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Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
- 1870s
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Orange County names a three-man Board of Education and a panel of teacher examiners
Under the Reconstruction school law the county had a Board of Education of W. N. Patterson, J. T. Hogan and Jones Watson in 1872. Samuel W. Hughes and Charles Curtis were among the county examiners who licensed teachers that year.
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Paul C. Cameron buys the Hillsborough Military Academy at public sale
Two years after Elizabeth Tew's death in 1870, the academy property was sold at public auction to Paul C. Cameron. His heirs sold it to the Farmers' State Alliance in 1891.
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The Turner family goes bankrupt and its North Churton Street estate is sold at auction
In 1872 the Turner family goes bankrupt and its estate around the house at 404 North Churton Street is sold at auction. Edmund Strudwick of Norfolk bought the house in 1887.
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H. P. Jones ships two hundred cases of Tar Heel smoking tobacco from Hillsborough to Georgia
The Recorder reported that Jones had lately shipped two hundred cases of his Tar Heel brand smoking tobacco to Georgia and held orders for a hundred more.
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The Hillsborough Presbyterian session asks that members be allowed to withdraw without church trial
The session resolved to ask presbytery to propose to the General Assembly a change in discipline, so that a member living outside the church's standards could leave its communion without a formal trial. After this, discipline cases disappear from the minutes.
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Job Berry is named a delegate to the Republican state convention
The Orange County Republican convention chose Rev. Job Berry as a Hillsborough delegate to the 1872 state convention, which backed Ulysses S. Grant and Governor Tod R. Caldwell.
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The county school board settles the school fund account with Treasurer David C. Parks
The Board of Education settled the school fund account with county treasurer D. C. Parks up to March 7, 1872. It showed $9,245.36 received from the state apportionments for 1869 to 1872 and the 1871 school poll tax, and $3,869.54 paid out to the townships.
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St. Matthew's rector Moses Ashley Curtis dies
Moses Ashley Curtis, rector of St. Matthew's for twenty-one years and a botanist of international standing, died at 64. The font and a south window in the church are his memorials.
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The school board refuses back pay to a Mangum Township teacher accused of misconduct
Thomas Anderson asked the board to pay him for two months he taught without a contract. The board sided with the township committee, finding he had no contract after March 7, 1872 and citing poor discipline and improper conduct toward girls in his school.
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Jones Watson and Pride Jones are elected to the state House for Orange County
Running as Conservative (Democratic) candidates, Jones Watson and Dr. Pride Jones won Orange County's two seats in the state House of Representatives in the August 1872 election.
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Addison Holden builds the Holden–Roberts farmhouse
Addison Holden, a Confederate veteran and half-brother of Governor William W. Holden, built a tri-gable frame I-house in 1873 and 1874 on the farm about three miles east of Hillsborough that he bought from his uncle Isaac Holden in 1871. It is one of very few Orange County houses built during Reconstruction; George Cain Roberts bought the farm in 1908.
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Fuller's Sea-Gift, the first novel set partly in Chapel Hill, is published
Fuller turned his student years into Sea-Gift, which follows John Smith through the university and the Civil War and draws on the Dromgoole duel legend of Piney Prospect. Students later called it the Freshman's Bible.
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Harriet H. Strayhorn serves as Hillsborough's postmistress
Harriet H. Strayhorn, who with William F. Strayhorn owned Twin Chimneys on West King Street, was Hillsborough's postmistress from 1873 to 1881.
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Robert Bingham takes charge of the Bingham School near Mebane
When his brother William died in 1873, Robert Bingham became headmaster of the Bingham School, which had moved from the Oaks to Mebane. In May 1879 he bought out his cousin William B. Lynch's interest and became sole proprietor.
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Robert F. Hoke obtains a charter for the Chapel Hill Iron Mountain Railroad
While the university was closed, Robert F. Hoke, owner of an iron mine north of Chapel Hill, obtained a state charter for a railroad to carry ore from Iron Mountain to the North Carolina Railroad.
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William Strowd of Chatham County buys land at the edge of Chapel Hill
The tract, where 51 Davie Circle now stands, stayed in his hands until he passed it to his son Robert L. Strowd in 1886.
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Alumni meet in Raleigh to plan the university's revival
At the invitation of trustees led by Superintendent Alexander McIver, fifty-five alumni met in the state Senate chamber with B. F. Moore in the chair. Their committee proposed that the alumni association nominate a new board for the Board of Education to appoint, but most of the 1868 trustees did not resign and the plan lapsed.
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The Board of Education divides the 1872 school fund among the townships by race
At its March 5, 1873 meeting the board named a teacher examining committee and apportioned the 1872 fund at the same rate per child for both races: $4,219.60 for 3,080 white children and $2,402.98 for 1,754 Black children across eight townships.
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State educational convention calls for reviving the university
A convention called by the State Board of Education, with B. F. Moore presiding, resolved that the university should be revived as soon as practicable. It added that the revival was impossible except on a basis impartial between denominations and political parties, after Braxton Craven, Thomas H. Pritchard and A. W. Mangum argued over church representation.
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Lightning strikes the Davie Poplar
Lightning split the Old Poplar's bark from top to bottom while the university was closed, and its friends took it as an omen, but the tree survived. It then measured 14 feet 6 inches around at two feet above the ground, and Cornelia Phillips Spencer wrote a lament for it in a Raleigh paper.
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The Board of Education appoints Hazel Norwood county examiner
The board filled the county examiner's post with Hazel Norwood after Dr. Morgan Clop resigned, and settled its account with the treasurer, who held a balance of $7,686.92 from the state's 1872 apportionment.
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A constitutional amendment returns the election of university trustees to the General Assembly
An amendment taking the election of the university's trustees from the governor-controlled Board of Education and giving it back to the General Assembly became part of the state constitution in August 1873, after a vote of the people and a two-thirds vote of a second legislature. Friends of the university had first carried it through the General Assembly in 1871 by the required three-fifths, the credit going to two alumni and brothers-in-law, the Democrat Montford McGehee and the Republican Richard C. Badger.
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Nancy Hilliard, longtime Chapel Hill hotel keeper, dies
Nancy Segur Hilliard, whose family moved to Chapel Hill in 1817 and who fed students and stage travelers for decades, died on November 8, 1873. Cornelia Phillips Spencer appealed to alumni to help her in her last illness and to pay for her burial and a modest monument.
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Charles Jones Curtis succeeds his father as rector of St. Matthew's
After his ordination to the priesthood, Charles Jones Curtis followed his father, Moses Ashley Curtis, as rector and served until he resigned in 1880.
