Cary, North Carolina: Sissipahaw Land to Tobacco Farm to Boomtown

The Sissipahaw people lived along these Carolina Piedmont creeks for generations, living along the Haw River and nearby streams until disease, enslavement, and war pushed them from the region in the early seventeen hundreds.

European settlers arrived by the seventeen hundreds, clearing forest for cotton and tobacco farms on land parceled out as the colony expanded westward.

In eighteen fifty-four, a Wake County farmer named Frank Page purchased three hundred acres beside the new North Carolina Railroad junction for two thousand dollars. He named the village Cary after a temperance leader who had impressed him with a speech in Raleigh. That leader was Samuel Fenton Cary, head of the Sons of Temperance in North America. Page built a sawmill, a store, and donated land for a depot. He became the first postmaster in eighteen fifty-six. The town incorporated in eighteen seventy-one. Page was its first mayor, and in eighteen seventy he and others built Cary Academy. Sixteen residents bought it in eighteen ninety-six and turned it into Cary High School, and in nineteen oh seven it passed to the state, which Cary counts as North Carolina's first state-funded public high school.

Cary stayed small for a century. Then Research Triangle Park opened in nineteen fifty-nine, and this quiet tobacco-country crossroads became one of the fastest-growing towns in America, its population doubling again and again across four decades. Cary counted one thousand four hundred forty-six people in nineteen fifty, ninety-four thousand five hundred thirty-six in two thousand, and one hundred seventy-four thousand seven hundred twenty-one in twenty twenty.