Storyline
How Orange County began closing its one- and two-teacher schools and hauling children to larger ones: the first school trucks to Chapel Hill, Claytor’s consolidation plan, the new schools at Cedar Grove, Efland, Orange Grove and White Cross, the county’s first buses, and the sale of closed schoolhouses.
In briefBetween 1919 and 1926 Orange County closed many of its small country schools and began carrying the children by truck and bus to larger ones. The Chapel Hill Graded School had a Ford truck for country children by 1919, and in 1923 superintendent Claytor began folding the county's one- and two-teacher schools into larger ones. The county board set an order for new buildings at Efland, White Cross, the Orange County Training School, Orange Grove and Caldwell, ordered its first school buses in 1924 and sold the emptied schoolhouses. By April 1926 the county had put up seven brick consolidated schools since 1922, including the Orange County Training School for Black pupils, and ran 24 buses.
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By December 1919 the Chapel Hill Graded School had a Ford truck to carry country children, and around 1920 pupils from the Old Oxford Road area began riding buses to the elementary school in Chapel Hill, and their two-room schoolhouse was made into a house. On August 11, 1922 the county board under superintendent Claytor agreed to build a modern school at Cedar Grove, accepted in January 1924 and named Aycock School. In November 1922 Piney Mountain parents, whose children rode a motor bus to the Chapel Hill School, got the commissioners to repair the road the school truck used.
In 1923 Claytor began folding the county's one- and two-teacher schools into larger ones. On April 7, 1924 the board moved $30,000 in building money from White Cross and Caldwell to Efland and set the building order as Efland, White Cross, Orange County Training School, Orange Grove and Caldwell. In June the commissioners called school tax elections in the Carrboro district and next to the Murphey district. A. R. Davis took the contracts for a school for white children at Efland at $21,388, Orange Grove at $13,600 and White Cross at $14,436, and on June 21 the board ordered its first ten school buses. Consolidation emptied the Fairfield, Fairview, South View and Sunnyside schoolhouses, and the superintendent was ordered to sell them.
In April 1925 the county let the contract for a new school at Caldwell in Little River Township, and in June the board merged every school in the township except Schley into Caldwell, which opened with 124 pupils. By April 1926 the county had put up seven brick consolidated schools since 1922, worth $152,000 in all and including the Orange County Training School for Black pupils, ran 24 buses, and had cut its one-teacher schools from 26 to 16 in a year.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 18 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 6 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 Schools & Education. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
A 2026 novel set in Carrboro. Frances, thirty and grieving her mother, and her husband Ben open their marriage, and the book follows what that decision does to them and to the people closest to them. The characters include college teachers and a ghostwriter. 296 pages.
An illustrated online timeline of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, issued by the school in 2025. One page with portraits.
A 2025 history of University of North Carolina baseball from its nineteenth-century beginnings to the program's rise as an ACC power. Chapters cover the early years on campus, the building of Boshamer Stadium, and the Mike Fox era. Self-published by the author, 288 pages.
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.
The 2023 issue of Carrboro High School's literary magazine, featuring fiction and poetry written by its students.
William R. Burk's history of botany at the University of North Carolina, from its early natural scientists such as Denison Olmsted and Elisha Mitchell through later figures including George Francis Atkinson, Joseph Austin Holmes and Henry Van Peters Wilson, closing with a chapter on the Department of Botany itself. Published in Fort Worth in 2023.
Willis P. Whichard's biography of David Lowry Swain, governor of North Carolina from 1832 to 1835 and president of the University of North Carolina from 1835 until his death in 1868. The subtitle ties Swain, nineteenth-century North Carolina and the university together, and the book belongs with the lives of college presidents and governors. Published in 2022.
Jim Grimsley's coming-of-age novel about Ronny, who grew up in a trailer alongside his mother and a string of stepfathers, kept his head down, earned good grades and won a scholarship to UNC in Chapel Hill. On campus he finds his first love and begins to sort out who he is. Subjects include gay college students, first loves and mothers and sons. Published by Levine Querido in 2022, 322 pages.
Scott Madry's recollections of the student tech crew at Memorial Hall, the University of North Carolina's auditorium in Chapel Hill, presented under the banner of the Carolina Union, the campus student union. Published in Chapel Hill in 2021.
Geeta Kapur's history of race at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the enslaved labor that built the campus through desegregation and the Black student protests that followed. Twelve chapters, with a foreword by William Barber II, move from the founding era and the Great Depression controversies to the state's response to integration and the turmoil of later decades; North Carolina Central University also figures. Published 2021 by Blair in Durham.
Tracy Deonn's young adult fantasy about an African American teenager who arrives as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after her mother's death and finds a secret society bound to Arthurian legend, with demons, magic and her own family's past. Published by Margaret K. McElderry Books in 2020, 501 pages, for ages 14 and up. Winner of the 2021 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Reviewed in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books./Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (2020).
Sylvia D. Hoffert's article on Margaret Anna Burwell, 1810 to 1871, and the work of being a Presbyterian minister's wife in North Carolina from 1835 to 1857, the years of the female school she and her husband kept in Hillsborough. Pages 245 to 275 with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits, issued by the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh in 2019.
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