Industrial

Some of the buildings I've most enjoyed seeing re-done in other cities are train-related - stations/depots of course, but also the kind of wholesale companies that lined the railroad tracks in many cities. A line of these type of structures were spread along the railroad tracks along the 300 block of East Peabody St. Looking east from the First...

(Courtesy Duke Archives) The Durham Gas Company was formed in 1888 by George Watts and Julian Carr, and would later become the Durham Light and Power Company. The Durham Traction Company and Durham Light and Power split the electricity and gas franchises, with L&P taking the gas franchise in 1905. The company built the Gilbert St. plant shortly thereafter, constructing a facility able to hold 40,000 cubic feet of gas.

--- The site just to the west of the first Duke Factory was Washington Duke's first in-town home. (Durham Historic Inventory) In 1884, Duke built a new brick factory, just to the east of his house and original factory. In 1888, he built a new house, which he called Fairview. Looking west, with the old factory building to the right. The steeple of...

Scanned from 1924 Durham City of Industry book. Another of my favorite buildings in Durham, the John O'Daniel Hosiery Mill building, was built at 801 Gilbert St. in the late 1910s as the Paragon Hosiery Mill. It changed names rather quickly thereafter to become the Bowling-Emory Knitting Mill before being acquired in 1919 by Julian S. Carr as a...

Original 1854 NC railroad survey, showing the future location of Durham's Station (Courtesy David Southern/Steve Rankin)

Peabody Drug Co, looking southwest, 1965. (Courtesy Durham County Library) 305 West Pettigrew was initially one of the small houses built just east of the Blackwell factory in the 1880s. In 1926, this house was torn down for a new building for the Peabody Drug Co., which had started its life in the 100 block of East Peabody Street in 1907. The new...

The site of the 2008, $44 million Durham Performing Arts Center grew as a mixture of industrial and residential uses, located just south of the main railroad depot and just east of Blackwell's Durham Tobacco Co. Julian Carr established the "Carrolina Roller Mills" - a flour mill - in 1902, incorporating the concern on April 21, 1902. The firm was...

Looking southeast, 1953. (Courtesy Keith Phillips) Lloyd Brown started his bottling company on Morgan Street in March 1925, but in 1934 moved to a building on North Church St. when he outgrew this structure. This space soon proved too small as well, and he constructed a new, 'modern' bottling plant at 321 West Geer St., which opened June 1, 1939...