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Webb, Roulhac & Cameron prepare to move their tobacco business from Hillsborough to Durham
The Hillsborough Recorder reported that the tobacco firm of Webb, Roulhac & Cameron was about to move to Durham, where it had been offered better terms. The paper said the town could ill spare them.
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A county school census finds 24 more schoolhouses are needed
An 1874 count of school-age children by township found 2,380 Black children and set the need at 24 additional schoolhouses, ten of them in Hillsboro Township.
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Andrew Mickle serves as Chapel Hill's magistrate of police
Under the town charter the commissioners chose a magistrate of police to preside at their meetings, and Andrew Mickle held the office in 1874 and 1875. In March 1870 a rival group of citizens claiming to be the town's officers had named him to the post, which the sitting board said was without authority of law.
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Commissioner's report keeps the campus and 600 acres for the university
Commissioner George H. Snow inspected Chapel Hill in the summer of 1874 with trustees Paul C. Cameron, John Manning and Kemp P. Battle, and on Judge Bond's advice to be liberal the court left the university its campus, faculty houses, libraries and 600 acres. The outlying land, including about seventy acres at Piney Prospect, was sold, and Cameron bought the parcels along with the escheated mountain lands to secure his sister Mildred Cameron's debt.
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George Trice turns Tom Moore's former house into a restaurant and shoe shop
George Trice made the East Franklin Street house where Tom Moore had lived into a restaurant and ice cream parlor with a shoe shop. He gave up the restaurant after his wife died in 1899, and by 1903 a tailor and a shoe shop were in its place.
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Hillsborough Methodist Church finishes paying for its building
The Civil War interrupted work on the brick church John Berry designed and built on West Tryon Street, and the congregation did not finish paying for it until 1874.
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John Manning serves on the university's Board of Trustees
John Manning became a trustee of the University of North Carolina in 1874 and held the post for two decades, through the university's 1875 reopening.
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Maj. John W. Graham builds a twelve-room house at Montrose on his father's old foundation
In 1874 William A. Graham gave the vacant Montrose land to his son Maj. John W. Graham, who built a twelve-room house on the foundation of the first house. It burned in 1893.
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Pine Street is cut through Lot 16 from Franklin Street to Rosemary
A new street, Pine Street, was opened through the old Lot 16, running from Franklin Street to Rosemary Street.
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Seaton Barbee opens a drugstore on Franklin Street
Seaton Barbee, a son of merchant Sidney Mulholland Barbee, opened a drugstore on the south side of Franklin Street across from his father's house, with Tom Dunstan's barbershop on the floor above.
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The General Assembly elects sixty-four trustees, who organize under William A. Graham with Kemp Battle as secretary and treasurer
By an act of January 28, 1874, the legislature elected sixty-four university trustees by joint ballot, only two of them from the Reconstruction board, and fourteen of them men removed in 1868. The new board first met on February 18, 1874, in the Citizens National Bank in Raleigh, elected William A. Graham of Hillsborough its president and Kemp P. Battle its secretary and treasurer, named an executive committee, and the next day sent a committee to inspect Chapel Hill, after Governor Tod R. Caldwell declined to preside because he held the legislature had no power to elect trustees.
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Walter Steele and Paul Cameron inspect the derelict campus and Solomon Pool refuses to surrender the keys
On April 3, 1874, trustees Walter L. Steele and Paul C. Cameron came to Chapel Hill for the new board. Solomon Pool declined their written request for the keys and possession of the buildings, since the governor had not recognized the board, but let them inspect as visitors. Their report to the trustees on April 9 described broken doors and fallen plaster, the lower passage of Old West fouled by cattle and horses, rotted gates and axe-scarred oaks, 7,490 books in the Dialectic library and 6,901 in the Philanthropic, and recommended an immediate suit against Pool for possession.
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Haywood Beverly and Lewis Jenkins run for Hillsborough town commissioner as Black Republicans
In the Hillsborough town election, Black Republicans Haywood Beverly, a tanner, and Lewis Jenkins ran for town commissioner. Both lost, and the board elected was Conservative except for H. N. Brown, who ran on both tickets.
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The new trustees sue Solomon Pool and Alexander McIver at Orange Superior Court and win possession of the university in the Supreme Court
At the May 1874 term of Orange Superior Court the new board brought one action against Superintendent Alexander McIver, who held the university's seal and books and had agreed to a friendly test suit, and another against Solomon Pool for the buildings. Judge Albion W. Tourgee ruled against the trustees; John W. Graham and James A. Graham of Hillsborough argued for them without fee, as did B. F. Moore and William H. Battle on appeal in June 1874. At its January term 1875 the state Supreme Court decided for the university on every point, and possession passed to Andrew Mickle, the board's agent, with the seal, books and papers going to Treasurer Kemp Battle.
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Federal court rules the campus cannot be sold for the bank debt
In the suit of Charles Dewey, assignee in bankruptcy of the Bank of North Carolina, to sell the university's property under its mortgage, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite with Judges Hugh L. Bond and George W. Brooks held the debt valid. They ruled that neither the trustees nor a creditor could sell the property that made up the life of the institution, as distinct from its endowment.
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Pleasant H. Dalton becomes stated supply at New Hope
Dalton, who had joined New Hope as a university student in 1842, began supplying the church in August 1874. By his own count at least fifty members were added in his twelve years there.
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Joseph Blount Cheshire marries Annie Huske Webb at St. Matthew's
Joseph Blount Cheshire Jr., later Episcopal bishop of North Carolina, married Annie Huske Webb of Hillsborough at St. Matthew's Church.
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Adolphus W. Mangum joins the faculty of the reopened university
When the university reopened in 1875 Mangum became professor of mental and moral science, history and English language and literature. He taught until he died in Chapel Hill in May 1890 and was buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Archibald Jordan completes an Italianate house at Caldwell
Archibald C. Jordan, later Caldwell's physician, finished a two-story Italianate house there in 1875, with a projecting center pavilion, a bracketed cornice and arched windows. Inside is a curved staircase in a diagonally sheathed hall.
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Charles Phillips returns to Chapel Hill and chairs the faculty
When the University of North Carolina reopened in 1875, Phillips was invited back as professor of mathematics and served as chairman of the faculty during his first year. Illness forced his retirement in 1879, when he became the first professor emeritus named by the trustees.
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George Tayloe Winston joins the faculty of the reopened university
Winston, a Cornell graduate who had also studied at UNC, came to Chapel Hill in 1875 as professor of Latin and German when the university reopened.
