Durham, which grew from a rural whistle-stop to one of the South's most industrialized cities on the success of cigarette manufacturers, is losing one of its last vestiges of the tobacco industry to Wake County.

Liggett Vector Brands, with executives at 1 Park Drive on the Durham side of Research Triangle Park, plans to move to Perimeter Park in Morrisville in October.

The marketing subsidiary of Miami-based Vector Group, which makes cigarette brands Liggett Select, Eve, Jade and the reduced-nicotine Quest in Mebane, agreed to lease 20,000 square feet at 3800 Paramount Parkway, Liggett Vector CEO Ron Bernstein said.

The group didn't need space for major growth, despite two consecutive years of Vector sales growth. It's just that its lease was up, and it wants its 45 employees to be on one floor instead of two, as they are in RTP. That was available in Morrisville. All that will remain in Durham will be a dozen researchers.

"If they're staying in the Triangle area, hopefully that will work out for the people that are involved with the company," Durham Mayor Bill Bell said Friday.

The executives' departure is one of tobacco's final chapters in Durham, whose county seat was nicknamed "Bull City" after a tobacco product. In the late 1800s, James B. Duke built American Tobacco Co. into the country's biggest cigarette manufacturer.

Liggett & Myers and American Tobacco Co., two companies spun off from Duke's empire, employed thousands in Durham.

Liggett's manufacturing complex in downtown Durham was at the heart of the growth. By World War II, one-fifth of all cigarettes smoked by GIs were Chesterfields.

A shrinking market and lawsuits led Liggett to end cigarette production in Durham in 2000; it moved its machines and most of its workers 25 miles west to Mebane. Developers have since made former cigarette factories into homes, offices and restaurants.

(Staff writer Jim Wise contributed to this report.)

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