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Despite its reputation as Bloomsbury on the Eno, my most recent visit to Hillsborough was no literary pilgrimage. I had no interest in driving up and down the main drag, Churton Street, honking at authors. I didn’t have all day.

I was after barbecue, but I kept overshooting the place. A grove of trees partly hides Allen & Son on N.C. 86, and it’s hard to see unless you know where to look. I didn’t know where to look. I couldn’t remember.

That’s how I wound up in Hillsborough. I thought maybe I was wrong about Allen & Son being on the Chapel Hill side. Maybe it was on the other side, toward Yanceyville.

So, I drove into Hillsborough. Surprised? Yes. The place was not nearly as draggy dog tail as I remembered. The streets looked clean. Plywood didn’t cover store windows. Yards were mowed. People were about. I hadn’t been there in years.

In fact, the town looked rather nice. So nice, I parked and walked about a bit, reading historical markers until my neck ached. Hillsborough is an old Orange County town, founded in 1754 where a Native American trading path crossed the great bend of the Eno River.

Now, I know that 27 other people think Hillsborough is nice. They’re the contributors to “27 Views of Hillsborough: A Southern Town in Prose & Poetry” (Hillsborough: Eno Publishers; 216 pages, paperback, $15.95, www.enopublishers.org).

Some, like Michael Malone, the novelist and soap opera script writer, think it’s realllllly something. He writes, “In vibrant contrast to the strip malls and suburban complexes that stretch indiscriminately from state to state, there’s a particularity to Hillsborough, a human scale to its brick storefronts and frame eighteenth- and nineteenth-houses that feels authentic, local, as alive as good literature. You wouldn’t be surprised to see Tom Sawyer whitewashing the Colonial Inn (which could use it) or Scout Finch and her father Atticus shopping for a watering can at Dual Supply …

“These literary analogies are pertinent. Hillsborough is chock-a-block with writers, perhaps more novelists, poets, essayists, scholars, and historians per square foot than any other small town since, well, Concord, Massachusetts.”

Hmmm. It makes you wonder. What did the good people of Orange County do to bring this upon themselves? They already had Chapel Hill.

As you would expect, the contributions to this project are uneven. I’m talking here about the writers, the ones with national reputations. Consider, say, the piece by novelist David Payne, which is an excerpt from a memoir, “Barefoot to Avalon.” An excerpt from the excerpt about walking with his children to the Eno reads like this:

“We put our packs down on a gravel spit the kids call Treasure Island, and Grace with her keen eye says, Dad, come here, come look! And on a big rock in the middle of the river is a snake, a black one with a yellow streak running lengthwise down its belly, and when we peer closely, we see a young one curled up with it, and we watch them sunning, and Will says, Can I poke it? And I say, No, sir, if you poke that snake what does it do?”

This snake was lying on it’s back, exposing its yellow-streaked belly to the sun? I’ve never read a Payne novel, and I don’t think I will.

Here’s an excerpt from Craig Nova, a Hillsborough resident who teaches at UNCG, that’s not snakebit:

“So when Nancy Goodwin, who had read a book of mine in which a hunt is described, called to ask if I could help with her deer, so perfectly trapped inside the fence, I found myself putting down the phone and staring out the window. What I remembered were those fall afternoons in New York when we drove deer toward the main gate, and, in particular, I recalled walking through a dry swamp where a copperhead, sluggish from the cold and not yet denned up, wiggled under my boot: a sensation at once familiar and oddly old.”

It’s written well, that “oddly old” gets me.

The realllllly big literary name in Hillsborough – Lee Smith – didn’t write anything for this collection. She’s represented by a few scenes from her novel, “On Agate Hill,” inspired by incidents and scenes in Hillsborough. Jill McCorkle has a two-page anecdote titled “Dog Hunting,” a look at a way deer are hunted, perhaps in the area around Hillsborough, though it’s unclear where. Allan Gurganus wrote of finding a house and sanctuary in Hillsborough after fleeing decades ago the AIDs epidemic in New York City. Randall Kenan contributed an amusing story of wildlife encounters after his arrival in town. Hal Crowther, who is married to Lee Smith, has a nice reflection on trees.

But there’s more to this collection than the outpourings of the literati. Peter Wood, a retired Duke historian, contributed a poignant musing about delicate neighborly inquiries about who he was after he moved in. Aaron Vandemark, owner of the restaurant, Panciuto, created a Hillsborough inspired menu. The entrée is fried rabbit with cherry-mustard braised dandelion greens. Thomas Campanella, an urban planner at UNC-Chapel Hill, wrote insightfully about preservation in Hillsborough – outsiders, the new people moving in, inspired it. Judge Beverly Scarlett wrote of growing up in African American Hillsborough and coming to a better understanding of a complicated past.

Bob Burtman, a freelance reporter who lives outside town, wrote that Hillsborough was saved perhaps more by accident than design from the explosive growth that made a sprawl of Cary. “Hillsborough, hidden behind Durham from the rest of the Triangle like a moon in eclipse, never registered on the development radar screen, even as the area’s construction boom reached its peak in the late 1980s and 1990s.” Hillsborough has a population of about 6,000; Cary, more than 100,000.

The collection, overall, sounds celebratory – we live here, and you don’t. The town comes across as one cozy, bucolic gated community. With the proper credentials, you’re accepted. Everyone is high-minded and eats properly. Nobody hangs out in a poolroom or steals cars. Boy, would I like to live there. Right.

Still, this is a strong book and fun to read. It must have been a bear to organize. But Elizabeth Woodman of Eno Publishers came up with innovative categories: A Place Called Home, Street Scenes, Views in Fiction, In the Country, and Views from Before. You see the town from lots of points of view. They overlap, yes, but intertwine. The writing, of course, isn’t always stellar, but so what? It’s a collection and a good one.

When I drove to the Yanceyville side of Hillsborough, I knew that barbecue place was on the Chapel Hill side. I turned around. I stopped at a roadside produce stand. A woman was unpacking tomatoes from a wholesaler’s boxes and putting them in weathered bushel baskets. She said that barbecue place was a mile or two down the road on the right. I found it, but wouldn’t you know it – closed. The owner was on vacation.