- This program is made possible in part by generous support from the American Battlefield Trust, connecting you to the places where our nation was forged.

Visit battlefields.org today.

♪ - Next on North Carolina Weekend, join us for a tour through Durham.

We'll explore a historic inn, visit a botanical garden, stroll through history, and enjoy some of the best food the state has to offer.

Coming up next.

♪ - Funding for North Carolina Weekend is provided in part by Visit NC, dedicated to highlighting our state's natural scenic beauty, unique history, and diverse cultural attractions.

From the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains across the Piedmont to 300 miles of Barrier Island beaches, you're invited to experience all the adventure and charm our state has to offer.

♪ - Welcome to North Carolina Weekend, everyone.

I'm Deborah Holt-Noel, and this week, we're exploring the vibrant city of Durham.

Commonly referred to as the Bull City, Durham is known for its rich history, close proximity to nature, and widely celebrated food scenes.

When it comes to places to stay, the options here range from historic to contemporary.

I chose a place that has a special connection to Durham's story, plus breakfast.

Join me at the Moorhead Manor.

♪ What made you pick the Moorhead Manor?

- We like to have a good anchor event that keeps us out and about, and then a nice place to stay cozy, a little home base, safe haven, where we can rest and relax, and this was the perfect spot.

It was away from the hustle and bustle, and we had no idea that the hosts were gonna be so gracious and welcoming.

It was wonderful talking with Monica and Daniel, and just made it a very nice place to relax and unwind and get to meet some of the other guests, too.

- Moorhead Manor is a bed and breakfast located near downtown Durham in historic Moorhead Hills.

We've been here since 1997.

The house itself was built in 1910.

The original owner of the house was James Cobb, who was one of Durham's founding tobaccoists.

The gentleman who founded this neighborhood in the late 1800s was the son of the former governor of North Carolina, Robert Moorhead.

- This has become a really popular place.

What do you think is the staying power?

What draws folks in?

- We're within walking distance to the D-PAC, the Durham Bulls athletic park, lots of entertaining and shopping in the downtown district.

When we talk with our guests, one of the things that they're very pleased about is the fact, not just the close proximity to downtown, is the fact that they feel at home here with an extension of hospitality.

- That hospitality can include special occasion packages with gifts from Moorhead Manor and curated in-room massage, but it always comes with a delicious home-cooked breakfast served in the dining room.

Upstairs, each of the five guest rooms is individually designed, featuring thoughtfully selected furnishings, artwork, and decor.

- Monica, I'm seeing kitty cats everywhere.

It's even in your logo.

What's the story behind that?

- When we first opened it in, we had a Sill Point Siamese by the name of Jasmine, who is in our logo.

And since then, he's passed away, and we ended up with three more Siamese cats.

The last girl standing is Shambay, who's 17 years old, and she's a Blue Point Siamese.

I love Durham because of its authenticity, because of the diversity, culture, and the food scene that is here.

It's a very close-knit community.

People love Durham.

Even people who come to visit here enjoy that they feel very welcome when they're tooling around in the city.

- That welcoming spirit can be found all across Durham, where each neighborhood offers its own unique character and local favorites waiting to be discovered.

- Red Start Foods is a catering and meal delivery company, and we have a restaurant called Red Start Takeaway that is right next to our main catering kitchen.

Red Start Takeaway is an all-day cafe that serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Just sort of like a casual neighborhood restaurant where you can also pick up a nice bottle of wine, nice beer.

The Red Start Breakfast Sandwich is definitely, like, the most popular thing that we sell.

We use a homemade English muffin, it's a souffle egg with fancy American cheese on top.

A lot of people will add pickles and hot sauces to it, which we make in-house.

You can also get something a little nicer.

We run seasonal specials that rotate very frequently, sort of like a chef-driven menu that's creative and constantly changing with the seasons.

- Red Start began as a meal delivery service before growing into the neighborhood cafe it is today.

Each week, the team creates a seasonal menu for home delivery across the triangle while stocking the cafe's takeaway fridge with many of the same chef-prepared meals.

