Agenda - 01-19-1993 - VIII-H - Laserfiche WebLink

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Character of Resources The landscape of Chapel Hill Township is often strikingly beautiful because of the steep, rocky terrain. The township is rapidly suburbanizing as new roads • are cut into the woods and new houses are built, however, the effect is not as detrimental as in many other suburban areas because many of the new develop- ments respect the terrain and many of the lots are large. Although this report is based on visual evidence and oral history, a summary of the historical composition of the county drawn from secondary sources is help- ful in evaluating visual and oral evidence.1 Orange County in the 1850s was a county containing an extremely stable population of settlers who had emigrated into the area in the 18th century. They were largely Scotch-Irish and Germans who emigrated from Pennsylvania and English settlers who had emigrated from Virginia. The county was typical of the upland South, with a population com- posed largely of yeoman farming families. In 1860, 59% of the white male heads of households owned no land, and 71 .5% of them owned no slaves. Thirty-three percent of the white male household heads owned between one and 250 acres and 21 .6% owned between one and nine slaves. Kinship was more important than class in Orange County, for succeeding generations settled adjacent to each other in ever growing neighborhoods that were extremely stable. By the 1850s the county was extensively but thinly settled, with one family for each 200 acres of land. In reality, families lived closer than this, along creeks and rivers and in neighborhood clusters. The initial reconaissance survey of Chapel Hill Township revealed very few his- toric buildings, for we were driving the paved county roads, and few historic houses stood on these roads. We were therefore surprised to find that there were many more early buildings standing in the township than we had ex- pected. These buildings were located on dirt roads, often one quarter to one- half mile from the present road. We discovered that, prior to the early twentieth century, farms in the township were linked by dirt paths that zigzagged from one farm to another. In the early twentieth century the public roads were laid out in more or less straight orientations between the rows of farms, leaving the farmhouses sitting well-back from the new roads on long dirt driveways. Another surprising discovery about the historic buildings of the township is that almost one-third of the pre-1940 buildings are one-room log houses built be- tween ca. 1810 and ca. 1905. This is a higher incidence of log building than we expected. Fewer antebellum frame buildings were found than we expected. The township was apparently composed primarily of small subsistence farms throughout the nineteenth century. The farmers built their houses out of avail- able materials, with the help of neighbors. Perhaps most remarkable is the fact