New Bern's first federal building stood at Pollock and Craven streets, a Romanesque Revival post office and courthouse built in 1897. By the early 1930s the town had outgrown it. The U.S. Treasury chose a new site - the block bounded by Middle, Broad, Hancock, and New streets - and announced the project. Almost immediately, controversy followed. The Daughters of the American Revolution passed a resolution opposing demolition of the John Wright Stanly House, a fine 1780s Georgian residence then standing on the proposed lot. Business owners objected to the new location. The standoff broke when the city agreed to buy the old 1897 building for its city hall, and the Stanly House was relocated rather than destroyed. Construction on the new federal building began in 1933 in the depths of the Depression. It opened on April 1, 1935.

Local architect Robert F. Smallwood designed the building in the Georgian Revival style - a deliberate echo of colonial-era classical architecture, appropriate for a town that had once served as a colonial capital. Three stories, granite base, red brick veneer laid in common bond, limestone trim. A central colonnade with six pairs of two-story limestone columns dominates the symmetrical facade. Five arched entrance openings on the first level carry decorative swag-and-garland motifs and broken pediments topped by cast-bronze eagles. Quoined pavilions flank the colonnade. A slate roof rises to a wood cupola with arched windows and a copper roof. The whole composition cost $325,000 - at completion, one of the largest and most expensive buildings in eastern North Carolina.

Inside, the postal lobby on the first floor ran the full width of the east wall. Royal black-and-white marble pilasters topped with Ionic plaster capitals; Alabama creme and black marble tiles set on a diagonal; coved plaster ceilings with massive bronze octagonal light fixtures; iron grilles with painted floral designs over the old post-office windows; black-marble postal tables on scrolled brackets. The ceremonial courtroom upstairs is the building's masterwork: mahogany panels, fluted pilasters with Ionic capitals, a broken pediment with carved eagle behind the judge's bench, bronze chandeliers with eagle motifs designed personally by Smallwood. Behind the bench, Silvette's three 1938 murals depict the moments that made New Bern - the founding by Graffenried, the constitutional argument of Bayard v. Singleton, the First Provincial Convention. New Deal-era public art at its most ambitious: art that taught civics and beauty simultaneously.

For decades after the building opened, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina sat in the upstairs courtroom. During World War II, the United States Marine Corps Command Contingent occupied the second and third floors, repurposing the federal courthouse for war work. Postwar, the building returned to its civilian purpose. From 1961 until his death in 1990, Judge John Davis Larkins, Jr. presided here, nominated by President John F. Kennedy. Larkins's docket in the eastern district covered civil rights cases at the height of integration battles, and environmental cases as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts took effect. His rulings on both helped shape federal precedent. The murals above his bench would have watched it all happen.

The Post Office vacated the building in 1992 but retained ownership; the U.S. General Services Administration took over in 2004 and led a renovation. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973 as a contributing structure within the New Bern Historic District, and individually listed in 2018. Federal court still meets here. From the air, the slate roof and copper-clad cupola distinguish it from the residential blocks around it; the central colonnade catches afternoon light cleanly. It is one of the New Deal's quieter gifts - the kind of federal building that the United States once routinely produced in small towns, with the assumption that civic architecture mattered as much as the proceedings inside it.