Baron Christopher de Graffenried and his group of Swiss and German settlers founded the town of New Bern at the confluence of the Trent and Neuse Rivers in 1710 and named it after his Swiss hometown; at the time, they did not realize that this town, nearly 300 years later, would grow into one of the Southeast's most desired places to live. Through the 20th century, New Bern was transformed from a sleepy Southern town to a growing retirement community with a thriving tourism industry. Among the cards presented in New Bern are these cover images of two of the grandest homes in the area: one gone forever and the other preserved as part of a state historic site.
Vina Hutchinson Farmer was selected the North Carolina Society of Historians' Historian of the Year in 2006. She is the author of Images of America: New Bern and Then & Now: New Bern. She has been a resident of North Carolina since 1989.