Tonight, a look into Washington’s maritime past — and the history that shaped all of eastern North Carolina — will go on display at the Turnage Theater Gallery.

The public is invited to attend the opening reception for the Port of Washington Project Exhibition from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. The exhibit features artifacts, archival photographs, paintings and drawings, and at the center of it all, is artist and maritime historian Douglas Alvord’s recently completed mural of the Port of Washington in its heyday, between 1880 and 1920.

The mural was a piecemeal process: a photograph here, a painting there, a memory shared, all served to fill in the missing pieces of a thriving waterfront in a bygone era.

“There’s been a lot of collaboration and dialogue of descendants who built this,” said Pat Mansfield, one of the key Port of Washington Project members. “They helped us identify where things were.”

At 6:30 p.m., Alvord will put the finishing touch on the portrait — his signature.

The mural may be the focal point of the exhibit, but around the Turnage Theater Gallery, brief snippets of history can be found: portraits — many pre-Civil War — of those who made their mark in shipping and, indeed, determining the path of North Carolina commerce; maps depicting Washington through its growth; photos of a bustling waterfront taken long before it was a place of recreation. The project, and recognition of Washington’s importance in North Carolina, has generated a lot of excitement in the greater community, according to Mansfield.

“Everybody was ready for this — young, old, in between. The people of Washington are excited about this,” Mansfield said, adding that the excitement extends beyond the exhibit proper to the future, when plans for a permanent home come to fruition.

For Ray Midgett, another instrumental figure in the project, one painting included in the exhibit pulls together his own family’s legacy with that of Washington. In the watercolor, a sharpie — a flat-bottomed sailboat — is shown docking at the oyster factory near the foot of Market Street. The painting is a reproduction of a photograph of the Georgia A. Gaskins, owned by a Hatteras waterman, Luey Midgett — Midgett’s grandfather.

Yet another drawing shows Civil War Washington, as painted by Merrill G. Wheelock, a Boston portrait painter and illustrator for the Union Army. The piece is dated 1863, and is titled “Little Washington.”

“This guy was a pretty well-known artist after the Civil War,” Midgett said.

The opening of the exhibit coincides with the annual conference of the North Carolina Maritime History Council, held this year in Washington and Bath, from Oct. 23 to Oct. 25. In addition to tonight’s opening exhibit, on Friday, noted historian and author Kevin Duffus will give the keynote address for the NCMHC meeting at the Turnage Theater: “Black Beard’s Black Pirates: Their Origins, Their Identities, and Their Fates;” and on Oct. 29, from noon to 1 p.m., Alvord will give a talk at the gallery about the process of creating the mural. Both events are open to the public.