Durham County

Durham County, formed April 17, 1881, has a current population of 316,739 and a total employment of 201,889 (63.7%). The county seat is the city of Durham, about 30 minutes from NC State’s main campus.

Adjacent to NC State’s home county of Wake, Durham is a partner with Wake and Orange counties in sharing the 7,000-acre Research Triangle Park, the nation’s largest research park. A vision of academics from NC State and Duke with support from then-Governor Luther Hodges, RTP employs more than 65,000 workers and contractors at some 300 large- and medium-sized campuses throughout the region. Most of RTP’s land is in Durham County.

Durham County’s most profitable agricultural product is nursery/floriculture, while the largest product by acreage is forage-land (for grain production). By total number, the largest livestock produced is cattle and calves/layers.

The largest manufacturer is IBM Corp., which is also the county’s third largest employer overall with nearly 10,000 employees at the company’s largest U.S.-based facility. An original tenant of the RTP, IBM manufactures computer software, storage systems and technology.

NC State is Here

Principal Education

The Durham Principal Leadership Academy (DPLA) is part of the NC State Educational Leadership Academy (NELA), a nationally recognized two-year program in the College of Education that seeks to increase student achievement by preparing and retaining academic leadership in high-need schools in about one-quarter of the state.

NELA creates a comprehensive leadership development and succession plan for NC high-need school districts. Each component is anchored in research-based best practices in leadership preparation and is designed to meet the specific contextualized needs of schools in North Carolina.

As of 2019, the DPLA has conferred master’s degrees to more than a dozen leaders for the Durham Public School System. [Read more about DPLA.]

[Learn more about the NC State Educational Leadership Academy.]

G.W. Hill Forest

Philanthropist and Greensboro banker George Watts Hill gave NC State forestry founder Julius Hofmann 378 acres in Durham County in 1929 to begin a research forest.

The G.W. Hill Forest now covers 2,690 acres, bisected by the Flat River.

The mostly pine forest also includes an endangered sumac preservation effort, with trees located from other forests. Properly permitted and licensed members of the public can access the forest year-round for still hunting, fox hunting, hiking, biking, horseback riding and fishing, all accessible by an extensive trail and road system.

[Apply for a permit.]

The managed forest is a teaching laboratory and demonstration forest where students learn to identify vegetation, perform water and soil quality tests, tend forest land, survey, measure and conduct other scientific explorations. To date, students have produced 15 Ph.D. dissertations, 31 Master’s theses and 23 referred scientific journal articles from work done in Hill Forest.

Camp Slocum, located within the boundaries of Hill Forest, is home to 6-to-9-week summer camps for forest management students and fisheries, wildlife, conservation biology students. One of those summer opportunities is an intensive nine-week training course on fighting forest fires.

The campsite consists of onsite classrooms, a workshop, storage, bathrooms and food preparation facilities, in addition to three year-round and 18 seasonal cabins. The camp maintains three historic buildings, all built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps.

[Learn more about NC State’s research and recreational forests.]

Pride of the Pack

Renowned American Architect Phil Frelon

Phil Frelon, acclaimed American architect, maintained his design offices in his native Durham. The crowning achievement for the 1975 graduate of the College of Design was leading the 32-member design team for the Smithsonian Institution’s $540 million National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Frelon was on stage with President Barack Obama and former president George W. Bush when the ambitious project on the National Mall between the White House and the Washington Monument was dedicated on Sept. 24, 2016, as a tribute to the history, heritage and enduring cultural impact of African Americans. [Frelon’s monumental design]

Pioneering ACC Student-Athlete Irwin Holmes

Irwin Holmes grew up in Durham, the son of the county’s director of African American recreational services. Not allowed to play football by his father, who was an All-American player at ???, Holmes took up tennis and track as a youngster and performed well in both at Hillside High School.

In 1956, when the University of North Carolina system approved accepting undergraduate African American applicants at its three schools, Holmes and three other black students from Raleigh and Durham were accepted as the first African American undergraduates at NC State.

Holmes and Manuel Crockett of Raleigh participated in a freshman indoor track meet on Feb. 1957, becoming the first black athletes to participate in an athletic event sponsored by the Atlantic Coast Conference.

Holmes joined the tennis team later that year, becoming the ACC’s first African American varsity athlete. By 1960, he was named co-captain of the team, also a first for the ACC.

Holmes graduated from NC State in 1960 with a degree in electrical engineering, becoming the school’s first African American to earn an undergraduate degreee, and enjoyed a long career with RCA and IBM.

In 2009, a building on NC State’s campus was renamed to honor Holmes’ perseverance and contributions to the university. [Read more about the dedication of Holmes Hall.]

Giving Back, with Dewayne Washington

Durham-native Dewayne Washington’s first contributions to NC State were on the football field, as an All-ACC cornerback during the 1990s. A graduate of Durham’s Northern High School, he was a three-year starter for head coach Dick Sheridan.

He took the talents he developed here to the National Football League, where he was the first-round pick of the Minnesota Vikings in the 1994 NFL Draft and an All-Rookie selection his first year. He spent 14 years in the NFL with Minnesota, Pittsburgh, Jacksonville and Kansas City.

Since retiring from professional football in 2005, Washington returned to the Triangle, serving as chief executive officer of DWG Property Services. He and his wife Adama, also an NC State graduate, have focused their giving efforts on helping other young African American students pursue educational opportunities, a focus on giving Dwayne says he learned from his grandmother.

“Giving is in my DNA,” he says.

The Washingtons contributed to the African American Cultural Center’s Washington Sankofa Room and a scholarship endowment in their names. Dewayne is in his second term as a member of the NC State Board of Trustees, while Adama is a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board.

 

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