Qualla: Durham, North Carolina

Durham, North Carolina: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Durham, North Carolina: Bulls and Smoke

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Durham, North Carolina: Black Wall Street

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 busine...

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Durham, North Carolina: The First Sit-In Nobody Remembers

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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. The...

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Durham, North Carolina: After Tobacco

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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, founde...

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