Tracing the Whitted family's legacy in Orange County

The Whitted family is embedded in Orange County’s history — from being the namesake of the Hargraves Community Center to raising the first Black principal in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools — but few know of these widespread connections. 

Members of the family, however, are working to change that through vast preservation efforts.

More than 500 people are members of the Whitted Family Association of North Carolina, an organization dedicated to bringing the family together and preserving their history. Beginning in 1950, the family organized annual reunions where relatives from across the state would come to see each other and share stories of the past year. 

In 1988, the family sat down and wrote out a comprehensive family tree documenting their known relatives, and challenged everyone to research further. Krishna Mayfield, who today serves as the historian for the association, took that challenge and ran with it. 

Mayfield began extensively researching her family’s history for a high school English project, and has kept up her efforts since.

“I started to actually, truly research the family, and that’s how I found out all these stories, because I truly had no idea,” Mayfield said. 

The Whitted family’s history in Orange County began in the early 18th century when William Whitted, whose last name has also been documented as Whitehead in some instances, moved to the region from Newcastle, Del., Mayfield said. 

William Whitted had several children, who then had numerous children of their own, creating a far-stretching family tree with legacies cemented across Orange, Durham and Alamance counties, especially regarding education.

London Whitted was the first Black principal in Orange County, serving at the Quaker Freedmen’s School, which was founded in the late 19th century.

“That history is pretty foundational to the school system in Chapel Hill,” Molly Luby, the community history coordinator at the Chapel Hill Public Library, said. “The Quaker [Freedmen’s] School was really the first free public education center for Black children in Chapel Hill.”

Frances Hargraves, a descendant of the Whitted family, was the first Black teacher to teach in white schools prior to the integration of Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools, and was the first teacher in the school system to be certified as a special education instructor. 

The Hargraves Community Center, originally founded in the 1940s as the Negro Community Center, is named after William Hargraves Jr., Frances Hargraves’ son. He served as a member of Chapel Hill’s Parks and Recreation Commission and worked to implement several programs to support the community at the center.

Descendents of the Whitted family have also left an impact on the Black community's education in Durham. 

James Shephard, the founder of N.C. Central University, James Whitted, the first Black principal in Durham and Louisa Burton, an educator which Burton Elementary School is named after, were all descendants of the Whitted family.

“It’s just nice to know that we flourished and we prospered, and particularly through education,” Tonya Gerald-Goins, a descendant of the Whitted family and associate professor at N.C. Central, said.

Although local governments and organizations have done some work to recognize the legacies of individual descendants of the Whitted family, there is scarce writing about how these figures are all connected through their Whitted lineage, Mayfield said.

“It’s frustrating to us because we know these stories and everything, but trying to get it out and share is really difficult,” Mayfield said. 

The preservation of the Whitted family’s contributions to the greater Chapel Hill area is important in order to understand the larger history of Black families’ contributions to the area, as well as how those contributions shaped the town into what it is today, Luby said. 

When Mayfield first began researching her family’s history in high school, she relied on the existing family tree, oral histories from her relatives and physical government documents. In the early 1990s, Mayfield began using Ancestry to explore her family’s genealogy through the company’s network of historic records, and Ancestry’s vast library of documents continue to serve as the basis for Mayfield’s research into her family.

“You literally can never stop, because you’re always finding something new,” Mayfield said. 

Today, the Whitted Family Association of North Carolina’s family tree comprises nearly 30,000 relatives, ranging in professions from educators and doctors to bricklayers and musicians.  

“It’s wonderful to see the contribution in the past that my family has made, and made to not just Orange County, but the state and the nation,” Gerald-Goins said. 

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