Local theme
Where people lived and were kept from living: Black neighborhoods, segregated housing, campus expansion, and the fight to stay.
401 indexed records are connected with this theme.
Narrow the indexed records. Each link opens the search already limited to this theme. Counts are indexed records, not copies on a shelf.
Named events and episodes the index follows in detail. Each has its own page.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. The first group is the works most libraries hold on this theme, novels aside; the second is what the index added most recently. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
History of the Rogers Road neighborhood of Orange County, N.C., and discussion of the effects of a landfill built near the neighborhood.
"The Kings Mill-Morgan Creek History Project began in June 2014 with a request on our email listserv for neighbors to share their favorite stories and memories about life in the neighborhood. Soon we began hearing from …
The Council on the Status of Women started as the Governor’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1963 by Governor James Terry Sanford. The Commission was responsible for reviewing areas where women were likely to suf…
Materials gathered from residents and the neighborhood association for The Copperline Chronicles (Chapel Hill Historical Society, 2020), 3 boxes.
Foundational works for this theme in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection: broad histories, major interpretations, primary-source collections, and reference compilations, chosen by the Friends from the collection’s catalog.
No title directly promises a history of Orange County housing segregation, neighborhood displacement, campus expansion, or residents' fights to remain. One of the clearest collection gaps.
Dated events connected with this theme: sixteen of 178, the highlights and the earliest of the rest, in date order. See all 178 in the chronology →
The house on Purefoy Road, on land now owned by St. Paul AME Church, dates to the 1840s and stood on the Hogan plantation, where enslaved people lived in its basement. INDY Week reported in 2012 that many Rogers-Eubanks residents descend from people held on the plantation.
After emancipation, Black families kept homes and small farms on Chapel Hill's west end. St. Paul's congregation, first gathered under an arbor in December 1864, built a log church on Merritt Mill Road and bought land in 1878, and in 1866 Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal bought an acre nearby for a freedmen's school.
At an estate auction in January 1866 Benjamin Craig, a local farmer, and Green Cordal, a formerly enslaved minister, bought one acre opposite the northwest end of Franklin Street for fifty dollars, and by August 1867 had conveyed it to three Philadelphia Friends for the relief of colored freedmen. The Friends sent George Dixon and his family to run the school, which stood at what is now 100 Merritt Mill Road on the edge of Northside.
Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 9 events
People: Green Cordal · Benjamin Craig
By the late nineteenth century the area between Homestead and Eubanks roads, north of Carrboro and Chapel Hill, was a neighborhood of Black-owned family farms and sawmills set among forest. RENA and the Town of Carrboro both date settlement of the wider area to the 1700s.
The Strayhorns built a one-room log cabin at what is now 109 Jones Ferry Road, and their son William built the house next door at 107 in 1915. Toney Strayhorn is remembered as a founder of First Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, and the house is still owned by a great-granddaughter.
Chapel Hill members of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church, who had worshipped at Hamlet Chapel in Pittsboro, formed their own congregation named for founder Henry Cotton. Its first building later burned and was rebuilt as a frame church.
Lloyd built the Alberta Cotton Mill beside the railroad in West End in 1898 and 1899, the brick mill that later became Durham Hosiery Mill No. 4 and then Carr Mill Mall.
Part of From West End to Carrboro: railroad, mills, and a new town, 1882–1913 · 6 events
People: Julian S. Carr · Thomas F. Lloyd (Carrboro mill builder)
Paid for by a $35,000 bond, a new Chapel Hill Graded School building designed by Hook and Rogers was finished on West Franklin Street in spring 1916. It housed white elementary and high school students, and Chapel Hill High School counts 1916 as its founding year, though its classes predate the building.
Subject: Chapel Hill High School
Louis Hackney had opened Hackney's Educational and Industrial School for Black students in 1913. In 1916 he sold the property to the Chapel Hill School District trustees for $2,300, and the school was renamed Orange County Training School with a Mr. Malone as principal.
People: Louis H. Hackney
Cheek began working for the university as a boy, helping his father Rubin Cheek, a stonemason born in slavery in Warren County, lay the stone walls around the campus. Around 1920 he joined the janitorial staff of Venable Hall.
Luther R. Hargraves, a carpenter and Chapel Hill's first African American mortician, built a row of houses with tin roofs on Hargraves Street near the railroad tracks behind St. Paul AME, and the cluster became known as Tin Top or Tin Top Alley.
The Junior Order of Gimghouls subdivided its land east of campus into house lots, with a plat recorded in Orange County Plat Book 1, page 51. The original deed covenants carried the racial restrictions standard for the period, along with setbacks and a requirement that the order review house plans.
Cheek's daughter Marian Cheek Jackson said he was instrumental in negotiating the 1924 land swap that moved Hackney's Educational and Industrial School from South Merritt Mill Road into the Northside community.
James Lewis Cates Jr., 22, a Black Chapel Hill resident, was stabbed outside the UNC Student Union shortly before 2 a.m. during an all-night dance, in a clash with members of Durham's Storm Troopers motorcycle gang, and died at North Carolina Memorial Hospital. Three white men charged in his death were acquitted by an all-white jury in 1971.
Part of Killing of James Cates, 1970
In 1972 officials placed the county landfill on Eubanks Road beside the historically Black Rogers Road community, promising it would run about ten years. It was expanded instead and did not close until 2013, and residents' organizing through the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association helped win a sewer line for the neighborhood, completed in 2019.
Chantal dropped up to 10 inches of rain on Orange County on the night of July 6, 2025. Chapel Hill crews made more than 50 water rescues around Camelot Village and Eastgate Crossing, Carrboro's Weatherhill Pointe flooded, and the Eno at Hillsborough set a record crest on July 7. The county declared an emergency that day.
Background from selected state and local sources
Maps, surveys, and the ground itself
Other catalogs, databases, and guides worth searching
Local organizations that preserve the story and can help you go further
Other catalogs to search and local organizations that can help.
More to discover
The Friends connects people with new library materials, local writers and publishers, and resources documenting Orange County.
