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Colonial and Regulator years · 1680–1774
- 1680s
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The Occaneechi settle on the Eno near Hillsborough
After leaving the Roanoke River valley in 1676, the Occaneechi built a town on the Eno River near present-day Hillsborough and lived there from about 1680 to 1710. It was a small stockaded village of ten or twelve houses and probably fewer than 75 people, and it was the town John Lawson visited in 1701. Archaeologists dug the whole village between 1983 and 1986 at a place they named the Fredricks site, and they call this period of Occaneechi life on the Eno the Fredricks phase.
- 1750s
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Creation of Orange County and Hillsborough
The General Assembly created Orange County in 1752 from parts of Granville, Johnston and Bladen counties. William Churton laid out its county seat in 1754 where trading paths crossed the Eno. The town was called Orange, then Corbin Town, then Childsburgh from 1759, and took the name Hillsborough in 1766.
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How Orange County’s boundaries changed
A year after creating Orange, the Assembly in 1753 replaced the eastern line the 1752 act had set, ordering a new line run from the Virginia line twenty miles west of Granville Court House due south to the Neuse River and down the Neuse to the mouth of Horse Creek, and the creation of Rowan County that year gave Orange its first fixed western line. An act of 1761 moved part of southeastern Orange into Johnston County. In 1767 Orange still ran over land later taken into Wake, Chatham, Guilford, Caswell, Person, Randolph, Rockingham, Alamance and Durham, and had the largest population of any county in North Carolina; successive divisions cut it to about 7,560 people by 1779. In November 1768 the Assembly rejected bills to form new counties out of Orange and Johnston and out of Orange and Rowan, though many people had to travel as far as 60 miles to court, and in 1770 residents of northern Orange petitioned for a county of their own, telling the Assembly that travel to the county's musters and courts was a heavy burden. Between 1771 and 1777 the legislature carved Guilford, Wake, Chatham and Caswell counties wholly or partly out of Orange, then took Alamance from its west in 1849 and Durham from its east in 1881. Records filed under Orange County before those dates can therefore concern places that now lie in other counties.
- 1760s
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The Regulator crisis
Orange County farmers organized in 1766 against high fees, taxes and dishonest county officers, calling a meeting at Maddock's Mill that October. Protest turned violent at the Hillsborough court in September 1770 and ended with the Regulators' defeat at Alamance on May 16, 1771 and the hanging of six at Hillsborough on June 19.
- 1770s
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Regulators disrupt the Hillsborough Superior Court
About 150 Regulators crowded the Hillsborough Superior Court, beat the lawyer John Williams, Edmund Fanning and others, and forced Judge Richard Henderson to adjourn; he fled that night. The next day the crowd tore down Fanning's house and wrote mocking judgments on the court docket.
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Battle of Alamance
Governor William Tryon's militia defeated the Regulators at Alamance. James Few, captured on the field, was hanged at Tryon's camp the next day.
Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
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Third Provincial Congress meets at Hillsborough
Delegates to the Third Provincial Congress gathered at Hillsborough on August 20, 1775 but lacked a quorum. The Congress organized the next day, its members signed the test of allegiance on August 23, and it sat until September 10.
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General Assembly holds its August 1778 session at Hillsborough
The second session of the 1778 General Assembly met at Hillsborough, elected Whitmell Hill and Thomas Burke as additional delegates to the Continental Congress, and authorized 850,000 pounds in bills of credit to pay the state's war debts. The House adjourned to meet next at Halifax in January 1779.
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Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies
Meeting at Halifax on February 12, 1779, the General Assembly chartered an academy near Hillsborough named Science Hall, naming William Hooper, Thomas Burke, Nathaniel Rochester, James Hogg and others as trustees, with the same powers as those of Liberty Hall in Mecklenburg County. Jesse Benton, who supported the school, was secretary-treasurer of its trustees in 1784, and some years later he gave it the 50 pounds damages he won from Colonel William Sheppard for an assault. The school opened about 1785 as Hillsborough Academy in the old Anglican church, which an act of the 1784 Hillsborough session had ordered repaired for a school and a free meeting house, but it never thrived and closed in 1790. Pender lists a school kept by Joseph Dunn Hughes near Eno Presbyterian Church in 1785, the earliest of the Hughes family schools that later produced Cedar Grove Academy, and in September 1790 Richard Stanford, who had come to the Hawfields from Maryland in 1789, opened an academy there, with Thomas Hart Benton among his early pupils. At New Hope church William F. Thompson urged the congregation in 1795 to take up schooling, and the church generally kept a school for many years after. Hillsborough Academy opened on a larger plan under Andrew Flinn in October 1801 and grew under William J. Bingham, principal from 1827 until 1844, when he left to open his own school at the Oaks. The Burwell School for girls ran from 1837 to 1857. The Nash and Kollock School opened in 1858 and Hillsborough Military Academy in January 1859. The military academy closed for a time in 1865 at the end of the Civil War.
