ABSTRACT
On November 4, 1986, David Eugene Price was elected to the US House of Representatives from the Fourth District of North Carolina, a five-county area that included the cities of Raleigh, Chapel Hill, and Asheboro. At the time, he was a student at Mars Hill, a junior college in the North Carolina Mountains a few miles from his home in Erwin, a town in East Tennessee. He went north in 1961 to divinity school and eventually graduate school and a faculty appointment in political science, all at Yale University. The Fourth District has been redrawn six times since Price was first elected, after three decennial censuses and three additional times ordered by the courts. The Fourth District has always centered on cities of Raleigh, Cary, Durham, and Chapel Hill in some combination and has included all or parts of Research Triangle Park, a monument to synergy among high-tech large and small businesses, research universities, and the state and federal governments.
