Even after contributing land to 10 other counties, Orange County is too large. Or maybe large isn’t the right word — it’s schizophrenic.

Down in the southern part of the county there’s Chapel Hill-Carrboro, which, with their satellite bedroom communities, contain about half the county’s residents. By most accounts the area is a hotbed of art, intellect, and frivolous consumption, and despite Chapel Hill calling itself a “village,” is somewhat urban.

In western Orange County, and on up into its northern reaches, there’s little beyond farms, an occasional crossroads community, and woods. Tobacco, dairy farming, and beef production dominate the culture and commerce.

Folks in the outlying parts of the county, particularly up north, often wish they could cut loose from the southern part, with its liberals and academic types, its citified concerns, and its bloc of student voters often ignorant of interests outside their ken. Folks up around Mebane and Caldwell, Cedar Grove and Schley get to talking every now and again about how nice it would be if they could form their own county, leaving off Carrboro and Chapel Hill.

Meanwhile, down south, many view the farmers as redneck reactionaries and impediments to progress.

And innocently occupying Orange County’s middle ground is Hillsborough, the queen of piedmont North Carolina’s county seats.

I don’t mean the Hillsborough you encounter along the US 70 bypass north of town, or lining the railroad tracks, or greedily embracing the interstate in a swarm of tourist pit stops, instant living complexes, and fast fooderies.

I’m talking about “historic Hillsborough,” nestled like a New England village on a few hills beside the Eno River at the foot of the Occoneechee Mountains (big bumps south of town).

Laid out in 1754, Hillsborough is one of the oldest towns in the state; even before it was built it was the site of an Occoneechee Indian settlement white men called “Achonechy Town.”

The beauty of the Hillsborough area first came to English attention in 1709 with the publication of “Lawson’s History of North Carolina,” an account of the travels of John Lawson, Surveyor General of North Carolina.” Leaving from Charleston, South Carolina late in 1700, Lawson and a half dozen compatriots (plus slaves) journeyed through central North Carolina, then headed for the coast. Along the way, the group crossed the Haw River near Graham in Alamance County and encountered land so rich “no Man that will be content within the Bounds of Reason, can have any grounds to dislike it,” according to Lawson.

Among the region’s other wonders, Lawson recorded meeting “great Gangs of Turkies,” sometimes 500 to a flock; strange “insects,” a category which included snakes, lizards, turtles, and alligators; and many beavers, of whom Lawson advised, “If you take them young they become very tame and domestic, but are very mischievous in spoiling Orchards by breaking the Trees and blocking up your Doors in the Night with the Sticks and Wood they bring thither.”

Lawson headed for Achonechy Town along a path nearly identical to that now followed by the North Carolina Railroad, noting, “. . . the Country through which we passed was so delightful that it gave us a great deal of Satisfaction.”

The wealth of the Occoneechee Indians impressed him too. “Their Cabins were hung with a good sort of Tapestry, as fat Bear, and barbacued or dried Venison; no Indians having greater Plenty of Provisions than these. The Savages do indeed, still possess the Flower of Carolina, the English enjoying only the Fag-end of that fine Country.”

Although Lawson didn’t live to see it (some Neuse River Indians executed him and his slaves in 1711), it wasn’t long before the Occoneechees were supplanted by white settlers and the town of Orange, then Corbinton, Childsburg, and finally Hillsborough was born.

Hillsborough was the scene of the Regulator uprising against arbitrary taxation by county officials in 1768, and of the hanging of six Regulators in 1771. British Gen. Cornwallis made it his headquarters before marching on to defeat at Guilford Courthouse and eventual surrender at Yorktowne, pausing long enough to cobble the muddy streets. (The cobbles remained into the 1900’s.)

After the Revolution, the town hosted several sessions of the state legislature, a show that traveled a Tarboro — Fayetteville — Hillsborough circuit. Agitation to make Hillsborough the state capital almost succeeded, but a 1791 compromise set the “unalterable seat of government” at a site in Wake County christened Raleigh.”

According to the Hillsborough Chamber of Commerce, “at least 116 late 18th and early 19th century structures” still grace the town’s quiet streets. Many are beautifully preserved and marked for the passerby. One, the Colonial Inn on King Street, still operates as an inn, with Southern-style lunches and dinners served by waitresses in colonial get-up.

Not that Hillsborough hasn’t changed.

Joe Mayo was raking leaves outside the old courthouse in whose tower a 211-year-old clock faithfully minds the time. From Mayo’s vantage point, a lot has changed.

“Things are changing every day,” said the Hillsborough native as the rake tines stirred up the smell of moist earth and parched leaves. “You used to be able to look out your window and see what you would be doing next year or the year after. Now you can’t see from one day to the next.”

