Durham Real Estate Listings of Houses and Durham Homes for Sale in North Carolina


	Durham Houses for Sale

Durham

Despite all the focus on the future, Durham is also a city that values and recognizes the past. It is a compact and textured community from the vibrant quality of life found in its beautifully restored historic homes on tree-canopied streets to downtown lofts or planned communities overlooking a lake, golf course or forest. Modern Durham has definitely made the transition to the new millennium with its significant heritage and bright future intact.

One of the nation’s finest mid-size cities, Durham is a single city-county located in the north central portion of the rolling Piedmont Crescent region, four hours east of the Blue Ridge Mountains and three hours west of the Atlantic Ocean. Home to approximately 179,000 residents, it is the only governed municipality within Durham county.

Durham owes its humble beginnings to a public-spirited doctor named Bartlett Durham, who gave the North Carolina Railroad four acres of land worth less than $158 to build a new station. In recognition of his gift, the railroad named its new station “Durhamville,” which was eventually shortened to Durham. As a monument to the pioneer country doctor, a bronze likeness was erected at his gravesite 68 years after Durham was incorporated in April 1937.

Prior to Durham’s incorporation, General Johnston’s armies of the Carolinas, Georgia and Florida surrendered to the northern forces of General Sherman in the largest single troop surrender of the Civil War. This significant historical event occurred at the Bennett Place farmstead and effectively ended the war in the South, opening the door for Durham’s leap to economic growth and prosperity.

While the area is known for its cigarette and textile production over much of the last century, it is technology that has put the city on the map. Research Triangle Park, a 6,900-acre campus located in the lush Piedmont Crescent, is known worldwide for its interactive, cutting-edge research and development. The Park quickly established itself as the premier corporate location for progressive companies with an interest in developing new technologies in a global business environment. Some of the major employers in the RTP are IBM, Nortel Networks, Ericsson, Cisco Systems, the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences and GlaxoSmithKline, a pharmaceutical company that employs several thousand people in the triangle.

State-of-the-art medical centers and other healthcare facilities are also highly concentrated within the city. In fact, Durham’s claim as America’s “City of Medicine” is well founded. Nearly one in three workers in the labor force works in a health or medical related industry and the city has one of the nation’s top five concentrations of physicians per capita or four times the national average.