sympathizers. On March 12, 1865, Sherman's troops set the torch to the ardently pro-Confederate local newspaper.
According to one account, the Observer office was at Hay and Anderson streets. Union officers sat on a hotel veranda across the street and merrily watched as the Observer went up in flames.
There's an irony there. Nowadays, The Fayetteville Observer takes pride in being the hometown newspaper of Fort Bragg, the Army's premier installation. Elite magazine has a piece of that Civil War heritage, too. Fayetteville Publishing Co. publishes both Elite magazine and The Fayetteville Observer newspaper.