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25 <br /> ORANGE COUNTY LOCAL LANDMARK APPLICATION <br /> STATEMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE <br /> The Eno Quaker Burying Ground is highly significant at the local level as one of the very few <br /> rural cemeteries in Orange County dating from the eighteenth century and as a tangible reminder <br /> of the Quakers who came primarily from Pennsylvania to settle in the area west and north of <br /> where Hillsborough developed as the county seat. These Quakers established the Eno Friends <br /> Meeting in 1754, first congregating in the homes of members. In 1759, William Comb leased the <br /> Quakers a tract of land north of Hillsborough for their meeting house, school, and burying <br /> ground, and with their various occupations, the Quakers took an active role in the life of both the <br /> county seat and the surrounding area. After a large group of the Eno Quakers moved to Georgia <br /> in the late 1760s, the Eno Quaker Meeting weakened during the last decades of the eighteenth <br /> century, and by the early nineteenth century, it appears that the Meeting existed in name only. In <br /> 1847, the Yearly Quaker Meeting was compelled to "lay down" the Eno Meeting for its lack of <br /> activity. The Eno Meeting House burned in 1877, and the school, which had become the Mars <br /> Hill Public School by the early twentieth century, was demolished by the mid-twentieth century. <br /> However, the Eno Quaker Burying Ground survives relatively intact, and although it has <br /> deteriorated due to the course of nature and lack of adequate attention over the last century, its <br /> collection of marked and unmarked gravestones that exhibit both folk art and the work of <br /> professional stone carvers, along with its surrounding rock wall, remain a testament to the <br /> thriving Eno Quaker community that once played an important role in the early history of <br /> Orange County. <br /> 3 <br />