The complex sits in the middle of Beaufort's historic district, a two-acre cluster maintained by the Beaufort Historical Association. The oldest building is the Russell House, built around 1732, which now houses the Mattie King Davis Art Gallery. Leffers Cottage from around 1778 was the former home of Samuel Leffers. The Carteret County Courthouse from about 1796 is the oldest wood-framed courthouse in North Carolina, a low white-painted box of a building that handled the county's legal business for generations. The John C. Manson House dates to roughly 1825. The Apothecary Shop and Doctor's Office, from around 1859, still smells faintly of the wood smoke and pine that have soaked into its boards over a hundred and sixty winters.

The Old Jail, built about 1829, remained in use until 1954, which is to say it housed prisoners through the Civil War, two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the early years of the civil rights movement. Most American jails of that vintage were torn down or replaced by mid-twentieth century, but Carteret County kept this one running for 125 years. The thick brick walls, the small high windows, the iron-strapped door: the building reads as exactly what it is, a place built to hold people who could not leave. Visitors today walk through it, but the building does not soften its purpose for them.

Adjacent to the site, the Beaufort Historical Association also operates the Old Burying Ground, where the divided town buried its dead in the same earth. The cemetery was among the few in the country consecrated by both Union and Confederate clergy, an unusual gesture in a place where the war was still being fought in the next county over. The graves under the live oaks include sailors, sea captains, soldiers from both armies, and a girl whose family is said to have buried her in a barrel of rum so her body could survive the voyage home from England. The stories told here have grown larger than verification can confirm, but the cemetery itself, walled with old brick and shaded by Spanish moss, asks visitors to take the past on its own terms.

Tours move building by building, costumed interpreters explaining what daily life looked like in the apothecary, the courthouse, the jail, the houses where Beaufort's merchants and farmers raised their families. The site sits a few blocks from the working waterfront, where shrimp boats still tie up and the wreck of Blackbeard's Queen Anne's Revenge was identified just offshore in 1996. The town has been called the third-oldest in North Carolina, established in 1709, and you feel that age in the cluster of preserved buildings, in the brick streets nearby, in the way the old houses lean ever so slightly toward the water as if listening for tides.