Named event or history
Durham’s Station on the North Carolina Railroad, the tobacco factories and warehouses that made the town, its incorporation in 1869, and its growth until Durham County was formed from Orange in 1881.
In briefThe North Carolina Railroad reached Durham's Station in December 1854, and flour and then tobacco went out by rail; a small smoking-tobacco factory opened by the depot in 1858. After the war Washington Duke began making smoking tobacco, the Dukes moved into a Durham factory in 1870, and by 1877 the town counted four sale warehouses and about fourteen factories. Hillsborough tobacco firms moved there, and in 1881 Durham County was formed from Orange over Hillsborough's protest.
The dated events and research sources on this page document this event. Explore the dated events, or browse the research sources.
Orange County Indexed has not yet linked any indexed works directly to this event. The background reading below is about Growth, Land & Planning, the wider history this event belongs to.
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 40, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 40 dated events in the chronology →
Having built up more than three hundred acres from 1847, Washington Duke finished a house for his family on his Orange County farm in time for his marriage to Artelia Roney in December 1852. The house, in the part of the county that became Durham County in 1881, is now Duke Homestead.
After the first Wilmington merchant known to visit the section came through, several loads of flour were hauled to Durham's Station (now Durham County) to be sent to Wilmington. Until then produce carried on the North Carolina Railroad had gone to Norfolk and Portsmouth.
Subject: North Carolina Railroad
By late September 1858 the Raleigh stone and marble cutters McCowan and Grier were taking building freestone from their quarry at Durham's Station on the North Carolina Railroad (now Durham County). State geologist Ebenezer Emmons examined the samples and judged the fine-grained stone good enough for carving and for the outside of buildings.
Subject: North Carolina Railroad
Dr. Bartlett L. Durham, the physician whose name the railroad station carried, died at his home at Durham's Station, aged about 37.
Back from Confederate service, Washington Duke starts making smoking tobacco on his Orange County farm, the start of the business his sons later built into W. Duke and Sons.
People: Washington Duke
The General Assembly passed an act authorizing the formation of the Durham North-Carolina Industrial Association in Orange County, an early act of incorporation for the Durham's Station community (now Durham County).
Robert G. Fitzgerald, who came to Hillsborough in January 1868 to teach a freedmen's school, set up a brick kiln in partnership with his brother; his diaries through 1871 record its supplies and labor. His brother Richard was selling bricks in Durham by 1869.
People: Robert G. Fitzgerald
Blackwell, the Durham smoking tobacco maker, had his rival Wright of Pittsylvania Court House, Virginia, arrested by the sheriff at the Hillsborough depot in their quarrel over the Durham brand; Wright waited in town for bail.
Blackwell built at Durham, now Durham County, what the paper called the prettiest warehouse in the South, and a Durham letter of February 1872 reported it filled to overflowing.
The Hillsborough Recorder reported that the tobacco firm of Webb, Roulhac & Cameron was about to move to Durham, where it had been offered better terms. The paper said the town could ill spare them.
The hands at Blackwell's tobacco factory in Durham, then in Orange County and now Durham County, struck work one morning about breakfast time and walked out. The firm went to Petersburg and brought back forty hands to take the strikers' places.
Citing the 'very unsatisfactory condition' of the tobacco trade, the Board of Trade of the town of Durham resolved to call all manufacturers and dealers of manufactured tobacco in the congressional district, peddlers included, to a convention at Raleigh, and invited the internal revenue commissioner and collectors to attend.
Durham (now Durham County) had four large tobacco sale warehouses holding sales four times a week and about fourteen factories by early November 1877, along with a smut-machine factory, sash and blind factories, steam sawmills, cotton gins and a factory making smoking-tobacco bags. Its railroad warehouse forwarded more freight than any station on the line that was not a transfer point.
Work began on a new Methodist church at Durham, planned as a large Gothic brick building with a steeple 200 feet high; it was still going up in December.
Pogue, a tobacco dealer since 1866 alongside his tinware and general merchandise trade, began making plug tobacco at a factory in Hillsborough in 1872 or 1873. In 1879 he moved the business to Durham, where E. H. Pogue & Son made granulated and long-cut smoking tobacco, while Pogue kept his home in Hillsborough.
At their regular meeting the Hillsborough town commissioners resolved against Caleb R. Green's bill to cut Durham County out of Orange, protesting that the question had never been put before the people, and named a committee of about a hundred citizens headed by the mayor to go to Raleigh and memorialize the legislature against it.
People: Paul C. Cameron · John W. Graham
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first.
These works give background on Growth, Land & Planning, the wider history this event belongs to (898 works in all). Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Stewart E. Dunaway's 2015 addendum to his history of Hillsborough's town lots, adding deed records arranged by lot number and further town history, with the expansion of the 1890s covered for the first time. Self-published in North Carolina as version 1.0, 446 pages with illustrations, facsimiles and maps. Topics include deeds, court records, land titles and real property in Hillsborough.
Ejectment suits were the legal route for disputing who held title to a tract of land, and the case files often include plats and drawings of the property. Stewart E. Dunaway gathered Orange County's ejectment cases from the state archives and reproduced them in facsimile, with maps, in a self-published volume issued through Lulu in 2015 (issue 2).
