Rogers Road is not unfamiliar to Chapel Hill residents. The small community between Eubanks and Homestead Roads has a history spanning more than two centuries, but is better known for its involvement in local political activism since 1972, when the Orange County landfill, originally slated for Chestnut Ridge, was sited in the neighborhood.

Many citizens of Orange County have heard some portion of the challenges faced by area residents over the years. They have lived with negative effects of landfill odor, illegal dumping, truck traffic and buzzards. A landfill expansion in the 1990s exhausted residents and community leaders with nearly eight years of deliberation and uncertainty.

What many people have not heard, however, is the rich history of this community, whose members still bear the surnames that are written on the neighborhood street signs. The Rogers family lives near Rogers Road, the Purefoy family on Purefoy Drive. Living representatives of names that have been in the county since it was settled in the 1700s, such as Hogans, Blackwoods, Nunns, and Caldwells, continue to hold ties in this community.

"When my parents passed...every one of us got a deed," one resident recollected. "It seems unusual that they gave everyone a written deed, but they believed in inheritance land, and that is how we were able to establish Rogers Road. It is historic Rogers Road and I'm grateful for that."

The enduring history of Rogers Road residents is the subject of two partnership projects involving residents of the Rogers Road neighborhood, the Carolina Center for Public Service Robert E. Bryan Fellowship, the Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill, and the Chapel Hill Historical Society.

The projects include the publication of an upcoming book titled "Rogers Road" and the building of a community photographic and documentation archive, housed both at Wilson Library and at Faith Tabernacle Church on Rogers Road. The Wilson Library archive will be displayed in an exhibition called "We're all Family Here: Preserving Community Heritage in the Rogers Road Neighborhood," premiering on June 25.

The collection of Rogers Road area history began through a Robert E. Bryan Fellowship from the Carolina Center for Public Service awarded to me in 2008 while I was a graduate student in the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health. I worked with Minister Robert Campbell, president of the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association (RENA), and other area residents to design a neighborhood history project. This collaboration used photographs and discussions to record community heritage and experience.

The book contains more than 300 pages of text and nearly 100 photographs that illustrate life in the community over nearly 20 decades. Based on oral histories, government meeting minutes, and other secondary documents, it contains previously unrecorded accounts of African-American community leadership in Orange County.

The neighborhood traces its history through emancipation, the Great Depression, the Jim Crow era, and the civil rights movement, developing and changing as the county's population grew at a record pace.

Older residents recounted memories of the neighborhood as it was at the turn of the century -- a series of family farms, churches, and a two-room schoolhouse created by Morris Hogan, for whom Morris Grove Elementary School was named. Men and women remember growing up on Rogers Road when it was still a rural country route.

"My favorite memory of Rogers Road was riding school buses -- we would get laughed at and called 'the Baja kids' because it was so dusty out here," one resident remembered.

Alongside this history is a compilation of the conversations and political processes that governed Orange County's solid waste decision-making from 1972 until the present. Buried in documents such as meeting minutes of the Board of County Commissioners and the Assembly of Governments, deed records, letters and legal documents is the story of how the Rogers Road neighborhood ended up bearing a disproportionate burden of waste disposal services for the county. The community has worked hard to protect its identity from being further degraded by solid waste disposal or erased by ongoing development.

With a history of engagement in coalition-building, public protest, and political activism, the community continues to advocate for basic services to offset the burdens it has borne: water and sewer lines, adequate lighting and pick-up and drop-off points for the bus route that currently passes them by. Most importantly, residents want an end to the use of their community for garbage disposal.

The purpose of the book and archive projects is to provide the public with an overview of this history: the actors and events that have shaped life on Rogers Road and impacted the development of Orange County.

Searching for a place to preserve and display the images of neighborhood life, Rogers Road residents found a welcome partner in Wilson Library, whose Southern Oral History Program already contained the spoken histories of some community members.

The Rogers Road Archive will become part of the North Carolina Collection, available to the public for viewing and research. Publication of the book, "Rogers Road," is being considered for a grant from the Chapel Hill Historical Society, and will be made available locally and online, with proceeds going to the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association for events such as the annual Back to School Bash, in which the community honors its young students.