- 1780s
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Patriots and Loyalists clash at Hart’s Mill
At daybreak about 45 North Carolina cavalry under Captain Joseph Graham and mounted riflemen under Captain Richard Simmons, sent out by General Andrew Pickens, surprised the British guard of about 26 regulars and two Loyalists that was keeping Thomas Hart's mill on the Eno grinding for Cornwallis's army. Graham's accounts report the whole guard killed, wounded or captured with no Patriot dead, and the party reached Pickens's camp with its prisoners ahead of pursuing British cavalry.
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Cornwallis occupies Hillsborough
After driving Nathanael Greene's army across the Dan River, Lord Cornwallis reached Hillsborough on February 20, 1781, and issued a proclamation calling loyalists to join him. The ceremony of raising the King's Standard, ordered for one o'clock on February 21 with a salute of 21 guns, was put off that noon until the next day. Short of food and forage, and told that Greene had recrossed the Dan, he left on February 26, crossing the Haw toward Alamance Creek.
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David Fanning raids Hillsborough and captures Governor Burke
Fanning’s Loyalists captured Governor Thomas Burke during a surprise raid on Hillsborough.
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Indian families from Virginia settle the Texas community in northern Orange County
Charles Whitmore, Jesse Whitmore and Jacob Jeffries appear on the Orange County return used for the 1790 federal census, which was compiled from a tax list of 1787. Families of the same names had moved southwest from Greensville County in Virginia, and by 1820 the settlement later called Texas, or Pleasant Grove, was intact, with the Corn and Jeffries families holding tracts of several hundred acres.
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Hillsborough Convention declines to ratify the Constitution
Meeting at St. Matthew's Church in Hillsborough, delegates defeated a motion to ratify the Constitution 184 to 84 on August 1, 1788. On August 2 they voted to neither ratify nor reject it until a declaration of rights and amendments went before Congress.
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The founding of the university and Chapel Hill
The General Assembly chartered the university on December 11, 1789. Meeting at Hillsborough in August 1792, the trustees voted to build within fifteen miles of Cyprett's Bridge, and that November their commissioners chose New Hope Chapel Hill. The Old East cornerstone was laid October 12, 1793, and the first student, Hinton James, arrived February 12, 1795.
- 1790s
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The county tax list counts 36 white polls and 82 taxable enslaved people in Hillsborough town
Orange County's 1790 tax list returned 2,272 polls and 406,106 acres across its eight districts, with a separate list for Hillsborough town showing 36 white polls against 82 black polls. William Hooper was charged for 22 of them, John Taylor for 10 and Francis Childs for 5.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1800s
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Suit by William Kirkland and others leads to the sale of Hannah and her children
Legal proceedings brought by William Kirkland, Catlett Campbell, Jacob Greer and Isaac Mordecai against Robert Bell placed Hannah and her children Jenny and David in the hands of the sheriff. Sheriff Samuel Turrentine sold the three at public auction at the Hillsborough Market House to Duncan Cameron for 200 pounds.
- 1810s
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Polly Burke helps organize the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church
In September 1816 Mary W. Burke joined eight other people and the Rev. John Knox Witherspoon to organize the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church, which acquired the town's brick church built in 1810. She rented pew 13 on the first pew list and supported the church for the next eighteen years.
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George Moses Horton begins selling poems to UNC students
By about age twenty, George Moses Horton, enslaved on a Chatham County farm, was carrying fruit to the UNC campus on Sundays, and students began paying him to compose love poems and acrostics. His first printed poem appeared in April 1829, the year The Hope of Liberty was published.
- 1820s
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The Hillsborough Recorder begins publication
Dennis Heartt began publishing the weekly Hillsborough Recorder in February 1820, at three dollars a year. The paper ran until 1879, and its surviving issues are a main record of nineteenth-century Hillsborough and Orange County.
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George Moses Horton publishes The Hope of Liberty
George Moses Horton’s The Hope of Liberty was published in Raleigh, with supporters hoping sales could finance his freedom.
