Within these walls

At her mother’s deathbed, Delores Clark promised she would live in the family’s house on Jones Ferry Road until her final days.

The man who built it — Toney Strayhorn, Clark’s great-grandfather — came to Carrboro with little more than the clothes on his back.

A slave on Calvin Strayhorn’s farm in Chapel Hill since childhood, Strayhorn would become a member of Carrboro’s small yet thriving black community of freedmen after Emancipation and shortly after the town was incorporated.

Though the outside of Clark’s home does not bear the mark of its years, its “fancy room” stands as a testament to years of struggle in the days following the Civil War.

The walls of the room, which are checkered with portraits of past and present Strayhorn family members, are made from the same logs used when the house was first built.

Toney Strayhorn and his wife, Nellie, gaze protectively over the room from two large portraits that hang on the eggshell walls.

“I keep my great-grandparents’ pictures in here because I cherish it so much,” Clark said.

Nellie used to tell her children about the day when her life, and the lives of thousands of former slaves, changed forever.

“She said the soldiers came with their blue suits on and their shiny gold buttons and when they told them (that they were free) they rejoiced in the field,” Clark said.

In a time when much of the South was drenched in the oppressive sweat of Jim Crow, segregation and racism, Toney Strayhorn carved out a life for himself, his wife and generations of their descendants.

Working on a farm near what is today Timberlyne Shopping Center, Strayhorn provided a home for his family. He purchased a small plot, cleared the land and built the modest log cabin home for his family. Clark and her family still live in the home to this day.

But this house — a symbol of hope and perseverance in a time of hatred and bias — has begun to crumble under years of wear and tear.

A host of problems plague the house. One of the three chimneys is beginning to fall away from the home, and the rock-on-rock foundation is beginning to deteriorate.

“Growing up in this house as a child and living with my great-grandmother and mother, it was just so special for me,” Clark said.

The family went to the town for assistance with repairs. But until September, Carrboro had no resources to help fix the Strayhorn farmhouse.

Clark has yet to make the repairs and has been in the process of applying for funding for more than a year. She now is waiting for approval of her request and said she hopes that a recent grant received by Orange County Housing and Community Development will ensure that the repairs are made.

“The process was long but I’ve continued to have patience and pray that something would come through,” she said.

The historical significance of her family’s contribution to Carrboro has made town officials want to save the site.

“When the entire white society for hundreds of years had been committed to suppressing African Americans, for him to sort of gain his prosperity and to build this home and do the civil activism he had done it was a very interesting and uplifting story,” said Ernest Dollar, executive director of the Chapel Hill Preservation Society.

At the time, blacks were banned from standing inside white churches during sermons or only were permitted to stand in the balcony.

After he taught himself to read by reading the Bible by moonlight, he used his literacy and religious awareness to establish the first black church in Orange County.

With the help of other freedmen in the area, First Baptist Church, formerly known as The Colored Church, became a center of religious life for the county’s black community.

Segregation was a typical condition during the days of Reconstruction, and Carrboro stood out for being less rigid about the rules.

“You think of the solid segregated South and Jim Crow days but it was very much a working-class community,” said Richard Ellington, a Carrboro native who also works for UNC Information Technology Services.

“People were so busy making a living and making ends meet that people really didn’t care much about black or white. By today’s standards, you’d think it was very segregated, but at the time it was a very unique community.”

Clark said she wants to see the house preserved and added to the state and town’s historical registry.

“My grandparents worked so hard for this land and I want to cherish this and keep this as long as I can,” she said.

“It may not stand for another 100 years but I’m hoping through my children and my grandchildren it will remain.”



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