Feat of clay: the gritty, redbrick grandeur of Durham's tobacco factories survives in new guises.

• Author: Martin, Edward
• Position: Picture This

As harbingers of the Industrial Revolution in North Carolina, cotton mills came first, some springing up and spawning their villages decades before the Civil War. But it was tobacco factories and warehouses that ushered in the modern age of urban capitalism during the 1870s.

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From a distance, they resembled the brick mills being built in rural villages such as Saxapahaw and Swepsonville. But the mills were part of self-contained worlds, fiefdoms carved from the fields. Even the power that drove the looms came from the streams that set their sites.

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It was towns, with their commerce ruled not by river but by rail, that attracted tobacco manufacturers. Amid the hurly-burly, they competed against like-minded men, in similar and in different endeavors, for labor, capital and control of markets. Here they built grand structures, such as these in Durham, whose form outlived their function. Now another generation of capitalists is giving the buildings new life.

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"They're imposing industrial landmarks," says Catherine Bishir, co-author of North Carolina Architecture. "They were partly about function but partly displays of power, just like today's skyscrapers. Originally, tobacco factories were barnlike structures, strictly functional. But as the industry got established, industrialists began creating monuments to themselves."

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In 1874, Washington Duke bought 2 acres near the train depot and built his first factory. W.T. Blackwell and Co. was firmly established with its Bull Durham smoking tobacco, but the rivalry spurred on Duke and his sons. Soon, brick factories and warehouses built by master masons ringed the town. "The Italianate architecture really wasn't particular to Durham," Bishir says. "The tall, arched windows and decorated eaves were the industrial style throughout America...