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Herbert McCauley builds an I-house off Old Greensboro Road
Around 1875 a two-story frame house mixing Greek Revival and Victorian trim was built for Herbert McCauley, with a log house and smokehouse on the place. Neighbors know it as the house where the singer James Taylor grew up.
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James A. Cheek builds an Italianate house on North Churton Street
James A. Cheek built a five-bay Italianate I-house with an ornate sawnwork porch on Lot 78, on a rise above North Churton Street. His family kept it until 1908; a brick kitchen and an 1880s barn survive behind it.
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John DeBerniere Hooper returns as professor of Greek and French when the university reopens
When the university reopened in 1875 Hooper was appointed professor of Greek and French. He resigned in October 1885 because of illness and died at his Chapel Hill home in January 1886.
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John Kimberly returns as professor of agriculture at the reopened university
When the university reorganized and reopened in 1875, John Kimberly was elected professor of agriculture. He resigned the next year to return to his farm in Buncombe County.
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John W. Carr gives $100 toward reopening the university
John W. Carr of Chapel Hill paid $100 to the subscription of nearly $20,000 raised to revive the university in 1875, alongside $500 from his son Julian S. Carr of Durham.
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Joseph B. Martin builds an I-house on East Rosemary Street
The two-story I-house at 401 East Rosemary Street, with end chimneys and a three-bay front, is credited to Joseph B. Martin, who probably put it up sometime from 1875 to 1885. W. M. Dey, who owned it later, gave the house its name.
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Mount Bright Baptist Church builds its church in Hillsborough
Mount Bright Baptist Church, the Black Baptist congregation in Hillsborough led by Alfred Bright, erected its church building in 1875.
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Ralph Henry Graves joins the faculty of the reopened university
Ralph Henry Graves returned to Chapel Hill in 1875 as professor of engineering at the newly reopened University of North Carolina. He later taught mathematics and held his professorship until his death in 1889.
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Solomon Pool sells his West Cameron Avenue house to Dr. Thomas W. Harris
Solomon Pool owned the Greek Revival I-house at 206 West Cameron Avenue, built about 1870, until about 1875, when physician Thomas W. Harris bought it. Harris went on to found and lead the university's medical school.
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St. Matthew's Episcopal Church reworks its entrance tower and adds the spire
In 1875 the west entrance tower of St. Matthew's was reworked and given its slate-covered spire.
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The reopened university adopts an honor pledge on examinations
From the reopening each student signed a pledge that he had neither given nor received help on an examination, and a student convicted of cheating had to leave. Battle says cheating had been widely tolerated before 1868.
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William A. Graham defeats Washington Duke for a seat in the 1875 convention
Orange elected Graham over Duke, 1,908 to 1,528, and Josiah Turner Jr. over John T. Hogan. Graham died before the convention met, and William N. Patterson beat Duke again in a special election, 2,000 to 1,297.
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Wilson Caldwell returns to the reopened university and later heads its labor force
When the university reopened in 1875 Wilson Caldwell went back to work there. He became curator of South Building and head of the campus labor corps, and held the post until his death in 1898.
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Women's groups give scientific apparatus to the reopened university
At the board's request Cornelia Phillips Spencer gathered gifts of instruments from women around the state, including Plateau's apparatus from the pupils of the Nash and Kollock school in Hillsborough. The women of Hillsborough gave a Holtz electrical machine in memory of William A. Graham, which Paul C. Cameron presented at the 1877 commencement.
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Commissioners order a new bell for the courthouse
The board authorized David C. Parks to buy and hang a new bell for the courthouse and to sell the old one on the best terms he could.
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer learns on her fiftieth birthday that the university will reopen
A telegram from Raleigh on March 20, 1875, reported that the legislature had passed a bill letting the closed University of North Carolina reorganize with some state support. Spencer, whose letters to state leaders had pressed for the reopening, and a few friends entered South Building and tolled the college bell to celebrate.
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Historical Society of North Carolina is incorporated
The legislature chartered the Historical Society of North Carolina, chiefly so it could receive the books and papers of the old university society held by President Swain's widow, with William A. Graham as its first president and Cornelia Phillips Spencer among the incorporators. Eleanor Swain refused to give up the papers until she later found proof that the bound books belonged to the society.
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A flood carries away the road bridge over the Eno at Hillsborough
Floodwater swept away the bridge over the Eno at Hillsborough, and the river rose to within a few feet of the railroad bridge. The same flood took bridges across Caswell County.
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County commissioners and township trustees adopt a uniform tax scale for livestock
Meeting with a trustee from each township, the board fixed values such as $100 for a first-class horse or mule, $20 for first-class cattle and $1 a head for sheep and goats. In May and June it sat sixteen days as a board of equalization to revise the tax list.
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Trustees adopt a six-college plan and set aside ground for athletics
The trustees adopted Kemp P. Battle's committee report to reopen the university on the first Monday of September with colleges of agriculture, engineering, natural science, literature, mathematics and philosophy, meant to satisfy the 1862 land-grant act. They also reserved the eastern part of the campus along the Raleigh Road for athletics and a parade ground.
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Kemp Battle's subscription drive raises $20,167 and Paul Cameron repairs the campus for the reopening
After the trustees on May 5, 1875, appointed a committee to seek gifts for the revival, Kemp P. Battle canvassed Raleigh, Goldsboro, Rocky Mount and Tarboro in person and the rest of the state by letter, reporting $18,787 in six weeks and $20,167 in twelve, at a total expense of $62.66; Zebulon B. Vance and Charles W. Broadfoot collected in Charlotte and Fayetteville, and women's groups sent scientific apparatus through Cornelia Phillips Spencer. Paul C. Cameron, without contractor or pay, spent the summer at Chapel Hill directing the repairs and reported on August 31 that he had spent $10,677.76 on the buildings and $2,249.09 on gas works and apparatus.
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Rufus L. Patterson moves a loan to repair the university buildings and offers to stand surety
At the trustees' reorganization meeting, Patterson moved that the treasurer be allowed to borrow $5,000 if needed to repair the Chapel Hill buildings, and volunteered to be surety for the university.
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Andrew Mickle becomes bursar of the reopened university
Electing the reopened university's professors, the trustees broke with the old practice of making a professor bursar and chose Andrew Mickle, the Chapel Hill merchant who had acted as their agent, at $400 a year. He held the post until he left to live with his children in Texas in the early 1880s.
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William A. Graham dies and is buried at Hillsborough
Graham died unexpectedly at Saratoga Springs, New York, on 11 August 1875, where he had gone for a meeting of the Virginia and Maryland arbitration commission. He was buried in the cemetery adjacent to the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church. He had been elected a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1875 but died before it assembled.
