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

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The most significant historic school standing in the township is the former Mur- phy School [OR 467] on Old NC 10 southeast of Hillsborough. It was built in the 1920s as part of the school modernization and consolidation movement throughout the state. It is a large, one-story brick building with lots of big windows and a stylish hip roof. A few years after construction, a brick auditorium with a Doric portico was added to the west end of the school. Be- hind the school is a large frame bungalow that may have been built as a teacherage, for the six or eight teachers who staffed this school would have needed somewhere to room and board. If this was a teacherage, it is an un- usual survival, for few teacherages in North Carolina are still standing. Four historic churches were recorded in the township. The two oldest church buildings are the Bethel Baptist Church [OR 405] and the Damascus Congrega- tional Christian Church [OR 383], both built about 1900. Both are of frame con- struction and Gothic Revival styling. Both churches have been covered with artificial siding in recent years and have lost some of their architectural integrity. Bethel Church has a picturesque pyramidal-roofed tower located beside its main front-gable block. Union Grove Methodist Church [OR 492] is also Gothic Revival in style, but is a stone building constructed in 1946. Neville Chapel United Church of Christ [OR 402] is a small, front-gable frame building constructed in the early twentieth century for a black congregation known as Strowd Grove Church but has been considerably altered in recent years. None of the historic church cemeteries that were recorded have graves with death dates earlier than the 1860s. It seems that residents utilized family graveyards on the farms until after the Civil War. The most interesting early gravestones are at New Hope Presbyterian Church Cemetery [OR 458]. The earliest gravemarker is a crude native stone headstone for infant Vernon Craig, who died in 1868. His stone notes that his was "the first grave in this ground." The stylish marble headstone of David K. Blackwood, who died in 1859, notes that he was reinterred at New Hope in 1912 from the family burying ground. Very few family burying grounds were found. These must have had homemade fieldstone markers and must not have been well-maintained. Stylish Late 19th and Early 20th Century Farmhouses Until the early twentieth century, farmhouses in Chapel Hill township are of vernacular design, and belong to one of three types: the one-room log house, the one-story frame single-pile, side-gable house, or the 2-story frame single- pile, side-gable house (often known as the I-house). The majority of these