Orange County NC Website
The site of Synnott ' s home and ordinary should be located on or near St. Mary' s <br /> Road east of the intersection with Pleasant Green Road . Instructions to surveyor William <br /> Churton in 1751 describe a proposed grant to Synnott that included the former home of <br /> James Moss on Buckquarter Creek (Browning 1969) . The Moss home site is also a <br /> ignificant archaeological site, if it can be located . <br /> potentially s <br /> Thomas Wiley, a Quaker planter and tavern keeper from Pennsylvania (Engstrom <br /> 1983 : 8 , 37), acquired a 560- acre Granville grant on the Trading Path and the Eno River <br /> in 1760 . The grant ' s plat shows the Path splitting into two sections on the west side of <br /> present- day Highway 70 . The southern branch follows the route of a sunken road clearly <br /> visible today on the north side of Ayr Mount . The northern branch roughly follows the <br /> . route of St . Mary ' s Road. <br /> The Wiley tract may contain a significant eighteenth-century site (William Few' s <br /> house and tavern) and certainly contains most of a major nineteenth- and twentieth <br /> century site (Ayr Mount Plantation) . William Few bought 200 acres from Thomas Wiley <br /> in 1763 and operated a tavern or ordinary on the Trading Path. Local tradition places the <br /> site of Few ' s home and tavern in the 1760s near the junction of the Trading Path and the <br /> Halifax Road, in the vicinity of Ayr Mount lands (Anderson 1989 ; Anderson 1991 : 16- 17, <br /> 35 ) . Today Ayr Mount is represented by the 1815 Kirkland mansion, placed on the <br /> National Register of Historic Places in 1971 . The house was once surrounded by <br /> buildings that were vital for the operation of the large , high- status plantation complex. <br /> This complex included a kitchen, dairy, smokehouse, icehouse, barns, well, stables and <br /> very likely a slave quarters (Anderson 1991435) . Anderson, the Kirkland family <br /> ' biographer, remarked that "Almost nothing , for example , is revealed of either the <br /> Kirkland slaves or plantation operations " in the documentary record of the family <br /> (Anderson 1991 : vii1) . Some of this missing data might be retrieved through archaeology. <br /> Ayr Mount was probably the grandest (but perhaps not the most prosperous) of the <br /> plantations on the Trading Path. It could provide an excellent contrast with the sites of <br /> other farmsteads and plantations on that Path. Ayr Mount , although located west of the <br /> rridor grant project boundaries, should be considered as part of that <br /> St. Marys Co <br /> Corridor ' s archaeology study area. <br /> The Isaac Jackson family from Chester County, Pennsylvania was among the first <br /> group of Quakers who settled in the Eno River valley near Hillsborough. The three <br /> grants to Jackson on the Trading Path were only part of his holdings . So far, we do not <br /> know whether he and his family lived on one of these tracts . This family was the first of <br /> the Eno Quakers to be recorded at the Cane Creek Meeting . Several family members <br /> were disowned by that Meeting for marrying outside the faith, for bearing arms , or for <br /> aiding the Regulators (Engstrom 1983 : 8 , 10) . <br /> John Dennis received at least two Granville grants on the Trading Path. The 1761 <br /> grant shows the Path following the route of St . Mary ' s road, but the 1759 grant shows <br /> two roads (Figure 6) . The "new road" was near the route of St . Mary ' s Road, but the <br /> "old road" was south of the present corridor and near the north bank of Buckquarter <br /> Creek. The Dennis family apparently lived in Hillsborough, where they operated the <br /> Spar- Hawk Inn on Margaret Lane . With many other area Quakers, the Dennis family <br /> moved south to Georgia in the late 1760s (Engstrom 1983 910 , 3 8 ) . <br /> 28 <br />