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Trustees burn the repudiated railroad bonds
As the act restoring the land-scrip fund required, trustees B. F. Moore, David M. Carter and Kemp P. Battle burned 160 special tax bonds of $1,000 each issued for the Western North Carolina Railroad, with Seaton Gales as witness. In return the state had given the university its bond for the $125,000 fund, paying $7,500 a year.
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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.
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The Dialectic and Philanthropic societies meet again
On the evening of the reopening celebration the two literary societies were revived, the Dialectic called together by its last secretary, Thomas M. Argo, with Judge William H. Battle as temporary president. William L. Saunders, who had kept the Philanthropic Society's books since its last meeting in 1868, called that society together.
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Francis D. Winston is the first student to arrive for the reopening
Battle names Francis Donnell Winston of Bertie County the first student on the Hill in 1875, arriving a day ahead of other entrants with his brother Robert and Charles Bond. Bond was the only student to enter the agricultural department on opening day, and Battle calls him the first student of the first college of agriculture in the state.
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Anne Ruffin dies and Little Hawfields passes to her heirs
Anne Kirkland Ruffin, who had inherited the Hillsborough house on Thomas Ruffin's death in 1870, died on October 28, 1875. The estate passed to her children and a grandchild.
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Algernon S. Barbee opens his own general store
Civil War veteran Algernon S. Barbee left his clerk's job with his brother-in-law David McCauley and opened his own general store. From its location Bryant judges that he took over the store of his father, Sidney Mulholland Barbee, then about seventy.
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Chapel Hill's commissioners accept a new Caldwell Street
A short street named Caldwell was laid off along the east side of the old president's-house square and accepted by the town commissioners. Until then the square had been undivided.
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Faculty dismisses five students for a mock revival meeting
During a revival in a village church, a group of students staged a burlesque meeting with mock sermons, and the faculty dismissed five of them despite petitions from townswomen and both literary societies. When classmates marched the five out of town, Charles Phillips stopped the procession at his house and turned it back, and four of the five later returned and graduated.
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John W. Graham serves on the university board of trustees
John W. Graham sat on the University of North Carolina board of trustees from 1876 until his death in 1928, and from 1891 he was an elected member of its executive committee.
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Kemp Plummer Battle becomes president and reorganizes the university
Kemp Plummer Battle became president in 1876 and reorganized the reopened university that year. He served until 1891 and later wrote its two-volume history.
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Kemp Plummer Battle buys his father's Chapel Hill house and names it Senlac
Returning to Chapel Hill in 1876 to become university president, Battle bought the family house from his father, added a one-story wing on each side and named it Senlac. The house stands on Battle Lane.
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The university begins keeping Washington's Birthday as a holiday
The reopened faculty set the precedent of a holiday on February 22, and the literary societies later chose a Washington orator for the day. At the first or second observance Francis D. Winston displayed a battered hatchet he claimed had felled the cherry tree.
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The school board orders a landowner to stop fencing off the Bethany Meeting House school
Told that William Jackson had fenced in the schoolhouse of District 15 at Bethany Meeting House and would not let school be taught, the board warned him to return the lot to the district committee or face legal action.
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Former professor William Hooper dies at Chapel Hill
William Hooper, who had brought his bride to Chapel Hill in 1816 to teach at the university, died on August 25, 1876 after a trip to Philadelphia for a meeting of descendants of the Declaration's signers. At his request he was buried beside his mother and her second husband, President Joseph Caldwell, and in 1904 the remains were moved to the new Caldwell monument.
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The poorhouse count records ten deaths in a single year
The enumeration listed six white men, eight white women, four Black men and six Black women living at the poorhouse. Over the previous year ten residents had died, two children had been born, twelve people had come in and four had left.
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Professor William H. Smith publishes a guide to collecting specimens
William H. Smith, professor of natural history, issued a pamphlet with directions for skinning and preserving birds and mammals and for keeping reptiles, insects, plants, rocks and soils, to build up the university museum. Battle calls it probably the first such guide in the state.
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A Presbyterian church for Hillsborough's Black members is founded
More than a decade after emancipation, a Presbyterian church for people of color was established on land from the Brodie family at the corner of Orange and Wake streets.
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Dr. Thomas W. Harris opens a drugstore at Franklin and Henderson streets
Dr. Thomas W. Harris, the first dean of the university's medical school, opened a drugstore on the northeast corner of Franklin and Henderson streets. He sold the business to Robert Strange MacRae in 1884.
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McIver heads mathematics at the university's summer normal schools
Then principal of the Greensboro graded schools, McIver was chief of the mathematics department at the 1877 Summer Normal School in Chapel Hill and taught mathematics, English grammar and physiology at the 1878 session.
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Phi Kappa Sigma is rechartered at the reopened university
Although the trustees still discouraged fraternities after 1875, Phi Kappa Sigma regained its charter in 1877 and met in secret, often off campus.
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State experiment station opens at Chapel Hill
After Kemp P. Battle pressed for it with the State Grange and farm societies, the legislature created a Board of Agriculture, taxed commercial fertilizers and placed an experiment station at the university, whose trustees elected Albert R. Ledoux its chemist in 1877. Working in Smith Hall it analyzed fertilizers, seeds, soils and waters until it moved to Raleigh in 1881.
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The university holds its first summer session, a state normal school for teachers
In the summer of 1877 the university hosted a statewide Summer Normal School, set up by the General Assembly in March 1877 to train white teachers for the common schools. President Kemp Battle and the Board of Education admitted white women to its classes, though state money could not be spent on them.
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Thomas Ruffin Jr. and his wife Mary build the Ruffin-Hill House
Thomas Ruffin Jr. and his wife Mary built an I-house with Italianate and Eastlake trim on a 47-acre tract near the burned Priestly Mangum House. Their daughter Mary Ruffin Hill and her husband Thomas Hill lived there for many years.
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William Horn Battle returns to Chapel Hill to teach law
Battle had left for Raleigh in 1868 when Reconstruction politics disrupted the university. When his law school reopened at Chapel Hill in January 1877, while his son Kemp was president, he returned as professor of law, and he taught until he resigned in January 1879, shortly before his death that March.
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Fire guts Person Hall
Person Hall, the old chapel finished in 1798 and recently given to the chemistry department, burned on February 6, 1877, apparently from a stovepipe set too close to a roof rafter. The thick walls stood, the loss came to about $1,000, and gifts from A. F. Redd, J. S. Carr and others paid to restore it.
