Federal-style columns front the Mint Museum Randolph, housed in a building that is itself a piece of North Carolina history. The structure was built in 1836 as the Charlotte branch of the United States Mint, one of three branch mints established to process the gold being pulled from Carolina and Georgia streams and rock formations after gold was discovered in Cabarrus County, just northeast of Charlotte, in 1799. That discovery made Charlotte a significant gold-production center for decades, and the mint stamped millions of dollars in gold coins here until the Civil War halted federal operations.
After the war the building served various purposes before being moved, stone by stone, to its current location in the 1930s and converted into an art museum — the first art museum in North Carolina, opening in 1936. Today the Mint Museum Randolph focuses on American and European decorative arts, ceramics, fashion, and historical collections, while its uptown sibling handles contemporary and international work. The original mint building, with its Federal-style columns and careful brickwork, is worth examining as an artifact of the antebellum South's brief moment as a gold-producing region.