- Really lucky to have a co-owner in Jordan Owens.

She's a wonderful artist, and she designed the space and the vibe for the space, and Jordan manages the retail section.

The idea with the retail section is that it all sort of relates to us being a restaurant and serving foods.

The beverages, the wine, we're really just shooting to have things that nowhere else in town has.

Most of our customers are regulars.

I sort of see the same folks in here every day.

It's a really nice community.

I also live in the neighborhood.

I sort of-- the idea with this restaurant was sort of just like what type of restaurant I would want to see in the neighborhood, and we've been really lucky that there have been a lot of other people that have been excited about it, too.

(music) - To learn more about the city's history, I joined Aya Shabu of "Whistle Stop Tours" for an immersive look at Durham's historically Black neighborhoods.

- Not only are we alive, but we belong, because we belong to our first home, which is our physical bodies.

Mother Earth, our second home, home to our ancestors.

You've become witnesses to the stories and some of the hopes and dreams of the people on this land.

(music) - As Elder Vivette Jeffries Logan of the Okaneechi Band of the Sopone Nation has said many times and has said to me, "This land here in Durham is the dust of the bones "of her people's ancestors."

So I had a partnership with the Hayti Heritage Center.

They were thinking about doing a historic walking tour along Fayetteville Street, and they asked if I would be the lead researcher.

And I did-- I researched probably 30 different places along the Fayetteville Street corridor.

And then, things happened where the project got dropped, but I was already hooked.

(laughing) And so, I kept the tours going.

I wrote the tour, I hired theater artists, and started producing the tours on my own back in 2011.

And "Whistle Stop Tours" was born.

And so, it's a 90-minute immersive neighborhood history tour, and they happen in several neighborhoods here in Durham.

So the very first tour is the Hayti neighborhood.

It's the Free Soil Haven Hayti to Hayti tour.

This is the Hayti Heritage Center.

It's named for the neighborhood.

So we are in the performance hall now, but this was the original sanctuary of St.

Joseph's AME Church, founded in 1869, the same year that Durham was incorporated as a city.

And so, you don't come to Hayti and not come to the Hayti Heritage Center.

It is our first stop.

The new tour, "Hymns for Salted Bones," "A Remembering of Hayti," those places are all gonna be places in peril.

A lot of these places don't exist, and that's why I use this embodied, performance-based orientation for my tours, because I have to be the places.

When few places allow them to breathe enough to be free, everybody deserves room.

Different participants on the tour will do an activity.

And the reason why we do that is, one, we want people to, one, expect that this is a full-body tour.

Like, I might throw anything at you.

There's gonna be some dancing.

There's gonna be some singing.

Like, so they're not surprised by that.

♪ This is my home ♪ And so I really want to bring everybody in here, all of the participants, as co-creators of their own experience.

At each site today, we have witnessed places in peril.

But as we have heard, none of these places have died.

Care and then advocate.

So I believe that if you can connect to a place, then you'll instinctively care about it.

And if you care about it, then you'll do whatever it takes to protect it.

♪ This is my home ♪ After spending time learning about Durham's history, I headed east to continue my journey through the city's neighborhoods, this time in search of something to eat.

When it comes to lunch in Durham, there are dozens of great eateries to choose from.

But I heard of a place that recently got dubbed the number two spot for sandwiches in the United States.

So you know I had to check it out.

Paul, Ian, what is Ideal Sandwich?

It's a sandwich shop located in East Durham, just a place where we're trying to serve good food and nourish good people.

Yeah, bringing northeastern sandwiches down to North Carolina.

Try to make whatever we can fresh in-house every day.

Fresh mozzarella we make every day.

Chicken cutlets get breaded every day.

All the peppers and mayos get made every day.

Just try to keep it as fresh as possible.

What's it feel like to be voted the number two sandwich in America?

A little bit of imposter syndrome, I think.

I just, that was never like our goal, you know.

We just put our heads down and wanted to make good sandwiches, good food for people.

And now we're here.

