Search and filters
Search and filters
7,313 dated events and 63 storylines match your filters.
Searched the full chronology of 7,313 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1,601–1,800 of 7,376, 200 to a page.Back to highlights
Entries
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1860s
-
Orange County elects William A. Graham to the secession convention
Graham had led Union men in defeating a February 1861 referendum to call a convention on disunion. After Fort Sumter he was elected by a large margin to represent Orange County in the Constitutional Convention of May 1861, where he stood unsuccessfully for the presidency of the convention before voting for secession.
-
The Orange County court sets aside $50,000 for soldiers' families
Recognizing that many volunteers were men of small means, the county court appropriated $50,000 to support their families. The fund lasted until late in the war.
-
Hillsborough Baptists hold a prayer meeting called by Jefferson Davis
The Baptist church gathered for prayer in response to a proclamation by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, a few weeks after North Carolina left the Union.
-
Faculty deny rumors of closing and add military drill
Alarmed by reports that the university had suspended, the faculty issued a circular that there had been no suspension since 1795 and would be none, and that students were being taught military tactics. Drill was led first by a Mr. Lilly and Professor William J. Martin, and on March 18, 1862 tutor Frederick A. Fetter was made drill master.
-
Presiding elder William Barringer dedicates the new Methodist church in Hillsborough
The brick church that Capt. John Berry built on the Tryon Street lot bought in 1859 was dedicated by William Barringer, presiding elder of the Raleigh District. The first sermon in it was preached by Jesse A. Cunninggim.
-
A carved brownstone headstone marks Thomas Fletcher's grave in the enslaved people's section
Thomas Fletcher, 1838-1862, received a round-topped brownstone headstone with a monogrammed footstone in Section B, as did George, son of Samuel Barbee (no dates). The rough local stone points to a mason cutting gravestones on the side; with Burnett's ledger they are among the few inscribed antebellum markers in a North Carolina slave cemetery.
-
Caroline Bennett and Sallie Brooks, free Black women, join the Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church
Early in the war the church admitted Caroline Bennett and Sallie Brooks, both free women of color, to a membership of a little over forty. The same year the roll counted three Black and thirty-seven white communicants.
-
Commencement held without its ball or marshals
The ball managers told the trustees the seniors' ball could not be held unless the board gave $200 or $300, and the trustees did not answer, so it was omitted for the first time. A quarrel between seniors and juniors over the marshal left the commencement without marshals or music.
-
Dr. Armand J. DeRosset of Wilmington buys a West Franklin house as a wartime refuge
DeRosset bought Mary Southerland's house and kept it as his family's refuge from the coast for the rest of the war. He sold it to Caroline Frederica Baudry in 1867.
-
Druggist Richard Benbury Saunders makes blue mass for the Confederacy
Saunders enlisted in 1861 but was back at his Franklin Street drugstore by 1862, compounding blue mass, a mercury purgative the Confederate army counted as essential.
-
Eagle Lodge's rooftop observatory is taken down and a hipped roof built
In 1862 the glassed-in observatory on the roof of the Masonic hall, said to have predated President Caldwell's 1831 observatory at the university, was removed and the present hipped roof built.
-
George Attmore Sparrow gets approval for his discharge from the Hillsborough academy
Writing from the academy on 21 July 1862, Sparrow told his father he had approval for his discharge and would leave with other cadets when the session ended on 31 July. He was writing from the academy again that fall, through November 1862, and by April 1863 he was in camp with the Army of the Pamlico near Kinston.
-
The legislature elects William A. Graham to the Confederate Senate
Early in the session that began after the 1862 election, the Assembly chose Graham, then Orange's state senator, for the Confederate Senate term starting in May 1864. He kept his state seat until December 1863.
-
William A. Graham's house at Montrose burns
The house the Grahams had enlarged at Montrose burned in 1862, and the family moved to a house on West Tryon Street. Only the law office and outbuildings were left on the land.
-
Fire destroys Robert Loder's clothing store
Robert Loder's store near Franklin and Columbia burned, and the fire crossed Columbia Street to John Wesley Carr's store before it was put out.
-
New Hope's 1805 church burns
The church burned on a Saturday night, most people believing it was set on purpose. The next morning James Phillips preached to the congregation under the trees, and through the summer of 1862 they worshipped under a large arbor built on the grounds.
-
The Presbyterian session drops Benjamin and Ellen Hedrick from membership
After his 1856 dismissal from the faculty for backing Fremont, Benjamin Hedrick and his wife Ellen found themselves shunned at church and stopped attending. The session then struck both from the roll for nonattendance.
