Origin of the name "Carolina Trace" | Property Owner Association Info

Lewis Clarke and Associates were hired in 1969 as the land planners and proposed in early 1970 that Sandhill Properties become The Carolina Trace Corporation. They had worked hard to find a name, logo-monogram, and symbol simultaneously and meant to denote and connote a large lake encircled by a major trail (Traceway) uniting individual communities along the lake shore.

They drew on trace as a “mark left by something which has preceded” (a hint of the Indian heritage), but Carolina Trace visionary and developer Bill Arnold’s first reaction was the “trace” or line from a mule or horse in harness, also appropriate to the agricultural history of the region and the tales of the Wicker brothers who had traversed it in their mule- and horse-drawn wagon. (Given the creativeness driving the group to that moment, they might well have thought of “kicking over the traces.” Nor did they seem to draw on a “trace” as a “tract” or “stretch of territory,” as in Natchez Trace.) “Carolina” was natural for the setting as well as positive with the public as the common name for what is now called the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.