Looking at a sprawling construction site near I-40 in Mebane, cars whizzing by, it’s hard to picture how this swath of land looked hundreds of years ago, when, some activists say, Indigenous people traversed it as a trading route.
On a Saturday afternoon, Crystal Cavalier-Keck is asking a group of about 30 people to try. She gestures toward a nearby tree with a thick limb jutting out at a right angle and tells the group to look where the limb is pointing.
“That was one of the ways we marked our path,” said Cavalier-Keck, a member of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, tracing her finger from the tree across the street and into the 32-acre expanse where a new Buc-ee’s, projected to be the world’s largest convenience store, is expected to open by May 2027.
This is the final stop on a four-hour trek organized by 7 Directions of Service, an environmental justice organization helmed by Cavalier-Keck, along portions of the historic Occaneechi Great Trading Path—an ancient route that once linked tribal nations from present day Virginia through the Carolinas.
The trek is meant to honor a bittersweet new designation: in November, the Trading Path was selected for the World Monuments Watch list, a biennial catalog of historic places facing threats from climate change, development, tourism, and war. The application for the designation, which Cavalier-Keck completed with help from tribal elders and Orange County’s Register of Deeds, highlighted development pressures such as Buc-ee’s as threats to the path.
The path was one of only two sites in the United States to be placed on the list last year, and one of 25 in the universe: other honorees included a Buddhist monastery in Mongolia, the “historic urban fabric of Gaza,” and the Moon.
The designation is largely symbolic. It won’t prevent development on the Trading Path or offer legal protections. But it will bring international attention to the path and strengthen 7 Directions’ ability to fundraise for historical markers along it—something the group requested from the state but was denied, according to Cavalier-Keck.
Whether the Buc-ee’s site sits directly on the Trading Path has been a point of contention. A 1997 state survey of the property, conducted for an unrelated project, found no evidence of the path, per a letter the state historic preservation office sent to Buc-ee’s after the company inquired about the site. Moreover, the Occaneechi tribe’s leadership has never opposed the Buc-ee’s; a Tribal Chairperson, Tony Hayes, told UNC Media Hub in 2024 that “we have found no evidence that this was any part of a burial site, or that any Occaneechi remains were found in the area.”
Asked about the lack of physical evidence, Cavalier-Keck wrote in a statement to the INDY that she could not “claim absolute certainty about one parcel.” She pointed to oral histories from longtime local families who described finding arrowheads and pottery on the land, but conceded that “the strongest claim is not that the Trading Path can be proven to run through one exact modern parcel beyond dispute, but that the area constitutes a historically significant Indigenous travel and trade landscape.”
And in the context of the World Monuments Watch designation, she says, there’s no dispute that the path generally faces threats from development.
Saturday’s trek attracted a mix of tribal members and other local residents, most of whom have participated in past 7 Directions actions, like opposition to the MVP Southgate Pipeline. It included a stop in Hillsborough where an elder Occaneechi member displayed items that would have been traded on the historic path, like a seashell for scraping crispy bits from cooking pans and a gourd that could serve as a baby rattle or water carrier.
At another stop, the group filed into the woods to visit what Cavalier-Keck described as an untouched segment of the path, tucked behind a residential property. Talking loudly to be heard over a dog barking in the backyard of the residence, Cavalier-Keck urged attendees to imagine the landscape before fences and houses.
What stands here now, she said, “was built on top of Indigenous movement, not in its absence.”
Cavalier-Keck told the INDY 7 Directions hopes to make the trek an annual event each January. Ultimately, she envisions it as a weeks-long journey where participants ride horses hundreds of miles along the historic path.
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