-
Robert Bingham goes to war with an Orange County militia company
Robert Bingham, a member of an Orange County militia company, enlisted in state service with his fellow members on March 8, 1862, and on March 25 was elected captain of Company G, Forty-fourth North Carolina Infantry. He was captured in June 1863 and held in Union prisons until he was exchanged in 1864.
-
Chapel Hill Presbyterians vote to give their church bell to the Confederacy
The congregation directed its trustees to offer the church bell to the Confederate government so it could be cast into artillery.
-
The Episcopal diocesan convention meets at the Chapel of the Cross
The forty-sixth annual convention of the Episcopal Church in North Carolina met in the Chapel Hill church during the war. The rector, Francis W. Hilliard, and the parish's lay delegates William H. Battle, W. P. Mallett, A. Mickle and Manuel Fetter all attended.
-
Hillsborough Baptists give their church bell to the Orange Light Artillery
Meeting in conference, the Baptist church voted to hand its bell to the Orange Light Artillery so it could be melted down for Confederate cannon. After the war the church bought a replacement, sold it as unsatisfactory, and bought the bell that still hung in the belfry in 1953.
-
Hillsborough Savings Institution stockholders vote to stop paying interest
At a called meeting on August 9, 1862, stockholders holding 512 shares resolved to pay no interest on deposit certificates after September 16 and to settle all certificates by then. Cashier John U. Kirkland published the notice.
-
The Baptists sell their old courthouse church to George Bishop of New Bern
Trustees H. C. Strowd, John Cheek and William Ward sold the old Baptist church lot at Churton and Queen streets, part of town lot 80, to George Bishop of New Bern for $750. Bishop later resold it to Philadelphia Friends working for freedpeople, and it became the home of Dickerson's Chapel.
-
The Collins family buys the former Burwell School and calls it the Beehive
Members of the Collins family of Somerset Place, who had left Union-held eastern North Carolina, paid Robert Burwell $3,500 for the house and four lots. By 1863 about forty family members and enslaved servants lived there, and the family named it the Beehive.
-
Thirty Chapel Hill families pool money to buy corn
Amid wartime scarcity, thirty heads of families sent Andrew Mickle to buy corn in a better-supplied district; he brought back about 1,921 bushels by rail to Durham and wagon from there, at $6.75 a barrel delivered. The livery keeper John H. Watson took ninety barrels, President Swain 33 and Judge Battle 24.
-
Hillsborough meeting resolves to erect a monument to Col. Charles C. Tew
A Hillsborough meeting chaired by M. E. Manly resolved to raise a monument to Col. Tew, killed at Sharpsburg, at or near the front of his Military Academy, and named Dr. Edmund Strudwick, Dr. Pride Jones and Thomas Webb to collect funds and build it.
-
John Newman acquires the old Federal house on West Queen Street that his family keeps for generations
John Newman acquired the one-story Federal house at 230 West Queen Street in the mid-1860s. It passed to his son William Henry Newman in 1917 and then to his daughters Estelle, Josie and Gertrude, and late 1940s wings were added on each side.
-
New Hope Presbyterian Church builds its fourth church
In the middle of the Civil War, New Hope Presbyterian Church put up its fourth building, the one still in use in 1953.
-
Two rooms are added to the Nash law office for music practice and Sarah Kollock's lodging
Two rooms were built onto the west side of the old Nash law office to give the Nash and Kollock School more practice rooms and to house Sarah Kollock.
-
Wartime refugees from the coast swell the Chapel of the Cross congregation
Rector Francis W. Hilliard reported 59 communicants to the diocesan convention in 1861. By 1863 there were 92, the newcomers being refugees from coastal counties that Union forces held or threatened.
-
Cornelia Phillips Spencer begins teaching boys from refugee families
Widowed and growing deaf, Spencer began teaching three boys whose families had fled eastern North Carolina for Chapel Hill during the war: Baker Mallett, Hannis Taylor and Stephen Skinner. Taylor, later a writer on the English constitution, remembered her as the best-educated woman he had known.
-
Walter Clark resigns his Confederate commission and graduates first in his class at the university
When his regiment came back to North Carolina in February 1863, Walter Clark resigned his commission as a Confederate officer and went to the university, where he studied under David L. Swain and William H. Battle. He graduated first in his class in June 1864.
