Sep 30, 2026 · 17 min · 7 segments
On today's episode, Ben Kinney speaks with Mack Paul, co-founder and partner at Morningstar Law Group and co-author of \*Miracle Road: The Story of Research Triangle Park\*. Mack shares his winding…
Mack PaulGuest
Ben KinneyHost
What is the story there? I mean, we hear a lot about RTP, and the key thing that I always, when I'm talking to folks, and I've interviewed a lot of folks as well that are there, and kind of what is the history of it, it looks like one of the things that always strikes me is people say, the forethought and the planning ahead when no one was really thinking about these things.
We have that kind of foresight to to look into something and see where it could be, not five, 10 years down the road.
Yeah, I mean, so the one thing I hope this book will do is dispel this idea that we all have of the park.
Because anyone who lives here, we think of it as a place, as a geographic area in the center of the region that you can drive through.
It's kind of hard to know what's going on there because you've got all these landscaped areas.
And you have to understand North Carolina in the 1950s was by many measures the second poorest state in the United States in terms of GDP.
One of the highest percentages of people still working on farms, and these were like really small family farms.
And we had our industries were furniture, textiles, and tobacco, cigarette manufacturing, and all of them were declining in the 1950s.
But we had this kind of cadre of leaders with this civic spirit in North Carolina.
There was a book about the South and they defined this group as the progressive plutocrats or plutocracy.
A lot of them served in World War II and they wanted to bring the state up economically.
What is the story there? I mean, we hear a lot about RTP, and the key thing that I always, when I'm talking to folks, and I've interviewed a lot of folks as well that are there, and kind of what is the history of it, it looks like one of the things that always strikes me is people say, the forethought and the planning ahead when no one was really thinking about these things.
We have that kind of foresight to to look into something and see where it could be, not five, 10 years down the road.
Yeah, I mean, so the one thing I hope this book will do is dispel this idea that we all have of the park.
Because anyone who lives here, we think of it as a place, as a geographic area in the center of the region that you can drive through.
It's kind of hard to know what's going on there because you've got all these landscaped areas.
And you have to understand North Carolina in the 1950s was by many measures the second poorest state in the United States in terms of GDP.
One of the highest percentages of people still working on farms, and these were like really small family farms.
And we had our industries were furniture, textiles, and tobacco, cigarette manufacturing, and all of them were declining in the 1950s.
But we had this kind of cadre of leaders with this civic spirit in North Carolina.
There was a book about the South and they defined this group as the progressive plutocrats or plutocracy.
A lot of them served in World War II and they wanted to bring the state up economically.
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