Orange County NC Website
Draft 10/8/99 ' <br />Of the County's current <br />landholdings, no land contains <br />identified natural areas, wildlife <br />habitat or prime farmland. Of the <br />land currently held. for .parks, <br />none is actively used for <br />recreation -although 81 acres <br />are planned for parks in the <br />.future (Fairview Park, Northern <br />Human Services Center Park). <br />The. Efland-Cheeks-Park is on <br />° land owned. by the County- <br />schools. In terms of other <br />resources, one historic site is <br />owned by the County -the.. <br />Dickson House. in downtown <br />Hillsborough, which serves as <br />offices for the County Visitor's <br />Bureau and the Alliance for <br />Historic Hillsborough. <br />Portions of the 108 acres owned <br />on Seven-Mile Creekprovide <br />riparian buffers, and Lake Orange <br />is a 175-acre water resource and <br />flow augmentation impoundment <br />that is owned by the County. <br />Table i shows the type/amount <br />of acreage owned by the County. <br />Table 1 <br />B. Inventory of Other Public <br />and Privately-Owned lands <br />While Orange. County is by no <br />means a large landowner in the <br />County, the same is not. true of a <br />number of other public and <br />private entities. <br />For example, the Orange. Water <br />and Sewer Authority owns over <br />six times as much land in the <br />County, with 3,215 acres of land <br />,(1.25%) in October, 1998 - <br />including Cane Creek Reservoir <br />(but. not including University <br />Lake, which is owned. by UNC). <br />OWASA, the County's second- <br />.largest landholder, has plans to <br />acquire an additional 1,365 acres <br />in Cane Creek watershed over the <br />next decade. <br />-Duke University is the County's <br />largest private landowner, with <br />almost 4,933 acres in Orange <br />County. This equates to almost <br />two percent (1.93%) of the <br />County's 256,000 acres. See <br />Table 2 for a breakdown on land <br />ownership by public and large <br />private entities. <br />The County's third-largest <br />landholder is the University of <br />North Carolina. Between the <br />areas of campus, the Botanical <br />Garden and Mason Farm area, <br />and the Horace Williams tract, <br />UNC owns 2,585 acres ~of land in <br />the County. The vast majority of <br />this land is in Chapel Hill or the <br />immediate environs. <br />6 <br />