Cary is a town in Wake , Chatham , and Durham counties in the U. Cary began as a railroad village and became known as an educational center in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Cary, Before the arrival of European settlers, the Tuscarora and Catawba people lived in what is now called Cary.
In the s, John Bradford moved to the area and opened an ordinary or inn, giving Cary its first nameβBradford's Ordinary. Arriving around , Jones of White Plains plantation owned 10, acres 4, ha in eastern Cary, while Jones of Crabtree owned most of what is now western Cary. In , Bradford's Ordinary was linked to a major transportation route when the North Carolina Railroad came through the settlement, followed by the Chatham Railroad in Colored Troops.
Johnston on April 27, Cary's population grew after the Civil War with the completion of the Chatham Railroad junction. Cary was incorporated on April 3, , with Page serving as the first mayor. Sixteen Cary residents purchased Cary Academy in and converted it into the private boarding school, Cary High School, which had students from across the state by The town gained its first supermarket, Piggly Wiggly , in , followed by the Cary Public Library in , and a town-funded fire department in The population and number of developments in Cary continued to increase in the s and s after the opening of the nearby Research Triangle Park RTP in Bauer says, "The sleepy town of Cary Cary High School was the first school in Wake County to integrate in In , the town created Planned Unit Development PUD zoning, which lets a developer plan an entire community before beginning construction, allowing future residents to know where churches, schools, commercial, and industrial areas will be located in advance.
In , Cary's population was 3, but by , it had grown to 7, The PUD model became so popular in Cary that 22 more were created between and By , Cary's population had grown to 94, Located in the piedmont region of North Carolina, most of Cary is in western Wake County, with neighborhood-sized sections in the northeast corner of Chatham County and small portions of southwest Durham County.
Cary is seated on the boundary between the Durham Basin with its softer sedimentary rocks and the piedmont with its harder metamorphic rocks ; both geologic provinces have igneous rock intrusions.
