This page covers two overlapping sets of books at OCPL: the Orange County works in the index that the library holds, and the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection, the library’s wider local history room, from county deed and will abstracts to North Carolina histories. Some books belong to both. Start with the plan of the room, or go straight to either list.
About these counts
The index counts works, not copies or editions: the editions of one book are gathered under one entry, so the library’s own catalog lists more titles than the 357 here. The Wall Collection figure is the library’s inventory of that collection as of September 2026, counted by catalog title; the Orange County works shelved there are in both counts.
The Local History Room
Find your way around the local history room
Find the books, maps, research equipment, and displays of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection at the Main Library in Hillsborough. The lettered locations below match the plan; tap or hover one to see what stands there.
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Locked cabinet
Fragile items that mending would damage. Above it, a platter Rebecca Wall painted of the law office of Thomas Ruffin, an ancestor of hers, at 201 South Cameron Street, and a pastel portrait of her in her fifties.
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Gray file cabinet
Microfilm of the local newspaper and federal census returns from the 1800s; Orange County court records, vital statistics, tax lists and Confederate soldier records reaching back to the 1700s. On top, a photograph of Rebecca Wall in her twenties and a wooden model of the Burwell School.
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Research computer with microfilm reader and scanner
Read and scan the microfilm here, and search Ancestry and other research sites.
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Genealogy bookshelf, D-1
Historical records of many kinds, color-coded and labeled by county and record type, with books on how to do genealogical research.
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Genealogy bookshelf, D-2
Published family histories, biographies and genealogical journals; the colonial and higher-court records of North Carolina; lives of local figures from William Tryon to John Blackfeather.
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Genealogy bookshelf, D-3
More about Rebecca Wall.
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North Carolina history bookshelf, E-1
North Carolina histories of every kind, from the university and the State Fair to natural history and Durham’s Hayti.
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Reference bookshelf, E-2
Traditional general reference books, still valuable as comprehensive, authoritative sources.
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Framed print: the courthouse
Hope Summerell Chamberlain’s 1926 pen-and-ink rendering of the county courthouse; she was an author, artist and civic worker.
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Framed print: the 1892 county map
George W. Tate’s 1892 map of Orange County.
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Framed print: Hillsborough, County Down
Views of the Irish town the county seat is named for.
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Framed print: the Nash and Kollock School
Chamberlain’s 1926 interpretation of a late-1800s photograph of the school, which stood at 137 West Margaret Lane, the Main Library’s address today.
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Framed print: Hillsborough Military Academy
Uniform buttons from the academy, which ran from 1859 to 1861 off Barracks Road in West Hillsborough; outbuildings still stand.
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Framed print: the 1768 town plan
C. J. Sauthier’s 1768 map of the town of Hillsborough.
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Black file cabinet
Family and local histories researched, compiled and donated by patrons, with local history odds and ends. On top, a model of the county courthouse by Allen Alexander Lloyd (1914 to 2006), lifelong Hillsborough resident and keeper of the town clock, who with his wife Pauline wrote the histories of the town and of its churches that stand in this room.
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Assorted maps
Maps of the county and the town.
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Elizabeth Keckly display
Keckly was enslaved in Hillsborough by her half-brother Robert Burwell, minister of the Presbyterian church and founder of the Burwell School. A seamstress of rare skill, after her emancipation in 1855 she became dressmaker and confidante to Mary Lincoln.
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Elizabeth Keckly display, continued
The second panel of the Keckly display.
On the shelves
Orange County works at OCPL
These works connect to Orange County and are held at OCPL. Search by title, author, or description, or pick a section to browse it in call-number order. Open the catalog record for location and availability.
Travel, description and geography 910 to 919: 4 works as they shelve at OCPL, in call-number order. All 357, with filters by place, theme, and material, in the search →
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Best Easy Day Hikes Chapel Hill
Molloy, Johnny · 2020 · Guidebooks & tours
Johnny Molloy's pocket guide to short day hikes around Chapel Hill, one of the FalconGuides series. Trails and hiking in the Chapel Hill area are its whole subject, with directions and a map for each walk. Published in Guilford, Connecticut in 2020, 112 pages with illustrations and maps in a small format.
