Durham was established in the 1850's when the North Carolina Railroad extended its tracks westward across the state, and the new town became a destination where area farmers brought tobacco crops for sale and shipment to factories. By 1860, Durham had a railway station, post office, three stores, a carpenter shop, two bars, a tobacco factory, and a few houses. Robert E. Morris began manufacturing smoking tobacco there in 1858, and in 1860 he sold his factory to John R. Green, who started producing Bull Durham Smoking Tobacco, which became the most popular brand of its kind in the world. In 1869, William T. Blackwell and John R. Day took over the business and expanded the Bull Durham plant into the world's largest tobacco manufacturer. Washington Duke began making cigarettes in 1881 on his small farm in northern Durham, and by 1884 he became the first manufacturer to mechanize cigarette production. He also helped start cotton mills and machine shops to support his growing business, and his son James B. Duke formed the American Tobacco Company. In the late nineteenth century, six rail lines entered Durham, bringing tobacco leaf from farms in eastern and southern North Carolina and South Carolina to the American Tobacco plants for processing. The last rail line, owned by Norfolk Southern, was built in 1905-06 from Chatham County into Durham through what is now the Lake Jordan reservoir, where in Wake County it met the Seaboard Coast line's main Florida-bound tracks. After Lake Jordan was constructed, the original line was moved east onto higher ground, where the route remains. In the second half of the Twentieth Century, trucks increasingly replaced rail cars for commercial freight, interstate highways replaced the railroads, and rail lines were abandoned. After the American Tobacco factory shut down in Durham in 1987, Norfolk Southern began removing track from its rail corridor, and sections were sold off, including a large parcel that became part of I-40. The corridor was saved by volunteers, local governments, and the State, and today the twenty-three-mile American Tobacco Trail runs through Durham, Wake, and Chatham counties from downtown Durham at the old American Tobacco factory site to Bonsal in Wake County, serving bicyclists and pedestrians and, in the southern sections, equestrians as well. A four-mile section in Wake County is maintained with engines and rolling stock as the New Hope Valley Railway, preserving a piece of railroad history.