Storyline · 1920–1932
Falling cotton prices and the boll weevil turned farmers in southern Orange County to dairying in the 1920s, and the price of Chapel Hill's milk twice went before citizens' committees. After the high school's agriculture teacher helped 37 farmers buy purebred Jersey cattle, they formed a breeders' club. By 1927 C. H. Weaver had built a pasteurizing plant at his Oak Grove Dairy, and a government inspector tested more than 400 cows for tuberculosis. When the dairymen together raised milk from 15 to 20 cents a quart in 1928, wide protest brought agreement on 17 1/2 cents. In 1932 a second committee recommended 12 1/2 cents, though the aldermen set no price.
The boll weevil, a beetle that attacks cotton, hit Orange County hard in the 1920s, and with cotton prices falling from over thirty cents a pound in the 1910s to ten cents by 1932, farmers in the southern part of the county turned to dairying. After the Chapel Hill high school's agriculture teacher helped 37 farmers buy purebred Jersey cattle, the buyers formed the Orange County Jersey Breeders Club, the News reported in February 1924, and a cream route followed, with about twenty members shipping sour cream weekly to a creamery. West of Carrboro, Jesse Nevilles turned the family's log homestead farm into a dairy, adding a cow barn in 1924 and a milking barn in 1925.
By August 1927 C. H. Weaver had built a brick pasteurizing plant at his Oak Grove Dairy northeast of Chapel Hill, at a cost of about $10,000, with a bottling machine and a laboratory for daily milk tests, and began selling pasteurized and lactic acid milk in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. On August 30 and 31, 1927 Dr. A. A. Husman, a United States government inspector, gave the tuberculin test, a skin test for tuberculosis, to more than 400 cows in the dairies selling milk in Chapel Hill, and told the town health officer, Dr. S. A. Nathan, that he found them in good condition as to cleanliness. By September 2 the Durham health officer had permitted Weaver's dairy to sell Grade A milk in Durham.
On January 1, 1928 all the dairymen serving Chapel Hill raised the price of milk together from 15 to 20 cents a quart, citing dearer feed and cows and new pasteurizing and cooling equipment, and after wide protest they agreed at a joint meeting with the mayor's citizens' committee on January 20 to sell milk at 17 1/2 cents a quart for three months. In early 1932 a second committee, named by Mayor Zeb Council and chaired by D. D. Carroll, heard the dairymen, the Durham Road Dairy and several smaller dairies cut their prices from February 1, and on February 10 the committee recommended 12 1/2 cents a quart for raw and pasteurized milk, though the aldermen set no price.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
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.
A printed petition addressed to Dudley DeWitt Carroll granting the authority to organize a chapter of Beta Gamma Sigma, the business honor society, at the University of North Carolina. The seal was affixed on the twentieth day of February 1933, and the document was produced by the Chas. A. Belz Co. of Philadelphia. Topics include Greek letter societies in Chapel Hill.
Records of the School of Commerce at the University of North Carolina for 1920 to 1929, including its Administrative Board. Subjects include Dudley Dewitt Carroll, cover business education at Chapel Hill and the university's curricula, and connect the school to the later history of the Kenan-Flagler Business School. In the University Archives at UNC, collection 40045.
A 1967 audiocassette about earlier Chapel Hill, concerning town history and social life. The people identified with the recording are Congressman Carl Thomas Durham, Samuel Huntington Hobbs and university chancellor Robert Burton House.
Scrapbook following the construction and launch of the S.S. Chapel Hill Victory, a Second World War cargo ship that carried the town's name, launched on 4 December 1944. Baltimore figures in the story, as do Congressman Carl T. Durham and Robert W. Madry. From the North Carolina Memory collection.
Photographs of the Army-Navy E ceremony in Memorial Hall, Chapel Hill, on 22 January 1943, the first such award in North Carolina during World War II. They show officers of the Pre-Flight School and of National Munitions Corporation, the audience and the presentation. Governor J. Melville Broughton, Josephus Daniels, Carl T. Durham and Frank Porter Graham are among those pictured.
A cassette recording of Carl Durham speaking with the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 1972. Part of its CHHS.012 Audiovisual Materials 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. “Dairying and clean milk around Chapel Hill, 1920–1932.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/dairying-storyline-1920/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
