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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1910s
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Charlotte Hawkins Brown starts the clubwomen's drive for a home for delinquent Black girls
As president of the North Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown of Palmer Memorial Institute began a public campaign in late 1919 for a reformatory for Black girls, the same year the legislature set up juvenile courts. The drive led to the Efland Home in western Orange County.
- 1920s
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Black clubwomen buy the Forrest farm at Efland for their home for girls
The North Carolina federation of Black women's clubs, led by Charlotte Hawkins Brown, bought the 143-acre farm of S. C. and Carrie Forrest at Efland as the site of its industrial home for Black girls. Plans for the first building were drawn that September, and the federation deeded the land to the home's trustees on August 3, 1922.
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Plans are drawn for the first cottage of the Efland Home
In a letter of September 5, 1921, to state welfare commissioner Kate Burr Johnson, Charlotte Hawkins Brown reported that plans were under way for a cottage at the Efland site estimated at $5,000. The architect is not known, but the finished building follows a professional drawing except for its weatherboard walls, which replaced brick to save money.
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Black clubwomen sell two-cent stamps across the state to build the first cottage at Efland
The state federation of Black women's clubs, led by Charlotte Hawkins Brown, sold two-cent stamps across the state in November 1922 to raise $5,000 for the first cottage of the North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls at Efland, on land it had bought the year before.
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Black clubwomen open the North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls at Efland
After years of fundraising, the North Carolina federation of Black women's clubs led by Charlotte Hawkins Brown opened a home and school for Black girls on a 143-acre farm on US 70 at Efland. The state gave only occasional small grants; the federation's board voted in October 1938 to close within five months, and the home closed on March 15, 1939. The state later opened a training school for Black girls, first at Rocky Mount and then at Dobbs Farm near Kinston.
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The state farm census records the Efland Home's first crops
The 1925 North Carolina farm census found the Efland Home's farm manager, staff and girls working 33 acres of corn, tobacco, wheat, cotton and Irish potatoes. Within a year the home was also keeping pigs, chickens and dairy cows for its own table.
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Contractor James Henry Liner and others finish the Efland Home cottage
By May 1925, when the clubwomen marked its completion at their annual meeting in Wilson, a one-story weatherboarded cottage with a hip roof stood on the Efland farm, built for about $4,600 by contractors including James Henry Liner of Cedar Grove. It held a classroom-living room, dormitory rooms, matrons' quarters, dining room and kitchen; a Greensboro firm added a pump and Delco generator house, and Efland merchant S. C. Forrest drilled the well and held the mortgage.
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The Efland Home takes in thirty girls in two years under matron Mary E. Hill
Juvenile courts had sent twelve girls to Efland by 1926. Between July 1, 1926, and June 30, 1928, matron Mary E. Hill, who had worked at the Virginia home for Black girls, cared for thirty; seven ran away and seventeen remained, more than the cottage's fifteen places.
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The General Assembly votes $2,000 for the Efland home for Black girls
The 1927 legislature added $2,000 for the Efland school for delinquent Black girls to its appropriations bill on the House floor. The clubwomen had asked the state to take the home over entirely, which it did not do.
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The Efland Home's farm cuts its yearly cost per girl
The home's 1928-1929 report showed the girls working ten acres, 24 fruit trees and a small stock of mule, cows, hogs and chickens, which helped bring the cost per resident down from about $598 in 1928 to $182.50 in 1929. That year fifteen girls were paroled and eleven placed in working homes; assistant matron Margaret Cromwell taught classes and Mebane physician Thomas David Tyson came when needed.
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Marie Clay Clinton of Charlotte becomes interim superintendent of the Efland Home
Marie Clay Clinton, a Charlotte widow active in the federation's work but not a trained teacher or social worker, was named interim superintendent in December 1929. Her assistant Bertha Vincent, a Scotia Seminary graduate, taught the classes, and both women served as house mothers.
- 1930s
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The Efland Home's eighteen girls come from ten counties across the state
In 1930 the home held eighteen girls, all committed by juvenile courts, from Buncombe, Carteret, Durham, Forsyth, Guilford, Mecklenburg, Pasquotank, Robeson, Vance and Wake counties; Durham sent the most, five. It was then one of ten such institutions for Black girls in the United States.
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University students plant donated fruit trees and grapevines at the Efland Home
In the spring of 1930 Lindley Nurseries gave the Efland Home 75 fruit trees and 25 grapevines, and University of North Carolina students set them out on the farm.