Sometimes it feels a little unreal, or surreal, I should say.

With accolades like that, I knew I could not leave without trying one for myself.

I can see why this was voted the number two sandwich.

I don't know why it's not the number one sandwich.

This is phenomenal.

When I'm exploring a city, I always love to spend a little time shopping.

And Brightleaf Square is the perfect place to do that.

I stopped into Indio, a beautifully curated boutique, featuring thoughtfully selected items from makers around the world.

I'm here with Wendy Cease.

She's the owner of Indio here.

Wendy, you have so many cool things in here.

How would you describe Indio?

Indio is a collection of things that I think work together and create a really great shopping experience, which was my goal.

To make a store that people could come in and have an enjoyable time just looking around.

We have a big collection from home goods to jewelry, to accessories such as bags, scarves.

We sell a lot of jewelry.

It's something that I was excited about curating at a price point that wasn't fine jewelry, that was accessible.

For people who were making Durham one of their weekend destinations, what would you share about Brightleaf and why they might wanna come on out here?

There's a lot of history in Durham, but Brightleaf is definitely a well-preserved one.

And then it's really grown into a really great destination with multiple shops, restaurants, and it's just been beautifully preserved.

They started building it in 1904 and it was where they cured the tobacco before they sent it across to be made into cigarettes.

And it was functioning as a place to cure tobacco until the late '70s.

To put a store inside of a building that has a lot of history is more interesting than just four walls.

Like I love coming to work in this space.

It's such a great space with the windows and the architecture and people are always looking up and looking around and I think they feel like they know they're somewhere special.

(gentle music) - It is about that time for a little pick me up in here in downtown Durham.

Swath has quickly become a buzz worthy spot to find great coffee and cocktails.

(gentle music) - Swath means thirsty in French.

Because we do coffee in the morning, cocktails at night, it's a place for drinks or whatever your occasion might be.

I wanted to see if a community based standing coffee bar, European style, could exist in Durham.

- A little coffee for you, what are we thinking?

- I found a space that I loved.

We're in the Snow Building.

It is this incredibly cool art deco building downtown.

I really like small spaces.

This is 593 square feet.

And I found the space and then I found the concept.

What we do and what we do well is very traditional coffee, whether it's your lattes, your cortados, your macchiatos, your espresso.

And we do it quickly and at a really good price.

For me, coffee culture is meant to be not a luxury and something you just do once in the morning, but something you can repeat throughout the day, $2, $3 and make it really enjoyable.

The evening service is also meant to be a little bit different.

We focus mostly on low ABV and non-alcoholic drinks, so a lot of spritzes.

We do the classics or riffs on the classics, like a martini, a Manhattan and a Negroni.

We don't have all the juices and all the syrups.

And that was also just sort of by design.

This is meant to be for right before dinner or right after dinner, or just the everyday place for a drink rather than the specialty cocktail.

I think for me and my upbringing, food, wine, coffee was always about sharing.

The moment of standing with a stranger or a family member or your best friend, the best moments are sharing something to eat or to drink.

And I think giving spaces that facilitate that is really important.

I walk in here in the morning and it's really fun to see people standing at the bar, making friends, looking at the newspaper, doing the crossword puzzle.

When people come to Swath, I really hope that they experience a different way of enjoying coffee, a different way of enjoying a drink, that they can have a reprieve from whatever their day is.

Just take a moment for the ritual.

- After spending an afternoon exploring downtown Durham, a visit to Sarah P. Duke Gardens offers the perfect way to slow things down.

Situated in the heart of Duke University's campus, the 55-acre public garden somehow feels worlds away from the hustle and bustle of downtown Durham.

Duke Gardens is consistently ranked among the top public gardens in the country.

And with free admission, it's easy to see why more than half a million people visit each year.

- There's a lot of different experiences to see here.

We have lots of color gardens.

We have a vegetable garden, which we display unique and heirloom vegetables every year.

We have Asian gardens.

We have native plant gardens.

So there's a lot to come and see here.

- And there's never been a better time to visit.

