Preservation Durham's enthusiastic and well-informed volunteer tour guides will lead you through the history of the tobacco industry as they tell many tales from Durham's past, using oral histories and photographs to illustrate the history of tobacco and the people who supplied tobacco products known throughout the world. The tour includes descriptions of life in the factories and at home for the thousands of workers who made the Bull City one of the biggest industrial cities in the South as well as those who, like guitarist John Dee Holeman, trekked to Durham's tobacco auctions to play the blues.
 

"The tour touches on life in the work force, market days in Durham's auction warehouses, the development of the cigarette and how that brought Durham into the global arena, and transformation of Durham's identity from a city of tobacco to a city of medicine,"according to Cynthia Satterfield, one of several researchers who prepared the program.
 

 
Preservation Durham partnered with UNC-CH Professor of American Studies Robert C. Allen and a class of graduate students to develop an online, virtual tobacco tour of Durham that anyone could take, at any time. "The online version of the tour complements, not supplants, our physical tour," said Bob Ashley, executive director of Preservation Durham. "About 150 people attend a free tobacco tour each year, so the website will allow us to educate a far larger audience. It represents a strong marriage of cultural legacy and modern technology." Durham's Tobacco Heritage Trail features historic maps of the area and multimedia features including transcripts of oral histories of tobacco workers, images of the tobacco factories, and recordings of blues songs enjoyed not only by tobacco workers in Durham but also by blues fans around the world.

Explore Durham's Civil Rights Legacy with HPSD's walking tour. This exciting tour focuses on many of the sites in downtown Durham that were important during the 1950s and 60s Civil Rights movement, including the Durham County Courthouse, the Arts Center (originally Durham High School and later City Hall), and the Kress and Woolworth buildings, sites of sit-in protests. Learn about the contributions of ordinary Durham residents to the struggle for equality as well as local leaders like Floyd McKissick and national figures like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who brought America's attention to the campaign for civil rights in the Bull City.

"We need not be historians to understand the struggle for equality in Durham and how it played out as the nation confronted the same problems, although on a much larger scale," said Dr. John Hope Franklin, honorary chairman of the tour organizing committee.

 
Preservation Durham has partnered with UNC-CH Professor of American Studies Robert C. Allen and a class of his undergraduate students to develop a "proof of concept" online map which shows the location of structures destroyed by Urban Renewal. Before the Freeway was built across the middle of Durham, Hayti was a vibrant African American neighborhood located between Downtown and NC Central University. Reconstructing Hayti overlays a series of scanned early 20th century maps from the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company, allowing visitors to see the change in landscape over a hundred years. Using a slider bar, a visitor to the website can adjust the transparency of the Sanborn Map overlay, creating the ghostly experience of buildings disappearing and reappearing.

The online map was a pilot project using the Main Street, Carolina framework, a digital history toolkit that Allen conceptualized and which has enabled cutural heritage organizations to share their stories on the Internet in a dynamic and captivating way with minimal technical requirements or expertise.

Explore Downtown Durham with HPSD's newest walking tour! Learn about how Durham as grown and changed as it has transformed itself from an industrial center to the City of Medicine. Docents describe the history of many of the landmark buildings that make up the Downtown Historic District, listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1977. Featured on the tour are the 1915 1st National Bank, the 1921 Mechanics and Farmers Bank Building, and Preservation Durham's one-time home, the Snow Building, built in 1933.

Built by the successful entrepreneurs of early 20th Durham, buildings Downtown were designed by nationally known architects like Milburn and Heister, Bertrand E. Taylor, Edward F. Sibbert, and Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon as well as by local companies Rose and Rose, George Watts Carr, Hill C. Linthicum, and Atwood and Weeks. There are fine examples of many architectural styles popular in the 20th century, including Art Deco, Italianate, and Neo-Classical, and post World War II Modern. Many of downtown's older building have recently changed their functions, turning from tobacco factories and textile mills into hip urban lofts, stores, and offices.