On a Saturday morning at the corner of High House Road and Davis Drive, the car park outside H Mart fills with families speaking Korean, the cart returns rattling between minivans with NC State and SAS lanyards on the dashboards. This is the everyday texture of the Koreans in Cary, a community of software engineers, pharmaceutical researchers and university professors who chose this Wake County suburb for the same reasons everyone else did, then quietly made it their own.
The Place
Cary sits on the south-western edge of the Research Triangle, the wedge of land between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill that gave the region its name. Once a railway village incorporated in 1871, it ballooned into one of the fastest-growing towns in the country after Research Triangle Park opened in 1959 and SAS Institute planted its headquarters here in 1980.
Today around 185,000 people live in Cary, roughly a fifth of them Asian, with a median household income well above the national figure. The town is known for two things above all: top-ranked Wake County schools and a kind of orderly, engineered calm.
For Korean families weighing where to settle in the South, that combination of good jobs and good schools proved decisive. They settled alongside the Chinese and Indian families who had made the same calculation, sharing the same school catchments and the same strip-mall grocers.
How It Became Korean
The Park that pulled them in
There is no single founding story for Cary’s Koreans, no garment district or grocery row that anchored a first wave. The community came the way most of professional Cary came: through work.
Research Triangle Park, the largest research park in the United States, was conceived in 1959 by faculty at UNC, NC State and Duke who wanted to keep the region’s graduates from leaving for jobs elsewhere. By the 1980s and 1990s it had drawn IBM, Cisco, GlaxoSmithKline and dozens of pharmaceutical and technology firms, along with the engineers and scientists they needed.
The effect on Cary was dramatic. The town’s population doubled in a few years after the park opened, tripled in the 1970s, and doubled again in both the 1980s and 1990s. Each surge of growth brought new arrivals, and a steady share of them were Korean.
Many of those hires were Korean nationals on H-1B visas or Korean Americans relocating from the older immigrant centres of New Jersey, New York and Los Angeles. They came for the laboratories of RTP and the campuses of three research universities, and they came for SAS, the analytics giant headquartered in Cary itself.
The pattern echoed what was happening across the Triangle, where Indian software engineers were filling the nearby town of Morrisville at the same time. Asian professional migration to this corner of North Carolina has long moved in parallel streams, drawn by the same employers but settling into their own institutions, churches and grocers.
A community of professionals, not shopkeepers
This shaped the character of Korean Cary from the start. Unlike the Koreatowns built on small business in Los Angeles or Queens, the Triangle’s Korean community grew around degrees and salaries. Its members were statisticians and biostatisticians, software developers, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers.
NC State University in nearby Raleigh became a particular draw, both as an employer and as a destination for Korean students, many of whom stayed after graduation. The university now teaches Korean language and culture courses, a reflection of how the population has grown.
The grocery store changes everything
For years, Korean families in the Triangle drove to smaller Asian markets or stocked up on trips to Atlanta. That changed in 2016, when H Mart, the New Jersey-based Korean supermarket chain with more than 60 locations nationwide, opened its first and still only North Carolina store in Cary.
It took over a 46,000-square-foot space in the Cornerstone Village centre that had previously held a Lowe’s Foods. For the community it was a milestone, the moment the Triangle felt, finally, like home rather than an outpost.
The same year, 2016, also saw the founding of The Connect Church, a Korean American congregation, marking how the institutional life of the community was maturing alongside its retail life.
A community that organised itself
Churches did much of the early organising work, as they have for Korean immigrants across America. Korean congregations in Cary and the wider Triangle offered worship in Korean, English-language services for the second generation, and the weekend Korean schools that keep the language alive in children born in North Carolina.
The Cary Korean School and the Triangle Korean School teach Korean language, history and arts to those children, while the older Chapel Hill-Durham Korean School, founded by immigrants and students in November 1990, has met at UNC since the mid-1990s.
By the time KoreaFest launched in 2017, drawing crowds to the NC State Fairgrounds in Raleigh, the Korean presence in the region was visible enough to fill an exposition centre with more than 5,000 people a year.
The Landmarks
H Mart, 1961 High House Road, Cary. The community’s anchor since 2016, occupying a former Lowe’s Foods at the corner of High House Road and Davis Drive. Beyond the produce, meat and seafood counters, a food court holds a Tous les Jours bakery and stalls selling Korean fried chicken, Japanese noodles and Thai curry, making it as much a weekend gathering place as a grocer.
The Connect Church, meeting at Highcroft Drive Elementary School, 5415 Highcroft Drive, Cary. A Korean American Southern Baptist congregation founded in August 2016, holding bilingual worship for first-generation immigrants and their English-speaking children. Its presence reflects how the church remains the social spine of Korean Cary.
