Bright Leaf Historic District

Bright Leaf Historic District is an industrial neighborhood of seventeen primary and twelve secondary buildings and structures on nine blocks, covering about thirty-four acres at the western edge of downtown Durham. Most of it was long part of the Liggett and Myers manufacturing plant. Tall brick warehouses and factories line city streets with little setback, giving the area a dense, urban character. The buildings fall into four phases. The oldest are the late-1870s B. L. Duke Warehouse and the 1884 Italianate cigarette factory designed by William H. Linthicum. Next come warehouses and processing buildings of 1897 to the 1910s with elaborate Romanesque Revival brickwork, built largely by the American Tobacco Company trust. Plainer buildings followed between 1920 and World War II, and austere postwar structures with Moderne entrances came last. The district records the growth of Durham's tobacco industry, from early Duke enterprises to cigarette manufacturing. It has kept a high level of integrity, with many buildings still in use or reused as offices and residences.