The recently completed Barnes Welcome Center serves as the new gateway to the gardens, welcoming guests with expanded visitor amenities, a cafe, and information to help make the most of their time here.

- Used to, people could drive by our visitor center, but now they have to park and they have to actually walk through this breezeway.

So it's an actual portal that people come through now.

- One of the newest additions celebrates a plant that's become an icon of North Carolina, the Venus flytrap.

Famous around the world, this carnivorous plant grows naturally only within a small radius of Wilmington.

We thought, wouldn't it be cool to be able to represent a small piece of that here in Duke Gardens?

So now people can come and visit our carnivorous plant collection, which features things that you can only see down in that longleaf pine, savanna type ecosystem in North Carolina.

- With nearly three miles of walking paths and dozens of unique garden spaces to explore, it's a destination people return to again and again.

- We want people just to come and enjoy themselves, whether it's enjoying family time, having a picnic, just strolling through the gardens, getting exercise.

We want people to forget about what weight they might have on their shoulders that day and just have a really nice, peaceful visit in the gardens.

- Another great place you have to check out while you're in Durham is the American Tobacco Campus.

It's just another example of how Durham continues to reinvent its historic spaces.

From Broadway shows at D-PAC to summer nights cheering on the Durham Bulls, this campus has become a destination for dining, entertainment, and some of the city's most popular attractions.

For an elevated dining experience, you might consider one of Durham's Michelin-rated restaurants.

Seraphine features Louisiana-inspired cuisine with the bold flavors of the bayou, and the interior is as extraordinary as its historic facade.

Let's take a look.

- I would describe Seraphine as a trip to New Orleans in your own backyard right here in Durham.

We've really designed the interior to evoke that kind of New Orleans feel, and the food also transports you straight there.

- Home for us is all over Louisiana, but specifically kind of Slidell and New Orleans.

We definitely have a lot of classics, but we also are not kind of afraid to try new things.

I think the underlying theme is it just has to be full of flavor and delicious.

- We were just blessed by Chris Garrett, our executive chef, that he came into the mix and helped us really conceptualize the actual food at Seraphine.

We sent him to New Orleans for two weeks, and he cooked at Pesche and Cochon the Butcher.

He is from North Carolina and has found the most magical way to incorporate all of our offerings here, our fresh produce, the oysters from the North Carolina coast, our fresh seafood.

- I would say our most popular is definitely our Drago-style oysters.

It's like a garlic butter parmesan cheese, and this butter kind of drips down in those little tins where we got this great bread that you can kind of go after.

- It's nice to sit and share.

I know my people love the boiled peanuts.

It is like their favorite thing, so we always start with that, too, and just share a few things, peel and eat shrimp and Caesar salad.

- The gumbo, it is pretty much the gumbo that Brad and I grew up with.

We grew up in a kitchen.

I mean, we did homework at the Kitchen Island.

Everything happened and revolved around the kitchen.

One of the jokes down there is, you know, you wake up in the morning, you're having your coffee, and the only thing you're talking about is what are we having for dinner?

I don't want to have to go back home every time I want to eat like this, so it's nice that we don't have to.

- No trip is complete without dessert, so I headed to Pincho Loco, a beloved family-owned ice cream shop where Salvadorian traditions meet Southern favorites.

Martha, what does Pincho Loco mean?

- That's an ice cream cone or a popsicle, but it's very regional.

What we have is a creation of our culture and the American Southern culture.

We have a lot of flavors that are from back home and a lot of flavors that are from here.

- Alongside classic ice cream flavors, Pincho Loco offers creative treats inspired by Salvadoran culture, from refreshing mangonatas to house-made popsicles and ice drinks.

What kind of goodies are here in the fridge?

- I have ice cream cakes.

I make all the ice cream cakes in-house as well, and I have the cake slices, ice cream sandwiches, all kind of good things, just in case you want to take some home.

- And after a day filled with great food, fascinating history, welcoming people, I can't think of a sweeter way to end a weekend in Durham.

