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Cedar Grove School, National Register nomination (OR3044).Open the sourceAll sources
Searched the full chronology of 9,006 dated events and 77 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–54.Back to highlights
- Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
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A state survey finds only one brick building among Orange County's 28 schools for Black children
The state's administrative survey of Orange County school units, compiled from 1934-35 figures, counted 28 schools for Black pupils, all but one of them frame, and rated 19 in bad condition. White pupils by then attended ten consolidated schools, and all but one of their twelve buildings were brick.
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Hillsborough's new high school for Black students is built
Hillsborough's new school for Black students was built in 1936 with Public Works Administration aid on land the county board bought from Louis Wilson and George Mayo. When the Chapel Hill Weekly toured it in May it had eight rooms and an auditorium, with completion expected in about six weeks. It opened as Hillsboro High School for Negroes under principal E. C. Hester. A. L. Stanback became principal in 1942, and in 1943 the school became Central High School. From 1948 the PTA staffed the school library three times a week so it could be opened to the Black community.
Part of Segregated schooling and the rise of Lincoln and Central High Schools · 52 events
People: A. L. Stanback
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Archie Royal Davis becomes architect for the University of North Carolina
The Durham architect Archie Royal Davis took the post of university architect at Chapel Hill in 1940. He then helped give Franklin Street's business district its Colonial Revival look, designing several store buildings and painting watercolor views to persuade owners to rebuild in that style, with backing from George Watts Hill and town leaders.
People: George Watts Hill · Archie Royal Davis
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A. L. Stanback succeeds E. C. Hester as principal of Hillsborough's high school for Black students
Albert Leon Stanback, a teacher at the Hillsboro High School for Negroes, replaced its first principal, E. C. Hester, in 1942. The school took the name Central High School the next year, and Stanback later pushed for the Cedar Grove consolidated school to take the lower grades.
People: A. L. Stanback
- Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Archie Royal Davis becomes architect for the Orange County schools
In 1948 the Durham architect Archie Royal Davis became architect for the Orange County school system. His work for the county included Cedar Grove and Efland-Cheeks schools for Black children, the first Cameron Park School building, Central High's 1959-60 main building and Central Elementary.
People: Archie Royal Davis
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Architect H. Raymond Weeks presents plans for a school for Black children in Cedar Grove Township
H. Raymond Weeks showed the Orange County Board of Education his design for a consolidated school for Black pupils in Cedar Grove Township. The board sent the plans to the Federal Works Agency, which lent school systems money for architects' fees.
People: Howard Raymond Weeks
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The state's new school building fund allots Orange County's rural schools $292,618
From the 1949 State School Plant Construction, Improvement, and Repair Fund, built from a voter-approved state bond issue and a matching legislative appropriation, the State Board of Education allotted $292,618.06 to Orange County's rural schools. The money let the county begin replacing small one- and two-teacher schools for Black children with central consolidated buildings.
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Cedar Grove parents ask that Black educators help plan their new school
A delegation from the Cedar Grove Parent-Teacher Association asked the county board to let Central High principal A. L. Stanback and M. C. Burt, the county's agricultural agent for Black farmers, take part in planning the new Cedar Grove school.
People: A. L. Stanback
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Archie Royal Davis replaces H. Raymond Weeks as architect of the Cedar Grove school
When state school planners faulted H. Raymond Weeks's design in April 1950, the board sent him to W. F. Credle and Edward Waugh of the Division of Schoolhouse Planning, but Weeks would not rework it on short notice. By May the job had gone to Archie Royal Davis, who was also designing Lincoln High School in Chapel Hill; the board approved his preliminary plans in June.
People: Archie Royal Davis · Edward W. Waugh · Howard Raymond Weeks
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Principal E. M. Stanfield reports on the one-room school for Black children at Cedar Grove
In her report for 1949-50, E. M. Stanfield told the state she was the only teacher for 36 pupils in seven grades in a single room with no library, gymnasium, fire protection or indoor toilet. The two-room Carr School nearby, under principal Anne May Morrow, had 73 pupils and lacked a drinking fountain and state health approval.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The county board accepts Archie Royal Davis's plans for Cedar Grove School
The Orange County Board of Education approved Davis's final design for the Cedar Grove school for Black children: a low, flat-roofed brick building with long bands of classroom windows.