-
County commissioners call for builders of a new bridge over the Eno at Hillsborough
In a notice dated March 4, 1863, commissioners William H. Brown and J. W. Norwood announced they would let the building of a bridge over the Eno at Hillsborough to contract at the courthouse on Saturday, March 14. The plan was on view at the county court clerk's office.
-
The county school board names committeemen for all 53 districts in wartime
The Board of Superintendents appointed school committeemen for each of Orange County's 53 districts, a sign the public schools stayed open during the war. That month W. H. Brown's examining committee also called would-be teachers to the courthouse in May.
-
Jim, an enslaved tobacco worker leased to Washington Duke, flees toward Union lines
Jim, an enslaved man whose labor Washington Duke leased to grow and cure tobacco, ran away with three others in June 1863 trying to reach Union lines. After the war he took the surname Cox and became a tobacco sharecropper in the Durham area.
-
Assessors announce the listing of Orange County property under the Confederate tax
H. M. Stroud and A. M. Angier advertised fourteen places and dates, August 18 to September 4, to list produce, goods and money under the Confederate tax act of April 24, 1863. A tax-in-kind notice followed in December 1864.
-
Fire destroys the block at the northwest corner of Churton and King streets
A fire that broke out about 1 a.m. destroyed seventeen buildings on the northwest corner of Churton and King streets in Hillsborough, among them the corner store owned by John U. Kirkland and occupied by W. F. and T. J. Strayhorn. The Recorder reported that few owners were insured.
-
Pastor Henry B. Pratt tells the Presbyterian session he will serve the army as a chaplain
Pratt informed the Hillsborough church that he expected to go into Confederate service for the rest of the war once he obtained a chaplain's commission. He returned as pastor in 1867-68.
-
Swain asks Jefferson Davis to exempt university students from the draft
Acting on a trustee resolution of October 8, President David L. Swain wrote from Chapel Hill to Jefferson Davis asking that the remaining students be spared from conscription. He reported 63 students left of the 430 enrolled in 1860 and fifteen young men of the village already killed. The Conscript Office then told the district enrolling officer to grant the exemptions.
-
Black and Native American worshippers in Chapel Hill gather under a grape arbor and form the congregation that became St. Paul AME
A group that included William Thompson, Charles Craig, Jerry Hargraves, Kenny Brooks, Green Merritt and Green Cordal began meeting under a grape vine arbor, with Rev. Green Cordal preaching the first service. The congregation was received into the African Methodist Episcopal connection in 1870.
-
Edwin W. Fuller studies at the university in Chapel Hill
Fuller entered the university as a freshman in the fall of 1864 and studied two years in Chapel Hill before going home to Louisburg to help in his father's business.
-
Hillsborough Baptists begin worshipping in the basement of their unfinished church
With its building money lost in the war, the congregation appears to have moved into the basement of the new Wake Street church around 1864 and met there for some years. The builder John Berry finished the building later.
-
Historic Black neighborhoods of Chapel Hill and Carrboro
Northside, Pine Knolls, Tin Top and Pottersfield in Chapel Hill and the Lloyd–Broad neighborhood in Carrboro grew from land bought by freedpeople such as Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, around their churches, the Orange County Training School and Lincoln High. Urban renewal, campus growth and rising land prices pressed them from the 1970s, and conservation districts, a zoning overlay in Carrboro and the Jackson Center’s work have answered since 2004.
-
Josiah Turner Jr. of Hillsborough is elected to the Confederate Congress
Turner won as an anti-administration candidate in the same year Orange gave Zebulon Vance an 885-vote majority over the peace candidate William W. Holden. In Congress his resolutions supported Graham's push for the Hampton Roads peace conference.
-
Northside, Pine Knolls, and Tin Top
Chapel Hill’s historic Black neighborhoods took shape after emancipation around the West End church and school, the Orange County Training School and its Rosenwald campus of 1924, St. Joseph CME and First Baptist, and the tin-roofed houses that named Tin Top. Lincoln High opened on Merritt Mill Road in 1951, residents resisted urban renewal in the 1970s, and as the Black population fell by about 40 percent the conservation districts, the Jackson Center and the 2015 Northside initiative worked to keep the neighborhoods in place.
-
Orange County's roll of justices of the peace reaches 62
The county court had usually been small, and often only five or six magistrates sat at a term, but the number of justices rose sharply during the war. By 1864 Orange had 62.
-
Wartime woodcutting strips the university forests
To ease the faculty's hardship the trustees let professors, and the widow of tutor George B. Johnston, cut firewood from university land, extending the privilege in December 1864 with Bursar Fetter to mark trees. Neighbors cut freely as well, and many acres near the village were stripped of oaks and hickories.
