He registered his cattle mark al the courthouse in 1758 and in 1759 bought well over half of Few’s 640-acre purchase: the part on the east side of the river. Among those already settled along that stretch of river, besides the Fews and Wood, was Barnaby Cabe – probably one of the neighbors who moved south with Few. 3 A mill already existed on the Eno in Hillsborough seven miles upstream, and another slightly farther away downstream, so that the Few mill could count on a wide radius of potential custom. 2 In 1759 William Few, his brother James, and James’s step-son, John Wood, built saw and grist mills on two acres obtained from William Cox at a fording place not far upstream from Few’s new homestead. The land Few bought in 1758, lying on both sides of the river, was 640 acres that had been part of an approximately 9,000-acre grant from Lord Granville to Governor Gabriel Johnston. The farmer from Maryland, William Few, Sr., was just one of thousands arriving at that time.
The colonial government’s establishment in the 1750s of Orange County and its seat at Hillsborough was a response to the flood of immigrants into the backcountry from the mid Atlantic colonies. He persuaded several of his neighbors to come too, and the land they found to settle on was precisely this stretch of Eno River. The story begins in 1758 when a farmer in Baltimore County, Maryland, having lost several successive crops by killing frosts, decided to come south in search of a milder climate and richer soil. This history focuses on two mills that stood at a ford and their owners – the nucleus of the neighborhood. After the Civil War, the population and activity began to wane, and the forest slowly returned with the quiet and isolation it now enjoys. As population and activity grew, it subtly changed over the years to increasingly cleared fields and ordered landscape. At its beginning in the 1750s, the scene was the wilderness the first settlers found.
The banks and hinterlands of a stretch of the Eno River that runs directly south near the eastern boundary of Orange county, North Carolina, once comprised a distinct community, whose history was played out over one hundred and fifty years.
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