The whole place is named after a man who happened to own four acres of trackside land. In 1849, when the new North Carolina Railroad needed a depot somewhere between Raleigh and Hillsborough, the merchants in what's now downtown Durham refused to lease the land - they were sure their businesses serving livestock drivers had a better future than "a new-fangled nonsense like a railroad." A doctor named Bartlett S. Durham handed over four acres, the depot went up, and the station took his name. Twenty years later the town that grew around it became the City of Durham. Most cities are founded on rivers or harbors. Durham was founded on a stubborn doctor and a steam locomotive that needed somewhere to take on water.
Veterans came home from the Civil War remembering the sweet flue-cured tobacco they had sampled around Durham Station. Orders poured in. John Ruffin Green's tobacco operation expanded, partnered with W.T. Blackwell, and rebranded itself as the Bull Durham Tobacco Factory - using a bull because Durham Mustard, made in Durham, England, used a bull on its tin. Within decades the company's pouches were rolled into cigarettes from Cuba to China, and Durham, North Carolina was rich enough to electrify itself early and build textile mills nearby to feed the smoking habit it had created. The Erwin Mill went up in West Durham in 1893. The Duke family - James B. Duke and his father Washington Duke - turned the family's American Tobacco Company into a near-monopoly, and in 1924 endowed Trinity College so generously that the school renamed itself Duke University and moved most of its campus a mile west. The nickname "Bull City" stuck. It still does.
While white Durham built tobacco empires, Black Durham built one too - on Parrish Street, just south of the railroad tracks, in a neighborhood called Hayti (pronounced "HAY-tie"). North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, founded in 1898, became the largest Black-owned business in the country. Mechanics and Farmers Bank stood across the street. The whole corridor became known as Black Wall Street. In 1910, Dr. James E. Shepard founded what would become North Carolina Central University - the nation's first publicly supported liberal arts college for African Americans. The community produced lawyers, doctors, ministers, journalists - and a culture confident enough that Durham native Pauli Murray once called the city "a unique town that is more liberal than what you would expect in a Southern state." Then came the 1960s. Durham Freeway construction tore through Hayti. Urban Renewal money flattened blocks of historic Black businesses and homes. The city is still reckoning with what it bulldozed.
On June 23, 1957, at the Royal Ice Cream Parlor on Roxboro Street, the Reverend Douglas E. Moore of Asbury Temple Methodist Church and six other African Americans - the Royal Seven - sat down in the whites-only section and refused to leave. They were arrested for trespassing. They were convicted. Each was fined ten dollars. It was two and a half years before the more famous Greensboro Woolworth's sit-in. It was, by virtually every measure, the first sit-in of the modern civil rights movement in North Carolina - but the press buried the story, and when historical markers were finally proposed in 1979 there was a public argument over whether the marker even belonged in Durham. Not until 2007 did the state put up a sign: "ROYAL ICE CREAM SIT-IN: Segregation protest at an ice cream parlor on this site, June 23, 1957." Within a week of Greensboro three years later, Martin Luther King Jr. would stand in Durham and coin the rallying cry "Fill up the jails" at White Rock Baptist Church.
By the late 1950s Durham's two big industries were both fading. So a remarkable thing happened: Duke, UNC, and NC State persuaded the state to buy a huge tract of pine forest in southern Durham County and build the nation's first science park there. Research Triangle Park, founded in 1959 by Governor Luther Hodges, eventually pulled in IBM, GlaxoSmithKline, Cisco, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and hundreds of other companies. It saved the region. American Tobacco closed its Durham factory in 1987, but by the 2000s the brick warehouses were being converted into apartments, restaurants, and software offices. The new Durham Bulls Athletic Park opened in 1995 next door. The Durham Performing Arts Center followed. In 2018 a 27-story tower called One City Center became the tallest building downtown. The 2020 census counted 283,506 people. The city had grown from a railroad whistle stop into the fourth-largest city in North Carolina, with Duke University Hospital and RTP as its biggest employers - and a downtown that, for the first time in fifty years, was full again.
Coordinates 35.99°N, 78.90°W, in the Piedmont of central North Carolina about 21 miles northwest of Raleigh. Recommended viewing altitude 4,000-6,000 ft AGL to take in the full triangle. The compact downtown core - dominated by One City Center and the brick warehouses of the American Tobacco district - is easily visible, with Duke University's neo-Gothic campus and chapel tower two miles west, North Carolina Central University to the south, and Research Triangle Park as a green oval ten miles southeast. Nearest airport is Raleigh-Durham International (KRDU), 12 nm southeast. Horace Williams Airport (KIGX) southwest in Chapel Hill closed in 2018.