Call number 917.56 FALCON 2020Chapel Hill View in OCPL catalog → -
Best Hikes
Molloy, Johnny · 2020 · Guidebooks & tours
Johnny Molloy's guidebook to forty hikes within roughly an hour's drive of Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh, in a second FalconGuides edition of 2020. Each hike gets a description, a specifications box and GPS coordinates for its trailhead, with color photographs and maps throughout; most routes are rated easy or moderate and were chosen with families and new hikers in mind. 213 pages.
Call number 917.56 FALCON 2020Chapel Hill View in OCPL catalog → -
Hugh Morton's North Carolina
Morton, Hugh M. · 2003 · Pictorial works
Photographs by Hugh Morton of North Carolina people, places and sporting events, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2003. Topics include pictorial works on the state, on notable North Carolinians and on sports at the university, and the volume runs to xvi and 207 pages, chiefly pictures, some of them in color. Part of the library's Wall Local History Collection.
Call number 917.56 MORNorth Carolina (statewide)Carolina SportsUNC & Campus Life View in OCPL catalog → -
The Pelican Guide to Hillsborough, Historic Orange County, North Carolina
Dula, Lucile Noell · 1989 · Guidebooks & tours
Lucile Noell Dula's guidebook to Hillsborough and its historic buildings, published by Pelican in 1989. It pairs a tour of the town with notes on its history, in 128 illustrated pages with a bibliography. Part of the Wall Local History Collection.
Call number 917.565 DULHillsboroughBuildings & Preservation View in OCPL catalog →
The Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection
Browse the full Wall Collection
The wider local history collection, named for Rebecca Wall, the retired librarian whose 1986 bequest built it: genealogy, North Carolina history, and regional reference works, alongside the Orange County titles. Browse it shelf by shelf or search by title, author, subject, or description.
Colonial America and the Revolution 973.2 to 973.3: 28 titles as they stand on the shelf at OCPL, in call-number order. North Carolina history bookshelf, E-1: North Carolina histories of every kind, from the university and the State Fair to the state’s natural history and Durham’s Hayti.
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The Jamestowne Society: Register of Qualifying Seventeenth Century Ancestors
1994
Virginia Lee Hutcheson Davis's register of the seventeenth-century ancestors through whom members qualify for the Jamestowne Society, a lineage society founded in 1936 for descendants of Virginia Company stockholders and of people who owned land or lived at Jamestown before 1700. Published by the society in Richmond in 1994; 94 pages with maps.
Call number NC 973.2 JAM View in OCPL catalog → -
A Brief History of the North Carolina Troops on the Continental Establishment: In the War of the Revolution : With A Register of Officers of the Same
Davis, Charles Lukens · 1896
Charles L. Davis, an army officer teaching military science at the Bingham School in Asheville, traces North Carolina's Continental regiments from the provincial congresses of 1774 and 1775 through the Revolution and adds a register of their officers. Bound in is Henry Hobart Bellas's sketch of the state's Society of the Cincinnati from its founding in 1783 to its reputed dissolution after 1790. Printed in Philadelphia in 1896, 106 pages with plates and portraits.
Call number NC 973.3 DAV View in OCPL catalog → -
The Narrative of Colonel David Fanning (a Tory in the Revolutionary War With Great Britain): Giving An Account of His Adventures in North Carolina From 1775 to 1783, as Written by Himself
Fanning, David · 1865
David Fanning's own account of his years as a Loyalist partisan in North Carolina, 1775 to 1783, including his 1781 raid on Hillsborough, where he captured Governor Thomas Burke. Edited by Thomas H. Wynne and first printed privately at Richmond in 1861, it was reissued in 1865 by Joseph Sabin of New York with an introduction by John H. Wheeler and notes partly by former governor David L. Swain; 86 pages.
Call number NC 973.3 FAN View in OCPL catalog → -
The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: A Study of Evidence Showing That the Alleged Early Declaration of Independence by Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, on May 20th, 1775, Is Spurious
Hoyt, William Henry · 1907
William Henry Hoyt tests the claim that Mecklenburg County declared independence on May 20, 1775, and concludes that the text was a later reconstruction, a garbled memory of the Mecklenburg Resolves of May 31, 1775, which newspapers of the time confirm. Most North Carolinians ignored the book, though the historian Samuel A. Ashe accepted it. Published in New York by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1907, 284 pages with facsimiles; reprinted in 1972.
