Named event or history
The crossroads communities north of Hillsborough: Cedar Grove, Efland, Caldwell, their farms, stores, churches, and schools, and the families who held the land.
82 indexed records are connected with this event.
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Data from 2017 & 2012 USDA Census
Braeburn Farm, Snow Camp, Alamance County / Melissa Brady -- Cane Creek Farm, Saxapahaw, Alamance County, Paul Bieber and Tom Simon -- Dawnbreaker Farms, Hurdle Mills, Orange County / Ellie Marshall and Madeline Wentz -…
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 17, the highlights and the earliest of the rest, in date order. See all 17 in the chronology →
The congregation first worshiped near the river, southeast of Cedar Grove.
John S. Pope, a Confederate captain, and his wife Mary Jane McDade Pope built a two-story I-house on land she inherited from her father's estate in 1869; it was likely finished by 1874, when her brother's share brought the tract to about 73 acres. Tobacco was the farm's main cash crop, and its oldest surviving barn dates to about 1875.
Subject: John S. Pope Farm
The loss preceded relocation to Cedar Grove.
The replacement church was constructed over three years.
Allen A. Ellis built a new crossroads store.
Thirty residents of the Schley farming community north of Hillsborough chartered Schley Grange No. 710, one of five Orange County Granges formed in the state Grange revival of 1929 to 1931. In November the county Board of Education sold the Grange the Schley School building, empty since the county's 1928 school consolidation, for $122.
The stone church replaced earlier facilities serving the congregation.
The 1940 census counted 1,753 Black and 1,671 white residents in Cedar Grove Township, the county's only township with a near-even racial balance, and about three-fourths of the township lived on farms. Nearly half of Orange County's 503 Black-owned farms were in the township, which also had the county's highest share of Black tenant farmers.
For a National Grange and Sears-Roebuck Foundation contest, Schley Grange members cleared right-of-way, cut cedar poles and strung three miles of wire so the telephone company could give service to 51 families; they also held a soil conservation workshop with the extension service. Schley won the national prize in November 1948, and the new brick Grange hall it paid for was dedicated on December 6, 1949 before about five hundred people.
The News of Orange County reported a Farmers Home Administration effort to raise tenant income by adding livestock to tobacco farming. Tenants on the Banks Wilson farm near Cedar Grove added hogs and other animals, and 42 county farm families had FHA operating loans.
Carr Store Road, the east-west road through the Cedar Grove crossroads, was paved in 1958, about a decade after the north-south Efland-Cedar Grove Road. Until then farmers in the area could find farm-to-market roads impassable for months of the year.
The school board voted in 1961 to close the white-only Caldwell School, built in 1925, as desegregation approached. After a plan to send its pupils to Cameron Park in Hillsborough, they were assigned to Aycock School in Cedar Grove by May 1963, and the county could not sell the building until 1973.
When Orange High School opened in 1963, the county consolidated the high school grades of Aycock School in Cedar Grove and Hillsborough High School into it, and the older buildings became junior high or elementary schools. Some Aycock seniors went to Eastern Alamance High School in Mebane, but most went to Orange High.
Under the county's Freedom of Choice plan, three Black families asked for their children to be transferred to the white Aycock School, and on May 20, 1965 the three students were assigned and began attending. United States Marshals escorted at least one of them.
The Caldwell Volunteer Fire Department was incorporated on December 6, 1977 and the Cedar Grove Volunteer Fire Department a week later, on December 13, extending local fire protection across the northern townships.
The National Park Service listed the Dr. Arch Jordan House at 7015 NC 57 in Caldwell in the National Register of Historic Places on August 6, 1998, for architecture and social history. The Italianate house, built between 1875 and 1885 and home to physician Arch Jordan until 1905, served as a manse for three churches from 1905 to 1929.
Subject: Arch Jordan House
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Held in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection. Selected because their titles or catalog subjects provide wider historical context for this event; they may not discuss the Orange County event directly.
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