Chronology

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1. Colonial and Regulator years · 1600–1774

2. c. 1000–1600
   Migration or settlement · Eno River valley Indigenous communities occupy the Eno River Valley

   Excavations at the Hogue and Wall sites on the Eno near Hillsborough show farming communities growing corn, beans and squash, first in small scattered settlements (Haw River phase, about 1000–1400) and then in compact palisaded villages (Hillsboro phase, about 1400–1600). The Wall site village held perhaps 100 to 150 people in the mid-1400s.

3. 1680–2024
   Storyline · 51 events · Orange County Occaneechi Town and the Great Trading Path

   Occaneechi Town on the Eno, occupied from about 1680 to 1710, was where John Lawson stopped in 1701 on the trading path that ran from Virginia to the Catawba. Archaeologists located the village at the Fredricks site in 1983, and the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, recognized by the state in 2002, rebuilt a replica village there and dedicated a highway marker in 2024.

4. c. 1680–1710
   Migration or settlement · Hillsborough The Occaneechi settle on the Eno near Hillsborough

   After leaving the Roanoke River valley in 1676, the Occaneechi built a town on the Eno River near present-day Hillsborough and lived there from about 1680 to 1710. It was a small stockaded village of ten or twelve houses and probably fewer than 75 people, and it was the town John Lawson visited in 1701. Archaeologists dug the whole village between 1983 and 1986 at a place they named the Fredricks site, and they call this period of Occaneechi life on the Eno the Fredricks phase.

5. 1701
   Life event · Eno River John Lawson reached Occaneechi Town on the Eno and wrote about its people and the trading path

   John Lawson visited Occaneechi Town on the Eno.

6. Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865

7. 1844 to 1856
   Slavery and freedom · Stagville and Fairntosh plantations, Orange County (Durham County since 1881) Paul C. Cameron sends enslaved people from the family farms to cotton plantations in Alabama and Mississippi

   Paul C. Cameron bought a cotton plantation in Greene County, Alabama, in 1844 and land for another in Tunica County, Mississippi, in 1856, and sent more than 100 enslaved men and women from the family's North Carolina farms to them.

8. 1850s
   Construction or physical change · Horton Grove, Stagville, Orange County (Durham County since 1881) Paul C. Cameron builds new quarters for enslaved families at Horton Grove

   In the decade before the Civil War Paul C. Cameron began a building campaign at the family's Horton Grove farm near Stagville. Four of the dwellings built to house families the Camerons enslaved still stand.

9. Early twentieth century · 1900–1944

10. 1938–1941
    Hillsborough Archaeologists excavate the wall site believing it to be Occaneechi Town

    Joffre Coe began digging a village site on a bend of the Eno at Hillsborough in 1938 in the belief that it was the town John Lawson visited in 1701, and Robert Wauchope carried the work on in 1940 and 1941 with federal funding. A state highway marker for the Occaneechi village was erected at Hillsborough in 1941. The village Coe had found was in fact an earlier settlement of about 1400 to 1600.

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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 4, 2026.