Brightleaf Square occupies the former Watts and Yuille tobacco warehouses, named for George W. Watts and Thomas B. Yuille.  The warehouses were built between 1900 and 1904 as part of an aggressive building campaign by the American Tobacco Company for storing, aging, and fermenting tobacco for cigarette manufacture. The twin brick structures punctuated the Durham skyline and announced the company's new, bold corporate image, which reflected the fair of its founder, the entrepreneur Washington Duke. Furthermore, the warehouses stood as economic and cultural symbols of the growing importance of cigarette smoking and the industrial revolution's impact on turn-of-the-century America.

The Dukes of Durham are legendary figures in the history of the tobacco industry. In 1865, Washington Duke, aware of the growing popularity of North Carolina tobacco, set up a factory and traveled throughout the state selling tobacco out of his wagon. The enterprise turned into a family one, W. Duke Sons & Co., and soon entered the cigarette-manufacturing market. In an effort to control competition, James Duke combined the nation's largest cigarette manufacturing companies into one: the American Tobacco Company. Thirty-five years after its formation the company controlled 90 percent of the worldwide cigarette business

The architecture of the warehouses advertised the company's status and reflected its specific functional requirements. The parallel brick buildings with an interior courtyard feature such intricate exterior detail as stringcourses, dentils, pilasters, and elaborate chimneys on the parapet walls of the firewalls. The decorative program precisely articulates the interior subdivisions. Each building is seven bays wide and twenty bays long; the bays are divided by pilasters on the exterior.