HISTORICAL SKETCHES

CANE CREEK BAPTIST CHURCH

Number 21: February 2007 www.canecreek.org 6901 Orange Grove Rd., Hillsborough, NC 27278

WHENCE "ORANGE GROVE?"

We have lived in Orange Grove all our lives. When I began doing these sketches a few years ago, I asked folks to make suggestions about topics for me to write about. The most frequent question I got was "Where did the name "Orange Grove" come from?" My short answer is that I don't know. So now I will use up two pages amplifying on my ignorance.

Before I get started, I would like to remind us that we have been here as a community for a long time. The first settlers came to our neighborhood in the 1750s. By end of the 1770s almost all the land was owned privately. So we are an old community. Robert Kenzer, in his 1987 book, Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community, focuses on Orange County and identifies eight primary neighborhoods in old Orange County before Durham County split off in 1881. Our community is one of them (along with White Cross, Patterson, Eno, New Hope, Little River, Flat River, and Durham).

My suspicion is that our community has had three names.

CANE CREEK

I suspect that we were first known by our church name, Cane Creek. The basis for this guess comes from Stephen Pleasant's letter to Samuel Wait, the founder of Wake Forest, in 1833. In it he writes:

"Very Dear Bro. Wait: I have just returned home from Cain Creek and found you had wrote me a letter... the people about Cain Creek are well ... things go on quite comfortable there..." [in the early days "Cain" was a common spelling; indeed it was used much more often than "Cane."]

We don't know for sure whether he was referring to the church in particular or the community in general. But, in all my readings about the history of the community, I have come across no other name for our neighborhood in those old days except the occasional use of Cane Creek. I should also note that I have inspected North Carolina maps dated 1770, 1775, 1808, 1833, and 1861, which give no indication of any community name.

ROCK SPRING

In doing a land trace on my property on Buckhorn Road some years ago, I found that the old gristmill on my property had been constructed in 1813 by Bernard Cate. The next year, 1814, James Kirk sold a huge (462 acres) tract adjacent to the mill tract to John Thompson. Thompson then acquired the mill tract in 1836 and the Thompson family operated the mill for a long enough time that it became known at Thompson's Mill. By 1868 the Thompson property that surrounded the mill tract had grown to about a thousand acres and was referred to in the deed books at Hillsborough as Rock Spring Farm. I think that the actual spring of "Rock Spring" lies near Turkey Hill Creek just north of Bradshaw Quarry Road. There was a post office nearby known at Rock Spring Post Office. Letters coming through this post office would have been stamped "Rock Spring."

Scott Hudson has a book of old Civil War maps. One map shows this part of the state and clearly locates Rock Spring southwest of Hillsborough, though the scale is a bit distorted. More precisely, it is located at the intersection of present day Bradshaw Quarry Road and Vernon Road (along the old Greensboro Stage Road).

ORANGE GROVE

One of the last references to Rock Spring is in 1895 when the church, under the leadership of J. F. MacDuffie, voted to build a school to be known as Rock Spring Academy. The school opened in 1897 under the Rock Spring name. The name must have been selected so that people would know exactly where the school was located. For some reason, the name was soon changed to Orange Grove High School and then to Orange Grove School. We have a catalog for the High School for 1902-03. In the back are listed the names and hometowns of all the '01-'02 students. Of 101 students, 63 list their place of residence as Rock Spring.

One possibility for why the school changed its name from Rock Spring to Orange Grove is that there had once been a Rock Spring Academy on the west side of Cane Creek in the mid 19th century. So the name might have caused some confusion. In any event, the presence of Orange Grove School, and the community's close identification with it, may have had something to do with the name, Orange Grove, becoming attached to the community. In the school's catalog for 1906-'07 the final section is headed "How to get to Orange Grove" which I take to refer to the community and not just the school. So the community changed its name sometime between 1902 and 1906. But as to who changed it and why Orange Grove was selected still remains a mystery. I do, however, recall that Ina Andrews, who died at age 95 in 1985 And who attended the school, once said, "Mr. MacDuffie changed the name of the school." This may tell us the "who" but doesn't tell us why "Orange Grove" was selected. If anyone has an idea, please share it with me. Ed Johnson