People: Archie Royal Davis
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Bids for Cedar Grove School run over budget and the board asks the state for $147,000
None of the construction bids opened on December 6, 1950, came within the budget, so the board rejected them all. On December 28 it voted to ask the state School Plant Construction, Improvement, and Repair Fund for a $147,000 grant to build the school.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Construction of Cedar Grove School begins
Work on the new school for Black children on NC 86 north of Hillsborough started in January 1951. By early February a well had been drilled and the footings poured.
Part of Consolidation and desegregation in the Orange County Schools · 120 events
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The board cuts the north wing and kitchen from the Cedar Grove School plans
To lower costs, the county board struck the six-classroom north wing, the kitchen, floor tile, clocks, bells, sidewalks and other items from Davis's design. The gymnasium was to serve as a multipurpose room partitioned into four classrooms until money for more space could be found.
Part of Consolidation and desegregation in the Orange County Schools · 120 events
People: Archie Royal Davis
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Cedar Grove parents ask for a say in hiring teachers and get a Black building committee
Seven Cedar Grove PTA members asked for a local committee with power to hire and dismiss the new school's teachers, and for paint and tile floors. The board named a building committee of Dallas Sheppherd Burnett, Wayne Compton, D. W. Torain, Elijah Poole and Oscar Carver Beasley but gave it no say over staff; it did approve the paint and the floor tile.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The county board votes to borrow for a six-classroom wing at Cedar Grove School
On a motion by board member Kemp S. Cate, the board voted to borrow $30,000 from the state literary fund and add $25,000 from its capital budget to build the north classroom wing cut from the 1951 plans. The county commissioners approved the loan.
Part of Consolidation and desegregation in the Orange County Schools · 120 events
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Millard Lee Bess joins the Cedar Grove School staff
The county board hired Millard Lee Bess, a Gaston County native, Winston-Salem State graduate and World War II veteran, for Cedar Grove School in September 1952.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Cedar Grove School's six-classroom north wing is finished
The north wing Archie Royal Davis had drawn in 1951 was finished late in 1953 and closely matches the original classroom wing. With the new rooms the multipurpose room became the gymnasium and auditorium. Davis and board members Harry Breeze and C. W. Stanford inspected the wing in January 1954.
Part of Consolidation and desegregation in the Orange County Schools · 120 events
People: Archie Royal Davis
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The News of Orange prints the first picture of the Cedar Grove Negro School
A front-page photograph presented the new school as a major piece of the county's three-year building program. The story listed seven classrooms, a library, an office, a heating plant, two toilets and a multipurpose room used from the start as four classrooms.
Part of Consolidation and desegregation in the Orange County Schools · 120 events
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The name Cedar Grove Negro School gives way to Cedar Grove School
The county board and local papers had called the school the Cedar Grove Negro School from the 1946 land purchase on. After 1954 they used Cedar Grove School or Cedar Grove Elementary School.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The county school board decides to carry on as before after the Brown decision
Two days after Brown v. Board of Education, the Orange County Board of Education put on record that since the Court had not said when or how segregation would end, it would go on hiring teachers, preparing the budget and running the schools as in the past. Like other North Carolina boards, it took no step to comply.
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Harold H. Webb becomes principal of Cedar Grove School
Harold Hudson Webb, a Greensboro-born veteran of the Tuskegee Airmen with two degrees from North Carolina A&T who had taught at Central High, was hired as Cedar Grove's principal. He led the school until 1962, when he joined the state education department; in 1977 he became North Carolina's first Black state personnel director.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The county board keeps every pupil in last year's school for 1955-56
The Orange County board ruled that students would attend the same schools in 1955-56 as in 1954-55. Pupils new to the county were to apply to a principal, who would admit them under board policies that kept the races apart.
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The county board names a committee to study school segregation after Brown
Answering a letter from the Governor's Advisory Commission on Education, chaired by Thomas Pearsall, the Orange County board appointed a local committee to study the problems the Supreme Court's segregation ruling raised for its schools. Ira Ward and Delmar Brown soon replaced two of the first members, Bonner D. Sawyer and W. T. (Buck) Murray.