Deed transcripts for the town lots of Chapel Hill and adjoining land from 1790 to the 1930s, compiled by Stewart E. Dunaway. Each transcript keeps only the working facts: grantor and grantee, price, acreage and the metes and bounds of the parcel. Self-published in 2014 as Issue 1G, 702 pages with maps and facsimiles.
Comprehensive transportation plan for Orange County prepared by Sarah Lee for the Transportation Planning Branch of the N.C. Department of Transportation, October 2013. It covers highway planning, roads and their environmental effects, and traffic engineering, with color maps, some folded.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Strategic plan for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library covering 2013 through 2018, issued by the university libraries in July 2013. A 12-page pamphlet with color illustrations. Its title ties the library's plans to the mission of the university as a whole.
David R. Godschalk and Jonathan B. Howes describe the ten-year building program that reshaped the UNC campus in Chapel Hill, when some six million square feet in new buildings went up and a million more of historic buildings were restored. Chapters treat the campus master plan, siting and design decisions, the historic north campus, the southeast and health-sciences precincts and the planned Carolina North research campus, with contributions by chancellors James Moeser and Holden Thorp. Published by UNC Press in 2012, 175 pages.
Mark Chilton's short history of transportation planning in the North Carolina Piedmont, drawing lessons from earlier projects. Subjects include the Cape Fear Navigation Company and river navigation, and the railroads of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, including the State University Railroad Company whose spur brought trains to the two towns. Chilton was mayor of Carrboro when the book appeared. Published by Hand Made Books, Carrboro, 2012, 92 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
J. Ronald Oakley's pictorial history of Mebane, the railroad town on the Orange and Alamance county line, from Arcadia Publishing in 2012, 127 pages of photographs. Chapters cover the railroad, industries, businesses, the Depression and war years, profiles past and present, churches and civic clubs, recreation and sports, school days, and preserving the past. Topics include Mebane's history, economy, buildings and railroads.
A group of materials combining a county planning document with a highway map of Orange County, dated 2012. The planning piece, issued in Raleigh by a state commission, lays out a planning and management process for the county with recommendations on land development. The map, based on the statewide highway planning survey, shows roads, bridges, utilities, public property, businesses and industries across Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsborough; one copy carries red-pencil notes naming the county's voting precincts.
Stewart E. Dunaway's abstracts of civil suits over land heard in the Hillsborough District Superior Court between 1778 and 1806. The district covered Orange, Wake, Granville, Caswell, Person, Chatham and Randolph counties, and the papers concern boundaries, ownership and disputed tracts. Published through Lulu in 2011, 337 pages with illustrations, maps and facsimiles.
Stewart E. Dunaway's four-volume set of ejectment cases from Orange County, reproducing the original documents and maps from the North Carolina State Archives with partial transcriptions. The volumes cover 1778 to 1814, 1817 to 1832, 1833 to 1849 and 1850 to 1902. Ejectment suits contested title and possession of land, and the cases include surveys and plats. Self-published in 2010.
Stewart E. Dunaway's two-volume edition of the Orange County land entry book, the register in which settlers first claimed vacant land from the state before a grant was surveyed and issued. Volume one covers the first thousand entries, all made in 1778; volume two runs from 1779 to 1795. Each entry is reproduced from the original in the State Archives with an abstract of its contents. Self-published through Lulu in a second version dated 2010, two volumes at 28 cm with facsimiles and maps.
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this event. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled. Books marked Wider context cover the broader subject rather than this event itself.
Bryon Pulkownik's double sided Durham map for Seeger Map Company, dated 1994, with five ancillary maps including downtown Durham and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus. The supplied information also identifies a separate title, Durham, North Carolina: a postcard history, and appears to combine two works. Part of the Wall Local History Collection.
Durham County's history in captioned photographs, assembled by Jim Wise for Arcadia's Images of America series. Its chapters move from the county's beginnings to the years of freeway building and the Bicentennial. It runs 128 pages with an index and first appeared in 2000. The county was formed from parts of Orange and Wake in 1881.
Durham's history and its look in the late 1970s, told in more than 350 pictures by Joel A. Kostyu and Frank A. Kostyu. Donning of Norfolk, Virginia, published the book in 1978; 205 pages. Durham County was formed in 1881 from parts of Orange and Wake.
An 80-page illustrated booklet issued by the Durham Centennial and Historical Commission for the city's centennial in 1953, marking a hundred years since 1853. It presents the historical pageant 'Durham's Centurama', staged at Duke Stadium from April 27 to May 2, with pictures and biographical sketches from Durham's past. Durham County was formed from parts of Orange and Wake in 1881.
The marriage register of Durham County for its first quarter century, 1881 to 1906, transcribed and compiled by Frances Holloway Wynne. Durham County was created in 1881 from parts of Orange and Wake counties, so the register begins with the county itself. Oracle Press of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, published the 256-page transcription in 1983.
Durham's bicentennial touring guide to the buildings and historic sites of the city and county, written by John Baxton Flowers and Marguerite Schumann for the Durham Bicentennial Commission in 1976; 86 pages with illustrations, in a pocket size. Durham County was formed in 1881 from parts of Orange and Wake.
Resources picked for this event, each with a note on what it holds.
More to discover
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