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Thomas Ruffin issues the State v. Mann decision
Thomas Ruffin of Hillsborough, newly seated on the North Carolina Supreme Court, wrote the opinion in State v. Mann, overturning the conviction of John Mann of Edenton for shooting Lydia, an enslaved woman he had hired, as she fled a whipping. Ruffin held that a master's power must be absolute, and abolitionists later cited the ruling widely.
- 1830s
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Burwell School for young women operates
Robert and Margaret Anna Burwell operated their Hillsborough school for girls from 1837 to 1857.
- 1840s
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The North Carolina Railroad is chartered and built
The General Assembly chartered the North Carolina Railroad in 1849, after Senate speaker Calvin Graves cast the deciding vote. The state built the 223-mile line from Goldsboro to Charlotte between 1851 and 1856, running it through Hillsborough, and the first train ran its full length in January 1856.
- 1850s
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Elizabeth Keckly purchases freedom for herself and her son
Elizabeth Keckly purchased freedom for herself and her son in St. Louis, after earlier enslavement in Hillsborough.
- 1860s
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Orange County during the Civil War
Students left Chapel Hill to enlist from late April 1861, and Hillsborough Military Academy's founder, Charles Tew, left in May to command a Confederate regiment. The university stayed open as enrollment fell to about a dozen. Federal cavalry held Chapel Hill from April 17 to May 3, 1865, as many newly freed people left town or joined the army.
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Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation
After emancipation, Black residents of Orange County built their own churches, schools and societies. Chapel Hill's First Baptist Church formed in September 1865, and in June 1866 Job Berry and Philadelphia Quakers opened Hillsborough's freedmen's school in the old courthouse. Over the next two decades congregations bought land, Black Masons established Mount Olive Lodge No. 86, and supporters of Chapel Hill's Black public school pledged nearly $80 toward a schoolhouse. In 1886 Hillsborough's AME church bought the old courthouse where it had worshipped and kept school for twenty years. A normal school for Black pupils opened in Hillsborough in 1887, and in 1889 the American Missionary Association made the Methodists' 1853 Chapel Hill church a Congregational church for Black worshippers.
The full story
After emancipation, Black residents of Orange County built their own institutions. Chapel Hill's First Baptist Church formed in September 1865; Job Berry and Philadelphia Quakers opened Hillsborough's freedmen's school in the old courthouse on June 5, 1866; Black residents bought land for a Chapel Hill school in 1866; and St. Paul AME bought its church lot in 1878.
Early in 1880 the Rev. G. W. Offley of Chapel Hill's AME church appealed to the public for help in finishing its house of worship, and supporters of the town's Black public school, which had more than 80 pupils and one teacher, pledged nearly $80 toward a schoolhouse, much of it from university faculty and students. That year Black Masons established Mount Olive Lodge No. 86, a Prince Hall lodge serving Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and about that year Black Baptists organized Glenn's Grove Baptist Church, with Henry Fuller as first pastor, and Orange Cross Roads Baptist Church.
In 1882 the congregation then known as Poplar Springs, later Mount Zion, bought an acre from S. W. and Margaret J. Hughes for its first church. In 1883 the American Missionary Association, with a gift from a Mrs. Gray of California, began a church and school building for Black residents at Brownsville, west of Hillsborough. In 1886 the trustees of Hillsborough's AME church bought the old courthouse, where the congregation had worshipped and kept school for twenty years, from the Philadelphia Friends for $800.
A normal school for Black pupils opened in Hillsborough on October 1, 1887 under Miss L. C. Jenkins, a Hampton Institute graduate, and had forty-five pupils by January 1888, when the Independent Literary Society at the A.M.E. church installed the Rev. J. E. C. Barham as president. In March 1889 the Methodist trustees sold their 1853 Chapel Hill church to the American Missionary Association, which made it a Congregational church for Black worshippers.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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Washington Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow and Daniel Morrow are lynched
Early on August 7, 1869, about 100 disguised white men took Washington Morrow and his brother Nelson from the Hillsborough jail, where they were held on barn-burning charges, and shot Washington as they fled; he died of the wound. On October 14 a mob hanged their father, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, and their uncle, Daniel Morrow.