Seol Grille, Cary. A tabletop Korean barbecue restaurant repeatedly named among the area’s best, where families and SAS colleagues grill premium cuts over the table and work through plates of banchan. It has become a default destination for both the community and the curious newcomers discovering Korean food.
SAS Institute headquarters, Cary. Founded in 1976 by NC State professor James Goodnight and John Sall, the analytics company built its sprawling campus in a forested stretch of Cary beginning in 1980. For Korean statisticians and software engineers, SAS is both employer and one of the reasons the community clustered here in the first place.
Green Hope High School, 2500 Carpenter Upchurch Road, Cary. Ranked among the top public high schools in North Carolina, in the state’s top 5 percent for test scores. Schools like Green Hope are why many Korean families chose Cary over flashier addresses, treating the school district map as the real estate map.
Research Triangle Park. The engine of the whole story, a few minutes’ drive north. The laboratories and offices of RTP’s pharmaceutical and technology firms employed the first Korean researchers and engineers to settle in the area, and continue to draw new arrivals every year.
KoreaFest, NC State Fairgrounds Exposition Center, 4825 Trinity Road, Raleigh. An annual celebration of Korean culture launched in 2017 and held just over the Cary line in Raleigh, drawing more than 5,000 attendees with traditional drumming, dance, taekwondo and a marketplace of food and K-beauty vendors.
Where They Came From
The Koreans of Cary trace back, ultimately, to South Korea, but their path to North Carolina rarely ran straight from Seoul. Many arrived first in the established Korean communities of the American coasts, in the towns of Fort Lee, New Jersey, the suburbs of Los Angeles, or the apartment blocks of Queens, before a job offer or a graduate placement pulled them south.
Others came directly as students and researchers, recruited by NC State, Duke and UNC or by the firms of Research Triangle Park. This is a community defined less by a home province than by a profession, drawn together by laboratories and analytics rather than by a shared village back home.
What they have in common is the calculation that brought them to Cary specifically: the schools, the safety, the salaries, and increasingly the presence of one another.
Cary Today
Cary is home to roughly 2,500 Korean residents, the third-largest Korean population of any city in North Carolina after Charlotte and Raleigh, and the highest as a share of population among the state’s larger towns. They live alongside the substantial Indian and Chinese communities that share these neighbourhoods, in a suburb where Asian families make up about a fifth of the population.
The Korean presence here is real but understated. It shows in the H Mart car park on a Saturday, in the Korean schools that meet at weekends, in the barbecue restaurants along the strip malls, and in the children moving through Green Hope and Panther Creek toward the universities their parents work for.
It is a community without a single street you could point to and call Koreatown. Its centre is functional rather than geographic: a grocery store, a handful of churches, a fairground festival once a year. For a community built on quiet professional success, that may be exactly the point.
The second generation is now the centre of gravity. Children raised on weekend Korean school and weekday public school move through Green Hope and Panther Creek and on to NC State, Duke and beyond, fluent in two cultures and rooted in a suburb their parents chose on purpose. Whether they stay in Cary or scatter to the coasts their parents came from, the institutions are now here to hold them, and to welcome the next researcher off the plane from Seoul.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Koreans live in Cary, North Carolina?
Cary is home to roughly 2,488 Korean residents, about 1.41 percent of the town’s population. That makes the Koreans in Cary the third-largest Korean community in North Carolina by raw numbers, after Charlotte and Raleigh.
Why did Koreans settle in Cary?
Most came for work. Research Triangle Park and SAS Institute drew Korean engineers, statisticians and pharmaceutical researchers to the area, while NC State, Duke and UNC attracted Korean students and faculty. Cary’s top-ranked schools and high incomes then made it a natural place to raise families.
Where do Koreans in Cary shop for groceries?
The community’s main anchor is H Mart at 1961 High House Road, the only H Mart in North Carolina, which opened in Cary in 2016. Its food court and Korean bakery make it a social hub as well as a grocery store.
Are there Korean churches in Cary?
Yes. Korean congregations, including The Connect Church, founded in 2016, hold bilingual worship and run weekend Korean schools. These churches have long served as the social and organisational backbone of the Korean community in Cary and across the Triangle.
Is there a Korean festival near Cary?
KoreaFest, launched in 2017, is held each year at the NC State Fairgrounds Exposition Center in Raleigh, just over the Cary line. It draws more than 5,000 attendees with Korean drumming, dance, taekwondo demonstrations and a food and K-beauty marketplace.
What is the best Korean food in Cary?
Cary has a growing cluster of Korean barbecue and restaurants, with Seol Grille frequently named among the area’s best for tabletop grilling. H Mart’s food court is also a popular spot for Korean fried chicken and fresh banchan.
If your family’s story passed through Cary, or any of the places Koreans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the laboratories of Seoul and the apartment blocks of Queens to the school districts and grocery aisles of Cary, to wherever you are now.