Morrisville Town Center Plan - 2007

Introduction

Overview To honor its past and create a vibrant focus for the community into the future, the Town of Morrisville is working to create a Town Center in the area around its historic crossroads. The preparation of this Town Center Plan completes the first step in this process: drafting a plan that describes the community’s vision for this area. This document summarizes the existing conditions in the project area, describes the public planning process that the Town conducted to share information and solicit community input, presents the final design prepared with assistance from the consulting team retained by the Town, and lays out a series of implementation strategies to pursue this vision for the Town Center over time. The story behind this plan begins 150 years ago with the birth of the town. The Birth of Morrisville In the mid-nineteenth century, North Carolina was known as the “Rip Van Winkle State”, locked in a deep economic slumber, with large expanses of its interior cut off from the outside world. To help change this, state leaders launched a grand civic project to build a railroad across the Piedmont that would link Charlotte with Goldsboro and an existing rail line that connected to the state’s largest port in Wilmington.

In 1850, surveyors were sent out to assess the terrain. They found the best route ran along a ridge line between the Neuse and Cape Fear Rivers. 12 miles west of Raleigh, they came to Crabtree Creek and decided to site a depot. An enterprising local business- man named Jeremiah Morris donated land for a station, and the site lay at a rural crossroads that could help feed the rail line with passen- gers and freight. Morrisville was born.

Morrisville at a Crossroads A century and a half later, Morrisville is once again at a crossroads. But now it is a crossroads of the region, with great access to employment centers like Research Triangle Park and major transportation hubs like Interstate 40 and Raleigh-Durham Airport. (See Map 1) As a result of this outstanding location and the rapid growth of the region, our community has nearly tripled in population in the last seven years. At present, the town is adding about 4.5 new residents every day. In the midst of this growth spurt, Morrisville’s small town character is beginning to disappear. As a result, there is widespread interest in re- establishing a center of community where our paths might frequently cross and where others will know when they have arrived in Morrisville. From its earliest days, Morrisville has benefitted from its location at a crossroads, which helped supply the rail line with passengers and freight. This detail from an 1870s map of Wake County shows that the original crossroads lay at the intersection of Church Street and what today is Morrisville-Carpenter Road. (Map: Wake County Historical Society)

In the 1850s, the North Carolina Railroad sited a depot near Crabtree Creek, and Morrisville was born. This 1937 photo shows Morrisville mailman, Walter Churchill, at the Morrisville Depot, with Lettie and Eunice Bullock in the background. To the left is the Maynard Store that still stands today along Chapel Hill Road. (Photo: North Carolina State Archives)

│ Town Center Plan

January 2007