People: Ira Ward · Roosevelt Warner · Carter White
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Orange County passes a $2 million school bond issue
A two-million-dollar county bond issue for schools passed in 1956. The next month Cedar Grove's Black parents went to the board to ask for a share of the building money.
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A Cedar Grove committee asks for classrooms, a lunchroom and playground land
Wayne Compton, Arthur Wells, Lonnie Thompson, Carter White and Oscar Beasley asked the county board for four more classrooms at Cedar Grove School, a lunchroom large enough to grow, and two more acres for a playground. The board did not act.
People: Arthur Wells · Oscar Carver Beasley · Carter White
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The county board approves a cafeteria for Cedar Grove School
After voting in September to study the need, the board approved a cafeteria for 150 pupils at Cedar Grove at no more than $40,000, while again putting off new classrooms. Archie Royal Davis's plans for it were approved and sent to the state in October 1957.
People: Archie Royal Davis
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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A kitchen and cafeteria are added to Cedar Grove School
A one-story brick kitchen and cafeteria, 78 by 49 feet, was finished behind the gymnasium late in 1958 to Archie Royal Davis's plans. One open dining room filled two-thirds of it, with the kitchen, dishwashing and storage along the north side.
People: Archie Royal Davis
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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A Cedar Grove delegation asks for a classroom and playground to win accreditation
Seeking state accreditation, a delegation from the school asked the board for one more classroom so the library could be used as a library again, land for a playground, paint for the north wing and outdoor floodlights. The board took no action.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The state declines to accredit Cedar Grove School for lack of space
Ruth Lawrence Woodson, state supervisor of the Black elementary schools, refused accreditation because the school had too few classrooms and was using its library as a fourth-grade room. Her report counted the parents' involvement, a staff study program, the office, auditorium and clinic room in its favor.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Archie Royal Davis's new main building for Central High goes up
After the 1958 fire, Archie Royal Davis designed a two-story, flat-roofed brick main building and a barrel-roofed gymnasium for Central High School. The main building went up in 1959-60; the campus is now Hillsborough Elementary.
People: Archie Royal Davis
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Efland-Cheeks School gets its first addition
An addition went up in 1959 on the north side of the 1952 Efland-Cheeks School, which Archie Royal Davis had designed for Black children in western Orange County. A modern wing larger than the original school followed around 1980.
People: Archie Royal Davis
Subject: Efland schools
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Cedar Grove's advisory committee asks for two more classrooms
Lonnie Thompson, Arthur Wells, Carter White, Wayne Compton and Oscar Beasley of the school's advisory committee asked the board for a two-classroom addition. The board agreed to consider it and in August approved Archie Royal Davis's plans with a $20,000 limit.
People: Archie Royal Davis · Arthur Wells · Oscar Carver Beasley · Carter White
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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A vocational building is added at Central High School
Between 1960 and 1962 the county added a one-story, flat-roofed, brick-veneered vocational building with metal awning windows to the Central High campus in Hillsborough.
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Two classrooms are added to the south wing of Cedar Grove School
The two classrooms at the south end of the original wing, built to Archie Royal Davis's plans on bids taken in fall 1959, were finished by September 6, 1960, when the board inspected them with Davis and contractor Lindsay Fogelman.
People: Archie Royal Davis
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Belton Edwards becomes principal of Cedar Grove School
Belton Edwards, a South Carolina native and North Carolina A&T graduate, followed Harold Webb as principal in 1962 and stayed until 1968, when he became the first Black member of the Orange County Board of Education. George Pierce succeeded him at the school.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Teacher Hassie Vanhook Gattis retires after 34 years
Hassie Vanhook Brooks Gattis retired in 1963 after 34 years of teaching Black children in northern Orange County, at the Sartin, Grover, Poplar Grove and Carr schools and, from about 1955, at Cedar Grove. The News of Orange County marked her retirement in June.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Four of Orange County's 2,001 Black pupils attend white schools
The county school system enrolled 2,001 Black students in 1964-65. Four went to formerly white schools; the rest attended Central High, Efland-Cheeks or Cedar Grove.
