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4 A GUIDE FOR WORKING WITH THE TOWN OF CARY and post office. He called his development Cary, after Samuel Fenton Cary, an Ohio prohibitionist whom Page admired. The Town of Cary — the community we serve today — was officially incorporated on April 6, 1871. 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, serves as a museum and performance space and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. 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 the Cary Arts Center in the heart of Cary's downtown. With the development of Research Triangle Park in the 1960s and its proximity to Raleigh, Durham, and the Raleigh-Durham International Airport, Cary experienced the beginning of the high-quality development that still characterizes the Town today. From about 1,000 residents, Cary grew dramatically during the first decade of RTP, logging nearly 6,000 new citizens by the early 1970s. That number more than tripled to about 24,000 in the early 1980s and doubled again in the 1990s to more than 45,000. Cary broke the 100,000 mark in 2001. In 2017, under new Town Manager Sean R. Stegall, Cary realized the most ambitious long-range planning effort in the community's history with a wholesale update to the Town's comprehensive plan. This process, dubbed "Imagine Cary," was built on the values, needs, and aspirations of citizens over several years of planning, workshops, and meetings, and sets a long- term vision and action plan out to 2040. The Cary of today is home to the largest privately-held software company in the world — SAS — and has attracted other key, world-class businesses, including Deutsche Bank, John Deere, Epic Games, MetLife, Kellogg, Siemens, American Airlines, Oxford University Press, and the Lord Corporation. V I T A L S T A T I S T I C S Per the U.S. Census Bureau and permit data, Cary is the 148th largest municipality in the nation, seventh largest in North Carolina, and the second largest in Wake County with a population of 191,000 people. The community consists of people representing over 60 nationalities, with 24% born in another country. Seventy-five percent of citizens speak English, 10% speak Asian and Pacific Islander languages, 8% speak Indo-European languages, 5% speak Spanish, and 2% speak other languages. The median age is 38.7, and 70% of our population has a college degree, with another one-fourth holding advanced degrees. Our median household income continues to be well above the national average at over $129,000 annually. Learn more about Cary's diversity, safety, amenities, and high quality of life at carync.gov/about. O U R G OV E R N M E N T Cary, North Carolina, exists because the people who lived here long ago asked the state of North Carolina to officially recognize their community and to give them the right to chart their destiny. These people banded together because they knew they could accomplish more as a group than they could as individuals. Over the years, they created a shared vision for the area and put in place a structure to make their vision a reality. That structure is our organization, the Town of Cary. Authorized by the North Carolina General Assembly in 1871, the Town of Cary is a municipal corporation of the state of North Carolina and is governed by a Council-Manager form of administration as provided for in North Carolina general statutes. The powers and authority of Cary are spelled out in state law, and Cary may do no more than authorized by that body of law. The residents of Cary elect a seven-member Town Council, which includes the mayor. Four of the seven Council members are district representatives chosen by

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