Storyline
The county’s campaign to raise farm family income and improve homes and communities: neighborhood surveys and leaders, the prize nights for white and Black farm families, and Orange’s two County of the Year titles in 1953 and 1954.
In briefOrange County joined the state Rural Progress campaign in September 1951, aiming to add $1,000 to each farm family's income and to improve every home and community. County workers enlisted more than 100 white neighborhood leaders and Black captains to survey farm families, and Lincoln High's agriculture department began the program among Black families around Chapel Hill. Separate prize nights for white and Black farm families followed each year. Orange was named the state's County of the Year in December 1953 and won the division for Black families in February 1954. Successor programs followed in 1955 and 1957, and Cedar Grove won the silver loving cup for Black families in 1957 and 1958.
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No works in the index are currently linked directly to this storyline. The works below provide background on Farms & Rural Life.
Farm, civic and church leaders launched Orange County's part in the state Rural Progress campaign in September 1951, aiming to add $1,000 to each farm family's income and to improve every home and community. County workers enlisted more than 100 white neighborhood leaders and Black captains to survey farm families, and Lincoln High's agriculture department began the program among Black families around Chapel Hill. Separate prize nights for white and Black farm families followed each year. Orange was named the state's County of the Year in Rural Progress in December 1953 and won the Negro division in February 1954, and the farm leaders gave part of the prize money to landscape the old courthouse grounds. In 1955 a Farm and Home Efficiency Program took its place. A Blue Ribbon Farm and Home Program followed in 1957, with ribbons for families meeting 18 of its 25 goals, and the programs for Black families went on: Cedar Grove won their silver loving cup in 1957 and 1958, and Orange placed second in the state's contest for 1958.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 21 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 the 2 with a known location.
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 Farms & Rural Life. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Bland Simpson's memoir of country life in the Clover Garden community of Orange County, in the North Carolina Piedmont, published by UNC Press in 2024. Short chapters take in cabin life, neighbors like the Binghams and Mr. Stacy, hounds, owls and turkeys, an auction, Merritt's and Lewis Allen's store, the sculptor of White Cross School, Maple View, Saxapahaw, the Devil's Tramping Ground, storms and snows, and a carol for Cane Creek. 182 pages with illustrations.
Companion picture book about Minnie the collie by Courtney Soling Smith, again from the Orange County Historical Museum in 2022, following an African American farm family in Cedar Grove Township. Thirty-seven unnumbered pages, chiefly color illustrations, with a facsimile. Written for children, with the museum's local history interest behind it.
Two-page profile of farming and local food in Orange County from NC Cooperative Extension, 2017, drawing on the 2012 and 2017 USDA agricultural census figures. It came out of NC State Extension's Local Foods Program and FarmLink.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Photobook from a June 2017 workshop at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University in which thirteen participants, from teenagers to retirees, photographed farms in Orange and Alamance counties. Each farm gets a section by one or two of them: Braeburn Farm at Snow Camp, Cane Creek Farm at Saxapahaw, Dawnbreaker Farms at Hurdle Mills, Maple View Farm at Hillsborough, McAdams Farm and others, in color photographs and portraits of the farmers. Published in Durham in 2017, 89 unnumbered pages.
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.
Cindy Econopouly's 2013 story for beginning readers about the cats at Eco Farm in Chapel Hill, with colors as a second theme.
Raised in Orange County's Cane Creek community, Nancy Holt became one of its organizers when the Orange Water and Sewer Authority planned a reservoir there. Interviewed alongside Brian Holt by Frances E. Webb in October 1985, she describes farm life, the school and church that held the community together, how scattered neighbors cooperated, and the environmental and social costs residents expected from the reservoir. Runs about two and a half hours; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2007, through Documenting the American South.
Sam Crawford (born 1949) helped found Cane Creek Conservation Authority, the residents' group formed in 1975 to fight plans by OWASA, the Chapel Hill area's water utility, for a reservoir on Cane Creek in rural Orange County. In this October 1985 interview with Judith Wheeler, joined by Patty Crawford, he recounts how residents learned of the plan and organized, and the environmental and water-supply arguments on each side. A little over two hours; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2007, through Documenting the American South.
Dairy farmer Bobby Kirk, who led the conservation authority formed at Cane Creek, describes the fight against the Cane Creek Reservoir, proposed for southwestern Orange County. In this Southern Oral History Program interview, recorded October 28, 1985, by K. Campbell, Kirk explains why he and neighboring farmers opposed the project, how residents first organized against it, and his view that the reservoir was badly planned. Just over an hour long. Published online in 2005 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Joe Liles's 2004 maps of Fish Dam Road, tracing its course across Durham, Orange, Granville and Wake counties.
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.
Design manual from the Orange County Planning Department, dated June 20, 1996, setting out flexible development standards meant to preserve the county's rural character. Topics include land subdivision, rural land use, the environmental aspects of land use and open space in Orange County. Published in Hillsborough, one volume in various pagings with illustrations.
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