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Latin salutatory and valedictory orations are dropped from commencement
A month after the Person Hall fire the university abolished the Latin Salutatory and Valedictory speeches, though for several years the top graduate was still called the valedictorian.
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Andrew Mickle is appointed Chapel Hill postmaster
Andrew Mickle was appointed postmaster at Chapel Hill on May 19, 1877, succeeding Hugh B. Guthrie. Thomas M. Kirkland followed him on January 31, 1881.
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Charles F. Deems preaches the commencement sermon and receives an honorary degree
At the 1877 commencement, Deems, then pastor of the Church of the Strangers in New York, preached the baccalaureate sermon, and the university conferred on him the honorary Doctor of Laws.
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The reopened university graduates its first class
At the 1877 commencement five men took degrees, William Battle Phillips of Chapel Hill a Ph.B. and Julian M. Baker, Frank M. Fremont, Joseph C. Powell and James C. Taylor the B.S. The 1876 commencement had had no graduates.
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William C. Claytor, Nettleton G. Craig and Charles W. Johnston are ordained elders at New Hope
Three elders were added to the session. Claytor was a son of the 1859 elder Samuel Claytor; Johnston's grandmother was Mary Cabe, a daughter of Gilbert Strayhorn.
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Louisa Turner sells Maple Hill and 140 acres to her brother-in-law Israel Turner
Louisa Jackson Turner, widow of John Turner, sold her father Jacob Jackson's home tract and the house where she lived to Israel Turner Jr. for $10,500. Israel Turner later ran a government-licensed distillery on the farm.
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The school board approves Piney Mountain as school District 53
The board recognized Piney Mountain as District No. 53 and named its committeemen. At the same meeting it ordered that no committee contract teachers beyond the money apportioned for the year.
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Fairfield School is allowed to draw water from the county poorhouse spring
The board let the Fairfield school in District 21 use the spring at the county poorhouse for its water.
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Hickory Grove Baptist Church is organized
Black families organized Hickory Grove Baptist Church, with C. D. Hackney as first pastor.
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The school board names committeemen for 52 numbered school districts
The board's 1877 appointments name every district school in the county, from North East and Deals Creek to Prospect Hill and Orange Factory, with three committeemen for each.
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University Day is established
At Kemp P. Battle's request, seconded by Zebulon B. Vance, the executive committee made October 12, the anniversary of the laying of Old East's cornerstone in 1793, a permanent holiday. At the first observance in Gerrard Hall, decorated by Cornelia Phillips Spencer and village women, Battle spoke on the charter and the cornerstone.
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Bursar Andrew Mickle helps poor teachers through the university's summer normal school
At the summer normal school the university lent its dormitories and bedding and let teachers cook for themselves, so that many lived on $4 or $5 a month. Andrew Mickle, the school's business agent, worked tirelessly to advise and help those who needed it.
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Dr. T. W. Harris opens a private medical school in Chapel Hill
In 1878 Dr. T. W. Harris moved from Chatham County to Chapel Hill and started a private medical school there. Within a year the university absorbed it and named him the first dean of its School of Medicine.
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Hillsborough's Black Presbyterians build their church on Orange Street
The congregation built its church about 1878 with some help from white residents. Leading families were the Ellisons, Boldens, Morrows, Richmonds and Webbs; Bill Bolden played the organ and a Rev. White was pastor.
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John H. Watson buys the Chapel Hill Hotel from David McCauley
John H. Watson, a brother of Jones Watson, bought the Chapel Hill Hotel from McCauley. By 1891 he had taken W. W. Pickard as a partner.
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Joseph A. Harris publishes the Chapel Hill Ledger
Joseph A. Harris began printing the Chapel Hill Ledger in a small wooden shop on the south side of East Franklin Street. He stopped publishing it in 1880.
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Joseph Blount Cheshire is assigned to the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill
Ordered deacon at Tarboro on 21 April 1878, Cheshire was assigned by Bishop Thomas Atkinson to the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill at the request of university president Kemp P. Battle. He served his diaconate there under Robert Sutton, rector of the Pittsboro parish.
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Mount Zion AME Church is organized at Martinsville
Lefler and Wager say five Black men, Jack Horner, Bedford Corbett, Richard Jordan, Sam McBroom and Richard Thompson, organized the church about 1878 at Martinsville, probably the Martin farm near Cedar Grove. The congregation's own history dates its first gatherings to about 1869 and says it was known as Poplar Springs, with a pastor by 1878, until it took the Mount Zion AME name about 1880. It bought an acre from S. W. and Margaret J. Hughes in 1882 and moved to its present site about 1927.
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Nelson P. Hall buys the Ellis house and 267 acres on the Eno
Nelson Parrish Hall bought 267 acres of the Ellis land with the brick house, though his family may have lived there since about 1870, when his son Simeon was listed as a miller. The mill on the Eno across the road took the Hall name as Hall's Mill.
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Teachers at the Normal School form a State Teachers' Association
Teachers attending the 1878 University Normal School organized a State Teachers' Association with Kemp P. Battle as president and began forming county associations. They also petitioned the legislature to continue the school.
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The Orange County Observer begins publication at Hillsborough
Joseph A. Harris started the Orange County Observer at Hillsborough in 1878 as editor and owner. The paper ran until about 1917.
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The present Morrow's Mill is built on Cane Creek
The timber-framed mill on a stone foundation known as Morrow's Mill was built in 1878 on Cane Creek in southwestern Orange County, the third mill on a site whose stone dam enslaved laborers had built before the Civil War. It ground grain until 1930, and the 1993 county survey found it the only rural mill building besides Faucett's still standing, with its dam kept up.
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The wife of pastor J. H. Wheeler is buried in front of the Hillsborough Methodist Church
During J. H. Wheeler's four-year pastorate his wife died and was buried in the church's front yard, a grave the church still showed in 1962.
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St. Paul AME buys a church lot from Benjamin and Dilsy Craig
The congregation paid fifty-five dollars on April 15, 1878 for a church lot bought from Benjamin and Dilsy Craig, and was raising money in December 1879 and January 1880 to finish a church there. In 1892 it built its present church across Merritt Mill Road from the earlier one, on land the 1983 Carrboro inventory says the Hargraves and Caldwell families gave about 1890.
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Three men hanged for a string of Chapel Hill burglaries
In 1877 a band of four broke into six houses in and near Chapel Hill and wounded the widow Margaret Hendon with an axe blade while trying to rob her. Albert Atwater, a Black man held for a lesser offense, confessed and named two white men and a Black man, who were convicted in Orange Superior Court and hanged on April 16, 1878 after Governor Jarvis refused clemency.
