The Research Triangle. William M. Rohe

of the eminent sociologist Howard Odum, and a well-respected UNC-Chapel Hill professor of sociology. The choice of Simpson was a wise one in that it countered the skepticism toward the project held by many university officials. Walter Harper recalled that it “gave assurance to the universities that one of their men was in a position to give guidance to the Philistines.”¹⁶ In January 1957 Simpson presented a plan for moving the RTP project forward. First, he proposed beginning to market the idea to the heads of companies involved in industrial research. Second, he proposed beginning to acquire land and building laboratory buildings for lease. Third, he proposed moving forward on the establishment of a research institute to anchor the park.

      The marketing effort began with the development of brochures targeted to several types of industries including pharmaceuticals, chemicals, electronics, ceramics, food, forest products, and textiles.¹⁷ Simpson also put together a team of faculty members from UNC, Duke, and N.C. State to visit chief executive officers and sell them on the RTP idea. “Simpson assembled one of the most unusual teams of traveling salesman ever seen in business offices,” Harper noted.¹⁸ By the end of 1957, this team had visited over two hundred businesses.

      One of the difficulties in marketing the RTP idea was that no specific site had been selected. Simpson and others believed that they needed something tangible to sell. Simpson commented: “There is great value in having something concrete, something that can be mapped and walked over…. Something tangible stimulates the imagination.”¹⁹ Upon studying maps of the area, they focused on an area equidistant from Durham and Raleigh with access to the Southern Railway line and to two highways, N.C. 54 and U.S. 70-A. The area was largely composed of worn-out farmland with “nothing but scrub pine and opossums.”²⁰

      Simpson also believed that this land purchase would be best handled by a private company: “Someone might care to buy a substantial acreage of land, build a laboratory building or buildings, on the assumption that a profit would be made.”²¹ Thus a search for investors began. On the advice of the director of the N.C. Department of Commerce and Development, Governor Hodges contacted Karl Robbins, a retired North Carolina textile mill owner who had moved to New York. He agreed to invest $1 million in the project and formed Pinelands Incorporated to sell stock. Romeo Guest, who had done business with Robbins in the past, was elected president and treasurer of this new company and Robbins was the chairman of the board and the sole stockholder.

      Upon Robbins's commitment, William Maughan, a consulting forester, was hired to quietly begin purchasing options on tracts of land for the park. The goal was a whopping five thousand acres. By the time of the official announcement of the park he had successfully optioned or purchased four thousand acres at an average price of $175 per acre.²²

      In what was to be the first of several significant obstacles to development of the RTP, private investors showed very little interest in buying shares of the company and Robbins began to be concerned that his investment was going down the drain. Albert Link notes, “Robbins wanted North Carolinians to own 49 percent of Pinelands, and as of then, there were no investors.”²³ Many of the options on land were coming due and Robbins was not willing to invest additional funds in the company. In addition, “questions of propriety were being raised about the promotion of a privately owned research park by public universities and other state government agencies.”²⁴ The solution to both these problems was to make a fundamental shift in the conception of the park and the approach to fund-raising.

      In response to the lack of investors, Governor Hodges and Robert Hanes met with Archie Davis, the new head of Wachovia Bank, to ask him to take a lead role in selling Pinelands stock. In that discussion Davis suggested that the fund-raising concept was flawed: “To me, I just felt without knowing anything about it, it just didn't make sense. If this indeed was designed for public service, then it would be much easier to raise money from corporations and institutions and the like, who were interested in serving the State of North Carolina, by making a contribution.”²⁵ Davis accepted the task of raising funds from private and corporate donations rather than investments. In accordance with this change, the Research Triangle Committee became the Research Triangle Foundation (RTF) and the Pinelands Company would operate as a subsidiary of the foundation. On September 10, 1957, Governor Luther Hodges held a news conference to officially announce the creation of the RTP. Former UNC system president Bill Friday recalled: “The new model worked amazingly well. It changed the whole venue. We were in the public arena from that day on. Nobody was making a personal profit. It was the pivotal day, because everyone was either on the team or you had to explain why you weren't.”²⁶ Davis began fund-raising in September 1958 and by January of the following year he had raised $1.425 million for the project.²⁷ It is interesting to note that many of those donations came from outside the Raleigh-Durham area as the “citizenry of North Carolina came forth to invest in the future of the state.”²⁸ The funds raised were used to buy out Pinelands stock and transfer land to the RTF and to create the Research Triangle Institute, which was to become one of the first anchor tenants of the park.

      Figure 14. Picture of Governor Luther Hodges presiding over a ground breaking in the Research Triangle Park circa 1959 (courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Libraries).

      THE ORIGINAL ANCHORS: RESEARCH TRIANGLE INSTITUTE AND CHEMSTRAND

      As noted earlier, the idea for creating a nonprofit research institute to anchor the park and to provide an intermediary organization between university and corporate researchers is credited to Paul Gross, the Duke vice president. On January 18, 1957, a committee was formed to assess the feasibility of the idea, and how it would fit into the Research Triangle Park. Robert Hanes appointed Brandon Hodges, business executive and former state treasurer, as the chair of this committee.

      The committee's report presented that May concluded that a research institute was feasible, that it should engage in both basic and applied research as a way to encourage faculty participation, and that it would not require financial support from the universities. Based on the committee's positive assessment, funding to create an institute was added to the Research Triangle Park's fund-raising goals.

      In late 1957, Brandon Hodges died and George Watts Hill, board chairman of a local bank, was appointed as the chairman of the Research Triangle Institute Committee and by the end of that year Archie Davis, as part of his overall fund-raising efforts, had collected $500,000 for the creation of an institute. The Research Triangle Foundation donated land for the creation of RTI and a portion of funds raised was used to construct what was to be named the Robert M. Hanes Memorial Building, after he died in 1959. The Hanes Building was the first of numerous buildings to house RTI's expanding research activities.

      With funding in hand, the Research Triangle Committee lost no time in hiring George Herbert, who had served as executive associate director of the Stanford Research Institute, as the first president of RTI, a position he held from December 1957 until he retired in 1989.²⁹ Soon after, Gertrude Cox, a world-renowned statistician, agreed to move her Survey Operations Unit from the University of North Carolina to RTI. Her unit became the first part of “a scientific institution that had no name, no staff, no money, an optimistic but vague mission, and a small, enthusiastic cheering section.”³⁰ Yet Cox's move provided credibility to this fledgling effort. Eighteen of the institute's first twenty projects were in statistics.