The current Secretary of Natural and Cultural Resources, the cabinet-level officer who oversees the department, is D. Reid Wilson.

[4] In 1973, Grace Rohrer succeeded Ragan, becoming the first woman to hold a cabinet-level office in North Carolina.

These organizations either remained independent or were gradually combined under the Office of Archives and History until 1971, when the Department of Cultural Resources became the first cabinet-level office of any state in the United States to deal solely with history, the arts, and cultural knowledge.

The name change came with a transfer of several divisions to the department, including North Carolina's state parks, aquariums, zoological park, museum of natural sciences, the Clean Water Trust Fund and the North Carolina Natural Heritage Program.

The North Carolina General Assembly's appropriation in 1947 of $1 million for the purchase of artworks and sculpture to be housed in the Museum of Art made it the first state in the nation to use public funds for the purpose of building a state art collection[4] The department is organized in the following manner (all divisions located in Raleigh unless otherwise noted):[9][10]