Durham Map
Durham grew on a tobacco warehouse and a railroad stop and now sits at one corner of the Research Triangle, 25 miles from the North Carolina capital.
Where is Durham?
Durham is in the north-central Piedmont of North Carolina, about 25 miles northwest of Raleigh and roughly 12 miles northeast of Chapel Hill. Those three points make the Research Triangle, and Research Triangle Park — a large planned research campus opened in 1959 — lies in the middle of them, partly in Durham County and partly in Wake. Greensboro is about 55 miles west and Charlotte some 140 miles southwest. The Blue Ridge escarpment is roughly 150 miles west and the coast about 150 miles east, so Durham sits close to the middle of the state in every sense.
Durham at a glance
| State | North Carolina |
| Counties | Durham, Orange, and Wake counties |
| Population (2024 estimate) | 301,870 |
| Rank among US cities | 71st of the 100 largest |
| Time zone | Eastern Time |
| Region | South — South Atlantic division |
Durham in North Carolina
Durham is the seat of Durham County, and the city limits also cross into Orange County to the west and a small piece of Wake County to the southeast — all three appear on the North Carolina county map, which has 100 counties in all. It is the fourth largest city in the state, after Charlotte, Raleigh and Greensboro, and the closest of them to its neighbor: Durham and Raleigh function as one labor market. Duke University, endowed with tobacco money in the 1920s, and the old American Tobacco factories converted to offices downtown are the two most visible pieces of the city's history. How the state divides into mountains, Piedmont and coastal plain is set out on the North Carolina state page.
The Eno, the Triassic basin and Falls Lake
Durham sits at about 400 feet on rolling Piedmont uplands, but the rock beneath it is not the usual Piedmont granite and gneiss. The city lies along the edge of the Durham Triassic basin, a long rift valley of soft red sandstone and shale that formed when the Atlantic began to open — the boundary between the two rock types runs through the county and shows up in soils, quarries and building foundations. The Eno River runs east across the northern side of the city through a state park, and joins the Flat and Little rivers just downstream to form the Neuse, which is dammed immediately below the confluence as Falls Lake, the reservoir that supplies Raleigh. Durham's own water comes from Lake Michie and the Little River reservoir to the north.
Cities near Durham
Raleigh is half an hour away, Greensboro and Winston-Salem an hour west, and Charlotte and Richmond a few hours out. The South region page shows North Carolina among its neighbors.