-
William Bingham takes over the family school at the Oaks and incorporates it
With his brother Robert in the army and his father in declining health, William Bingham was running the school at the Oaks by 1864. That year he incorporated it as the Bingham School, a military and classical academy, and in December moved it to Mebaneville.
-
Confederate War Department refuses to exempt underclassmen
When the exemption Jefferson Davis had granted proved to cover only juniors and seniors, the trustees on March 5, 1864 had the petition sent to Secretary of War Seddon, showing that drafting the lower classes would add almost no soldiers. Seddon refused on March 10, and the students liable to conscription volunteered.
-
Freedpeople build a church and school at Chapel Hill's West End
After emancipation, Black families kept homes and small farms on Chapel Hill's west end. St. Paul's congregation, first gathered under an arbor in December 1864, built a log church on Merritt Mill Road and bought land in 1878, and in 1866 Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal bought an acre nearby for a freedmen's school.
-
Bingham School moves from the Oaks to Mebaneville
William Bingham and Robert Bingham, sons of William James Bingham, moved the school, late in 1864 or in 1865, to a site east of Mebane's Station on the North Carolina Railroad, after the legislature incorporated it in 1864 as a military and classical academy. The highway marker's 1865 may be when classes began at the new site.
-
Anderson's Confederate cavalry sign their paroles at Paul Cameron's house Highlands
At the end of the Civil War, Confederate troops used Highlands, Paul C. Cameron's house south of the Eno, and the paroles of Anderson's cavalry were signed in the old part of the house.
-
Emancipation frees about 6,000 people in Orange County, many of whom become tenants and sharecroppers
About 6,000 enslaved people in Orange County were freed at the end of the Civil War. Many Black families left for Durham and other towns, while some stayed on the land as tenant farmers or sharecroppers.
-
George Laws carries the Orange magistrates' petition for a jury court to Governor Holden
With no courts open in the county after the Confederate surrender, the magistrates appointed by the provisional governor petitioned for a jury court twice a year. Laws carried the petition to Governor William W. Holden, who refused it.
-
George Moses Horton leaves Chapel Hill with the Union cavalry
The enslaved poet George Moses Horton, who for decades had written verses for students, lived near Chapel Hill until Federal cavalry arrived in 1865. He left with them and went to Philadelphia with a Union officer after the war.
-
Hillsborough Military Academy closes for a time at the end of the Civil War
After Charles C. Tew left for the army in 1861, the academy stayed open through the war under Maj. William M. Gordon. Its 1865 term began in February, but that spring, with Sherman's army in the adjoining county, the school closed for a time. Gen. Raleigh E. Colston announced that it would resume under his direction on October 1, 1866, as a polytechnic school on a military basis.
-
Orange County sends John Berry and Samuel F. Phillips to the 1865 convention
Orange would have elected Graham to the postwar convention, but his pardon was held up, so he withdrew and voters chose Berry and Phillips.
-
Orange County voters ratify the ordinances abolishing slavery and repudiating secession
In the 1865 vote on the convention's work, Orange approved the abolition of slavery 169 to 73 and the repudiation of secession 170 to 55.
-
The legislature elects William A. Graham to the U.S. Senate, but Congress refuses to seat him
Elected to the state Senate in 1865, Graham could not take that seat without a pardon. The legislature then chose him for the U.S. Senate, and he was turned away with the rest of the state's delegation. His pardon arrived in 1867.
-
Thomas Ruffin buys the Hillsborough house he called Little Hawfields
The house on East Orange Street, built about 1821 and enlarged in the 1830s, was sold to Thomas Ruffin in 1865. He named it Little Hawfields. The Town of Hillsborough acquired the property in 1972 and made it the Town Hall.
-
Washington Duke begins manufacturing smoking tobacco on his farm
Back from Confederate service, Washington Duke starts making smoking tobacco on his Orange County farm, the start of the business his sons later built into W. Duke and Sons.
-
Wilson Caldwell walks out with President Swain under a white flag to meet approaching Union troops
When Union troops approached Chapel Hill in 1865, Wilson Caldwell walked out under a white flag with President David L. Swain, Judge W. H. Battle and others to meet the incoming cavalry and seek protection for the town and the university.
-
The county court sets its 1865 levy for poor relief and soldiers' families
The February court matched the state tax on land and polls and split the money: $15,000 for poor relief, $10,000 for county purposes and the rest for soldiers' families. The previous August, presiding justice James C. Turrentine had called all the justices together on the families' support.
