As of November 8, 2024, Rameses, the live animal mascot for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been around for 100 years, but that’s relatively recent history for the farm where he lives. When Rameses debuted at a VMI vs. UNC football game in 1924, Jimmy Carter was five weeks old. Ace Hardware had just been founded in Chicago two weeks earlier, and commercial radio broadcasting was still in its early days with the first radio program broadcast from a presidential convention taking place just months earlier in June 1924.
It may not have been clear at the time, but UNC’s live mascot would become part of a farm northwest of Chapel Hill that has been in the Hogan family for 252 years – since 1772. That’s nearly two decades before the university or the town of Chapel Hill were even founded, and it easily makes the farm part of the N.C. Department of Agriculture’s Century Farm and Bicentennial Farm programs.
Photo by ANTHONY SORBELLINI for GoHeels.com
How Rameses came to be UNC’s mascot living at the Hogan farm is an interesting, but somewhat murky, origin story. The obvious connection is that a Hogan family member was on the football team in the 1920s and/or another Hogan was still involved with the team after graduating. There are plenty of places to find summaries of the story, but the most researched yet succinct explanation may come from a UNC University Communications article published in 2020, which gathered details from university archivist Nicholas Graham.
There’s certainly more to the history of the Hogan farm though. So, here’s a brief story of how the farm came into the Hogan family, followed by a few other interesting facts from the farm’s history:
According to county deeds and an online NCpedia.org summary, in the 1750s, Major Thomas Lloyd acquired 2,655 acres of land in Orange County through various means, including two land grants from Earl Granville, the purchase of land and a land grant from the state of North Carolina. Beginning in 1772 and then later during the American Revolution (1775 – September 3, 1783), he sold hundreds of acres to two of his sons-in-law who were Hogan brothers Colonel John Hogan and Daniel Hogan. Since Lloyd remained a loyalist to Britain, he found himself in an uncomfortable position following the Revolution, and he feared his land and property would be confiscated. So three years after the Revolution ended, he conveyed the rest of his remaining land and property to the Hogan brothers who in turn leased it back to him for “an annual rental of sixpence silver.”
“Since he must have been worried his land was going to be taken away, he basically gave it to his daughters and their husbands so they could keep it in the family,” explained Chris Hogan, a descendant of Daniel Hogan who grew up working on the farm.
- The evolution of the Hogan family farm included a dairy and a sheep herd. (And yes, Rameses was part of the herd – sort of.)
A summary of the farm timeline compiled by Chris Hogan and his wife Jane says, based on a will in 1786, the Hogans’ farm had hogs, horned cattle, horses, sheep, chickens and goats. The summary also mentions corn, tobacco, cotton and other crops. Essentially, just like many other people in that time, farming was about subsistence for the family for more than a century.
The farm took on a more official feel after another descendant Henry Clay Hogan died in a farm accident in 1926. His four sons – Glen, Jack, Henry Saunders and Hubert – and his brother Arthur decided to pull together and form Lake Hogan Farms. They began a dairy in 1930, and that dairy became the main operation for the family farm, continuing until 1995.
Along with the dairy, there were various farm animals including a small sheep herd, Chris Hogan and his cousin Don Basnight said. When Rameses came to live on the farm – possibly as soon as 1924, but certainly by 1936 – he just became part of an already varied collection of farm animals.
“I think what’s happened over the years is the land has shifted or pieces have been sold, but the core of the family has basically held it together through these various permutations of business model and land design and whatever, and it’s still shared land. It’s undivided interests in a lot of ways – so still joint family effort,” said Ann Leonard who was married to Chris and Don’s cousin Rob Hogan Jr.
Rob died in 2010, three weeks after he fell off his tractor and was seriously injured. After the dairy closed in 1995, a residential community was developed on most of the dairy farm land, but Rob had spent time and attention raising grass-fed beef cattle on some of the remaining land. The farmland now is mostly leased out for hay production.
- Records show that one of the live mascots came from a state agricultural research farm, but it’s unclear if it lived at the Hogan farm.
