Bank of Chapel Hill: photographs (Chapel Hill Historical Society)
Two 1928 images of the Bank of Chapel Hill: an interior view of the teller desks and a bank advertisement printed alongside one for the telephone directory.
Storyline · 1923–1927
In 1923 the Bank of Chapel Hill backed the Chapel Hill high school's purebred Jersey program, and that fall Jersey owners in the southern half of the county formed a breeders' club. Federal inspectors found no tuberculosis in the town's dairy herds that summer, a result the Weekly credited to the town's testing rule. In 1924 the first county poultry show formed a poultry breeders' association, and in 1925 the Lloyds' large incubator at Sunnyside began hatching farmers' eggs. That year the county joined the federal and state campaign to rid its cattle of tuberculosis and Chapel Hill began grading its dairies under the state milk ordinance, and in 1927 a federal inspector tested more than 400 cows in the town's dairies.
By January 18, 1923 the Bank of Chapel Hill had offered to furnish capital for the better livestock campaign of the agriculture boys in the Chapel Hill high school. Two young bulls, four heifers and a cow came into the county as foundation animals, and the plan was to put a registered Jersey bull in every community of Chapel Hill and Bingham townships. From July 9 to 12 two United States veterinary inspectors, in a test arranged by town health officer S. A. Nathan, gave the tuberculin test to about 250 cows in the ten dairies supplying Chapel Hill milk. The Weekly reported that not one cow was found infected and credited the town's rule that every cow selling milk in town be tested. In mid-November Jersey owners from the southern half of the county met at a supper in the Chapel Hill school and formed the Orange County Jersey Breeders Club, with Harmon McIver as president. The News tied the club to the 37 farmers whom the high school's agriculture teacher had helped buy purebred Jersey cattle costing more than $6,000. In December W. G. Neville, who delivered milk in Carrboro each morning, built a concrete-floored milking house and a separate house for sterilizing bottles and cooling milk on his farm beyond Calvander.
On February 23, 1924 exhibitors at the county poultry show in Hillsborough, which the Weekly called the first of its kind in Orange, formed the Orange County Poultry Breeders' Association, with George C. Wall as president and R. P. Harris as acting secretary. By September 25 a census by Chapel Hill's health department counted 40 cows inside the town and 199 on the seven dairy farms that sold its milk, and Nathan was testing each dairy's milk at least every ten days. On January 27, 1925 the 4,608-egg incubator that Paul Lloyd and his sons built at Sunnyside, west of Chapel Hill, hatched its first set, and farmers brought their eggs to be hatched for a fee. On August 3, after the farmers present voted 91 to 1 for it, the county commissioners voted $1,500 as Orange's share of testing its cattle for tuberculosis; infected cows were to be killed, with two-thirds indemnity from the state and nation. On September 1 Nathan announced the first grades under the State Board of Health's standard milk ordinance, which Chapel Hill had adopted in place of its old dairy rules, and six dairies made grade A. On August 30 and 31, 1927 Dr. A. A. Husman, a federal inspector, gave the tuberculin test to more than 400 cows in the dairies selling milk in Chapel Hill.
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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, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Two 1928 images of the Bank of Chapel Hill: an interior view of the teller desks and a bank advertisement printed alongside one for the telephone directory.
Newspaper clippings, photocopied articles and a report with notes on the Bank of Chapel Hill, undated, from the Businesses series of the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Vertical File Collection.
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Jean Bradley Anderson's history of the Bennehan and Cameron families and their plantations, Stagville and Fairntosh, on lands that lay in Orange County until Durham County was formed from it in 1881. Published by the Historic Preservation Society of Durham in 1985, the book follows plantation life and ownership across several generations, with genealogical tables, a map, portraits, a bibliography and an index; 227 pages plus plates.
Reviewed in South Atlantic Quarterly (1987).
Sydney Nathans's history of a Black community in Hale County, Alabama, whose founders were enslaved people sent there before the Civil War from the Cameron family's plantations in Orange County, North Carolina. Instead of following the Great Migration out of the South, this group stayed, moved from bondage to owning the land they had worked, and held onto it across generations. Published 2017, 342 pages with plates and maps; this is the e-book edition.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (2017), Journal of Social History (2017), London review of books (2017), The Journal of the Civil War Era (2018), The Journal of Southern History (2018), Environmental History (2018), The Alabama review (2019), The Oral History Review (2019), The Register - Kentucky Historical Society/The register of the Kentucky Historical Society (2020).
Herbert G. Gutman's 1976 history of African American families from 1750 to 1925, published by Pantheon Books in New York, 664 pages with 38 leaves of plates. Its Orange County connection is the Bennehan and Cameron family plantations, Stagville and Fairntosh: the book discusses the people enslaved by Richard Bennehan (1743-1825) and the Camerons, and follows family ties among them under slavery and after emancipation. Subjects include African American families and enslaved persons in Orange County.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1977), The William and Mary Quarterly (1977), The American Historical Review (1977), Journal of American History (1977), The History Teacher (1977), Political Science Quarterly (1977), Journal of Black Psychology (1978), Journal of Social History (1978), Civil War history (1978), Signs (1978).
Rachel Frankel's Duke University honors paper of 1984 on the Couch tract in the Durham Division of Duke Forest, a history of agricultural land use from 1750 to 1950. The Couch family, family farms and rural land use in Orange County are its subjects. A photocopied typescript, 97 leaves with maps and a bibliography.
Evan P. Bennett returns to the photographs Marion Post Wolcott made in 1939 in Cedar Grove, a Black farming neighborhood in northern Orange County that she documented for the federal resettlement program. Published in 2025 by the Historical Research Office in Raleigh, pages 384 to 406, with illustrations and portraits. Topics include rural African Americans in the Cedar Grove township and photographers in the state.
A tour guidebook prepared for the 2016 Vernacular Architecture Forum conference in Durham, leading visitors through buildings in Orange and Caswell counties. It takes in the architecture of the bright leaf tobacco economy and the work of Thomas Day, the free Black cabinetmaker of Caswell County who worked in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Joe Liles's interviews with longtime residents of Fish Dam Road, an old rural road in Durham County, recorded in 2004, with subjects tied to both Durham and Orange counties. The interviewees are Charles Scott Harkey, Mary Scarlett Jones, Boyce Link and John Scarlett, all born between 1912 and 1920, and the topics include country life, the road's history and the Duke Power Company.
Richard L. Bushman looks at the county court of Orange County and the farmers who came before it between 1750 and 1776, a period that in this county included the Regulator insurrection of 1766 to 1771. Published in 2001 as pages 388 to 413 of a larger volume. Topics include courts, farmers and eighteenth century law in the county.
AlexSandra Lett's family history and memoir of country life around a Lee County store, subtitled Lett's set a spell at the country store. Published in 2000, it includes anecdotes of the Lett family and of Sanford and Lee County, North Carolina.
Megan Elizabeth Greene's 1998 study of smoking pipes recovered from three Native American communities in the North Carolina Piedmont dating between about 1400 and 1700. The evidence includes material excavated at Hillsborough in Orange County. The study also concerns tobacco use among Indigenous peoples of North America. Bibliography on leaves 35 to 36.
Bradley J. Lambert's study of the fiddler Joe Thompson and the Black communities of the rural Piedmont, covering music and daily life in Orange County in the early twentieth century. Seventy-seven leaves with a bibliography, completed in 1998. Topics include African American musicians in the county and African American history there.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “Breeding and testing the county's dairy cattle and poultry, 1923–1927.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/dairy-poultry-breeding-storyline-1923/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
