Storyline
The fights over where Orange County’s new hard-surfaced roads would run after the 1921 Highway Act: the eastern and western routes from Chapel Hill to Hillsboro, Hillsborough’s protests against the Central Highway route north of the courthouse, the Eno bridge, and John Sprunt Hill burned in effigy.
In briefThe route of the Central Highway, the trunk road of the state network paid for by the 1921 Highway Act that Harriet Morehead Berry of Hillsborough championed, set off a fight in Orange County. In August 1921 the county commissioners weighed eastern and western 'Frog Pond' routes, and eastern Chapel Hill township residents demanded County Attorney A. H. Graham's discharge. In November a Hillsborough mass meeting resolved to fight the State Highway Commission's plan to carry the highway north of the courthouse. A Hillsborough group protested in Raleigh on March 1, 1922, Commissioner John Sprunt Hill was burned in effigy the next day, and the town board vowed to keep fighting in the state courts.
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The 1921 Highway Act, championed by Harriet Morehead Berry of Hillsborough, paid for a state highway network whose trunk route, the Central Highway, ran through Hillsborough. On August 1, 1921 the county commissioners took up the route of the hard-surfaced road from Chapel Hill to Hillsboro, with Solicitor S. M. Gattis arguing for an eastern route against backers of the western 'Frog Pond' route. On County Attorney A. H. Graham's advice the board referred the matter to John Sprunt Hill and withdrew its promise of a sand-clay road on the eastern route, and on August 5 eastern Chapel Hill township residents met at the Blackwood school house and demanded Graham's discharge. On November 21 a Hillsborough mass meeting, led by commissioners' chairman Ralph Ward, resolved to fight the State Highway Commission's plan to carry the Central Highway along the old pre-Revolutionary route north of the courthouse instead of the road running due west from it. On February 8, 1922 the commission let a concrete bridge over the Eno at Hillsboro to George W. Kane for $30,651.20. A Hillsborough group protested the route to the commission in Raleigh on March 1, and on March 2 Commissioner Hill was burned in effigy at the railroad station. The town board deplored the burning but said it would keep fighting the route in the state courts.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 8 dated events in the chronology →
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.
Background reading on Law, Courts & Justice. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
An Alex Cross thriller by James Patterson with Chapel Hill among its settings alongside Washington, D.C. Bombings, a kidnapping, a missing-persons investigation, terrorism and fathers and sons are its subjects; the Sampson of the title is Cross's longtime partner John Sampson. Published by Little, Brown in 2026.
David Cook collects the grim side of the Eno River's past in Orange and Durham counties: ghost stories, crimes, train wrecks and accidents, including the hanging of rebels near the river in 1771, a sawmill accident said to have started a run of hauntings, and a dance one Valentine's Day that ended badly. Published by The History Press in 2025, 141 pages with illustrations.
Joanna Pearson's novel of a cold case at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Karlie Richards was a nineteen-year-old student when she was murdered; decades later her onetime roommate, divorced and in middle age, finds herself drawn back to the crime as online conspiracy theories about it multiply. A psychological thriller with a Chapel Hill setting, published by Bloomsbury in 2024, 275 pages.
Rick Jackson's true crime history of Chapel Hill, published by The History Press in 2023, in 28 short chapters. Cases include the Efland bank robbery, the execution of John Henry Breeze, the unsolved murder of Suellen Evans, the killing at the Internationalist Bookstore and the death of Eve Carson.
John Bare's mystery set in Chapel Hill. Lassie James is drinking at the Pig Farm Tavern one October night when Holly Pike, the woman who left him years earlier when they were about to marry and never explained, walks in; before he can settle his feelings she draws him into trouble involving fraud, corruption and a murder that he ends up investigating as an amateur. Published by Wisdom House Books of Chapel Hill in a first edition of 2021, 287 pages.
Patricia S. Parker draws on civil rights organizer Ella Baker (1903-1986) to set out a method of community engagement and communication for social justice work, illustrated by case studies from the Ella Baker Women's Center for Leadership and Community Activism in Chapel Hill. Chapters cover entering into community partnerships, creating participative spaces for organizing, storytelling as leadership, and self-care for activists, with a case study timeline and curriculum overview appended. Published by the University of California Press in 2020, 177 pages.
Charlotte Fryar's 2019 doctoral dissertation on racial justice movements at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1951, the year the university admitted its first Black students, through 2018. Topics include African American students and employees, school desegregation, racial discrimination and activism, and the work belongs to the history of race relations on the Chapel Hill campus.
J. G. Hetherton's mystery novel set in Hillsborough, in which a woman journalist returning home investigates murder and missing children. Published in New York by Crooked Lane in 2018, 312 pages.
Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest, raised in Durham. Its six parts follow a Southern childhood, the move to New York, the 1938 application to the University of North Carolina that was refused because Murray was Black (the chapter is titled 'Members of your race are not admitted'), law school and the coining of the phrase Jane Crow, the Cold War years, the push toward 'an NAACP for women', and a late-life ordination. 494 pages with portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2018).
Jean Bolduc's 2016 collection of interviews with African American residents of Durham and Orange counties, presented as short biographies. The subjects are Floyd McKissick (1922-1991), the first African American admitted to UNC's law school, Walter Jackson, Brenda Stephens, Nate Davis, poet Jaki Shelton Green, Jackie Wagstaff, Diane Wright and Michelle Johnson, with a closing chapter on the Ku Klux Klan. 125 pages with illustrations.
Stewart E. Dunaway's 2015 addendum to his history of Hillsborough's town lots, adding deed records arranged by lot number and further town history, with the expansion of the 1890s covered for the first time. Self-published in North Carolina as version 1.0, 446 pages with illustrations, facsimiles and maps. Topics include deeds, court records, land titles and real property in Hillsborough.
Deed transcripts for the town lots of Chapel Hill and adjoining land from 1790 to the 1930s, compiled by Stewart E. Dunaway. Each transcript keeps only the working facts: grantor and grantee, price, acreage and the metes and bounds of the parcel. Self-published in 2014 as Issue 1G, 702 pages with maps and facsimiles.
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