The United States District Court has been meeting in New Bern continuously since October 4, 1790. The present monumental Georgian Colonial style building, designed by Robert F. Smallwood of New Bern and completed in 1934, was the nation's first public building to use "WPA" funds, one of the post-depression programs of President Franklin Roosevelt. The courtroom contains old murals depicting four historical scenes from New Bern's history: founder Baron de Graffenreid's naming the town for his native Bern, Switzerland in 1710; printing of the first newspaper and book in North Carolina in 1749; holding of the first provincial convention in America in defiance of British orders in 1774; and the 1786 ruling in Bayard v. Singleton, first establishing the right of the judiciary to nullify a law enacted by the legislative branch.
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