Bor is located on the site of a fishing village on the White Nile (Bahr al Jabal River), where an ivory-and-slave trading depot was established in the 1860s. It grew into a regional hub of the slave-and-ivory trade during the late nineteenth-century. In 1874, Charles George Gordon established a government station there under the Turkiyah Government. In the early years of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Bor was a "wooding station" for steamers travelling along the White Nile (Bahr al Jabal River). In 1905, Bor was established as the headquarters of the Bor-Duk District.