Story by: Laura Brummett
Video by: Jackson Lanier
North Carolina’s Highway Historical Marker Program, represented by the 1,619 silver and black markers lining roads across the state, has been forced to pause its work acknowledging local and state history.
Money is short.
Run by the state Department of Transportation and Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, the program has purchased no new markers since 2019 when the most recent one was erected in Raleigh commemorating Lunsford Lane, an enslaved man who bought his freedom and became an outspoken abolitionist.
Financial issues within DOT have cut the $60,000 program budget. Even so, the program is a one-woman show run by Ansley Herring Wegner. She oversees the applications, maintains old markers and writes the inscriptions for new markers.
Since 1936, when the first marker was erected in Granville County for John Penn, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, the program has noted both the good and the bad in the state’s history.
“We don’t shy away from the difficult stories,” she said. “We have a marker just a couple of blocks from here about the Eugenics Board. We’ve got the marker about the Wilmington coup, we’ve got the marker about the Greensboro massacre. None of the markers are designed to praise people. They’re not honoring people, they’re just telling you that a person lived nearby or that this event happened.”
When choosing inscriptions, Wegner is careful. Many existing markers dating back to the 1930s use wording that many people now find offensive. Some refer to Black people as “Negroes.”
If the budget returns, Wegner wants to replace the older offensive markers with new inscriptions.
Then there are the markers that get damaged or go missing. In one instance, a boat being pulled by a truck came unhooked and barreled into a marker, toppling it to the ground. The driver of the truck got out, hooked the boat back up and drove away.
The simple mishap was a blow to the underfunded program, because each marker costs $1,860.
During the summer of 2019, Wegner once saw a nine-day period where seven markers went missing.
Wegner is confident the program will be back, and she encourages citizens to continue submitting applications.
“I think more than anything, there’s just a lot of joy in seeing the markers that you’ve written,” she said. “And you can kind of remember how hard it was to come up with something that concise about a person or about an event and I just get a lot of joy out of knowing that people will pass them and it might spark their curiosity.”
