Recent Tours

[Many thanks to Peter Kramer for lending his collection of material about the Terry family, and both him and Terry Mangum for answering my copious questions.] James T. Terry was born in 1801, the son of James Terry, Sr. (II), and Sarah Thorpe. In 1848 James T. Terry acquired 260.5 acres on Little River adjoining the land of William Cain, the...

Preservation Durham offers free walking tours, leaving from the Farmers' Market on Foster Street, on Saturdays at 10am from April through November. On the 2nd Saturday of each month a tour guide presents the Civil Rights Legacy walking tour. This tour was first offered on November 17, 2002 and since then thousands of Durhamites and visitors alike...

Watts Hospital-Hillandale is a treasure trove of early twentieth-century American residential architecture. Just as the revolution in transportation, the streetcar, made Watts-Hospital-Hillandale possible, modern conveniences such as central heating, electric appliances, and indoor plumbing had a dramatic impact on home design. The new architecture...

Historic Bahama: Durham's Country Crossroads Long before Dr. Bartlett Durham sold a parcel of land to the railroad for a station, many families had settled in the northern part of what was then Orange County. As early as the 1740S settlers were moving south from Virginia and Maryland and west from the coastal settlements to the wooded frontier of...

The Lustron house is a quirky branch on the evolutionary path of mass housing production in the United States during the mid-20th century. I'm not an expert on this topic, and there are entire websites devoted to Lustron fandom out there to peruse. Various attempts to mass produce housing in the US date back to at least the first decade of the 20th...