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Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County
Six people are documented as lynched in Orange County: Washington Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, Daniel Morrow, Wright Malone and Cyrus Guy in 1869, and Manly McCauley in 1898. Sworn testimony before Congress in 1871 gives the same count for 1869, four men hanged and one shot (Josiah Turner Jr.), or five Black men killed (constable W. G. Turrentine), though names differ: the Senate committee's list and two Orange witnesses name a man called Wood, hanged east of Hillsborough, and two sources a William Guy, who may be Cyrus Guy. In September 2022 the county commissioners apologized for racial-terror lynchings and approved markers, citing five cases without naming the victims.
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Orange County in the Kirk–Holden War
Governor Holden named Orange County in his October 1869 warning about Klan violence, Hillsborough men were named in a Klan plot against Senator T. M. Shoffner, and Kirk's militia arrested Josiah Turner Jr. at Hillsborough in August 1870. Orange men Frederick N. Strudwick, William A. Graham and John W. Graham then helped bring, prosecute and decide Holden's impeachment.
- 1870s
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John and Mary Jane Pope build their farm near Cedar Grove
John S. Pope, a Confederate captain, and his wife Mary Jane McDade Pope built a two-story I-house on land she inherited from her father's estate in 1869; it was likely finished by 1874, when her brother's share brought the tract to about 73 acres. Tobacco was the farm's main cash crop, and its oldest surviving barn dates to about 1875.
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The University of North Carolina closes
Under President Solomon Pool and the Reconstruction board of trustees, the university shut down on February 1, 1871, after years of few students, little money and public opposition. It reopened on Monday, September 6, 1875.
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UNC reopens
The university resumed classes on Monday, September 6, 1875, after more than four years closed, with Charles Phillips as chairman of the faculty, and held a public celebration on September 15. Kemp P. Battle, then secretary of the trustees, was elected president in 1876.
- 1880s
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From West End to Carrboro: railroad, mills, and a new town
In 1882 a university railroad spur ended a mile west of Chapel Hill, and the settlement of West End grew around its boxcar depot. Thomas Lloyd opened a gin and grist mill in 1883 and the Alberta Cotton Mill in 1899, which Julian Carr's Durham Hosiery bought in 1909. Incorporated as Venable in 1911, the town became Carrboro in 1913.
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E. H. Pogue & Co. hold the opening sale at the Hillsboro Tobacco Warehouse
The Hillsboro Tobacco Warehouse, run by E. H. Pogue & Co., held its opening sale on Tuesday, January 5, 1886, and the Observer reported a heavy break with good prices. Three days earlier Pogue and fourteen other men had incorporated the Orange County Tobacco Association to buy and sell leaf tobacco.
- 1890s
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Women enroll at UNC for the first time
After the trustees opened UNC's post-graduate courses to women early in 1897, four women registered in September for the 1897–98 session, which The Tar Heel called the start of coeducation: Dixie Lee Bryant, Sallie Walker Stockard, Cecye Dodd and Mary MacRae. President Edwin Alderman let women enter junior and senior classes as well.
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Sallie Walker Stockard becomes UNC's first woman graduate
Sallie Walker Stockard, a Guilford College graduate, entered UNC's senior class in the fall of 1897, the first year the university admitted women. She became the first woman to graduate from UNC when the class of 1898 received its degrees on June 1, 1898, and she earned a master's degree there in 1900.
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Manly McCauley is lynched near Carrboro
Manly McCauley, an 18-year-old Black farmhand, left Milton Brewer's farm west of Chapel Hill with Brewer's wife on October 26, 1898. A posse caught them beyond Jonesboro, and on the way back masked men took McCauley from the officer holding him and hanged him. His body was found on November 6, about three miles west of Chapel Hill.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
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Elizabeth Cotten composes Freight Train
At about age eleven, growing up near the railroad tracks in the settlement that became Carrboro, Elizabeth Cotten wrote "Freight Train." She played a right-handed guitar upside down, and the song became a folk standard after Folkways released her recording in 1958.
- 1910s
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Silent Sam
On June 2, 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and UNC alumni dedicated a Confederate soldier statue in McCorkle Place, and Julian Carr's dedication speech boasted of whipping a Black woman. The monument drew decades of protest until demonstrators pulled it down on August 20, 2018.
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Orange County's Black high schools: the Training School, Lincoln and Central
In 1916 the county board of education bought Louis H. Hackney's private school campus in Chapel Hill, helped by $3,000 raised by Black citizens, to house the Orange County Training School, which took the name Lincoln High School in 1949. Hillsborough's school for Black students was built in 1936 and became Central High School in 1943. Lincoln High merged with Chapel Hill High School in 1966. In 1968, a year of student walkouts against a phased desegregation plan, Central graduated its last high school class, and its high school students then went to Orange High School.
