Episode 1 of 1
Fire Destroys State House and Statue
- When
- June 21, 1831
- Where
- North Carolina State House
On June 21, 1831, a fire destroyed the North Carolina State House in Raleigh and Canova's statue of George Washington housed in its rotunda.
The fire occurred after the state had decided to protect the wooden roof with zinc sheets following a previous fire in Fayetteville. Workers accidentally set the roof on fire while soldering nail heads to the zinc. The destruction was reported as an "Awful conflagration!" in The Raleigh Register on June 23, 1831.
Sources
- George Washington (Canova) Wikipedia, revision of 2026-09-11
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.