In 1872, Camille N. Drie set out to document the city of Raleigh, providing a “Bird’s Eye View” of the city. It was just a few years after the War Between the States, and back then Raleigh was a relatively small capital city in the South. Despite how it appears, his map was not drawn from a hot air balloon. Instead, he made a series of drawings from vantage points across the city and later stitched them together.
Although the intricately detailed drawing shows hundreds of structures across Raleigh, there aren’t many still standing. Project Bird’s Eye View is a new series in which we will document the remaining structures from this historical map and provide a small bit of history of the building over the years.
The first entry is 227 S. Wilmington Street, now home to Slim’s Downtown Distillery.
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