Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

Just Up the Road

Posted on June 30, 2010June 30, 2010 by Staff

By Vicky Dickson

When I was growing up in Chapel Hill, Hillsborough was the place we drove to on Sundays to eat fried chicken and biscuits at the Colonial Inn. Those were delicious meals – particularly to a kid brought up on TV dinners and fish sticks – but I never paused to consider what other wonderful things the town might have to offer.

Nor, in later years, did my consideration of Hillsborough extend beyond a vague awareness that the town seemed to have turned into something of a mecca for nationally known writers. So I’m very glad to have come upon a new book that’s helped fill in some blanks.

27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose and Poetry is a collection of poems, stories and essays by some of the town’s most illustrious citizens. All the pieces are inspired, in some fashion, by the town of Hillsborough – though as Lee Smith pointed out at a reading at The Regulator, the collection is far from a “sweetie, sweetie” sort of travelogue meant to attract tourists from New Jersey.

The perspectives are fresh, and often unexpected. In “Views of the Eno,” Beverly Scarlett writes of her shock, after multicultural summer camp at Carolina Friends School, at entering first grade and finding that “everyone at school looked like me.” The happiness she felt when integration provided a best friend who didn’t look anything like her was eventually replaced by the misery of being the harassed, only black on the school bus. But the solace she found in an old Churton Street house along the bus route led in turn to some fascinating discoveries about Scarlett’s family history.

The solace to be found in houses also figures prominently in Allen Gurganus’ “Old Houses and Young Men: Notes on Renovation and Survival,” which tells how the restoration of his Hillsborough home brought Gurganus back to life after New York City had become a graveyard for far too many of his friends.

Randall Kenan’s “Where the Wild Things Are” depicts a fictional retreat from the big city into small-town gardening, while real-life gardening at Montrose, the complex of historic gardens where Nancy Goodwin lives and works, forms the focus of her story “A Gardener’s Journal. ”

Much of 27 Views deals with history, from Michael Malone’s story inspired by the Regulator uprising to Barry Jacobs’ account of one of the town’s (and the state’s) most prominent early families. There are excerpts from Lee Smith’s novel On Agate Hill, for which she found inspiration in Hillsborough’s Burwell School. And there’s Katharine Whalen’s “Stop Your Engines,” about the Occoneechee Speedway, which closed in 1968.

The wilder surroundings of Hillsborough aren’t left out. Hal Crowther describes his love of trees, and his distress at the loss of so many to hurricane Fran. Jill McCorkle admires the cocky independence of a hunting beagle named Dottie. And Chef Aaron Vandemark describes the edibles to be found growing wild (or in a neighbor’s garden) in a walk around Hillsborough.

The book includes poems by Piedmont poet laureate Jaki Shelton Green and others, cautionary essays about the precarious nature of Hillsborough’s unique community and much more. So, to get a real sense of the wealth of history and literary talent that is Hillsborough, check it out for yourself.

Web Archive

© 2026 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme