Orange County, NC

 I know for sure that my Moore family and my Lakey family are found in Orange County, NC by 1764.  I think it likely that there could be other families.  Many years ago when I was trying to find parents for Sarah McKinsey I looked at the possibility that Edward Thomas who lived in Orange County, NC might have been her father.  This proved to not be the case.  But I made a trip to Hillsboro at the time and did a bit of research.  While there I copied pages from Orange County--1752-1952 Edited by Hugh Lefler and Paul Wager.  And actually the stamp on the title page says that I looked at it at the Rowan Public Library in Salisbury.  I am rereading chapter III by Ruth blackwelder who had been affiliated with UNC at one time.  The chapter is labelled Settlement in Early History.

The first paragraphs tell about the fact that in 1740 there was almost no settlers in the area but by 1767 Orange County had the largest population of any county in NC.  She mentions the Eno Community about seven miles north of Hillsboro which she says was the most distinctly Scotch-Irish settlement in the county.  And that Scotch-Irish also lived east of the Haw River.

So next I look for a map of the waterways of Orange county.  However, I am distracted by information about William Few.  William Few moved to NC from Maryland.  He first settled at Few's Mill area and ran a mill there.  Later he moved to Hillsboro to run a tavern from his home that was on the Old Trading Path. Hillsboro had several names before receiving name it now holds in 1777.

https://www.enoriver.org/store/journals/fews-ford/

Ms. Blackwelder explains that while the Scotch-Irissh were thick in the Eno and east of the Haw, The germans settled west of the Haw.  There were so many Germans in western Orange that an English traveler in 1773 said he had trouble finding anyone who spoke English.

Do not forget that in 1764 Orange County was quite large:

And that if you had moved into NC in that time period and ended up in Randolph, Guilford, or Rockingham, You would first be recorded in either Rowan or Orange.  The boundary of that time period went right down the middle of those counties.

Hillsboro, which is the County Seat, sits where the old Trading path crossed the Eno River. 

Chapter IV is called Orange County and the War of the Regulation by nHugh T. Lefler.  I am not reading it today.  It is filed in North Carolina in Revolution/Regulation