“You’ve got to get to know your community": Generations of Chapel Hill families preserve history

Toney and Nellie Strayhorn became the first Black landowners in Carrboro in 1879, building a home that has survived seven generations. Their home today is not only a significant piece of Carrboro’s history, but a testament of the resiliency of their family through generations of hardship, and decades of gentrification. 

The Strayhorn Home was the third location in Chapel Hill to be awarded a plaque from the Carrboro Truth Plaque Task Force. The project marks the community’s history and is funded by Preservation Chapel Hill, Lorie Clark, the great-great-granddaughter of Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, said. 

The Strayhorn family served as pillars for the Carrboro community, Delores Clark, the great-granddaughter of Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, said. Generations of Strayhorns have participated in service work, such as cultivating food for the community on their 30 acres of land.

Lorie Clark's niece, Nevaeh Hodge, is continuing the Strayhorn legacy of service work with involvement in the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP Youth Council.

The original home was just a small cabin, Lorie Clark said. But over the years, generations of Strayhorns adapted the home to their needs, each room in the house representing the character of a new generation. 

Her great-aunts — and Delores Clark's aunts — moved up North during the Great Migration. 

Delores Clark said that she has always treasured the home she grew up in, and wanted to stay because she knew how hard her great-grandparents worked for their property. 

Toney Strayhorn was a minister and founding member of Rock Hill Baptist Church, now First Baptist Church. After both of his children died, things became extremely difficult for the family, but their resiliency is what allowed for the Strayhorn family’s continued survival. 

Delores Clark said that this home is valuable for the larger Chapel Hill-Carrboro community. But Lorie Clark said that it means more than the surrounding community: it means family. 

“Can you imagine that people who were enslaved worked really hard to build this house, and it’s still standing, right?” she said. “It could have gone so many different ways of being torn down, and a million-dollar house being built here because this is prime real estate, but it’s still standing.”

While the home has been maintained, the surrounding Carrboro and Chapel Hill community has undergone extensive changes over the past 30 years as a result of development.

Delores Clark said that Black businesses that used to surround Franklin Street and Graham Street are no longer there.  

“When my mom was growing up, she can share places that were predominantly Black, and there was a lot of Black pride and culture,” Lorie Clark said. “If you didn’t know that, coming here, and just looking around, you would think that the Black community is almost non-existent.”

Gladys Lee Pendergraph, who grew up in Chapel Hill, said that gentrification not only displaced many of Chapel Hill’s Black residents but also reconstructed the way the community itself looks.

Pendergraph's children started going to elementary school during the Civil Rights Movement and subsequent integration of white and Black southern schools. As a result, instead of taking her children to Frank Porter Graham Elementary School, her children bussed to Ephesus Road Elementary School. 

Chapel Hill High School – which was located where the Carolina Square apartments are currently — was moved to its current location in 1966 to serve all white and Black students in Chapel Hill. Lincoln High School, the all-Black high school, shut down the same year. 

Pendergraph's family are practitioners at St. Joseph’s CME Church, which serves as a pillar for them and the Northside community. 

The Marian Cheek Jackson Center was created in connection with the church and aims to give a voice to community members who might not otherwise have it, according to Pat Jackson, Pendergraph’s sister and a board member of the Jackson Center. 

Jackson works as secretary of St. Joseph’s CME Church and currently lives on Merritt Mill Road. 

“When I grew up in Chapel Hill, it was everybody in the community living side by side, neighbor with neighbor, everybody looking out for everybody,” she said. “Presently, what you have is a few neighbors left, but you have homes that developers have come in, and basically stolen the homes by putting a little shiny dollar in front of people that may have needed money at one time, but didn’t understand that that dollar that was being fanned in their face was just a temporary for what the value of property that they were sitting on.” 

Pendergraph said that preserving the Northside community is extremely important to preserving the history of Chapel Hill. 

“You’ve got to get to know your community,” she said. 

However, Pendergraph said she still wishes there was more communication with the Town of Chapel Hill.

“They think this is the southern part of Heaven?” Pendergraph said. “Let them come down here, and live a little bit.”

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