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The Carolina Playmakers are organized
Frederick H. Koch organized the Carolina Playmakers at UNC.
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Influenza epidemic strikes Chapel Hill
Spanish influenza swept the University in early October 1918, putting the campus and its student soldiers under a three-week quarantine. By October 23 about 300 students had been ill and three had died, and President Edward Kidder Graham died of influenza and pneumonia on October 26.
- 1920s
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The University of North Carolina Press is founded
On June 12, 1922, university librarian Louis Round Wilson, nine other faculty members and three trustees founded the University of North Carolina Press, the first university press in the South. Its first book, William C. Coker's study of water molds, appeared in 1923, and William T. Couch became director in 1932.
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Ellis Store and post office opens
Allen A. Ellis built a new crossroads store.
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The Carolina Inn is built
John Sprunt Hill built the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill.
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Paul Green wins the Pulitzer Prize for In Abraham’s Bosom
Paul Green received the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for In Abraham’s Bosom.
- 1930s
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Census counts tenants on about a third of Orange County farms
Tenants operated 643 of 1,870 Orange County farms in 1930 (34.4 percent), 718 of 1,956 in 1935 (36.7 percent) and 687 of 2,043 in 1940 (33.6 percent). Of the 1940 tenants, 514 were share tenants and croppers.
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Water for the towns: University Lake, the 1976–77 drought, and OWASA
The University dammed Morgan Creek in 1932 to create University Lake. Droughts in 1968 and 1976–77 forced rationing and purchases from Durham, and on February 16, 1977 the Orange Water and Sewer Authority, organized by the county and both towns, took over the university and town systems. A long fight over a Cane Creek reservoir followed.
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Desegregating the University of North Carolina
In 1933 Thomas Raymond Hocutt, a 24-year-old Black man from Durham, went to court to compel Dean of Admissions Thomas J. Wilson Jr. to admit him to the University's school of pharmacy; Judge M. V. Barnhill denied the writ of mandamus on March 28, and the Weekly noted that no state school for Black students taught pharmacy or law. On December 14, 1938 Dean W. W. Pierson rejected Pauli Murray's application to the graduate school because of her race, and her appeals to President Frank Porter Graham became national news. After a 1951 federal court decision in McKissick v. Carmichael, five Black students began law school classes at UNC on June 22, 1951. In September 1955, again under court order, LeRoy and Ralph Frasier and John Lewis Brandon of Durham registered as the university's first Black undergraduates.
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Hillsborough builds the Confederate Memorial Library
Federal relief crews began a new library on Churton Street in Hillsborough in December 1933, with local money, including $7,000 from the Hillsborough United Daughters of the Confederacy, paying for materials. The cornerstone of the Confederate Memorial Public Library was laid on July 13, 1934, and the building became the Orange County Historical Museum in 1983.
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The Texas community asks the Bureau of Indian Affairs for an Indian school
Clayton Jeffries, Charles Will Jeffries and others retained a lawyer, drew up a list of Indian families, made contact with the Indian community in Person County that already had a state sponsored school, and wrote to Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier seeking a federal school for their children. A bureau agent visited and reported the families to be Indian, and the bureau's letters called the settlement an Indian community, but no assistance was ever given.
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District health department holds midwife classes across Orange County
Classes for midwives were held at Efland and Hillsboro and began for those in and near Chapel Hill at the health department offices, with attendance required before a permit to practice would be issued. Health officer W. P. Richardson said 17 percent of births in the county were attended by midwives, against 31 percent statewide.
- 1940s
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Journey of Reconciliation comes to Chapel Hill
Interracial riders testing segregation on interstate buses reached Chapel Hill on April 12, 1947. The next day police arrested four of them at the bus station and a white cab driver struck rider James Peck. Convicted in Orange County, Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko and Joe Felmet surrendered at the Hillsborough courthouse on March 21, 1949 to serve chain-gang sentences.
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Occoneechee Speedway, Hillsborough
Bill France and four partners chartered a company in September 1947 to build a one-mile dirt oval by the old Occoneechee Farm, and it opened in June 1948. The track held a race in NASCAR's first Strictly Stock season in 1949, was renamed Orange Speedway in 1954, and closed after Richard Petty won its last race on September 15, 1968.
