The North Carolina Executive Mansion was built in 1891 and designed by Samuel Sloan, a prominent architect of the time. The mansion is one of the gems of architecture in the state of North Carolina and acts as a repository for a grand collections of North Carolina paintings and furnishings from the eighteenth century and nineteenth century. The Executive Mansion has been the residence of many governors of North Carolina and their families and has been a cultural, social, and political center for the state for over one hundred years, one of only a handful of executive mansions in America built for that purpose.