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Colonial and Regulator years · 1680–1774
- 1750s
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Thomas Lloyd is appointed a justice of the peace
Thomas Lloyd, a settler of Welsh descent with a land grant on Mark Creek, was made a justice of the peace in 1757 and later sat in the North Carolina Assembly. He founded the large Lloyd family of southern Orange; by 1850 nineteen of his grandsons and great-grandsons lived around White Cross.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1830s
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White Cross Church, later an AME congregation, is organized
The church list dates the White Cross congregation and its first building to May 1832. It was rebuilt in 1921 and was an African Methodist Episcopal church by 1953.
- 1840s
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A stage inn, later the Snipes House, is built near White Cross
The Snipes House near White Cross began in the 1840s as a stagecoach inn, with paired chimneys at each end. It has since been altered.
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The Morris Lloyd family builds its first home, a log house near White Cross
A log house of about 1840 near White Cross was the first home of the Morris Lloyd family. When Lloyd later put up a much larger timber-frame house in front of it, the log house stayed in use behind it as a kitchen and sleeping space.
- 1850s
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The Morris Lloyd farmhouse is built near White Cross
A farmhouse is built around 1850 on the Morris Lloyd place near White Cross, a farm that keeps an early log house and a half-dovetailed log corn crib. The survey put it on the Study List.
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William Strowd builds a two-story frame house near White Cross
A two-story frame house is built in 1851 on the William Strowd place near White Cross.
- 1860s
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A one-room log house goes up on the Bryant Nevilles farm near White Cross
By family tradition a one-room log house and log smokehouse on the Nevilles farm near White Cross date to about the Civil War years. Bryant Nevilles (1850-1931), who married Julia Lloyd in 1872, later farmed here, and a frame bungalow was added to the farmstead in 1926. The farm is on the Study List.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
- 1880s
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The White Cross Store is built
A country store is built at White Cross in the late nineteenth century. It was later covered in vinyl siding.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
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A one-room school for Black children is built at Hickory Grove
Hickory Grove, near White Cross, gets a one-room front-gable schoolhouse for African American children early in the twentieth century.
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Arch Cates's I-house goes up on what became Arthur Minnis Road
The two-story frame I-house at the Cates-Dodson-Minnis Farm was first owned by Arch Cates. It later passed to Albert Dodson and then to Albert and Lois Dodson Minnis, and was remodeled in the 1940s.
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A school district is created south of White Cross on donated land
The board approved a new district south of White Cross whose land and building were given on condition that they revert when no longer used for a public school, with Sunday school and preaching allowed. Children of the Old Field school were moved to it.
- 1920s
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Alston Grove Congregational Church builds its frame church near White Cross
The Alston Grove Congregational Church near White Cross builds a front-gable frame church around 1920 beside its cemetery.
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White Cross AME Church builds its present church
White Cross AME Church builds a new church in 1921; the congregation refaced it in brick veneer in 1958.
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The county board moves $30,000 in building money to Efland and sets the order of its new schools
The board shifted $15,000 each from the White Cross and Caldwell building funds to Efland, reasoning that Efland had the greater need, a local tax with an eight-month term, and a paved road for school trucks. It then fixed the building order as Efland, White Cross, Orange County Training School, Orange Grove and Caldwell.
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A new consolidated school is built at White Cross on the Saxapahaw road
After neighbors rejected a site at the crossroads near Leuco Lloyd's, the board placed the new White Cross school on the north side of the Chapel Hill and Saxapahaw road and let the contract to A. R. Davis for $14,436. It accepted the building in March 1925 and sold the old White Cross schoolhouse to F. J. Eubanks for $250.
- 1930s
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White Cross School is built as a consolidated brick school
White Cross School, built in 1933, is a brick school with four large classrooms split by an auditorium in the middle. The form names it one of the county's two best examples of the larger central schools that replaced one- and two-room schools during consolidation.
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White Cross School burns and the board orders a new building
The board learned in April 1933 that the White Cross school building had been destroyed by fire and authorized a new one for $10,859. At the same meeting it set aside $3,325 for two new rooms at Efland.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
- 1940s
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Superintendent Proffit's $1 million school bond pays for a new Efland school for Black children and county lunchrooms
The $1,000,000 school bond passed under Superintendent Glenn T. Proffit paid for grounds and a building for the Efland school for Black children, an addition to Hillsboro High School, and lunchrooms at Aycock, Efland, West Hillsborough and White Cross. It also bought a cannery and gymnasium at Aycock and a remodeling and auditorium at Caldwell.
- 1950s
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The Parkvue Drive-In Theatre opens west of Carrboro
The Parkvue, a drive-in theater for 280 cars on the Greensboro highway (N.C. 54) west of Carrboro, opened with two evening showings of Three Little Girls in Blue. J. W. Thompson and C. M. Rumley owned and ran it.
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White Cross voters turn down a merger with the Chapel Hill schools a second time
White Cross voters defeated a merger of their school into the Chapel Hill city district, 116 to 110, a year after Carrboro had joined it; a first vote had failed in May 1958. A third vote failed in the spring of 1960, and the county closed the school in 1961. The county board sold the White Cross property to Edmiston Realty Company for $14,900 in 1967.
- 1960s
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Black parents at White Cross ask to send their children to White Cross School
The parents of 23 Black children living near White Cross applied to move them from the Hillsboro Negro elementary school, a long daily bus ride away, to the white school in their own community. Most of the children had gone to school in Chapel Hill until White Cross voters again turned down a merger with the Chapel Hill district in 1960.
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The county school board refuses the White Cross transfer requests
The Orange County Board of Education turned down the Black families' request, saying no reassignment had been asked for within ten days of the parents being notified of their children's school.
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Floyd McKissick represents the White Cross children at a school board hearing
At a hearing on the transfers, the children were represented by Durham attorney Floyd McKissick; the county board denied them again, reading a statement it had prepared before the hearing began.
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The school board's lawyer advises closing White Cross School rather than fight the case
A. H. Graham, attorney for the county board, told it the transfer fight could not be won and recommended shutting White Cross School instead.
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The county board votes to close White Cross School and send its white pupils to Hillsborough
Rather than admit the Black children, the Orange County school board decided to close White Cross School at the end of the school year and move its 75 white pupils to Cameron Park School in West Hillsboro, a step it tied to its ten-year building program.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
- 1990s
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The state places rural Orange County houses, churches, schools and districts on the Study List
On July 8, 1993, after the survey of the rural county, the National Register Advisory Committee placed 23 rural Orange County properties on the state Study List: eighteen farmhouses and log houses, the Carr Methodist and Harmony churches, White Cross School, and the Cedar Grove and Oaks Rural historic districts.
- 2000s
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The Cates-Dodson-Minnis House joins the Study List
The National Register Advisory Committee placed the Cates-Dodson-Minnis farmhouse west of Chapel Hill on North Carolina's Study List, its list of properties likely to qualify for the National Register.
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Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated October 2, 2026.