Call number NC 973.3 HOY View in OCPL catalog → -
The Campaign of 1781 in the Carolinas: With Remarks Historical and Critical on Johnson's Life of Greene : to Which Is Added An Appendix of Original Documents, Relating to the History of the Revolution
Lee, Henry · 1975
Henry Lee IV's account of Nathanael Greene's 1781 campaign in the Carolinas, with critical remarks on William Johnson's life of Greene and attention to the part played by his father, the Revolutionary cavalry officer Light-Horse Harry Lee. An appendix prints original documents of the Revolution. First published in Philadelphia by E. Littell in 1824; this is the Reprint Company's 1975 edition from Spartanburg, South Carolina, 511 and xlvii pages.
Call number NC 973.3 LEE View in OCPL catalog → -
Copy of the Original Index Book Showing the Revolutionary Claims Filed in South Carolina Between August 20, 1783 and August 31, 1786
South Carolina · 1990
Janie Revill's copy of the index book kept by James McCall, South Carolina's auditor general, naming the people who filed Revolutionary War claims with the state between August 20, 1783, and August 31, 1786. First published in 1941 and reprinted by the Genealogical Publishing Company in 1969, it was reissued by Clearfield Company of Baltimore in 1990; 387 pages.
Call number NC 973.3 REV View in OCPL catalog → -
Revolutionary War Gravesites of Soldiers, Patriots, and Ancestors Buried in North Carolina
2007
A roster of Revolutionary War soldiers, patriots and other ancestors buried in North Carolina and the sites of their graves, compiled by the North Carolina Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution and published in 2007 with sketches by Morgan Harris. Unpaged and illustrated.
Call number NC 973.3 REV View in OCPL catalog → -
The Pension Roll of 1835
United States · 1992
The War Department's 1835 report to the Senate on the pension establishment of the United States, listing military pensioners, largely of the Revolutionary War, state by state. First printed in Washington by Duff Green in three volumes, it was later rearranged into four regional volumes for New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the Southern and the Mid-Western states, and this 1992 Genealogical Publishing Company printing adds a new index. North Carolina falls with the Southern states.
Call number NC 973.3 UNI View in OCPL catalog → -
The Encyclopedia of Colonial and Revolutionary America
1990
A one-volume encyclopedia of colonial and Revolutionary North America, edited by the historian John Mack Faragher and published by Facts on File in 1990. Its alphabetical entries run from the English settlements through the Revolution and take in New France, with illustrations, bibliographical references and an index; 484 pages.
Call number NC 973.303 ENC View in OCPL catalog → -
Uzal Johnson, Loyalist Surgeon: A Revolutionary War Diary
Johnson, Uzal · 2000
The Revolutionary War diary of Uzal Johnson (1757? to 1827), surgeon to the New Jersey Volunteers, a Loyalist regiment, kept during the British campaign in the Carolinas, where he served with Major Patrick Ferguson's troops; he later practiced medicine in Newark. Bobby Gilmer Moss edited it with maps, notes, a long bibliography and an index. Scotia Hibernia Press, Blacksburg, South Carolina, 2000; xxiv, 215 pages.
Call number NC 973.309 JOHNSON View in OCPL catalog → -
Not A Conquered People: Two Carolinians View Parliamentary Taxation
1975
Two pamphlets from the Stamp Act crisis of 1765, reprinted in full. Martin Howard, later chief justice of North Carolina, supported the act in 'A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax'; Maurice Moore argued against it in 'The Justice and Policy of Taxing the American Colonies'. William S. Price Jr. adds an introduction on the crisis and sketches of both men. The second North Carolina Bicentennial Pamphlet, 1975; 49 pages.
Call number NC 973.311 PRI View in OCPL catalog → -
North Carolinians in the Continental Congress
Morgan, David T. · 1976
David T. Morgan and William J. Schmidt study the men North Carolina sent to the Continental Congress, among them William Hooper, Joseph Hewes and John Penn, and their part in the Revolution. The authors had earlier written on the delegation of 1774 to 1776 for the North Carolina Historical Review. Published in Winston-Salem by John F. Blair in 1976, 150 pages with illustrations, notes and an index.
Call number NC 973.312 MOR View in OCPL catalog →
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