Buying Land in Craven County, North Carolina

New Bern's colonial history, and why Cherry Point matters more for land buyers

New Bern is North Carolina's second-oldest town and served as the colony's capital under Royal Governor William Tryon, whose reconstructed colonial governor's residence, Tryon Palace, remains one of the state's best-known historic sites today. New Bern also has a distinctive claim to commercial history: pharmacist Caleb Bradham invented what would become Pepsi-Cola there in 1898. Neither of those facts drives land-use rules, though, and the more practically important story for a Craven County land buyer is a modern one: Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, located near Havelock in the eastern part of the county, is one of the Marine Corps's major East Coast air stations, home to Fleet Readiness Center East (a large Marine Corps aircraft maintenance and overhaul depot) and active fighter and attack squadrons.

Craven County has gone further than most counties near an active military airfield: it has adopted its own dedicated Cherry Point Marine Corps Air Station Zoning Ordinance, with named Clear Zone, Accident Potential Zone, and noise-exposure-level classifications, plus disclosure requirements built into permitting, plat approval, and tax records. See our dedicated Craven County zoning page for the full detail, including how to pull the county's own GIS map layers for a specific parcel near Havelock.

Croatan National Forest reaches into Craven County too

As covered in more depth on this project's Carteret County page, Craven County shares a large piece of Croatan National Forest -- a roughly 160,000-acre federal forest -- with neighboring Carteret and Jones counties. Private land bordering the forest anywhere in Craven County can face the same kind of boundary, easement, and prescribed-burn-notification considerations discussed there; the U.S. Forest Service's local district office is the right first call for any parcel adjoining federal forest land. This is a genuinely separate consideration from the Cherry Point AICUZ overlay -- a parcel could plausibly border Croatan National Forest, sit inside a Cherry Point compatible-use zone, or both, so check each independently rather than assuming one implies the other.

What this pass could and could not independently verify

This pass replaces an earlier version of this hub written after that research batch's live web-search allowance had already been exhausted. Fresh research this pass confirmed the Cherry Point AICUZ zoning ordinance's real structure (now covered on its own page) but did not reconfirm Craven County's general countywide zoning-adoption status outside that specific overlay, nor current Environmental Health office contact details -- both remain open items to confirm directly with Craven County Planning & Development and the Craven County Health Department, respectively, before relying on this page for either.