Durham County

In this second edition, Jean Bradley Anderson revises and expands her monumental and sweeping history of Durham County, originally published in 1990, to provide a detailed history from the seventeenth century to the end of the 20th century. This remarkably comprehensive work moves beyond traditional local histories that focus on powerful families. Rather, Anderson integrates the stories of well-known figures with those of ordinary men and women, blacks and whites, to create a complex but fascinating portrait of Durham's economic, political, social, and labor history. Drawing on extensive primary research, Durham County examines the origins of the town of Durham and recounts the growth of communities around mills, stores, taverns, and churches in the century preceding the rise of tobacco manufacturing. Anderson pays particular attention to such turning points as the coming of the railroad, the Confederate surrender at Bennett Place, the war's connection to the rise and flourishing of the tobacco industry, the move to Durham of Trinity College (and its renaming as Duke University), and the development of Research Triangle Park with the subsequent rise of health service and high-tech industries. Written in a lively manner, the book offers readers a fascinating story that can be entered at any point.