Three coats and 240 gallons of paint later, the Bellamy Mansion Museum has a fresh exterior. In conjunction with the site’s 30th anniversary of becoming a public museum, officials spent the year fundraising $120,000 to paint the main house’s exterior.

Physician John Bellamy had the 10,000-square-foot, 22-room home built between 1859 and 1861. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, Preservation North Carolina worked with Bellamy Mansion Inc.’s board to raise funds for site restoration, and April 1994 marked the official opening of the Bellamy Mansion Museum of History and Design Arts.

“In our 30th year as a museum, we decided to celebrate the museum site and fundraise to preserve the main house,” executive director Gareth Evans said. “The house and slave quarters are the artifacts that allow us to tell our social history story. In recent years, we have preserved the site with a repaired roof, masonry, columns and now with much-needed coats of paint on the repaired exterior. We hope it will protect the site for many years to come.”