Q&A
DIGGING UP ROOTS Ernest Dollar turned a love for history and the Triangle into a full-time job at the City of Raleigh Museum by CATHERINE CURRIN photography by TRAVIS LONG
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ump into Ernest Dollar, and he’ll gladly share a gem from almost a decade of studying our city. As the Executive Director of both the City of Raleigh (COR) Museum on Fayetteville Street and the Pope House Museum on S. Wilmington Street, Dollar hopes to teach us more about our shared, surprising history. We caught up with him to learn about his love for all things Raleigh.
24 | WALTER
TELL ME A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND. I’m a Durham native, been in the Triangle all my life. I attended The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where I was originally a design major. But I got bit by the history bug my junior year of college—I later went on to grad school to pursue that interest. I worked in historical preservation until I landed my first director job in 2001, at the Orange County