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St. Matthew's rings its new bell, a memorial to Confederate dead
A steeple bell given by Mrs. Mary Curtis was rung for the first time for the Easter service. Its inscription remembers John Henry Curtis and the other men of the Orange Light Artillery who died in Confederate service.
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Summer Normal School offers the state's first kindergarten training
Emily M. Coe of New York taught a class of teachers the kindergarten method at the university's 1878 Summer Normal School, with 53 children drilled daily. Battle believed it the first normal kindergarten class in North Carolina; the session enrolled 402 teachers, 190 of them women.
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Alpha Tau Omega charters a chapter at the university
Alpha Tau Omega received a charter at Chapel Hill in 1879, while fraternities were still barred and met out of sight.
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Chapel Hill's amended charter creates the office of mayor
An 1879 amendment to the town charter replaces the magistrate of police with a mayor holding a justice of the peace's powers in Orange County. Merritt Cheek was the first mayor, serving until 1881.
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Charles B. Aycock edits the Ledger in Chapel Hill
Aycock, then a university student, took over as editor of the weekly Chapel Hill Ledger in 1879, succeeding Cornelia Phillips Spencer. The paper ran until 1880.
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer edits the Chapel Hill Weekly Ledger
For some months in 1879 Cornelia Phillips Spencer edited the Chapel Hill Weekly Ledger, with students R. P. Pell and Francis D. Winston as assistants. The book calls her the county's only woman editor; Charles B. Aycock took over from her.
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E. H. Pogue moves his tobacco manufacturing from Hillsborough to Durham
Pogue, a tobacco dealer since 1866 alongside his tinware and general merchandise trade, began making plug tobacco at a factory in Hillsborough in 1872 or 1873. In 1879 he moved the business to Durham, where E. H. Pogue & Son made granulated and long-cut smoking tobacco, while Pogue kept his home in Hillsborough.
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George T. Winston buys Benjamin Hedrick's house with its polygonal annex
Professor George T. Winston bought the former Hedrick house in 1879. In the 1880s or early 1890s he tied the old farmhouse and its many-sided annex together with a Queen Anne addition of porch, entrance hall and parlor, turning the house toward Franklin Street. It is now called the Horace Williams House after its later owner.
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John D. Cameron moves the Recorder from Hillsborough to Durham, ending fifty-nine years of publication in the county seat
Cameron carried the paper fifteen miles east to the tobacco town, where it continued as the Durham Recorder, published every Wednesday. The last issue under the Hillsborough title in the digitized run is March 5, 1879; the first Durham issue there is July 2, 1879.
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John Joseph Whitfield builds a farmhouse on Whitfield Road
About 1879 John Joseph Whitfield built an I-house with a rear ell; a tall Mount Vernon style porch was added later. Its well house and other domestic buildings survive.
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John Wesley Carr builds a second store at Franklin and Columbia
Merchant John Wesley Carr put up a second store on his corner lot at Columbia Street on West Franklin. By about 1904 one of the two Carr stores was a meat market and the other a grocery.
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Latta Grove Baptist Church is organized
Jerry M. Latta and others organized Latta Grove Baptist Church about 1879.
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Legislature extends Normal School benefits to women
The 1877 act limited state money for the Summer Normal School to men, though women attended by invitation. When the two-year act ran out it was renewed with the restriction as to sex removed.
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The railroad is rechartered as the State University Railroad
The legislature rechartered the stalled iron-mine line as the State University Railroad, shifting its purpose to a rail link for the university, with UNC president Kemp P. Battle working alongside Hoke to raise funds.
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Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, formerly enslaved, bought thirty acres in what became Carrboro
The Strayhorns bought about thirty acres and built a one-room log cabin at what is now 109 Jones Ferry Road, and their son William built the house next door at 107 in 1915. Toney Strayhorn is remembered as a founder of First Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, and the house is still owned by a great-granddaughter.
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UNC establishes its School of Medicine
UNC began a medical program in 1879.
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John C. Blake deeds Eno River land to the Catholic diocese
John C. Blake conveyed 15 acres on the Eno River to the Roman Catholic Diocese of Raleigh, decades before any Catholic parish was organized in the county.
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Samuel Kirkland and Leroy Craig are ordained elders at New Hope
The two were added to the session in what Craig in 1891 called the last ordination of elders at New Hope.
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The school board creates Buckhorn school district from four neighboring districts
On petition, the board formed District No. 56, Buckhorn, from the corners of the Gravelly Hill, Ridge Meeting House, Tom's Creek and Woody's Road districts so the school would sit at their center. Elerby (No. 54) and Vickers (No. 55) districts had been formed shortly before.
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Baptist minister James P. Mason speaks at University Day
At the 1879 University Day exercises, after President Kemp Battle's historical address, short talks were given by the Rev. Joseph Blount Cheshire, the Rev. James Pleasant Mason, the Methodist minister Mr. Heitman and several professors.
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Charles F. Deems starts the Deems Fund for student loans
Deems sent the university $300 to begin a fund lending both principal and interest to students on security, in memory of his son Theodore Disosway Deems, who was born in Chapel Hill and killed at Gettysburg. William H. Vanderbilt later added $10,000 through him.
- 1880s
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Alphonso J. McDade builds the first brick building in the business district
McDade put up the first brick building in Chapel Hill's business district, on the southwest corner of Franklin and Columbia streets. F. P. Booth rented it for a dry goods store in 1883, and Junius D. Webb later kept a grocery there.
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F. K. Ball builds a shingled house on East Franklin Street
F. K. Ball built the house at 604 East Franklin Street in 1880, with a steep roof, a large dormer and shingled walls and porch piers. It is named for a later owner, Dr. R. B. Lawson.
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Fairfield Presbyterian Church builds a new Gothic frame church north of Efland
The Fairfield congregation, dating to 1834, put up a new steep-roofed church with Gothic windows in the 1880s, sheathed inside with flush boards.
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Fire destroys Caldwell Lodge's records and the lodge gives up its charter
A fire destroyed all of Caldwell Lodge's old records, and the Chapel Hill lodge surrendered its charter the same year.
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Fire destroys the old Pleasant Henderson house on East Franklin Street
The old Pleasant Henderson house, where the children of Dr. George Moore were then living, burned. In 1881 Dr. William P. Mallett bought the lot and built on it.
