NC SHPO Website Search Tool
- Use this search tool to find keywords in documents posted on the NCHPO website, including PDFs of National Register nominations and architectural survey reports. This is especially useful for searching for comparable examples for contexts, other works by the same architect, places related to specific individuals or themes, etc.
- If you search on a string of words, placing them within quotes will limit the results to that specific string. Thus "Frank Pierce Milburn" will find only those documents where the architect's name is written in full. Searching simply on Frank Pierce Milburn (without quotes) will find those documents that have all three words in any order or sequence anywhere in the document. Searching on Milburn alone will find Frank Milburn, Frank P. Milburn, F.P. Milburn, Milburn & Heister, etc. -- and of course "George Milburn" and every other occurance of Milburn -- but you'll be surer of finding every possible instance of Frank.
- If your keyword is likely to appear often as a string within longer words, type the word in quotes with a space before the first letter. Thus " arbor" will find arbor but not harbor or Scarborough.
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To indicate a word to exclude from results, include it in the search with a minus sign in front. Thus searching on Georgian -Revival will exclude documents with the string "Georgian Revival" but otherwide keep all with "Georgian". But it will also exclude those nominations that use the word "revival" in some other context elsewhere in the document.
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Many PDFs of older nominations were scanned from poor quality photocopies (the originals are with NPS), and optical character recognition may not work perfectly in those nominations, so there is no guarantee you'll find everything. But you can find a lot!