From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

The Research Triangle

The Research Triangle Unlike most southern state capitals, Raleigh doesn’t draw its economic vitality from an expanding state government. Raleigh’s vibrancy comes from a bold experiment started some fifty-five years ago—the Research Triangle. In the early 1950s, Raleigh was designated one of the vertices in a triangle of research to be formed with Durham and Chapel Hill, specifically, the area’s educational institutions. The three universities were North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Duke University in Durham. The state government and business leaders called on these three schools to act, in appropriate circumstances, as a unified academic community. To say the experiment has worked would be an understatement . The whole area has been transformed by the Research Triangle. What started as a three-county endeavor has become an eight-county area with a population of more than 1.7 million people. The idea for the Research Triangle arose around the midpoint of the twentieth century when North Carolina was not doing well economically. The state had just fallen to third to last in per capita income, ahead of only Arkansas and Mississippi. Things were not good for North Carolina. Largely dependent on agriculture, North Carolina had an agricultural base which consisted mainly of small farms. Small farms were economic dinosaurs, and the average North Carolina farm was the smallest in the Union at just sixty-seven acres. Just as problematic was its industrial base. 50 Long-term prospects for North Carolina’s two major industries, textiles and furniture making, were little better. Even worse for the average worker, both industries relied on low wages to maintain competiveness. All in all, the future wasn’t bright in the Tar Heel State during President Dwight Eisenhower’s terms. Most southern states attracted industry during this period by trumpeting a cheap labor force and low property taxes. With the Research Triangle, North Carolina state leaders employed a different tactic: They would attract industry by the three local universities combining resources to assist and encourage area businesses. The state’s leaders started by forming a for-profit corporation, owned in large part by residents of New York City, to option and purchase some 4,200 acres of undeveloped land between Raleigh and Durham. This land ultimately became the Research Triangle Park. The governor and prominent businessmen then approved a subscription drive to raise $1,250,000 to form the Research Park Institute, build a building to house the institute, and acquire the Park from the for-profit group. By 1959, some 850 subscribers pledged a total of $1,425,000 and formed the non-profit Research Foundation of North Carolina which became the owner and developer of the Research Triangle Park. One of the founders of the non-profit foundation stated: Indeed, because North Carolina had no special advantage or resource in the area of economic development, it will be the intangible qualities of the State that will determine the course of development over the next fifteen years. He was wrong. It didn’t take fifteen years. It took only four months for the Park to announce its first industrial tenant. Who saw North Carolina as a center of scientific research in the early 1960s? No one did. An enlightened area in the South might hope to get a paper plant or a pallet factory—if it worked real hard. But recruiting scientists to work in a lab in the mid-twentieth-century South was fantasy. In 1964, an article in the Winston-Salem Journal-Sentinel extracted the essence of North Carolina’s new approach: What is the Research Triangle? … There is no simple answer because the Research Triangle is many things.…It is a place, a geographical 51 location. It is both an idea and a practical concept. It is a triad of operating institutions, interlaced with both private and public interests and support, and with three great universities as its cornerstones.…It is also a physical reality, a center of research in science and technology, something which has become a complex of new landscaped buildings, modern offices and gleaming laboratories. In 1965, the Park really took off. IBM and the U.S. Department of Health Education and Welfare announced the development of substantial projects there. Since that time, the Park has seen steady and stable growth. Over 157 organizations reside in the Park now. They employ more...