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Five custom grist mills work the creeks of Cedar Grove Township
The 1880 manufacturing census found five flour and grist mills in Cedar Grove Township on Back, Eno and Lynch creeks and the South Little River, grinding local farmers' grain about six months a year. James Allen, who owned the township's largest farm, ran one of the smaller mills on Lynch Creek; two sawmills on the Little River ran five months a year.
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Francis P. Venable is offered the chair of chemistry at the university
Venable, a University of Virginia chemistry graduate then studying in Germany, was offered the university's chair of chemistry in 1880. He taught at Chapel Hill until he retired in 1930.
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Glenn's Grove Baptist Church is organized
Glenn's Grove Baptist Church, a Black congregation, was organized about 1880 with Henry Fuller as first pastor.
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Harmony Baptist Church builds its frame meeting house northwest of Hillsborough
The one-room weatherboarded church on stone piers, with a double door and shuttered windows, was built in the 1880s.
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Henry Cole runs a general store near Caldwell
Henry Cole keeps a country general store near Caldwell in the late nineteenth century; the building still stood in 1993.
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Jack Brim, a Black blacksmith, and then Bennie F. Ray open smithies at West End
As the settlement around the depot and Lloyd's mills grew in the later 1880s, Jack Brim, an African American blacksmith, opened a shop at West End, and Bennie F. Ray opened a second smithy after him. Ray's shop was still working north and east of the depot in the early 1910s.
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Little River Township has one grist mill and two sawmills
The 1880 manufacturing census found a single flour and grist mill in Little River Township, on the Eno, and two sawmills on the South Little River: one run by Furner and Smith, the other by Harry Roundtree.
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Locke Craig teaches at the university and at a Chapel Hill school
After graduating from the university at nineteen, Locke Craig taught chemistry there for a short time and taught at a private school in Chapel Hill. Kemp Battle listed him among graduates then teaching as "Craig at Chapel Hill."
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Mount Olive Lodge No. 86 of Prince Hall Masons is established
Black Masons established Mount Olive Lodge No. 86, a Prince Hall lodge serving Chapel Hill and Carrboro. Randolph Chapter No. 185 of the Order of the Eastern Star was associated with it.
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Orange Cross Roads Baptist Church is organized
Orange Cross Roads Baptist Church, a Black Baptist congregation, was organized about 1880. It built its church in 1923.
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Pender Store is built at Cedar Grove
The two-story weatherboarded Pender Store, with a classical gable front and a hip-roofed porch, was built at Cedar Grove in the 1880s. Its shelves and display cases were still in place in 1996.
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Robert F. Hoke raises subscriptions to run the railroad toward Chapel Hill
When iron prices rose in 1880 and shipping ore to Pennsylvania furnaces paid, Gen. Robert F. Hoke, who owned most of Iron Mountain north of Chapel Hill, began organizing the branch line from University Station. His Iron Mountain Company put up $6,000, the largest single pledge, and Julian S. Carr was among the other subscribers.
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Ruffin Cheek and then Hiram Stone open West End's first general stores
Ruffin Cheek, followed by Hiram Stone, opened grocery and general merchandise stores at West End in the 1880s. The book counts their stores, east of the railroad spur on what became East Main Street, as the start of Carrboro's business district.
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Seniors begin the class tree and Class Day custom
The class of 1880, led by its president Thomas H. Battle, planted a sugar maple at the edge of the Forbidden Ground after Class Day speeches that included one by Charles B. Aycock. Later classes kept the custom, planting a water oak in 1882 and a white pine in 1883.
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State convicts build the University Railroad
Governor Thomas J. Jarvis supplied state convicts at low hire to grade the line from University Station to Chapel Hill, while the Richmond and Danville company laid the rails. A white convict was shot dead while fleeing, and a Black convict named Fries died of gangrene after a whipping by the road's managers, which the solicitor found no ground to prosecute.
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The Caine Roberts farm is built near Hillsborough
A farm complex centered on a two-story frame Triple-A I-house is built around 1880 on the Caine Roberts place near Hillsborough. The survey put it on the Study List.
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The Charles Davis Farm is built
The Charles Davis Farm, built about 1880, was placed on the state Study List in July 1991 at its owner's request.
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The Davis-Eubanks House is built on Mallette Street
The one-story frame house at 129 Mallette Street, with a center front gable, rear ell and turned-post porch, dates from about 1880.
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The Henry Lloyd farm is built around a walled barnyard in Chapel Hill Township
Henry Lloyd, farming in Chapel Hill Township by 1880, probably built his farmhouse in the 1880s; the farm grew in stages, and log and frame outbuildings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries close in a rectangular barnyard, an arrangement the survey found worth a Study List place.
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The Little River General Store is built on NC 57
A frame general store serving the Little River community goes up on NC 57 late in the nineteenth century.
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The Neville Building, thought to be Carrboro's first store, goes up east of the depot
A one-story frame store later called the Old Neville Building was put up in the 1880s on East Main Street between Broad and Lloyd streets and is believed to be the first store building in Carrboro. Its last tenant was the Carrboro Cash Store, run by Cliff and Wilbur Partin.
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The Phelps farmstead is built north of Hillsborough
The Phelps farm on NC 57 north of Hillsborough grows up in the late nineteenth century around a Triple-A I-house, with a log tenant house and one- and two-pen log barns. It is on the Study List.
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The White Cross Store is built
A country store is built at White Cross in the late nineteenth century. It was later covered in vinyl siding.
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The first McDade Store goes up at McDade crossroads
The first McDade Store, a two-story frame building, was put up in the 1880s at the McDade crossroads just north of Cedar Grove, where it would have stood over the small community. A second McDade store with a canopy for motorists buying gas was built across the road in the early 1920s.
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The upstairs courtroom of the Orange County Courthouse is renovated
In the 1880s the second-floor courtroom of John Berry's 1844-1845 courthouse on East King Street was renovated; the rest of the interior keeps most of its original finish.
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Two cotton gins operate on Cane Creek in Bingham Township
Bingham Township, where cotton was a cash crop, had two cotton gins on Cane Creek in 1880. The township also had three flour and grist mills running full time, two on Cane Creek and one on Turkey Creek, and four sawmills on Morgan, Cane and Tom creeks.
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W. R. Hughes makes bricks at Cedar Grove
The only brickyard in Cedar Grove Township in 1880 belonged to W. R. Hughes. It worked two months of the year and turned out about 100,000 common bricks.
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William Cole buys the Smith plantation seat on Smith Level Road
The Smith family held its large plantation south of Carrboro until the 1880s, when William Cole bought the 1845 house. No bigger pre-war house survives in the township, and in 1992 it stood almost unchanged on 130 acres.
