Qualla: Dix Park

Dix Park: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maria Kozmina, CC BY-SA 4.0. Walk the eastern edge of Dix Park on a July evening and you can hear honeybees. The five-acre sunflower field, planted as a Raleigh Water Department biofuel experiment in 2018 and then loved enough by the public to become permanent, blooms all at once in mid-July: about two hundred thousand stalks, taller than you, facing east at dawn and west at sunset. Goldfinches, painted buntings, and Mississippi kites have all been spotted feeding on the seeds when the petals fall. But the sunflowers are also covering ground that, until recently, was a state psychiatric hospital where hundreds of people lived, worked, and died largely outside public memory.

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Image: Maria Kozmina | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dix Park: From Dorothea Dix Hospital to a 308-Acre Park

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Robrcb, CC BY-SA 4.0. Dorothea Dix was a nineteenth-century reformer who spent her life arguing that people with mental illness deserved care, not jails. North Carolina's hospital named for her opened in 1856 on a Raleigh hill the locals already called Dix Hill. It operated until 2012. The 308-acre ca...

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Image: Robrcb | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dix Park: The Cemetery on the Hill

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maria Kozmina, CC BY-SA 4.0. Three acres of the park hold approximately nine hundred graves. Between 1859 and 1970, patients who died at Dorothea Dix Hospital were buried here, often without family present and frequently without permanent markers. Many were Black North Carolinians; many were poor; many had b...

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Image: Maria Kozmina | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dix Park: Sunflowers, Power Poles, and a Play Plaza

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Crashblanket, CC BY-SA 4.0. The park's headline attractions are bright. The Sunflower Field, planted every spring and timed to bloom simultaneously in mid-July, draws thousands of visitors during its two-week peak. Artist Thomas Sayre wrapped the utility poles at the park's entrance in stylized sunflower sc...

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Image: Crashblanket | CC BY-SA 4.0

Dix Park: Inter-Tribal Pow Wow and the Land Underneath

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Maria Kozmina, CC BY-SA 4.0. In August 2020, the city held its first native land blessing and acknowledgment ceremony at the park. The annual Inter-Tribal Pow Wow followed in 2021. It recognizes the eight North Carolina tribes with ancestral ties to this ground: the Coharie, Cherokee, Haliwa-Saponi, Lumbee, ...

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Image: Maria Kozmina | CC BY-SA 4.0