The community of Chapel Hill is centered around the University of North Carolina, the oldest state university in the US. This school has been a leader in American education for more than 170 years and is now part of a "research triangle," together with Duke University at Durham and North Carolina State University at Raleigh. Despite heavy losses of faculty and students to the Civil War, the school remained open until the years of Reconstruction, 1870-1875. During the next decade, the university was reborn.