Orange County Register of Deeds traces Chapel Hill's origins

It's not the classic landmarks of Chapel Hill — the Carolina Inn, Franklin Street, the Chapel Hill Cemetery — that fascinate Orange County Register of Deeds Mark Chilton. It's the history of the land they stand on.

Chilton, a UNC alum and former mayor of Carrboro, gave a presentation Sunday afternoon to the Chapel Hill Historical Society on his work mapping Orange County's original land grants, which date back as early as the 1700s.

To create the map, Chilton collected hundreds of colonial surveys of land in Orange County from the state archive. The surveys are crudely drawn maps of property boundaries that often contain unofficial and unclear landmarks like "Nelson’s Corner" or unnamed creeks, Chilton said.

“It’s very difficult to reconcile modern maps with maps from the 18th century,” he said.

Chilton matched the colonial surveys with 2200 state land grants for Orange County and redrew each grant to scale, then pieced together a jigsaw puzzle of individual sections of land.

The tedious task was only made more difficult when sections of land had changed size or ownership, he said.

“After a lot of analysis, we’ve got most of Orange County figured out,” he said.

One point of interest in his research, Chilton said, was how much of North Carolina's settlement could be attributed to a Native American trading path established prior to European settlement and later used by white settlers. Many of the land surveys, he said, blatantly label the trading path, which ran through Orange County where Saint Mary's Road in Hillsborough is now, as a major feature.

“It’s not marked on the highway anywhere, but it’s a beautiful drive across North Carolina," Chilton said."You’re traveling along this literally thousands of miles-long foot path of the Native Americans.”

Another landmark that has stood in Chapel Hill since long before European settlement, Chilton found, is Davie Poplar, which stands near the Old Well. The earliest records from UNC's Board of Trustees, he said, mention the poplar tree around when the board selected the site for the University.

“They literally stood underneath that very tree. It’s at least 350 years old," he said.

According to UNC's web-based interactive tour, Davie Poplar has been struck by lightning and survived several hurricanes over the course of its lifetime.

The earliest detailed survey of the area where Chapel Hill is today, Chilton said, is 600 acres dedicated to Mark Morgan for the "Chappel Tract" in August of 1762. Local farmers gave much of the land that UNC stands on to the University. Some maps show early depictions of Old Fayetteville Road and Franklin Street.

Chilton said the importance of his work is in its significance to Chapel Hill's long-time residents.

“There are a lot of people who are born and raised here and whose families go back many generations who find this really fascinating," he said.

“Some of these land records — even at that distant time — still have a certain amount of legal relevance today."

Richard Ellington, a board member of the Chapel Hill Historical Society, said Chilton's work has a lasting impact.

“It’s important for somebody to keep that interest alive, so that it’s there and made available for anyone to find out about," he said. "Orange County, when it was formed in 1752, incorporated ten other counties that surround us. We went from the Virginia border to the Deep River. A lot of things went on here — it’s important and needs to be documented."

Chilton, who majored in geography and went on to law school at N.C. Central University, said he's already moving on to another project in historical documentation — reviving the memory of the slaves who lived in Orange County.

“We’re going to go through all of our old land records and locate the names of slaves that are mentioned anywhere in our Orange County records," he said. 

"We'll create, basically, a master database, so that people who are doing research on slaves and slavery will be able to use that."

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