Qualla: Downtown Durham Historic District

Downtown Durham Historic District: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1957, three years before four students sat down at the Greensboro Woolworth and made the lunch counter a national symbol, seven young people walked into the Royal Ice Cream Parlor in downtown Durham and asked for service in the white section. They were arrested. The Durham sit-in did not make the history books in the way Greensboro did. It happened in this same downtown, inside the streets and buildings that the National Register listed as a historic district in 1977: 97 contributing structures across the central business district, mostly built in the first four decades of the 20th century, when tobacco money and Duke money turned a railroad stop into a city.

Image: Warren LeMay | CC BY-SA 4.0

Downtown Durham Historic District: Built by Tobacco

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay, CC BY-SA 4.0. Durham was a junction on the North Carolina Railroad until tobacco arrived. By the late 19th century, the bright-leaf tobacco grown on surrounding farms had made Durham one of the major industrial centers of the South, anchored by Washington Duke's American Tobacco Company and Ju...

Image: Warren LeMay | CC BY-SA 4.0

Downtown Durham Historic District: Black Wall Street

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay, CC BY-SA 4.0. Parrish Street, a few blocks of red-brick storefronts in the heart of the district, was the spine of what Booker T. Washington dubbed Black Wall Street. The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, founded in 1898 and headquartered on Parrish, became the largest Black-owned ...

Image: Warren LeMay | CC BY-SA 4.0

Downtown Durham Historic District: Royal Ice Cream

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay, CC BY-SA 4.0. On June 23, 1957, Rev. Douglas Moore led six young Black activists into the Royal Ice Cream Parlor at 600 Roxboro Street, just outside the historic district boundary but inside the same civic story. The owners had divided the parlor by race. The group sat in the white section, as...

Image: Warren LeMay | CC BY-SA 4.0

Downtown Durham Historic District: Churches and Theaters

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay, CC BY-SA 4.0. St. Philip's Episcopal Church (1907) anchors the district's Gothic Revival heritage. Trinity United Methodist Church, completed in 1880-1881, is one of Durham's oldest surviving churches. First Presbyterian (1916) carries early 20th-century ecclesiastical architecture in stone. T...

Image: Warren LeMay | CC BY-SA 4.0

Downtown Durham Historic District: August 14, 2017

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Warren LeMay, CC BY-SA 4.0. In front of the 1916 Durham County Courthouse stood a 15-foot bronze Confederate soldier on a granite base, dedicated in 1924. On August 14, 2017, two days after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville ended with the murder of counter-protester Heather Heyer, a crowd gathere...

Image: Warren LeMay | CC BY-SA 4.0