This week's America 250 celebration takes us to Charlotte, where the American Revolution comes alive through an immersive augmented reality experience at the Charlotte Museum of History.

Let's take a look.

- This is the American Revolution as you've never experienced it before.

This augmented reality experience is at the Charlotte Museum of History, right here in North Carolina, also known as the Queen City.

The exhibit is called American Revolution, the augmented exhibition.

Visitors use a tablet called a histopad to move through interactive portals covering the years 1763 to 1789.

- So to scan into a portal, we'll take that circle and we'll line it up.

And here we are in Versailles.

- You can experience the Boston Tea Party, the crossing of the Delaware, Winter in Valley Forge, more than 20 pivotal moments in the revolutionary era.

- When guests come to the Charlotte Museum of History, they're gonna see our new American Revolution augmented exhibit.

And what that is is three full galleries here on the first floor of the museum, full of interactive tech that will help you experience the American Revolution.

- For generations, centuries, museums have been things in boxes and panels on walls that you read.

What myself and my team have really been focused on is reengaging the public with history, making it exciting.

We're very excited for everyone to come and see this.

- This exhibit is special for a few reasons.

Number one is the technology itself.

This stuff is really cool video game technology that really immerses you in each of the scenes.

Every scene is interactive.

You're hearing people speak.

You can literally move throughout the scene.

That is just really new technology and we think it's really cool.

- When you walk in, you'll check in at the front desk and you'll be handed a tablet that is called a histopad.

You'll get a demonstration on how it works and then we send you off into the exhibit.

- If you're someone who is attracted by the cool objects or the striking pictures, you can set your journey around the visual things that stick out to you.

But if you're a panel reader and you wanna know every single detail, there are over five hours of reading content available for you.

And there's something for everybody in between.

There are treasure hunts.

For the kids, there are selfie stations where you can dress up like it's the 18th century.

There's all sorts of ways to interact with it.

- A lot of them have a time slider.

So you can go from 250 years ago and you can slide and you can see what's there now as if you were standing in that site today.

- But the national story isn't the whole story.

- It's a touring exhibit, but we are the first museum on the East Coast to open it.

And we're proud to say that we have a part of the exhibit that we curated for ourselves to talk about Charlotte and North Carolina's role in the greater war.

So that'll be a permanent installation that you can't see anywhere else.

- Kings Mountain.

The ride of Captain James Jack and the Battle of Charlotte.

It's an interactive experience of the war that happened right here.

When you're ready for a physical experience, just step outside.

- What's unique here at our site specifically is that you can pair that with the actual historic buildings.

You come to our site and you learn about how the revolution affected this area.

And then you go out to the home site and you see Charlotte's only revolutionary era building that we have left.

You walk through it.

- The 1774 Rock House has been standing on this land for more than 250 years, built by enslaved hands, owned by a framer of North Carolina's first constitution and Bill of Rights.

The exhibit runs through April, 2027.

Set aside two to three hours, tickets start at $17 and include a tour of the Rock House.

- It's going to be an experience that you wanna do again.

And it's an experience that you're not going to be able to replicate.

I recommend it to anybody that's a fan of history.

(upbeat music) - And that's it for tonight's show.

We have had an amazing time showing you what Durham has to offer.

And there's so much more from tobacco warehouses to vibrant gathering spaces.

Durham's Bull City roots really show how culture and community come together.

And if you've missed anything in tonight's show, remember you can always watch us again online at pbsnc.org.

And you can find all of our stories on our YouTube channel.

Have a great North Carolina weekend, everyone.

(upbeat music) ♪ - Funding for North Carolina Weekend is provided in part by VisitNC, dedicated to highlighting our state's natural scenic beauty, unique history, and diverse cultural attractions.

From the Blue Ridge and the Great Smoky Mountains across the Piedmont to 300 miles of Barrier Island beaches, you're invited to experience all the adventure and charm our state has to offer.

- This program is made possible in part by generous support from the American Battlefield Trust, connecting you to the places where our nation was forged.

Visit battlefields.org today.

♪