Back in 2007, a group of local Fayetteville residents originally got the NC History Center on the Civil War, Emancipation & Reconstruction off the ground by successfully getting a $1 million planning grant from the N.C. General Assembly. With the funding, over the next few years, the board hired Germann & Associates, the Winslow Group and the Planning Edge, all of which have experience in museum startups, to assess existing resources, pursue community wide feedback and discussions and come up with a strategic and programming plan.

The Center project has been divided into three phases.’
Phase 1:

- The Arsenal House, which was renovated primarily for K-12 students. It includes a classroom, a distance learning studio and a technical support room, all part of the Digital Education Outreach Center.
- The Culbreth House, which was renovated for higher education purposes. It will become the Center for the Study of the Civil War and Reconstruction in North Carolina. A catering kitchen and upstairs offices were added, as was a library, which will house an extensive collection of Civil War and Reconstruction books. It will be used as the offices for the Center’s Foundation.

-The Davis House will be used to help interpret the site of the U.S. Arsenal (later a Confederate Arsenal), where it is situated.

Phase 2 consists of a new outdoor education pavilion and the construction of a boardwalk that will run parallel to the remains of the Arsenal. Construction of Phase 2 is to begin soon.
Phase 3, the groundbreaking of which was held last summer, is a 55,000-57,000 square-foot main building that will replace the existing Museum of the Cape Fear, which was built on the site where the U.S. Arsenal once stood in Fayetteville.
The Center, once complete, will be owned and operated by the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. The building is currently being designed, with construction to begin soon.

The latest estimates are that the building will be completed in the first quarter of 2027 – with the online portion of history instruction for teachers and students to be rolled out before then.