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Hyconeechee Regional Library is established
The three county library systems incorporated as one region to enlarge book collections, run a shared bookmobile and provide trained supervision. The regional board held its second meeting on September 13, 1948 at the Confederate Memorial Library in Hillsboro, with Sydney Green of Orange County as president and Mrs. Douglas Davis as regional librarian.
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Morehead Planetarium is dedicated
Morehead Planetarium was dedicated at UNC on May 10, 1949.
- 1950s
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Orange County Negro Public Library dedicates its own building
About 150 people attended an open house on May 27, 1951 dedicating the Orange County Negro Public Library's own building in Hillsborough, a structure bought from Camp Butner and put up with volunteer labor. Begun in 1942 by Marinda McPherson, the library had opened to the public in 1949 and now held more than 3,000 books.
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North Carolina Memorial Hospital opens
North Carolina Memorial Hospital opened to patients on Tuesday, September 2, 1952, without a formal ceremony, as the core of the new University Medical Center. Its opening allowed the UNC School of Medicine to grow from a two-year program into a four-year school.
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WUNC-TV begins broadcasting
WUNC-TV began broadcasting from Chapel Hill on January 8, 1955.
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Desegregating the Chapel Hill and Carrboro schools
In 1956 and 1957 Preston Weaver applied to move his son from Northside School to the white Chapel Hill Elementary, and in 1958 the county school board refused applications from the Vickers and Walden families for places at the new white Carrboro Elementary. After the school board refused in 1959 to admit ten-year-old Stanley Vickers to Carrboro Elementary, his parents sued, and their 1961 win in federal court set the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools on the course to desegregation. In 1966 all-Black Lincoln High merged into Chapel Hill High, and Lincoln's name, colors and mascot were left behind.
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UNC men’s basketball wins the 1957 NCAA national championship
UNC defeated Kansas, 54–53 in triple overtime, to win the national title.
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Chapel Hill Public Library opens
Chapel Hill's first public library held its formal opening on December 15, 1958 in the east wing of the Hill House on West Franklin Street, with about 4,500 books, 2,000 of them lent by state and regional libraries. It moved to its own building at 523 East Franklin Street in 1967 and to Pritchard Park in 1994.
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Research Triangle Park and Orange County's growth
The Research Triangle Foundation, formed in 1959, ran the research park planned between Durham and Raleigh around UNC, N.C. State and Duke. That November Orange County commissioners said the park would bring the county mainly new residents and school costs rather than taxable industry, and began discussing county-wide zoning.
- 1960s
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Chapel Hill freedom movement
Nine Lincoln High students began Chapel Hill's sit-ins at Colonial Drug on February 28, 1960. Through 1963 and 1964 Black residents and UNC students picketed, marched and sat in, and held a Holy Week fast at the post office, but the aldermen narrowly rejected a public accommodations ordinance and many businesses stayed segregated until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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Speaker Ban controversy
In October 1962 the Division Three area of the state American Legion, meeting in Chapel Hill, endorsed a Chapel Hill post resolution by Col. Henry E. Royall asking for an investigation of possible leftist influences on the UNC campus. The General Assembly passed the Speaker Ban on June 26, 1963, barring known Communists and people who had pleaded the Fifth Amendment from speaking on state campuses. In March 1966 Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker spoke to UNC students from the Franklin Street side of the wall, and a federal court struck the law down on February 19, 1968.
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The Association for the Preservation of the Eno River Valley forms
Residents who had begun organizing in 1965 against plans to dam the Eno for a water-supply reservoir formed the Association for the Preservation of the Eno River Valley on October 14, 1966. Led by Margaret and Holger Nygard, it began the campaign that preserved the river corridor in Durham and Orange counties.
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Black student activism at UNC
Black students founded the Black Student Movement at UNC in November 1967. It presented 23 demands to Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson in December 1968, backed the cafeteria workers' strike of 1969, and in the 1990s pressed for a freestanding Black cultural center, which opened as the Sonja Haynes Stone Center in 2004.
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Braxton Foushee becomes Carrboro’s first Black alderman
Braxton Foushee was elected to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen in 1969, the first Black member of the town's governing board, and served until 1981. He pressed for paved roads and sidewalks in Black neighborhoods and counted bringing bus service to Carrboro as his proudest achievement.
