Feel the Bern: North Carolina's Colonial capital has 300 years' worth of coastal charm, but New Bern isn't content with tourism alone.

• Author: Maurer, Kevin
• Position: TOWNSQUARE

George Oliver strolls down Middle Street in downtown New Bern. It's a beautiful fall day, and Oliver, a local lawyer, greets each passerby with a hello. Not an "I don't know your name" hello, but the kind you'd offer a friend, because he seems to know everyone.

Up ahead, Laura Overman sees Oliver and stops to chat. They each renovated houses in downtown New Bern, where Overman was a pioneer in the early 1980s kickstarting the renaissance of North Carolina's Colonial capital. "She was one of the first people down here," Oliver says.

Overman smiles at the memory. "It used to close up down here around 5 p.m.," she says. "But people took a chance and moved into the old houses."

Sitting at the confluence of the Neuse and Trent rivers, New Bern played an important role in North Carolina's founding, a history that is enacted by volunteers dressed in period costumes for thousands of schoolchildren every year at Tryon Palace. With tree-lined streets of historic homes and churches, many established before the Civil War, New Bern looks like a Southern town straight from a movie set. But New Bern has moved beyond tourism and is doing better economically than most midsized North Carolina cities away from big metro areas.

"Everyone is paddling in the same direction," says Timothy Downs, director of Craven County Economic Development. "We have good manufacturing, tourism, health care. We have a diverse economy. We have the quality of life. Very few places in the country are like downtown New Bern."

BSH Home Appliances and Moen have promised to bring more than 500 manufacturing jobs to the area in the next five years. Ohio-based Moen has been making faucets in Craven County since 1983 and has 700 workers assembling more than 75,000 products per day. The company opened a components warehouse in May that added about 100 jobs. BSH, a subsidiary of Munich, Germany-based BSH Hausgerate, plans to add 460 jobs. The maker of sleek appliances with brands including Bosch and Thermador was awarded a state incentives package worth nearly $4.1 million if it meets job-creation and investment milestones.

The new jobs will boost the tax base by $20 million annually, Craven County officials say. The median family income of $45,762 is expected to rise by almost 25% to $56,233 by 2018. Median income in neighboring Lenoir County is about $36,000.

The grocery wars also signal the town's rising prosperity. Publix Super Markets Inc., which is expanding rapidly in North Carolina...