The town of Cary, "town" being a term of no small import under the circumstances, has practically quintupled in population since I moved there in 1981 upon coming to North Carolina.

It's now pushing 100,000 residents and is the state's seventh-largest city, a modern, bustling and attractive place. But in some respects Cary's links to the past, to the time when it was a modest village astride the tracks west of Raleigh or for that matter even earlier, when the first settlers were clearing homeplaces amid the pines, can now be seen with a special clarity.

A good deal of the credit belongs to a woman who recently died at the age of 97, having come to exemplify the spirit of "old Cary" and having championed the legacy of the town's most illustrious son.

Although Rachel E. Dunham and I exchanged correspondence a couple of times, I regret that I never made the stroll down her wonderfully old-timey driveway -- right there on busy Kildaire Farm Road just south of Cary Elementary School -- for a personal audience.

Until last year, we were neighbors of sorts; I lived a mile or so away. Commuting to work, jogging, walking the dog -- I must have passed the Dunhams' thousands of times. The property has the character of a mini-arboretum, and that driveway just seems to call out with an invitation to come visit . . .it's the dirt kind with two tire ruts and a nice hump of green in the middle, stretching back toward the house secluded in the trees. Occasionally in years not so long ago one would see Mrs. Dunham out tending her flowers and shrubs.

The proximity to the school, Cary High School in the old days, was no accident. Mrs. Dunham's late husband, R.S. "Dad" Dunham, was a storied and beloved teacher of vocational agriculture at the high school whose many student teachers included future Gov. Jim Hunt (that nugget was extracted from Lisa Coston's fine article about Mrs. Dunham in a recent issue of The Cary News). Mrs. Dunham herself had taught school before quitting to raise her children; besides sharing her husband's fondness for gardening, she was skilled as a seamstress and as a cook (State Fair blue ribbon-certified).

After Dad Dunham's death in 1987, a popular town park on Walnut Street near the present high school was named in his memory. Much of the Dunhams' own property -- forest stretching back from Kildaire Farm along West Cornwall Road toward where I used to live -- was sold off, not so it could join the shopping center parade but to help meet older folks' housing needs. It became the Presbyterian-affiliated Glenaire retirement community.

Mrs. Dunham had come to Cary from her native Davie County to attend Cary High back when it took in boarders. The school, as North Carolina's first public high school, was an integral part of the town's early identity, and the Dunhams' affiliation with it and the cause of education gave them a spot directly in Cary's historical mainstream.

But it became Mrs. Dunham's crusade to make sure that the mainstream suitably accommodated one of the most notable of all North Carolinians: Walter Hines Page, son of Cary's founder and, among his many accomplishments, a champion of education as an indispensable means of uplift for his hard-pressed state and the entire struggling post-Civil War South.

The lumberman Allison Francis "Frank" Page determined that this spot in the Wake County woods would be a good place to put down stakes. After a village emerged alongside the new railroad, it was he who came up with the name of Cary, after a temperance-minded politician from Ohio whom he admired. With his wife, the former Catherine Raboteau, they raised a family in a substantial house on the present site of Town Hall (the house burned in 1970). They also founded a trackside hotel that, renovated and enlarged, is now the town's cultural arts center. Walter, born in 1855, was their first child to live past infancy.

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