Recent Tours

An ever-expanding cheatsheet (or explorers' map) from past posts in the "What's It Wednesday?!" series on our social media accounts. Would you have been able to pick out these places from a single picture?

Scroll down to see a running account of the buildings identified in this (as of yet) undated aerial photo looking northeast across the railroad tracks at Duke East Campus. Their location is also shown in the map at left. So far, we know this has to be post-1930 and pre-1957. Can you pick out any others and help narrow it down further?

Even before the recent Oscar win for the 2018 film Green Book, there's been a long overdue spike in interest about the actual directory the movie title references - The Negro Motorist Green Book, published for three decades starting in 1936 by a New York City postalworker named Victor Hugo Green. Well aware of the rich history of black-owned businesses in the Bull City - only a small fraction of which were ever featured in the Green Book - Open Durham is initiating a project to better document the sites listed here in our community.

The history of Blackwell's Durham Tobacco (later American Tobacco) and the Golden Belt Manufacturing Co. are inextricably mingled. In 1887, the Golden Belt Manufacturing Co. originated in a portion of the Bull Durham Tobacco Factory (the white building at the northern extent of the American Tobacco complex) as an operation to produce the cloth bags...

It ain't pronounced like the Caribbean islands. Small community in northern Durham county whose name derives from an amalgamation of the last names of the early families in the area. (Ball, Harris, Mangum.)

April 26-27, 2014. Noon-4pm. Behind-the-scenes access to 6 historic tobacco manufacturing sites in downtown Durham.

A labor of love for Dr. James E. Shepard, North Carolina Central University grew from a small religious training school to a college in the UNC system largely due to his perseverance in the 1910s-1930s. It continued to grow over the mid-to-late 20th century into the university it is today.

This self-guided walking tour will be held on October 5th, 2013. http://clevelandholloway.blogspot.com/2013/08/2013-home-tour.html