Qualla: Cary, North Carolina

Cary, North Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Zajohnso, CC BY-SA 3.0. The locals had a name for it during the long growth boom: Containment Area for Relocated Yankees. The acronym spelled Cary. Native-born North Carolinians watched their old farming town between Raleigh and Chapel Hill fill up with engineers and biostatisticians from up north and somewhere around the 1980s gave up pretending they could fight it. By 2000 the population was 94,536. As of the 2020 Census, more than three of every four residents were not born in North Carolina, and one in five was foreign-born. The town now has Hindu temples modeled after Sri Venkateswara at Tirupathi, a Chinese Lantern Festival with 2,500 silk lanterns lit for the Lunar New Year, and a Dragon Boat Festival on a man-made lake.

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Image: Zajohnso | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cary, North Carolina: From Frank Page to First Postmaster

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Yassie, CC BY 2.5. The town was built around the railroad. Allison Francis Page, a Wake County farmer and lumberman, arrived in 1854 and started the work of turning a crossroads into a place. By 1856 he had added a post office and become its first postmaster. The community sat on the old road betwe...

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Image: Yassie | CC BY 2.5

Cary, North Carolina: A Town Built on Public Schools

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nader Moussa, aka Nimur at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. Cary did one thing first in North Carolina that mattered enormously: in April 1907, Cary High School became the first state-funded public high school in the state. By 1900 the predecessor private academy already pulled 248 students from across North Carolina. Town bonds and state...

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Image: Nader Moussa, aka Nimur at en.wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cary, North Carolina: Research Triangle Park Changes Everything

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Techshuffle, Public domain. In 1959, the State of North Carolina, Duke, UNC, and NC State opened Research Triangle Park on 7,000 acres of pine forest northwest of Cary. The state built a four-lane road from Cary to the park as part of the deal to attract RTP to North Carolina. Within a decade the town's pop...

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Image: Techshuffle | Public domain

Cary, North Carolina: The Software Company in the Woods

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sergey Galyonkin from Berlin, Germany, CC BY-SA 2.0. The largest employer in Cary is SAS Institute, the world's largest privately held software company, whose campus stretches across north Cary in low buildings surrounded by lakes and walking paths. Building A alone is ten stories tall with 990 offices. Founder Jim Goodnight famous...

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Image: Sergey Galyonkin from Berlin, Germany | CC BY-SA 2.0

Cary, North Carolina: The Quiet Choice

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Reverie 39, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cary keeps winning rankings nobody put on the original 1856 town plan. In 2021 it was named the safest mid-sized place to live in the United States. A 2025 federal crash analysis found Cary had the lowest per capita fatal motor vehicle crash rate among American cities over 125,00...

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Image: Reverie 39 | CC BY-SA 4.0