History:
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Originally NC 50 under North Carolina's first numbering system, US 1 was an original 1926 US highway, but the roadway was a plank road and before that a trading path long before it became a paved highway. No portion of what was first designated US 1 is now signed as such, although there are sections that now serve as service roads that come close.
The original routing of US 1 through Wake County was Chatham Street through Cary, Hillsborough Street and Wake Forest Road through Raleigh, service roads along existing US 1 between Old Wake Forest Road and US 1A, and US 1A through Wake Forest. US 1 and NC 59, which later became US 401, split northeast of downtown Raleigh at what is now the interchange of Capital Boulevard and Wake Forest Road. However, when a new stretch of roadway connecting Louisburg Road and Old Wake Forest Road opened in 1948 in what is now north Raleigh, US 1 was moved onto the NC 59 alignment and Wake Forest Road was re-numbered US 1A. A few years later, Downtown Boulevard (now the southern freeway-ish part of Capital Boulevard) was completed, and US 1 was no longer routed on any part of Wake Forest Road.
Two sections of what are now service roads, Cheviot Hills Drive just north of I-540 and Star Road in Wake Forest, were original sections of US 1. They were connected by a road that no longer exists in one continuous stretch, although this original part of US 1 used the eastern end of what is now Thornton Road and crossed the Neuse River about half a mile downstream from the current crossing. This original section can be traced by following treelines and property boundaries, and the section was largely demolished upon the construction of the "new" (1950s-era) section of US 1 to the west.
Meanwhile, Wake Forest was bypassed by US 1 in 1953, leaving behind another US 1A only five miles north of where the original 1A ended. That nonsense was short-lived, though, as the first US 1A was decommissioned only a few years later, when the Beltline was completed to the current Capital Boulevard interchange.
The first section of the US 1/I-440 freeway around Raleigh was the section between the Chatham County line and Hillsborough Street, completed in 1962. The former section of US 1 through Cary and Apex became...well, nothing (OK, it's SR 1011, but it isn't a US highway anymore). The next stretch of the Beltline was finished the next year, and US 1 was signed over the entire Beltline (it ended at Louisburg Rd. originally), demoting the former US 1 through Raleigh (the eastern extension of the former Cary US 1) to Business 1. The Wake Forest Road US 1A was decomissioned around this time, as well.
The freeway southwest of Cary was built as a Super 2, but with a twist: NCDOT had the land already acquired to widen 1 to four lanes. This finally came to pass in 1998--35 years after the original road was built.
Aside from the decommissioning of Business 1 through Raleigh in the late '70s, the routing of 1 has not changed since the opening of the Beltline in 1963.
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