On a Saturday afternoon this past April, a crowd gathered along South Front Street to watch a wall change. The building at 328 South Front had spent about two years wearing "New Bern Strong," a mural painted to hold the memory of Hurricane Florence and the flooding it sent through the Neuse and Trent rivers. By the time the tarps came down that Saturday, the wall belonged to something new: a design by muralist Georgie Nakima built around bears, cardinal flowers, and the people of the town that raised her. Some residents online called it a loss. Most of the people standing on the sidewalk that day called it a homecoming.
That single wall tells you more about how this town actually works than any bear-themed scavenger hunt map ever will. Everyone who has visited New Bern has heard the pitch: bears everywhere, a nod to the Swiss settlers who named the place after their capital, a fun family walk downtown. What almost nobody mentions is that the collection behind that pitch is not a museum piece. It moves, grows, gets stolen, gets voted on, and occasionally gets fought over on a public sidewalk. If you live here, that's the more useful thing to know.
The Count That Won't Sit Still
Ask five sources how many bears stand in New Bern and you'll get five different numbers. A well-known regional magazine's downtown guide puts the figure at 30. A travel writer who counted in person landed on 28 clustered downtown with more scattered citywide. Visit New Bern's own printed brochure, updated in 2025, says "over 95 bears around New Bern." Other travel roundups have floated 80, or a round 100.
None of these writers were being careless. The bears themselves are the reason the number won't hold still. The original push came in 2010, when the town marked its 300th anniversary by commissioning more than 50 hand painted fiberglass statues, each sponsored by a local business and designed by a local artist. Since then, more than 40 additional bears have joined the collection according to Visit New Bern's own count, which is why any brochure is out of date within a season of printing. Bears also retire. They get repainted. A few have simply gone missing. The wooden bear outside Bern Bear Gifts, which isn't even part of the official fiberglass collection, has been stolen from the sidewalk more than once. A downtown resident who tries to give a visiting relative an exact number is going to be wrong by the time they finish the sentence, and that instability is the actual story, not a flaw in the reporting.
Who Pays For A Bear, And Why
The sponsor list reads like a cross section of the local economy, and that's worth sitting with for a second. A hardware-themed bear stands within sight of Mitchell Hardware downtown. The New Bern Shrine Club, Coastal Carolina Health Care, Kincaid & Purvis Family Dentistry, the Fly-In EAA chapter at the general aviation community, and St. Paul Catholic Church have each put their names on one, and a cluster of local real estate and mortgage firms sponsored a statue named "Bearon De Broker, a.k.a. Super Agent" along South Glenburnie Road. A dentist's office bear is named Tooth Beary. A funeral home's bear is named Bury Bear. A bank's bear got a name built around money. The jokes are the point: sponsoring a bear is a small, semi-permanent way for a local business to plant a flag on a sidewalk that gets foot traffic every day of the year, and the naming convention has turned the whole collection into an inside joke the town keeps adding new lines to.
That's a different kind of civic investment than a plaque or a banner. A bear sits outside a storefront for years, gets photographed by out of town families doing the scavenger hunt, and quietly advertises a business that most tourist guides would never mention on their own.
The Bear That Floated Away
The most telling bear story predates the mural fight by eight years. When Hurricane Florence flooded the Neuse and Trent rivers in 2018, the water rose high enough to lift some of the lighter fiberglass statues off their bases. One of them was Bearon de Graffenried, a bear designed in old-fashioned dress and a powdered wig to represent Christoph von Graffenried, the Swiss baron who led the original 1710 settlement. He floated off during the flood and was later recovered and returned to his post in Union Point Park, the six acre waterfront green space where the Neuse and Trent rivers meet at the tip of downtown.
That detail matters because it means the bears already carried flood memory before "New Bern Strong" was ever painted. The mural commemorated the same storm that had, years earlier, sent a bear statue drifting through downtown streets. When the wall changed hands this spring, the town wasn't choosing bears over memory. It was folding one flood story into a symbol that had already been carrying flood stories for a decade.
What Actually Happened On Front Street This Spring
The 328 South Front Street building sold in 2025 to new owners, Deion King among them, and the Craven Arts Council & Gallery, which had originally helped produce "New Bern Strong," said publicly that the decision to paint over it sat entirely with the new property owner, not with the nonprofit. When the repainting began, word spread fast that a flood memorial was being erased, and the online reaction split. Muralist Georgie Nakima, who grew up in the New Bern area and had worked with the Arts Council before, absorbed most of the criticism directly. She later described the pushback as small compared to the support, telling a local television reporter that "there's an overwhelming amount of love that's coming from it, there's a small amount of trolling on the internet."
The finished piece, revealed that April afternoon, kept a version of the old memory rather than discarding it. King told a reporter at the unveiling that "the blue strip now represents the twin rivers that run through New Bern," the same two rivers that caused the flooding the original mural was painted to remember. The new work layers bears and native cardinal flowers over that blue band, according to Nakima's own description of the design's totems: youth, diversity, and love worked in alongside the town's oldest symbol.
Bear Plaza Isn't Decor. It's Where People Actually Show Up
None of this stays confined to sidewalk art. Bear Plaza, a small courtyard on Middle Street with three hand carved wood bears and flower beds tended by the New Bern Garden Club, is also where the town gathers every year the Friday after Thanksgiving for the tree lighting portion of Light Up the Season, after the celebration starts down at Union Point Park. City Hall's own facade carries bear gargoyles. The high school teams play as the Bears. Patrol cars carry the same emblem. None of that reads as a marketing gimmick to someone who has lived here fifteen years and watched a kid point out "Bearon De Broker" on the way to a dentist appointment named after a different bear entirely.
What this spring's mural swap actually proves is that the bear identity isn't a fixed piece of civic branding handed down in 2010 and left alone since. It's a live argument the town keeps having about what its downtown should remember and how. A statue can float away in a flood and come back to its post. A mural can vanish under new ownership and reappear carrying the same river memory in a new form. The count keeps climbing because the town keeps adding to the argument, not because anyone forgot to update a brochure.
If you've walked past these bears for years without knowing which one commemorates a founder who once floated through a flood, or noticed the new wall on Front Street without knowing what it replaced, you're looking at the same texture that makes this stretch of downtown worth living near in the first place. Melissa Rankin and Donnette Hancock at New Bern Property Group spend as much time walking these blocks as writing about them, and they're always glad to talk about what's changing downtown, whether or not a move is anywhere on your radar. If a conversation about the neighborhood turns into something more, they're easy to reach for a free consultation.
