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Cyrus Guy

Cyrus Guy was a 24-year-old Afro-Indigenous farmer from a free family of color. Around December 1, 1869, masked Klansmen seized him and hanged him on the High Rock Road above the Orange County Poorhouse; he is one of six people documented as lynched in the county.

Source: Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition: Those We Honor

1 indexed work is connected with this person. 1 held at OCPL →

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Indexed works

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Orange County, N.C. Road Records

Dunaway, Stewart E. · 2008

Three volumes of historic Orange County road records compiled by Stewart E. Dunaway and self-published through Lulu.com in 2008, with maps. The documents, reproduced as facsimiles and sometimes transcribed, include petitions for new roads, requests for road upkeep, bridge records and papers explaining why roads were rerouted. Road petitions name the householders along a route. The third volume also gathers records connected with Cyrus Guy's lynching in Orange County in 1869.

✓ Held at OCPL · NC 388.1 ORANGE NC Cardinal Durham

Life and Orange County connections

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Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County1869–1898 · 17 events · Six people are documented as lynched in Orange County: Washington Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, Daniel Morrow, Wright Malone and Cyrus Guy in 1869, and Manly McCauley in 1898. In September 2022 the county commissioners apologized for racial-terror lynchings and approved markers, citing five cases without naming the victims.

Dated events connected with this person, earliest first. See these 3 dated events in the chronology →

  1. Cyrus Guy is lynched by a masked mob in western Orange County A masked mob seized Cyrus Guy, a 24-year-old Afro-Indigenous farmer from a free family of color, and hanged him from a tree on the High Rock Road near the Alamance County line, above the county poorhouse. The Hillsborough Recorder reported that an inquest held under Sheriff Turner found out nothing, and Ben Johnson recalled in 1937 that the body was left hanging for four days. People: Cyrus GuyOrange County Community Remembrance Coalition: Those We Honor
  2. Ben Johnson, born enslaved near Hillsborough, recalls the Klan lynching of Cyrus Guy for a WPA interviewer Interviewed at 85 in Hecktown, Durham, by Federal Writers' Project worker Mary A. Hicks, Johnson said the Ku Klux came for Cy Guy a hundred strong, tried him in the woods and hanged him over the road. He said nobody would touch the body for four days, until the sheriff took it down.Search the index · Library of Congress: Federal Writers' Project Slave Narrative Project, Vol. 11, North Carolina, Part 2 (full text)
  3. Soil collection ceremony at the Orange County courthouse honors Cyrus Guy and four other 1869 lynching victims The Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition held a soil collection ceremony for Washington Morrow, Wright Malone, Daniel Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow and Cyrus Guy, all lynched in 1869. One jar for each man was to go to the Equal Justice Initiative's memorial collection in Montgomery, Alabama, and a second jar was to stay in Orange County. People: Daniel Morrow, Jefferson Morrow, Washington Morrow, Wright Malone, James WilliamsSearch the index · Chapelboro: 'Do Not Forget Us': Soil Collection Ceremony Held for 5 Orange County Lynching Victims (May 1, 2023)

Places in this person’s story

Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows them all.

Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange and OpenStreetMap; town and community pins mark the middle of their mapped buildings.

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