Blackwell Street

Blackwell takes its name from William Thomas Blackwell, called "The Father of Durham" in Hiram V. Paul's 1884 town history. Blackwell Durham Tobacco Co. manufactured Bull Durham smoking tobacco in a factory at the southwest corner of Blackwell and Pettigrew streets. The street appears, unnamed, on the Blount map of Durham c. 1867 but bears Blackwell's name on the city directory map of 1887 - by which time Blackwell had sold his interest in the company and become a banker. Taking over the tobacco business from partner J.R. Green (who coined the name "Bull Durham"), Blackwell and partners Julian S. Carr and James R. Day built the company into an international business, the United States' largest tobacco firm for a time in the 1870s.