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played important roles in the civil rights movement.⁹⁴

      The late 1800s were also a time of expansion in Raleigh's urban infrastructure. The influx of blacks and others after the war had made Raleigh the second largest city in the state by 1880, behind the port city of Wilmington. In 1881, the General Assembly expanded Raleigh's boundaries a half mile in all directions. To support this growing population, a centralized water supply system, electric streetlights, and a mule-drawn streetcar system were introduced during the ensuing decade. In addition, R. Stanhope Pullen donated sixty acres of land adjacent to what was to become North Carolina State University for a city park. In the 1890s, while several cotton mills opened in Raleigh, its industrial development lagged behind many other cities in the state.

      In 1911, Raleigh's Municipal Auditorium opened, providing a venue for large musical and theatrical performances. Besides a five-thousand-seat theater, it included municipal offices, a courtroom, police headquarters, and even a jail. The original building burned in 1930 but was quickly rebuilt. Today, the neoclassical Memorial Auditorium serves as one anchor for the recently reopened Fayetteville Street, the state Capitol serving as the second anchor. Like the state as a whole, Raleigh experienced the 1920s as boom years followed by the stock market crash of 1929. All eight of Raleigh's local banks succumbed to the country's economic turmoil. Because the city was the state capital, however, the local economy recovered more quickly than that of many other cities, and by the end of World War II “Raleigh's market in business real estate, stimulated by a wartime flow of money seeking an investment medium, has boomed as never before in the city's 150 years of existence.”⁹⁵ One of these real estate projects built on the western edge of town was Cameron Village, a 158-acre site offering 561 apartments, 100 single-family homes, and a shopping center. This award-winning development by J. W. York of Raleigh and R. A. Bryan of Goldsboro was Raleigh's first suburban shopping center. Many more were to follow.

      While the city of Raleigh grew and developed, the towns of Chapel Hill and Hillsborough largely languished during these years. After the Civil War, Hillsborough benefited from small-scale tobacco manufacturing but its role in that industry was quickly eclipsed by Durham. Toward the end of the century a furniture factory and two large cotton mills were built in the vicinity of Hillsborough, but the once important town was largely frozen in time. It remained as the Orange County seat, but during the first half of the twentieth century Hillsborough's population increased by less than four hundred residents.

      Chapel Hill also grew slowly after the Civil War as Union troops occupied the University of North Carolina campus, inflicting indignities on the university such as using the university library to stable their horses. Of greater concern to many, however, was the relationship between President David Swain's “beautiful and headstrong daughter” and the general in charge of the Union occupation.⁹⁶ After a whirlwind courtship they were married in August 1865. This union outraged many North Carolinians, and in 1868 Swain and the entire faculty were forced by the new Reconstruction government to resign. With no support coming from the General Assembly, the trustees were forced to close the university in 1871, and it remained closed until 1875, when the university's supporters persuaded the General Assembly to restore its funding. This closure had a profound influence on the town of Chapel Hill, which largely existed to serve the university's faculty and students.

      It had also been isolated. Since its creation, the only way to get to or from Chapel Hill was by traveling at least eight miles on dirt roads. That finally changed in 1882 when a ten-mile rail spur was constructed from the North Carolina Railroad, which ran just south of Hillsborough. The impetus for building the line was the discovery of a vein of iron ore northwest of Chapel Hill. The mine owner lobbied for a rail line, and the university threw its support behind the project. To serve the mine and to protect the students from “the temptations of the outside world” the line was routed so that it terminated a mile west of the university.⁹⁷ Not only did this line create easier access to the university, it also served to attract several textile mills, which became the nucleus for Carrboro, a working-class town that developed on Chapel Hill's western border.⁹⁸

      Despite the rail link, the university and town continued to grow slowly. When Francis P. Venable assumed the presidency in 1900 the university had a state appropriation of $25,000 and a faculty of forty. Venable, however, set high goals for the university. He wanted it to “serve the needs of the people of North Carolina, to be the most outstanding university in the South, and to enhance the institution's standing among the nation's universities.”⁹⁹ Although Venable made progress toward those goals before 1914 when he stepped down as president and resumed teaching, it was not until the 1920s that the university began to be recognized as one of the leading universities in the nation. Under the leadership of Harry W. Chase, who assumed the presidency in 1919 from Edward K. Graham who served as president between 1914 and 1918, enrollment began to swell, and both the curriculum and the campus were greatly expanded. University officials laid out a second quadrangle, anchored on one end by a new university library and on the other by South Building, and chose the colonial revival architectural style for the new buildings surrounding the quad. During Venable's tenure as president and professor, which ended in 1931, twenty new buildings were constructed on campus.

      Figure 13. The University of North Carolina in 1919 (courtesy of the North Carolina Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries).

      During this time Chapel Hill's fortunes were still closely tied to those of the university. Thus, it was not until 1919 that Chapel Hill's main street, Franklin Street, was paved and even then it was only a strip eighteen feet wide down the center of the street, which was forty-five feet wide.¹⁰⁰ During the boom years of the 1920s, however, the town grew along with the university. Between the 1920s and the 1940s, the town's business district expanded outward, and many of its older wooden buildings were replaced by brick ones. The town's planning board promoted the Georgian style for downtown buildings and many developers complied. New residential development also began to spill over the town's limits, which were unchanged since being established in 1851. The influx of servicemen for various training programs during World War II and the wave of new students after the war resulted in continued growth of the university and the town during the 1940s.

      CONCLUSION

      By 1950 geological and historical forces had shaped the basic elements of the Triangle area. Those elements included three distinct towns, separated by eight to twenty-six miles of fields and woodlands, with unique histories, economic bases, population characteristics, and local cultures. The towns did, however, have two elements in common. The first was that each contained a major research university. The second was that they were largely developed at relatively low densities.

      At this time the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area did not function like a metropolitan area but as a collection of distinct towns that happened to be near each other. The U.S. Census Bureau defined Wake and Durham Counties as two distinct metropolitan statistical areas. The physical distance and the lack of road capacity limited intercity commuting. The main road connecting Chapel Hill and Raleigh, for example, was NC 54, a narrow, two-lane road twenty-six miles long. Initial discussions were already under way however, that would knit these three distinct places together into one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the country.

      CHAPTER 2

      The Birth of the Research Triangle

      Metropolitan Area

      A metropolitan area is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau as “a core area with a large nucleus, together with adjacent communities that have a high degree of economic and social integration with that core.”¹ In 1950, when the first metropolitan areas were designated, Raleigh and surrounding Wake County were included in one area, while Durham and Durham County in another. In 1971 Chapel Hill and Orange County were added to the Durham metro area and in 1981 the two areas were combined into one, until further growth led to their being separated again in 2005. This chapter describes the three major development projects that were critical to the economic and social integration of what has become known as the Research Triangle. The development of the Research Triangle Park, the expansion

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