According to that University Communications article from 2020, the first Rameses mascot died “before making a return to Kenan Stadium for 1925.” (By the way, a 2024 video from the university points out that the first mascot was labeled “The Battling Ram” or “Buckaneer.”) “While some reports say that Rameses lived with the Hogan family — the current caretakers — others say he was living in Caldwell Hall under the care of students,” according to the article. The second mascot also died after a year, and there was no live mascot for several years after those two deaths.
In 1933, Carolina got Rameses III from a state test farm in the Pender County community of Willard, according to the article. (The official name of the test farm was eventually established as the Coastal Plain Research Station. Archive photos and documents can be found here, here and here. The Willard station is no longer in operation, but it’s less than ten miles from the Williamsdale Farm Extension Research Center.) Rameses III lived for three more years. It’s not until 1936 that solid records confirm UNC’s live mascot lived on the Hogan family farm. By that time at least, there was likely the aforementioned herd of sheep to join. Perhaps the live mascots had been splitting time between students on campus and the Hogan farm since 1924. It’s just hard to say without solid records on the topic.
- The Hogan farm brought electricity to the area, plus establishments to support the rural community.
“I think one story that shows the richness of our history is what Grandaddy [Henry Saunders Hogan] did with the rural electrification grant. My understanding is that he secured the first federal rural electrification grant in the nation – to pull electricity from what UNC was producing on Cameron Avenue and bring it up to here on Lake Hogan Farm,” said Basnight.
The running of electricity into the area helped get the dairy into significant production. It led to a great expansion of electricity. By 1950 more than 1,500 farms in Orange County had received electricity thanks to the Hogans’ initial efforts, according to the book Orange County, North Carolina 1752-1952. Then Henry Saunders Hogan worked to start a local livestock market and processor, a bank, a farmers co-op and a dairy cooperative.
“They formed a co-op because they needed a place to buy material for the farm, so they started Central Carolina Farmers exchange, which eventually became FCX and is Southern States today,” Basnight explained. “They needed a place to get financing, so they started what became Central Carolina Bank. They also needed a place to sell the milk, so they started Long Meadow Farm dairy company.”
Leonard added more perspective.
“It was a market for what they were producing. It was financing for what they were producing. It was a co-op to process the animals, and then the farmers exchange co-op to be able to get supplies. It was sort of a full-court press to build up and help maintain farming and the rural community.”
- The family that cares for Rameses and donated land to establish UNC also has graduates from N.C. State University and Duke University.
According to Chris and Jane Hogan’s summary, in 1792, Col. John Hogan donated 200 acres of land to help with the building of Carolina. Nine other landowners also donated similar-sized plots to form the university’s original campus footprint. Col. John Hogan also contracted to deliver 150,000 bricks for the university’s first building, Old East. The bricks were made of clay from the farm.
While the Hogans’ connections to UNC are strong, they didn’t keep Chris Hogan and his cousin Rob Jr. from going to N.C. State University. Having grown up on a dairy farm, they had interest in expanding their knowledge and each earned a degree in animal husbandry. With what they learned, they were able to incorporate newer fertilization techniques with the dairy herd.
For Chris, it was a natural progression from a rural farm life just outside the university community.
“We had horses and ponies and all sorts of animals – pets, cats and dogs – big gardens. We were canning and preserving food and killing hogs – all of those things. We would sometimes kill beef cows for butchering. That was all part of growing up,” Chris said. “One thing I grew to appreciate as I got older was growing up on the farm but also attending the Chapel Hill-Carrboro city schools. It was just a wonderful place to grow up and feel fully connected to a broad range of the community.”
More recently, Chris’s daughter graduated from Duke. Athletic rivalries don’t seem to have an undue influence over the Hogans. Just as they’ve progressed and evolved over the years to adapt on the farm, their choice of school has been based on their own needs and wants. No matter what, they all seem to want to come home to the farm where Rameses is waiting.
“The farm is still a gathering place. For example, we have Thanksgiving here with 60 to 75 people,” Leonard said. “I am constantly amazed and have so much appreciation for the fact that this sort of diaspora of cousins wants to come back for Thanksgiving on the farm because it means something to them to gather and to come to this place and to be connected to the farm, and of course the ram is part of that too, but it’s a very enduring legacy, which is very very interesting.”