East Durham Historic District

East Durham Historic District lies about one and a quarter miles east of downtown Durham, between the Southern Railway tracks and Holloway Street. Roughly five blocks wide and ten blocks long, it is mostly residential, with a two-block commercial area at Angier Avenue and Driver Street and three schools. It holds 563 contributing principal buildings built between about 1890 and about 1955, plus 168 contributing outbuildings and the Barbee Graveyard. The oldest houses are late Victorian I-Houses, Queen Anne dwellings and Gothic Revival cottages from the 1890s. Tri-gable, gable-and-wing and pyramidal cottages dominate the years from 1900 to 1920. Bungalows became the favored type in the 1920s and 1930s, while Tudor and Colonial Revival houses are scarce. Small Minimal Traditional houses and duplexes filled the last vacant lots in the 1940s and 1950s. Narrow lots, granite curbstones, stone and brick retaining walls and tree-lined Driver Street give the neighborhood a unified character. Its first residents included mill workers, tradesmen, grocers and other merchants.