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remember when St . Marys road was a dirt road . One resident has a picture of her property with the unpaved road in the background . She and other area inhabitants believe that St . Mary ' s remained unpaved until sometime after World War II , perhaps until as late as early 1960 (Mary Jane Lockhart Gosling and C . W. and H . Walker, personal communications 1999) . Site 31Or498 * * is a road remnant on the other end of St . Mary' s Road, to the east, not far from the county line . This appears to have been altered sometime after 1938 , but before 1987 (U . S . G . S . Northwest Durham 7 . 5 ' Quadrangle Map dates to 1973 , but was photorevised in 1987) . The fact that the site area is heavily forested suggests that this road section was bypassed at least thirty years ago . Site 31Or485 * * is not a remnant of St . Mary' s Road or of the Trading Path. It was a local ,road connecting St . Mary' s to New Sharon Church Road . It shows up on the 1918 soil map of the area and on the 1938 aerials . A portion of the road was in use at least in the early 1870s when the fieldstone was quarried to provide the foundation for the Caine Roberts house . The most well-preserved segment of the Trading Path in this part of Orange County is found just west of the St. Mary ' s Project Corridor (31 Or481 * * ). This is the approximately 15 ft deep, 50 ft wide dirt road found fronting Ayr Mount Plantation (31Or480 * * ) . Inspection of modern and historic aerial photographs indicates that there may be remnants of this road to the west, extending to the adjacent plantation (Montrose ?) . This deep- gullied road section continues eastward to a point just west of Highway 70 . This landscape feature appears on Sauthier' s 1768 map of Hillsborough. This road had its genesis as a prehistoric trading route paralleling the north bank of the Eno River (Cross 19790 Rights 1931 ; Stine 1990) . Taverns - Over time the condition and placement of the historic road (i. e . , Trading Path, Oxford Highway, St. Mary ' s Road) affected settlement and land use in the project area. j As has been shown, the roadway was often too muddy for a traveler to readily make his or her destination. This explains why the area had at least four possible tavern sites, excluding those actually within the town of Hillsborough. These are two possible eighteenth- century tavern sites (Few, Synnott) , and two nineteenth- and twentieth- century house sites with "resting and watering" areas for weary and/or wet travelers . Area residents have stated that Sunnyside Plantation, for example, had a covered rest spot near Strouds Creek for travelers (Henry , personal communication 1999) . It has also been said that one of the Walker ancestral home sites (still unclear which one) also had a place for travelers to camp and water their animals "near a little branch near Little Creek" (Walker cousins, personal communications 1999) . An important mid- eighteenth-century tavern site in the region is the home and ordinary of Michael Synnott . A probable eighteenth- century tavern site ( Wilson-Norman home site , 31Or501 * * ) has been located in the project corridor, in the general vicinity of Synott ' s holdings . A two - story structure once stood on this land until it burned sometime in this century. This structure is believed to have been over two hundred years old at the time it burned. Another interesting early tavern site is that of Few s Tavern. In 1764 William Few purchased a farm along the Trading Path ( depicted on Sauthier' s 1768 map) . His farm also served occasionally as a tavern stop for travelers along the road . The exact location of this site remains uncertain, 42