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John Henry Blue and his wife take charge of the Efland Home
John Henry Blue and his wife ran the Efland Home in 1931-1932 with a second matron. The farm then had forty acres in cultivation and supplied beef, pork, chicken, eggs, milk, butter, fruit and vegetables.
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Girls from the Efland Home receive free care at Durham's Lincoln Hospital
In 1934 the Efland Home's residents were treated without charge at Lincoln Hospital, the Black hospital in Durham, where Dr. Stanford Lee Warren, husband of home trustee Julia Warren, had been a founding trustee.
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Certified teacher J. A. Lassiter becomes matron of the Efland Home
J. A. Lassiter, a certified teacher, replaced Sadie F. Powell as matron in May 1934, and her husband took over the farm. That year the girls canned, sewed clothes and bedding, and made cornhusk mattresses, baskets and rag rugs, and the cottage's porch was painted and its floors oiled.
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Hilda C. Allen becomes superintendent of the Efland Home after a poor state report
Following a critical June 1935 state inspection and complaints about the home's management, the board's executive committee met in Durham in July and soon hired Hilda C. Allen as superintendent, keeping Lula Henderson as matron.
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Superintendent Hilda Allen sends the girls' Efland Quartette to sing in local churches
To raise money and show the home's progress, Hilda Allen taught the girls spirituals and arranged for the Efland Quartette to sing at churches around the area during her superintendency.
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Matron Lula B. Henderson and farm manager Lewis Walker are hired at the Efland Home
After J. A. Lassiter's husband was let go in March 1935, the home hired Lula B. Henderson as matron and Lewis Walker to run the farm in April. Henderson's husband, a retired minister living in Chapel Hill, taught the girls under the Emergency Relief Administration's adult education program.
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A state mental health survey finds the Efland Home's building failing its girls
At Hilda Allen's request, the state welfare board's Division of Mental Health studied the home in November 1935. It urged more vocational training, and reported one bathroom for all, a furnace idle every winter because the basement flooded, a pump that often failed, and barbed wire over every window to stop runaways, which it advised removing.
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Hilda Allen resigns as superintendent, leaving Lula Henderson in charge of the Efland Home
Saying she could not handle all her duties, Hilda C. Allen resigned in early May 1937 after making real gains in the home's conditions, and matron Lula Henderson took charge.
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State inspectors find the Efland Home failing and tell its board to fund it or close it
State welfare agents W. C. Ezell and T. L. Grier visited on July 2, 1937, and found the heat, plumbing and building in poor repair, about twenty acres in crops, the only cow dead and the mules unfit. Grier judged the home was not rehabilitating its girls and told the federation's board to raise enough money to fix it or shut it down.
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UNC field work director George H. Lawrence reports the Efland Home's conditions as appalling
After a visit in April 1938, George H. Lawrence, field work director at the University of North Carolina, wrote to the state welfare director that the home was doing more harm than good and that the girls would be better fed in a county jail. Gifts from churches and neighbors had not kept up with the girls' needs.
- 1940s
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The Black women's clubs pay off the last of the Efland Home's debt
Four years after the home closed, the North Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs cleared its remaining debt on the Efland reformatory in 1943, the year the legislature voted $25,000 for a state-run training school for Black girls.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
- 1950s
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Efland Home trustees sell the old reformatory farm to W. G. Fields Jr. and Nannette Fields
After nearly two decades of unknown use, the home's trustees sold the Efland property on April 29, 1957, to W. G. Fields Jr. and his wife Nannette, Chapel Hill investors, who cut the land west of the cottage into eight tracts between Redman Crossing and what is now I-40. The federation later gave about $12,000 from the sale toward a chapel at Dobbs School near Kinston.
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James and Myrtle Graham, a Black Efland couple, buy the old Efland Home cottage
In December 1959 James Nills Graham, called Nello, and Myrtle McAdoo Graham, both raised on Efland farms, bought the former reformatory cottage and 2.4 acres, and the Graham family kept it for more than fifty years. They belonged to White Cross A.M.E. Church and are buried there.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
- 2010s
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Mary E. Grant buys the Efland Home cottage at the Graham estate sale
After an auction held to settle James Barnard Graham's estate, Mary E. Grant bought the cottage and its 2.4 acres on November 13, 2013; the building was nominated to the National Register four years later.
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The North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls at Efland joins the Study List
Orange County submitted the Study List application for the former Efland home with the owner's knowledge, and the committee approved it with the other central region requests on February 9, 2017. A member asked whether the grounds had been assessed for archaeology; none had.
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The North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls is listed in the National Register
On January 25, 2018 the National Park Service listed the North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls near Efland in the National Register of Historic Places.
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