Just moved to Durham?

Worth knowing: Durham's "Bull City" nickname comes from Bull Durham tobacco — a brand that started here in the 1800s and became one of the best-known in the world. (source)

Worth knowing: Research Triangle Park opened in 1959 and now covers about 7,000 acres, making it the largest research park in the United States. (source)

Worth knowing: Duke University traces its roots to Trinity College, which moved to Durham in 1892 and was renamed for the Duke family in 1924. (source)

Worth knowing: Durham is named for Dr. Bartlett Durham, who provided the land for a railroad station in 1849. The town grew up around that station. (source)

Worth knowing: On June 23, 1957, Rev. Douglas Moore and six young African Americans took booths at the segregated Royal Ice Cream parlor, refused to leave, and were charged with trespassing. That was more than two years before the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, and it led to a court case testing the legality of segregated facilities. (source)

Worth knowing: The Duke Lemur Center houses the most diverse population of lemurs outside Madagascar: nearly 250 lemurs and bush babies across 12 species. It has cared for primates since 1966. (source)

Worth knowing: The largest troop surrender of the Civil War happened in what is now Durham. On April 26, 1865, the agreement signed at the Bennett farmhouse ended the war in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida and involved 89,270 soldiers. (source)

Worth knowing: Duke's "Blue Devils" name comes from the Chasseurs Alpins, a French regiment in World War I that called themselves "les Diables Bleus" and wore blue uniforms. It won a student newspaper contest over Blue Titans, Blue Eagles, and Polar Bears. (source)

Worth knowing: Duke Chapel's tower is 210 feet tall, and the chapel is built of stone from the Duke Quarry near Hillsborough, twelve miles west of Durham. Its chief designer was Julian Abele, a prominent African-American architect in a Philadelphia firm. It was first used for Commencement in 1932. (source)

Worth knowing: North Carolina Mutual, incorporated in Durham in 1899, called itself the largest Black-owned insurance business in the world. In 1971 it became the first Black-managed company in America to reach $1 billion of insurance in force. (source)

Worth knowing: The snorting "Hit Bull, Win Steak" sign from the 1988 movie Bull Durham was built for the film, because Durham Athletic Park didn't have one. The park kept it after filming, and the Bulls brought it along to their new ballpark in 1995. (source)

Worth knowing: The factory at the heart of today's American Tobacco Campus was once considered the world's largest tobacco factory. Cigarette manufacturing there ended in 1987, and the Lucky Strike water tower and smokestack were kept as landmarks. (source)

Worth knowing: The American Tobacco Trail runs 22+ miles on an old railroad line, the New Hope Valley Railroad, from downtown Durham through Chatham and Wake counties. (source)

Worth knowing: The UPC barcode came out of IBM in Research Triangle Park. George Laurer, a senior engineer there from 1969, led IBM's design, and the Universal Product Code was officially born on April 1, 1973. (source)

Worth knowing: Gertrude Elion won the 1988 Nobel Prize in medicine while working at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, "for their discoveries of important principles for drug treatment." She died in Chapel Hill in 1999. (source)

Worth knowing: Washington Duke, an Orange County farmer, came home from the Civil War and learned that Union soldiers had been eagerly sampling local Bright Leaf tobacco. He decided to market it, first from a small log structure on his homestead near Durham Station, with hand-lettered tags reading "Pro Bono Publico" (Latin for "for the public good"). (source)

Worth knowing: Cameron Indoor Stadium opened as Duke Indoor Stadium on January 6, 1940, before a crowd of 8,000, the largest in the history of southern basketball, and Duke beat Princeton 36-27. The architect had called seating for 8,000 "rather liberal." It was built in nine months for $400,000, which Duke finished paying after the football team won the Sugar Bowl in 1945. (source)