Oxford's Colored Orphanage: Founded in the Shadow of Jim Crow

In August of eighteen eighty-two, a Baptist minister named Augustus Shepard traveled across North Carolina and came home troubled. Everywhere he went he found Black children, orphaned and homeless, with nowhere to turn. Segregation locked them out of white institutions, and no alternative existed.

Shepard and allies in the Baptist community formed the Colored Orphanage Association and went to work. In eighteen eighty-three they had purchased twenty-three acres one and a half miles outside Oxford for one thousand five hundred sixty-five dollars. The home they built, first called the Grant Colored Asylum, was one of the earliest statewide child-caring institutions for Black children in the American South. Congressman Henry Cheatham, a Black congressman from North Carolina, helped secure congressional funding. The institution survived Reconstruction, the Depression, and desegregation, and it operates today as the Central Children's Home of North Carolina, listed on the National Register of Historic Places.