HISTORICAL SKETCHES

CANE CREEK BAPTIST CHURCH

Number 23: June 2007 www.canecreek.org 6901 Orange Grove Road, Hillsborough, NC 27278

WHO OWED THIS LAND?

This is still a community where the names on the mailboxes are the same as the names on the tombstones. Our family roots run deep into the soil of Orange Grove. I thought it would be fun to trace ownership of this land back to the beginning. Here goes.

First on the scene, of course, were the Indians. Local folks have found arrowheads and other ancient artifacts so that we know Indians once lived here. John Lawson, on his trek through the Carolina back country in 1701 found an Indian Village where Hillsborough now is. These were Occoneechee Indians. The Hillsborough site was a particularly good one for a village since it lay at an easy river crossing on the old Indian Trading Path. Indians probably frequently hunted along Cane Creek but so far no one has found evidence of an actual village. We will call the original owners of our land the Occoneechee Indians, a branch of the Sioux Nation, although they probably had only a dim notion of actual ownership.

The first person to actually claim ownership was King James of England. He based his claim on Sir Walter Raleigh's exploration of the coast in 1584 and his colony on Roanoke Island in 1585. To the south there was no European presence except for Spain, which had settlements in Florida. In 1663, King Charles II chartered the Carolina Colony and awarded it to eight of his friends who had helped him regain the British throne after the death of Oliver Cromwell. It was a "proprietary" colony (like Pennsylvania) in that it was an outright grant of land to private individuals empowered to sell tracts of land and to establish some form of government. These eight owners were known as the Lords Proprietors.

The colony, supposed to be a money-making venture for its owners, grew feebly at first. But by 1700 it had begun to prosper and the current king, George II, regretted that it did not belong to him. He began negotiations with the Proprietors to buy back the colony and reached agreement with all but one, John Carteret, Earl of Granville, who refused to sell. Finally, a deal was worked out in 1729 whereby the George II bought out the shares of the other seven and Lord Granville was granted sole ownership of the upper portion of North Carolina. On the eve of the deal's coming into effect, several prosperous Eastern North Carolina merchants seized the opportunity to purchase land grants in the back-country where there were no white settlers. These grants totaled about 50,000 acres and were along the Indian Trading Path in a region known only as Haw Old Fields. This will become important to the story later. But for now, the trace goes from the Indians to the British crown (1584) to the Proprietors(1663) to Lord Granville (1729).

It took a while for surveyors to blaze a line, Granville's southern boundary, from the Outer Banks westward to the Haw River. By 1746 Granville began issuing land grants to settlers. The first one I know about locally was to William Piggot for 180 acres in 1755. Unfortunately, Granville died in 1763 and his land offices were closed just as settlers were pouring into Orange County, having made their way south from Virginia and Pennsylvania. The newcomers had to just settle down and hope that somehow they would be able to stake a legitimate claim to their homes.

In 1776, the American Colonies declared independence from England and war broke out. The North Carolina colonial governor fled to Wilmington and set up headquarters on a British warship. North Carolina rebels quickly came together to organize a state government. Of interest to our story is that they confiscated all foreign-owned land in the name of the State and, in 1778, set up land offices and began to issue North Carolina land grants. (Of course, the confiscation held no water legally until the war was won in 1781.) This opened the floodgates. Many settlers in the Granville District had been waiting up to 15 years to be able to get a legal title to their land. By the end of the war, most of the land hereabouts had been granted to settlers.

So the trace continues from Lord Granville to the State of North Carolina (1778) to individual land owners. But there is a complication. Recall the 50,000 acres in Haw Fields that were gobbled up in 1729 by Eastern land speculators. Some 30,000 acres came under the ownership of the Colonial Governor, George Burington. Burrington's term ended and he returned to London. Sadly, his fortunes took a turn for the worse and he was thrown into debtor's prison. A London physician, William Strudwick, helped out by buying the 30,000 acres. In 1764 he landed in North Carolina and journeyed to Hillsborough to inspect his land. His tract extended from the Haw River northward into Haw Fields and eastward to the banks of Cane Creek. (When I bought my land in 1969, its back line was still known as "the Strudwick Line.")

Strudwick was shocked to find his land full of settlers who claimed to have a legitimate Granville deed to their holdings. He managed to threaten and cajole many of these "intruders" to move off his land. These included many Haw Fields Presbyterians who then moved east to establish New Hope Presbyterian Church. Others wouldn't budge and so Strudwick went to the Colonial Court and sued the holdouts. Strudwick won some cases and lost some, and the others simply fizzled because of the war. Among the intruders are such names as Thompson, O'Daniel, Morrow, Homes (Holmes?), Kirk, and Cate. After the war, Strudwick appealed his case to the North Carolina Supreme Court but they ruled against him. Nevertheless, he had successfully re-acquired large chunks of land and the Hillsborough deed books are full of his sales of tracts back to their original claimants and to other settlers. Strudwick settled down in Hillsborough and the family was prominent in local affairs for years. Indeed, fifty years ago, they boasted of a local hero, Shepard Strudwick, who was a famous Broadway actor.

So the story is now complete. Local landowners can trace ownership back to grants from the State of North Carolina, from Lord Granville, or to William Strudwick (and through him, back to the British crown.) There is only one exception that I know about. One of the original land speculators who acquired Proprietary grants in 1729, managed to hold on to the land and actually settle it. The grant was to George Moore for 4850 acres and was situated along Cane Creek south of NC 54. Folks in the Moore family were among the earliest members of our church.

Ed Johnson