Research Triangle Park and the Problem It Was Meant to Solve
Near Raleigh Durham, North Carolina
In the mid-nineteen fifties, North Carolina ranked forty-seventh out of forty-eight states in per capita income. The state's economy ran on three things: tobacco, textiles, and furniture. All three were contracting. All three were low-wage. And every year, graduates from the University of North Carolina, Duke, and North Carolina State, the three research universities sitting within a twenty-mile triangle of each other, left the state to find work elsewhere.
The idea that became Research Triangle Park emerged from a salesman named Romeo Guest, who had studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and seen how proximity to universities could anchor an industrial economy. Guest began promoting the concept in the early nineteen fifties. Governor Luther Hodges heard it and acted. In nineteen fifty-six, Hodges established the Research Triangle Committee with an explicit mandate: attract research laboratories to the land between the three universities.
The park was formally established in nineteen fifty-nine on seven thousand acres of pine forest in the center of the triangle formed by Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill. Research Triangle Institute, now called RTI International, was among the first tenants. The United States Forest Service became the first federal tenant in nineteen sixty-two.
The turning point came in January nineteen sixty-five, when Governor Terry Sanford announced that a new division of the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, was coming to the park. Six weeks later, IBM announced it was building a six-hundred-thousand-square-foot research center there as well. Both announcements came within the same winter.
Today Research Triangle Park holds more than three hundred organizations and over sixty-five thousand workers. The tobacco fields are gone. The logic that built them, growing a specialized local crop and processing it in place, was repurposed into something new: grow specialized local talent and keep it in place. The problem the park was designed to solve has not entirely been solved, but it has been substantially redirected.