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Sixty-six Black parents petition the county board to stop running schools by race
Led by the retired Cedar Grove teacher Hassie Vanhook Gattis, 66 parents signed a petition asking the Orange County board to stop operating its schools on a racial basis. It charged that the board had kept a dual system since the 1954 Brown ruling in disregard of the law.
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Only 7 percent of the county's Black pupils attend an integrated school
At the start of the 1965-66 school year, about 7 percent of the Orange County system's Black students were enrolled in an integrated school.
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Cedar Grove families answer the county's freedom-of-choice forms
The county sent 401 school-choice forms to Cedar Grove School families at the end of the 1964-65 year. Fifty-two made no choice, three asked for all-white Aycock Elementary and four for Orange Junior High.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Three Cedar Grove families ask to move their children to the all-white Aycock School
At the end of the 1964-65 school year, under its freedom of choice plan, the Orange County Board of Education sent school choice forms to the parents of every school-age child. Of the 401 forms sent to families at Cedar Grove School, the area's school for Black children, three asked for transfer to the all-white Aycock Elementary School and four to Orange Junior High School.
Subject: Aycock School · Cedar Grove schools
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Cedar Grove's advisory council asks for a painted lunchroom and a paved playground
Oscar Beasley and Arthur Wells of the Cedar Grove Advisory Council asked the board to paint the lunchroom, hang doors on the girls' restroom and give the school a hard-surfaced playground. The board granted part of the request.
People: Arthur Wells · Oscar Carver Beasley
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Principal George Pierce and Arthur Wells ask for basketball goals and better lighting
Cedar Grove principal George Pierce and advisory council chairman Arthur Wells asked the board for basketball goals, better lighting, doors for the boys' restrooms and supplies for the lunchroom.
People: Arthur Wells
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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The county board presents a plan to end its dual school system to federal civil rights officials
After the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare told Orange County to give up freedom of choice and balance its schools by race, the board met with Walter Warfield of the Office for Civil Rights' education branch to present its plan for ending separate Black and white schools. The plan took effect in 1969-70.
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Cedar Grove's advisory council petitions to keep the school open
As the county prepared to integrate its schools, the Cedar Grove Advisory Council brought the board a petition asking that Cedar Grove School run fully through 1969-70 and that the integration plan be reconsidered. The council said the community did not intend to give up its school.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Cedar Grove School closes under the county's integration plan
The county board announced in May 1969 that Cedar Grove School would not operate in 1969-70. The school closed at the end of the 1968-69 year despite the community's appeals, and its pupils moved to schools in Efland and Hillsborough.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
- Recent decades · 1976–2026
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The school board sells the empty Cedar Grove School to Orange County for ten dollars
After the building had stood vacant for nearly a decade, the Orange County Board of Education conveyed the former school and its eight acres to the county for $10.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Efland-Cheeks pupils use the old Cedar Grove School while their school is enlarged
Under county ownership the former Cedar Grove School served several purposes, among them holding Efland-Cheeks School students until an addition to their own building was finished in 1978.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools · Efland schools
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Orange County gets a grant to build a park behind the old Cedar Grove School
A $30,000 grant let the county develop recreation land behind the school, where it built a baseball field and a children's play area.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Cameron Park School is enlarged again in the late
Following its 1978 addition, Cameron Park School on St. Mary's Road in Hillsborough received further additions on its north and south sides in the late 1980s.
Subject: Cameron Park School
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Orange County buys 39 acres to expand the park at Cedar Grove
The county bought thirty-nine acres behind the old Cedar Grove School to enlarge its recreation park.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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Central Elementary School gets a second large addition
Around 2000 another large addition was built across the center of Central Elementary School's front on Hayes Street in Hillsborough, following the 1975 addition by John James Croft.
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A state trust fund grant pays for a larger Cedar Grove Park
Beginning in 2007, with a $500,000 grant from the North Carolina Parks and Recreation Trust Fund, the county greatly enlarged the park around the old school. It now has three ball fields, two basketball courts, a playground and parking.
Subject: Cedar Grove schools
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