One afternoon in 2005, Meg Walton went shopping for books with handsome bindings that might serve to decorate an empty shelf in her home. In a Chapel Hill antique shop, she found one such book, written in German and having a particularly striking cover.
Meg bought the book and placed it on her shelf where it remained untouched for four years until her daughter, waiting by the door on a rainy morning, took it down and flipped casually through its dusty pages. A folded sheet fell out, revealing an Orange County deed from the late 19th century and forgotten chapter of Chapel Hill's history.
The paper was a deed dated Dec. 15, 1881, conveying 67¼ acres of land on Morgan Creek and the Chapel Hill Road from Charles Cotton and his wife Edith to William R. Lloyd. The Cottons, like many rural North Carolinians of that time, were illiterate and signed the deed with a simple "+".
The 1870 Orange County census records Charles and Edith Cotton and their three children listed in Bingham Township.
Edith is entered as black and 40 years of age; Charles, 37, and the children -- Clarie, 12, Dolphus, 11, and Annie, 2 -- are entered as mulattos. A term more vague than it is today, "mulatto" could signify a person of biracial heritage or triracial heritage, or an Indian, or simply not white. Excepting Annie, who was born after 1865, implies the family had been formerly enslaved, but by whom and where? One must wonder what their time in bondage was like and how, once free, they obtained their farm.
The general location of the Cottons' land mentioned in the deed lies in Bingham Township, which, then and now, is a large block in the southwest corner of Orange. It is near the Chapel Hill Road -- essentially today's Dairyland Road that one associates with Maple View Ice Cream and the picturesque countryside between Calvander and Dodson's Crossroads.
Looking at the Cottons' neighbors, more can be deduced about their community. Entered as a mulatto with a mixed race family, Jesse Hopson, 56, and his wife Carmalia, 50, were both illiterate, and from their ages we may assume they were also former slaves. But another neighbor, Woodson Garrett, 36, had served in the Confederate army. Both he and his wife Caroline were white, illiterate, with five children.
The last clue included in the deed is the section written on Jan. 9, 1882, when the Cottons and the property's buyer, William R. Lloyd, another ex-Confederate, appeared before Justice L.G. Lloyd, who made the document legal and binding. Another neighbor, a 21-year-old white farmer named Thomas M. Booker, witnessed the transaction.
In the document, Judge Lloyd's use of the familiar "Charly" in reference to Charles Cotton, suggests a longstanding familiarity between the two, though it also may be indicative of a general paternalism that lingered for more than a century following Emancipation.
No reason is given for the sale of the land or how it came into the Cotton family. But searching for information on the family reveals a final fact that helps pull their story together.
The Cottons almost certainly were members of that congregation Hickory Grove Baptist Church, for Edie Cotton was buried there in December 1899. Immediately after the close of the Civil War, African-American Rev. Eddie H. Cole, who had been ordained in the white Chapel Hill Baptist Church, headed a movement to found separate black congregations in southern Orange County, and his efforts resulted in the creation of First Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, Barbee's Chapel and Mount Sinai Baptist Church.
On Sept. 27, 1877, Reverend Cole helped organize Hickory Grove Baptist Church about a mile from the white Bethel Baptist Church. Before the Civil War, most white and black Baptists worshiped together, though the latter were typically segregated in a balcony or gallery, and it is very likely that many or most of the Hickory Grove congregants had formerly worshipped at Bethel, the church where William Lloyd was buried in 1925.
The story of Charles and Edie Cotton reveals how former slaves created a new world for themselves after they achieved their freedom. They moved to take advantage of their American citizenship through land ownership, freedom of religion and exercising what few rights they had under Orange County's legal system. This chance antique story find of Meg Walton show just how easily history can be lost.
Ernest Dollar is an Orange County native who currently serves as director of the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill.