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William George Randall walks from Burke County to Chapel Hill to enter the university
Randall walked to Chapel Hill in the fall of 1880, was interviewed by President Kemp Battle and was helped by the Deems Fund. The Dialectic Society paid him as its librarian, the first year the post carried a salary.
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Chapel Hill's AME congregation issues a public appeal for money to finish its house of worship
Rev. G. W. Offley, preacher in charge of the African Methodist Episcopal church in Chapel Hill, signed a circular dated January 5, 1880 asking the public to help the congregation complete its house of worship and naming Brother George Trice to solicit subscriptions. The Chapel Hill Ledger printed it in full on January 10, 1880.
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Joseph Blount Cheshire is ordained priest two years after coming to Chapel Hill
Cheshire was ordained priest on 30 May 1880 by Bishop Theodore B. Lyman in St. Paul's Church, Winston, two years after going to Chapel Hill. While based at the Chapel of the Cross he also organized a mission at Durham and built a church there named for St. Philip the Deacon.
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The student YMCA first takes part in commencement
The 1880 commencement opened with an address to the Young Men's Christian Association by the Rev. F. C. Woodward of Elizabeth City, the association's first part in commencement exercises. By 1884 it met regularly in its own hall in South Building.
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The school board forms Center school district
A new District No. 57, called Center, was created with 34 white children and one Black child.
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Dr. William P. Mallett builds a house on the old Henderson lot
Dr. Mallett bought the burned-out lot from the heirs of Anna Ashe and built a large two-story house, keeping a chemist's shop at its southeast corner. After his death in 1889 his widow ran the house as a boarding house where new professors stayed.
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James Webb Jr. builds Mid-Lawn at East Queen and North Cameron streets
James Webb Jr. built a two-story Italianate house, later called Mid-Lawn, on the northwest corner of East Queen and North Cameron streets. David and Elizabeth Patterson bought it in 1919.
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John Manning teaches law at the university
Elected professor of law in 1881, John Manning taught at Chapel Hill while keeping a private practice, and law enrollment grew from seven students to eighty-seven by 1897-98.
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Joseph Blount Cheshire leaves Chapel Hill to become rector at Charlotte
In the spring of 1881 Cheshire accepted a call to St. Peter's Church in Charlotte, ending about three years at the Chapel of the Cross. He was elected bishop of North Carolina in 1893.
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Joseph W. Murphy serves as rector of St. Matthew's
Joseph W. Murphy was rector of the parish for eleven years. His family later gave the brass alms basin in his memory.
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Kappa Alpha charters a chapter at the university
Kappa Alpha was chartered at Chapel Hill in 1881, four years before the trustees lifted the ban on fraternities.
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Mebaneville, the railroad village on the Orange-Alamance line, is incorporated
The settlement that grew along the North Carolina Railroad from 1854 was incorporated in 1881 and shortened its name to Mebane in 1883. Part of the town lies in Orange County.
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St. Matthew's vestry asks Joseph Blount Cheshire to be its rector
The vestries of St. Matthew's and the Burlington church asked Joseph Blount Cheshire to take charge of their parishes. He would have come to his wife's home town, but Bishop Lyman wanted him to stay in Chapel Hill.
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The General Assembly makes its first regular appropriation to the university
In 1881 the General Assembly voted the university its first regular appropriation for maintenance, secured under President Kemp Battle. Until then the state had given no specific money for its upkeep.
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The literary societies agree to stop hazing
The Dialectic and Philanthropic societies adopted a joint rule, under heavy penalty, against entering another student's room against his will, laying hands on him or otherwise annoying him. It held for several years before hazing resumed in disguise.
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Typhoid kills the two surviving Mason daughters, and their father sets aside a family burial ground
Martha James Mason and Carolina Varina Mason both died of typhoid fever in 1881; their father caught it as well but recovered. James P. Mason marked off a small plot on the family land where all four daughters and later both parents were buried inside an iron fence, beside the graves of Solomon and Ann Morgan.
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The commissioners allow gates across the roads at Orange Factory
The board ordered a gate on the road from Orange Factory to the Durham and Roxboro road near the old Douglas place, and another across the road on the opposite side of the river on S. W. Holman's land.
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Voters approve forming Durham County from eastern Orange and part of Wake
Under an act ratified February 28, 1881, voters in the territory cut from eastern Orange and western Wake approved the new county on April 14, 1881, the Orange portion voting 1,464 to 250. Governor Thomas J. Jarvis then proclaimed Durham County established.
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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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Henry H. 'Hoot' Patterson opens a general merchandise store
Henry Houston 'Hoot' Patterson, a Civil War veteran married to Dr. Thomas Hogan's daughter Mary, started a general merchandise business in the building Andrew Mickle had used. Bryant calls it very successful.
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Hillsborough Presbyterian Church shares a pastor with the Chapel Hill church
During J. L. Williamson's short pastorate of 1882-83 the Hillsborough church was grouped with the Presbyterian church at Chapel Hill.
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Jones Watson serves as mayor of Chapel Hill
Jones Watson, one of the five commissioners named in the town's 1851 charter, was mayor of Chapel Hill in 1882, an office the town's charter had created in 1879. His brother John H. Watson followed him in 1883.
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Lisbon Berry becomes Orange County's first Black lawyer
Lisbon Payne Berry, born enslaved in Hillsborough in 1850, studied law in Hillsborough and was admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1882, becoming the first Black attorney in Orange County.
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William N. Pritchard and Thomas F. Lloyd open a general store on East Franklin Street
William N. 'Captain Billy' Pritchard and T. F. Lloyd opened a general store on East Franklin Street, probably in the building where John R. Hutchins had sold clothing.
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Railroad service reaches West End
The first passenger train on the University Railroad left Chapel Hill on Monday, February 6, 1882, and ran through University Station to Raleigh. The line ended about a mile west of the village at West End, where a boxcar served as the depot, and the settlement that became Carrboro grew up around it.
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The Mount Zion congregation buys an acre for its first church
The Black congregation then known as Poplar Springs, which had met in a schoolhouse and on members' farms, bought a one-acre lot from S. W. Hughes and Margaret J. Hughes for $10. Its first church there was a small frame building with benches made by members.
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Fire destroys the Bingham School buildings near Mebaneville
A fire that started in a cadet's quarters about 9:30 in the morning burned the barracks, office and library, the academy hall, the infirmary and the mess hall. About 175 cadets were in barracks, no one was hurt, and the loss was put at about $30,000.
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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 1, 2026.
