SAS Institute - 3,800 employees
Source: Wake County Revenue Department, 2001 data
Our Location
Cary is located in central North Carolina's Wake County in the heart of the Triangle area. It is between Raleigh and Research Triangle Park, near Jordan Lake. The population was 103,260 on July 1, 2002. Cary covered 44.26 square miles at that time.
Getting Here
Cary is easily accessible by car via Interstate 40 to the north, NC Highway 55
to the west, and US Highways 1 & 64 to the south and east. NC Highway 54
(Chapel Hill Road) cuts directly through Cary, two blocks north of the heart of
our downtown.
Cary also has its own scenic, train depot in downtown which hosts daily
Amtrak service.
By car, Cary is about 10 minutes from the Raleigh-Durham International Airport,
15 minutes from downtown Raleigh, 20 minutes from downtown Durham, and
30 minutes from downtown Chapel Hill.
Top Cary Employers
Cary Towne Center - 1,500
American Airlines Reservation Center - 1,250
Town of Cary - 1,010
Western Wake Medical Center - 895
Austin Quality Foods - 783
Lucent - 420
Strategic Resource Solutions - 350
Inveresk Research - 300
Global Knowledge Network - 297
Our History
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.