North Carolina's highway historical markers have stood since 1935, one of the oldest such programs in continuous operation in the country, run by the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources jointly with the Department of Transportation. Nearly sixteen hundred of them, as of September 2026, have permanent pages at TreeAlive, each carrying the program's current cast text from its own published guide on georeferenced maps from the eras it describes, and nearly all of them pinned where the Department's own map places the sign. For the few the Department has not yet pinned, mostly markers cast in the last few years, a small number stand on a location worked out from the program's own description of where the sign is, and those pages say the location is approximate; the rest are not shown.
1,577Marker pages
82,000+Historical map sheets
North Carolina Highway Historical Marker Program, N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural ResourcesCredited on every page
Every dot is a live page. Click one to preview it or add it to a road trip; many dots hold several markers each; click a busy spot to zoom in. Prefer a list? Browse all 1,577 markers by county.
TreeAlive maps family trees. When a visitor's ancestors lived in North Carolina, the markers standing near those places surface automatically alongside their family's journey:
Guilford Courthouse · near where a family lived in Guilford County in the 1780s · Armies of Greene and Cornwallis engaged in pivotal battle here on March 15, 1781
When a marker stands near a place in your own tree, you have a personal reason to go see it. Open the live demo tree, choose the Crossings tab, and turn on Historical Markers to see the experience working (the demo family’s markers are in Pennsylvania; a North Carolina family sees North Carolina’s).
Browsing all 1,577 markers by county.
Scan: the Wright Brothers marker page