The Research Triangle, Betting the State on an Idea

By the mid-nineteen fifties, North Carolina had a problem that statistics made embarrassingly plain. The state had three major research universities, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, North Carolina State in Raleigh, and Duke in Durham, and it was losing its graduates as fast as it produced them. The tobacco and textile economies were beginning to stall.

Young engineers and scientists took their degrees and left for the industrial North or California. Governor Luther Hodges believed the universities themselves were the answer. The idea was straightforward: if you put a research park in the geographic center of the triangle formed by those three campuses, companies would come.

They could hire graduates. The graduates would stay. The state would diversify.

In nineteen fifty-nine, the park was created on pine-forested land straddling Durham and Wake counties. The early years were difficult. The first major tenant was the Chemstrand Corporation.

The real breakthrough came in nineteen sixty-five when the federal health agencies and IBM both committed to major facilities in the park. From that moment, the momentum was self-sustaining. Today, Research Triangle Park has more than three hundred companies and more than fifty-five thousand workers on seven thousand acres.

The industries that arrived were the ones North Carolina had historically lacked: pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, computing, environmental research. The park's success over six decades transformed what kind of state North Carolina was, from a single-commodity agricultural economy into one of the most educationally and technologically concentrated regions in the country. The three campuses remained the engine.

The pine trees between them became the product.