Who is the founder of Cary?

Answer 1

I guess it depends upon which Cary you are talking about. If you're talking about my hometown, Cary, North Carolina...here's your answer from the Town of Cary website:

Today's Cary began in 1750 as a settlement called Bradford's Ordinary. About 100 years later, the construction of the North Carolina Railroad between New Bern and Hillsborough placed Bradford's Ordinary on a major transportation route.

Soon after, Allison Francis Page, a Wake County farmer and lumberman, bought 300 acres of land nearby and established a sawmill, general store, inn and post office. He called his development Cary, after Samuel Fenton Cary, a prohibition leader from Ohio whom Page admired.

In 1868, Page built a hotel to serve railroad passengers coming through Cary. Page sold the hotel to J. R. Walker in 1884; meals and rooms were available to travelers until 1916. Today, the Page-Walker Arts & History Center, located on Town Hall Campus, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The Seaboard Railroad began in this area about the time of the Civil War. By 1868, the Seaboard and the North Carolina railroads had formed a junction in Cary, and three years later, on April 6, 1871, the Town of Cary was incorporated.

In the late 1800s, a prestigious, private boarding school was started in Cary and later became the first public high school in North Carolina. The school was located on the site currently occupied by Cary Elementary School in the heart of Cary's downtown.

With the development of the Research Triangle Park in the 1960s, Cary experienced the beginning of the high-quality growth that still characterizes the Town today.

Home to the largest, privately-held software company in the world-SAS Institute, Cary has attracted other key, world-class businesses including IBM, MCI, Siemens, American Airlines, Lucent Technologies, Oxford University Press, the Lord Corporation, and Austin Foods.