Burch Avenue Historic District

Built mostly between about 1890 and 1960 on the west side of downtown Durham, North Carolina, the Burch Avenue Historic District is a residential neighborhood of about fourteen blocks. It holds 138 principal contributing buildings plus outbuildings, with houses ranging from late nineteenth-century Queen Anne homes to one-story bungalows and 1940s Minimal Traditional dwellings. The neighborhood grew as Durham's population expanded with the tobacco and textile mills and the growth of Trinity College, which became Duke University in 1924. Many early residents were contractors, carpenters, brickmakers and stone-cutters, and several built their own houses here. The district is significant for its link to that growth and for the variety of houses that show how middle-class and working-class families lived in the city during its expansion.