06/15/2026
THEN AND NOW: Remembering "The Cary News" - Cary's Hometown Community Newspaper.
Some institutions make a difference, even if they don’t last forever. One such institution for Cary was The Cary News. It was established in 1963 and died in 2018. Lewis Lawrence, a Fuquay-Varina resident, founded it. Around the same time, he also founded The Garner News. The first offices for The Cary News were at 114 South Academy Street. The building still stands, but it later became a florist’s studio and is now a coffee shop. The Cary News ended up at several other addresses but, with one exception, never far from where it started.
In 1974, the company that controlled the Raleigh News & Observer bought The Cary News. According to Tom Byrd in Around and About Cary, the paper’s ownership was in flux during the early ’70s until the News and Observer Publishing Company acquired it. A document available from the Wake County Register of Deeds shows the incorporation of “The Cary News Corporation” on March 20, 1974. A notice in The Cary News on March 6,1974 with the headline “We’ve Moved,” said that the paper had moved to 134 W. Chatham St. “to allow more space for production facilities.”
134 West Chatham Street has had many identities, including housing everything from a church, flooring retailer, and a martial-arts studio. The photos below show the building in its various states (Photos courtesy of Town of Cary and Anna Readling).
In 1976, The Cary News moved across the street to 145 West Chatham Street. Known as the Jordan Building, it had several storefronts. It was probably best known as the home of the Adcock Agency, an insurance brokerage run by long-time Cary resident Jim Adcock. Adcock graduated from Cary High School in 1955 and attended Wake Forest University. He was a founding member of the Cary Chamber of Commerce in 1962. He also served on several town boards and commissions and was active in many other community activities. In the late ’70’s Adcock visited what was then the Soviet Union and recounted those travels in The Cary News. The building was recently demolished.
In 1981, The Cary News moved to the building that housed it the longest, 212 E. Chatham St. The paper shared the space with a branch of BB&T (which merged with SunTrust to form Truist Financial). The paper settled there for more than 27 years.
That building has had various identities since it was built in 1963. Besides the paper and the bank it has, among other things, also housed a grocery store, an appliance-repair service, a bedding store, and a furniture- and antique-consignment shop.
In late 2008, The Cary News moved into an office park on Situs Court in southwest Raleigh and stayed there until 2014.
The hardest period to document regarding The Cary News is the most recent, from October 2014 to probably 2018 when it was fading from a standalone paper to an insert in the News & Observer to, well, nothing. Its final home was in the office portion of The Cary Theater, 122 E. Chatham St., after leaving the Situs Court site in Raleigh in 2014, according to an article in the Triangle Business Journal. By that time, the Town of Cary owned the once and now present theater, so the paper was the tenant of the entity that it spent significant resources to cover.
Resources such as Triangle Business Journal, the online archives of Cary Citizen, and records from the Wake County Register of Deeds, and the North Carolina Secretary of State reveal little about the paper’s demise. A document filed by The News and Observer Publishing Company with the Secretary of State on August 7, 2020, appears to have snuffed out The Cary News: a withdrawal of assumed name. By that time, The Cary News had been a corporate identity of the News & Observer for decades. The document indicates that The Cary News was an identity the News & Observer no longer needed or wanted.
The paper’s final home, however, has a rich history. In its original existence, The Cary Theater was, in fact, a movie theater built by Paul Thomas Chandler in 1946. The vintage photo below shows a Chandler family member changing the marquee in 1953. The building has also housed Cary Clothiers (also owned by the Chandlers), an auto-parts store, and a recording studio. Another photo below shows the building during its time as an auto-parts store, and another shows the theater as passersby see it now.
Author: Adam Arnold
Photo Credits: Adam Arnold, Kris Carmichael - Town of Cary, Carla Michaels, Rachel Palmer - Town of Cary, Anna Readling