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Chapel Hill and Carrboro music scene
Cat's Cradle opened in a small basement club near the UNC campus in 1969 and, after several moves, settled in Carrboro in 1993. With Merge Records, founded in Chapel Hill in 1989, and bands such as Superchunk and Polvo, the local scene drew national press in the early 1990s as a possible "next Seattle."
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UNC food workers' strike
On February 23, 1969 food service workers at UNC's Lenoir Hall left their counters and sat down at the cafeteria tables, and by the next morning nearly 100 dining hall employees had refused to report for work. The strike ended on March 21 when the University agreed to raise the hourly minimum from $1.60 to $1.80, pay roughly $180,000 in back wages, and appoint a Black supervisor.
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Howard Lee is elected mayor of Chapel Hill
Howard N. Lee defeated Roland Giduz by about 400 votes on May 6, 1969, in the largest turnout for a Chapel Hill election to that date, becoming the town's first Black mayor. He was the first African American elected mayor of a predominantly white Southern town since Reconstruction.
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UNC foodworkers strike a second time
About 250 of UNC's 275 cafeteria workers, organized as the UNC Non-Academic Employees Union, struck SAGA Food Services on November 7, 1969 over pay, job reclassification, and the firing of workers for union activity. They voted on November 21 to affiliate with AFSCME, and the strike was settled in December after Ralph Abernathy visited the strikers and Black students from across the state threatened to converge on the campus.
- 1970s
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James Cates is killed outside the UNC Student Union
James Lewis Cates Jr., 22, a Black Chapel Hill resident, was stabbed outside the UNC Student Union shortly before 2 a.m. during an all-night dance, in a clash with members of Durham's Storm Troopers motorcycle gang, and died at North Carolina Memorial Hospital. Three white men charged in his death were acquitted by an all-white jury in 1971.
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Rogers Road environmental justice
In 1972 officials placed the county landfill on Eubanks Road beside the historically Black Rogers Road community, promising it would run about ten years. It was expanded instead and did not close until 2013, and residents' organizing through the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association helped win a sewer line for the neighborhood, completed in 2019.
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Eno River State Park is created
After years of citizen opposition to damming the Eno for a reservoir, Governor James Holshouser accepted the first tracts for Eno River State Park in June 1973, including 90 acres donated by Dr. and Mrs. Frederick Bernheim. The first 1,000 acres opened to the public in 1975 along the river in Orange and Durham counties.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
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Severe drought creates a local water crisis
A drought from August 1976 to January 1977 forced Chapel Hill and UNC to buy more water from Durham, ban unnecessary water use and cut campus services. By August 1977 University Lake was lower still, and the new Orange Water and Sewer Authority kept conservation rules and used federal drought aid to buy Durham water.
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Bob Drakeford is elected mayor of Carrboro
Robert "Bob" Drakeford, a Carrboro alderman since 1975 and a Carrboro Community Coalition candidate, won the mayor's race on November 8, 1977, with 57 percent of the vote over John Boone. He was the town's first Black mayor and served until 1983.
- 1980s
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UNC women’s soccer builds a national dynasty
Anson Dorrance, the program's head coach from its first varsity season in 1979 through 2023, led the Tar Heels to the 1981 AIAW national title and 21 NCAA titles, and his successor Damon Nahas added the 2024 NCAA title, for 23 national championships in all through the 2025 season. UNC won 22 of the 43 NCAA tournaments held from 1982 through 2024, and its teams went 103 consecutive games without a loss from 1986 to 1990.
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Friends of the Orange County Public Library is founded
Residents organized the Friends of the Orange County Public Library on November 5, 1981, to raise money and advocate for a county library preparing to move into larger quarters in Hillsborough. The group incorporated on May 3, 1982, and the IRS recognized it as a 501(c)(3) charity in June 1983.
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UNC men’s basketball wins the 1982 NCAA national championship
UNC defeated Georgetown, 63–62, to win the national title.
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Orange County Rural Buffer is established
Orange County adopted the Orange County-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Joint Planning Area Land Use Plan and map on August 19, 1986, designating a low-density Rural Buffer. The three governments signed the Joint Planning Agreement on November 2, 1987, and the county dates the buffer to 1988.
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LGBTQ political firsts in Chapel Hill and Carrboro
Joe Herzenberg's election to the Chapel Hill Town Council in November 1987 made him North Carolina's first openly gay elected official. Carrboro created a domestic partnership registry in September 1994 and Chapel Hill followed in 1995, and in November 1995 Carrboro elected Mike Nelson, the state's first openly gay mayor.
