HISTORICAL SKETCHES

CANE CREEK BAPTIST CHURCH

Number 28: June 2009 www.canecreek.org 6901 Orange Grove Rd., Hillsborough, NC 27278

THE GRANVILLE DISTRICT

The Carolina Colony was formed in 1663 By King Charles II as a reward to eight of his buddies who helped him gain the English throne from Oliver Cromwell. It included, in the initial charter, all the land south of the Virginia colony down to about where Cape Canaveral now is. It extended westward to the "southern ocean." It was organized as a Proprietary Colony, which meant that for all practical purposes it was the personal property of the Proprietors. The charter gave them the right to sell land to settlers, to establish a government in keeping with British custom and practice, and to levy taxes to support the government. The eight Proprietors were:

Edward Hyde: Earl of Clarendon and Lord High Chancellor of England;

George Monck: Duke of Albemarle, a Cromwell general who switched sides;

William Craven: Earl of Craven, close friend of the king;

John Lord Berkeley: who fought with the King to regain the throne;

Anthony Ashley Cooper: Earl of Shaftsbury, Chancellor of the Exchequer;

Sir George Carteret: Earl of Granville who hid the royal family during their exile;

Sir William Berkeley: Governor of Virginia;

Sir John Colleton: a wealthy planter from Barbados.

There were already a few settlers in the colony. Many were Quakers who thought they might be still in the Virginia colony but who wanted to be far from civil authority as they could so that they could worship as they pleased.

The Proprietors, of course, hoped to gain considerable wealth from the colony. They could sell the land to settlers and, by law, were entitled to collect "quitrents" from them. A quitrent was an annual fee that dated back to feudal times. It allowed the landowner to be free of certain feudal obligations. But the colony did not produce as much wealth as had been hoped. The population grew only slowly; there were problems with creating an orderly government, the granting of land, and the collection of quitrents. Add to this the advise the King began to get from family members as well as from political advisors that he should never have given away so much land, and we find a movement beginning in England as early as the 1680s to have the colony returned to the Crown. This culminated in the 1720s when the exact location of the boundary line with Virginia was finally established. The King reached agreement with seven of the Proprietors (but not Lord Granville) to sell their share of the colony. The new arrangement took effect in 1729. There were no settlers this far west and Orange County did not yet exist.

On the eve of this new arrangement, several rich eastern gentlemen obtained land grants from the Proprietors in the vicinity of Haw Fields totaling 50,000 acres or so. The western boundary of these grants comes up to our community. These grants will eventually create much grief in Orange County and I'll write a Sketch or two on what happened.

Lord Granville's refusal to sell his share of the Carolina colony created an almost insurmountable problem. He had owned an eighth share of every square foot of the colony, a so-called "undivided interest." Finally, in 1743, a solution was worked out. Granville would get the northern eighth of the colony to call his own and the Crown would retain possession of the rest. A stake was driven on the outer banks and a line surveyed westward to beyond the Haw River. This boundary line is currently the southern border of Chatham County. Here is a rough idea of what our counties looked like. I have dashed in part of the Granville line.

With the southern boundary of the Granville District established, Granville sent land agents to the colony to begin the process of granting land. The earliest Granville grants date to 1746. The earliest ones in our neighborhood that I have been able to locate went to Alexander Mebane (356 acres on Cane Creek), Thomas Cate (456 acres on Toms Creek) and John Stroud (325 acres on New Hope Creek) all dating to 1754-57.

Granville's death in 1763 threw things into turmoil. Just as settlers were flooding into Orange County (established in 1752) looking for land, Granville's heirs squabbled for years about their inheritance and the land offices were shut down until things could be settled. New settlers continued to pour into the colony (mostly from Pennsylvania) and had to carve out some land to live on as best they could, and apply for a grant with hopes that eventually they could obtain clear title to the land. Just when it seemed that things couldn't get any worse, the Revolutionary War broke out. The colonial governor retreated to a warship in the harbor at Wilmington and anarchy prevailed. The rebels (Oops! Let's call them the "patriots" instead because they won the war) set up a provisional government in 1778, announced that all "open" land belonging to Lord Granville land was confiscated, and began to issue grants in the name of the State of North Carolina.

After the war ended in 1781, Lord Granville appealed the confiscation of his land. The case languished in the courts for years but the State Supreme court finally ruled against him in the early 1800s. Finally, the settlers who held North Carolina land grants could breath easy since the last threat to their ownership of their land had been laid to rest.

Through a curious twist of events, the largest portion of the Haw Fields land mentioned above, 30,000 acres, wound up in the possession of a London doctor named Strudwick.

What happened next is really interesting. I'll write about in a future sketch.

Ed Johnson