But some things haven’t changed.

Mayo, a black man, spoke sadly of the poor people marched repeatedly through the doors of the new courthouse across the street. He claimed nowadays good people are left to struggle while the bad get all the breaks. The thought made him angry, almost bitter, but the man who “likes to do good things for people” consoled himself with the age-old promise that “the Good Lord’ll take care of those that does good.”

One change you can see in Hillsborough are the new social service buildings being thrown up in a bottom east of downtown. Or the way commerce is being siphoned off by the new shopping areas along the highways. And you can see a paved parking lot where one of Hillsborough’s most interesting houses once stood, a building full of towers and turrets, curves and angles, that sat beside the Phillips 66 station on the corner by the Confederate Memorial Library.

That’s right — instead of a statue, Hillsborough has a library in memory of the boys who wore the grey. At least, I didn’t see a statue. What an odd choice of memorials for a rural North Carolina county seat to make! (Of course, there’s that Chapel Hill crowd to take into account.)

Maybe I just missed the statue.

Inside the Confederate Memorial Library, where a wooden staircase leads up to biography and literature, there’s a sign announcing, “This is a Library. Feel Free.” And if that’s not enough, there’s a selection of newspapers running the gamut from the Alamance-Orange Enterprise all the way to the New York Times and the North Carolina Anvil.

Behind the library, almost touching, is the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church and, just beyond that, a wondrous repository of the past.

The town cemetery, which is visible from Churton (main) Street through a blizzard of historical markers, would be a hell of a place to spend your next Halloween. Even in daylight, it’s got all the ingredients for being spooky. Square stone walls ring odd clusters of graves. The roots of a magnolia irreverently overflow a marker set flush with the ground. An open burial vault brims with leaves, roots, bark, shadows, and shards of brick. Most of the upright headstones, some of them legible after 150 years, are tilted, broken, mottled, overgrown by high grass and weeds. Several ancient cedars, last of a dying breed in Orange County, stand draped with vines.

The cemetery was set aside when Hillsborough was founded; its soil is fertilized by two centuries of natives like Sophonia Graham, an eight-year-old who died in 1885, on whose headstone a dove perpetually perches, while a lamb reclines at her feet.

Behind Sophonia, towering above her, is the obelisk of the august William Graham (the Alamance county seat is named after him), considered by a writer of the 1870’s “the foremost citizen of this state,” once Secretary of the U.S. Navy, a U.S. and Confederate Senator, Governor of North Carolina. And down the way there’s William Hooper, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, who proved that all men are created equal by winding up buried among them. (I’m not sure he planned to prove it that way.)

Rather than work out a more cleverly cohesive way to list other, random Hillsborough novelties, let me put a colon here and tell you about:

  • Hillsborough native Brigadier Gen. Francis Nash, killed in action in 1777, in whose honor Nashville, Tennessee was named.
  • Josiah Turner, a Conservative politician from Hillsborough who edited the Raleigh Sentinel during Reconstruction and “with a pen dipped in gall” relentlessly attacked Republican governor William Holden. As Holden declared Orange neighbors Caswell and Alamance counties to be in a state of insurrection because of Klan activity, Turner denounced him as “a white-livered miscreant” and dared Holden to have him arrested. Holden obliged, sending militiamen to Hillsborough to arrest Turner though Orange County wasn’t mentioned in Holden’s emergency decree. Turner’s arrest was one of the offenses for which Holden was impeached and removed from office in 1871.
  • The Orange County jail, built in 1925 and looking older, reputedly one of the state’s worst jails, where on a nice day you can watch armed deputies mow the lawn.
  • The “Make Me an Offer” antique shop, a commercial museum full of old magazines and train timetables, chamberpots and chairs, and classics like a 1931 guide to Vienna or the sheet music to “When That Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam’.”
  • James’ Pharmacy, with old-timey tile floors and a wooden booth hidden behind the greeting cards in back, where you can sip a milkshake from the soda fountain and admire yourself in the mirror.
  • Minnis’ Grocery, recently featuring fresh chestnuts for 50¢ a pound, oysters, onion sets, and prominently-displayed reports from N.C.’s Senator Helms.
  • Pope’s, a 5 and 10 where you can buy three pairs of “textile by-product” socks of “undetermined” composition for only one dollar.
  • Jack’s Drive-In restaurant, a small building with trailer/dining area attached. Although it’s out on the US 70 bypass north of town, Jack’s is where Hillsborough goes to eat. The last time I was there they offered 9 different meats and 13 vegetable dishes. Everyone from farmfolk to longhairs showed up for a sandwich and fries or to pay $2.20 for one meat, two vegetables, coffee or tea, and air bread or hush puppies graced with the ever popular “oleo pats.”