- 1990s
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UNC Housekeepers organize for pay and respect
UNC housekeepers formed the Housekeepers Association in 1991 and brought a class-action discrimination suit against the University over pay, advancement and treatment. Led by Marsha Tinnen and Barbara Prear, they signed a settlement with UNC on November 26, 1996, that brought raises, a career training program and monthly meetings with administrators.
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UNC women’s basketball wins the 1994 NCAA national championship
Charlotte Smith’s last-second three-pointer gave UNC a 60–59 victory over Louisiana Tech.
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WXYC makes the first internet radio simulcast
WXYC streamed its radio broadcast over the internet on November 7, 1994.
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Hurricane Fran strikes Orange County
Hurricane Fran came ashore on the night of September 5, 1996 and crossed to the Triangle overnight. In Chapel Hill winds topped 70 mph, falling trees caused about 29,000 power outages and UNC cancelled classes, and the Eno at Hillsborough hit a record flow. No one in Orange County was killed.
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Occoneechee Mountain becomes a State Natural Area
At the urging of the Eno River Association and The Nature Conservancy, the state began buying land on Occoneechee Mountain just south of Hillsborough, with the Conservancy purchasing 96 acres for the state. The 124-acre Occoneechee Mountain State Natural Area was dedicated on July 20, 1999, with a blessing from an Occaneechi tribal member.
- 2000s
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North Carolina recognizes the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation
Following the 2001 appeals ruling, the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation became the eighth tribe officially recognized by the State of North Carolina through the Commission of Indian Affairs.
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The Sonja Haynes Stone Center celebrates its grand opening
After more than a decade of organizing, the freestanding Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History opened in Coker Woods with a four-day celebration. A Friday candlelight procession from the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery preceded Saturday's dedication by Chancellor James Moeser before more than 500 guests.
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Refugees from Burma begin arriving in Orange County in larger numbers
All 55 refugee direct arrivals recorded in Orange County in fiscal year 2006-2007 came from Burma. A second resettlement agency, the Triangle office of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, opened.
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Eve Carson, UNC’s Student Body President, is killed
Eve Marie Carson, 22, UNC's student body president and a Morehead-Cain Scholar from Athens, Georgia, was abducted from her Chapel Hill home early on March 5, 2008, robbed and shot on Hillcrest Road near campus. Two men were convicted of her murder: one pleaded guilty in 2010, and a Hillsborough jury convicted the other on December 20, 2011.
- 2010s
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Orange County Main Library opens on Margaret Lane
The county's new 23,500-square-foot Main Library at 137 West Margaret Lane in Hillsborough held its grand opening on January 8, 2010, after planning that began with a task force in 2000 and a groundbreaking in April 2008. It added a teen center, a 90-person meeting room and a local history area.
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Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha and Razan Abu-Salha are killed in Chapel Hill
On February 10, 2015, a neighbor shot and killed Deah Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister Razan Abu-Salha, 19, in the couple's Chapel Hill condominium. He pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in June 2019 and received three consecutive life sentences without parole.
- 2020s
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COVID-19 transforms Orange County
Orange County, Chapel Hill and Carrboro declared states of emergency on March 13, 2020, and the county and its three towns ordered residents to stay home from March 27. UNC moved undergraduate classes online in August 2020 after campus clusters. The county emergency, extended more than a dozen times, expired on May 1, 2022.
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Zijie Yan, a UNC professor, is killed on campus
On August 28, 2023, Zijie Yan, an associate professor, was shot and killed in UNC's Caudill Labs, and the campus locked down for about three hours. A graduate student was arrested that afternoon and charged with first-degree murder; the case had not come to trial by March 2026.
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Drakeford Library Complex opens
Orange County's Southern Branch Library opened in February 2025 in the $42 million Drakeford Library Complex at 203 South Greensboro Street in Carrboro, replacing the Carrboro Cybrary, which had closed on January 31, 2025. The building, named for Robert Drakeford, Carrboro's first Black mayor, also houses town recreation offices and WCOM Radio.
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Tropical Storm Chantal floods Orange County
Chantal dropped up to 10 inches of rain on Orange County on the night of July 6, 2025. Chapel Hill crews made more than 50 water rescues around Camelot Village and Eastgate Crossing, Carrboro's Weatherhill Pointe flooded, and the Eno at Hillsborough set a record crest on July 7. The county declared an emergency that day.
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Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated October 12, 2026. Download the full chronology as a spreadsheet (CSV).
