Eagle Rock

Tom Harris

As you approach Eagle Rock on State Road 1003, it's obvious that there once was more to it than a railroad track and a few ramshackle buildings.

From about 1840 until the early 1900s, Eagle Rock was a thriving community, with a post office, several general stores, three grist mills, a hotel, a printing company and as many as five physicians' offices. Its residents included a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, the first superintendent of Wake County schools and a number of individuals influential in politics and business.

Legend has it that Eagle Rock got its name when one of its early settlers, Thomas Richard Debnam, shot and killed an eagle that had landed on a rock outcropping in front of his home. But in her definitive "Wake: Capital County of North Carolina," historian Elizabeth Reid Murray casts doubt on that story.

References to Eagle Rock appear much earlier, including an 1833 ad in the Raleigh Register offering 535 acres of "Eagle Rock for sale." Debnam, who was born in Virginia and grew up in Franklin County, didn't move to Wake County and build his home until 1836, Murray notes.

However, Debnam was an influential member of the community. His home, Debnam Hall, was about two miles east of the current Eagle Rock. It included his mercantile business, a post office (Debnam was post master in 1837) and the county polling place for the Mark's Creek and Buffalo Creek districts. The store was a gathering place for the community for more than five decades, even after Debnam's death in 1873.

Debnam and his wife, the former Priscilla Maron of Franklin County, had 11 children. One son, Walter, became a physician in Eagle Rock. A daughter, Leila, married Eugene Thomas Jones, who later (1883) became the first superintendent of the Wake County Public School System.

Learn more about Brogden in the June/July 2008 issue of Triangle East Magazine.