-
David L. Swain writes William A. Graham urging a move to end the war
Before daylight at Chapel Hill, university president Swain wrote to Graham at Hillsborough proposing that the two of them meet Governor Vance in Raleigh and press for steps to spare the state, its capital and the university. Graham answered that evening that Southern independence was hopeless and asked Swain to stop at his house on the way.
-
Swain and Graham agree on a peace plan at Graham's Hillsborough house
Swain spent the day at Graham's house in Hillsborough, where Graham wrote out a four-point plan calling for the legislature to meet and seek peace talks with the United States, and for the governor to ask Sherman for a halt to fighting. Swain carried it to Raleigh by the morning train, and Vance agreed to try it if General Johnston consented.
-
Graham and Swain bring Governor Vance word of Lee's surrender at Hillsborough
Returning from Raleigh with Sherman's invitation and safe conduct for the governor, Graham and Swain reached Hillsborough on the evening of April 14 and found Vance waiting in Graham's parlor. Neither Vance nor General Hampton had yet heard that Lee had surrendered. Vance chose to answer a summons from Jefferson Davis and left for Greensboro the next morning instead of going back to Raleigh.
-
Johnston's retreating infantry marches through Chapel Hill
On Friday, April 14, divisions of Confederate infantry passed through Chapel Hill at a quick step without halting, bound west toward Greensboro. That afternoon General Wheeler rode in from the Raleigh road and knelt at a street corner with his staff to study a map of the state while townspeople watched.
-
Wheeler's Confederate cavalry fought Union pursuers at New Hope Creek east of Chapel Hill
Retreating cavalry under Joseph Wheeler destroyed the bridge over the rain-swollen New Hope and the other bridges on the road toward Chapel Hill, then attacked Union cavalry trying to cross on fallen trees and driftwood at the Atkins plantation, about eight miles from the village. Cornelia Phillips Spencer, writing from Chapel Hill, called it the last skirmish and perhaps the last blood of the war and recorded that several men were killed on both sides.
-
Wheeler's cavalry reaches Chapel Hill and posts a guard on the university
Confederate cavalry under General Joseph Wheeler reached Chapel Hill, and at the request of alumnus James P. Coffin, Wheeler detailed Lieutenant McBurney Broyles and fifteen men to report to President Swain and protect the university's books and apparatus. Wheeler's headquarters were opposite the Episcopal church.
-
Swain returns to Chapel Hill with word of Lee's surrender
Swain got back to Chapel Hill on the morning of Saturday, April 15, and found Wheeler's cavalry camped in the village. He brought the first sure news of Lee's surrender to the troopers there, some of them former students of the university.
-
Sherman's orders protect the university and village of Chapel Hill
When a Federal officer rode into Chapel Hill at sunset on April 16, President Swain told him of General Sherman's promise to protect the university and village, and the officer said he had received the orders. When Smith D. Atkins's cavalry took the town the next morning, Sherman's orders were obeyed and dwellings and university property were guarded.
-
Sherman and Johnston first meet at the Bennitt farm on the Hillsborough Road
William T. Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston met midway between their lines on the Hillsborough Road, seven miles from Durham Station, and moved to James Bennitt's nearby farmhouse. Before talks began Sherman showed Johnston a telegram announcing President Lincoln's assassination; Sherman offered military terms only, and Johnston asked for terms of a permanent peace.
-
Union troops occupy Chapel Hill
Wheeler's Confederates left Chapel Hill at midday on Easter Sunday, April 16, and a small Federal party rode in at sunset, met President David Lowry Swain and returned to camp. Smith D. Atkins's cavalry took possession about 8 a.m. on Monday, April 17, posting guards from the Ninth Michigan at houses that asked for them and quartering officers and horses in the college buildings. Ordered to Greensboro, the brigade left on May 3, leaving a guard at the university that stayed in the college buildings for more than two months.
-
Johnston accepts Sherman's basis of agreement at the Bennitt farm
At their second meeting at James and Nancy Bennitt's farm on the Hillsborough Road, then in Orange County, Joseph E. Johnston accepted the "basis of agreement" William T. Sherman submitted, which offered an armistice, disbanding of the armies, recognition of state governments and a general amnesty. Jefferson Davis approved the terms, but Washington rejected them.
-
Swain asks Sherman to stop the stripping of farms around Chapel Hill
President Swain wrote General Sherman that Wheeler's men and then the Federals had stripped the country of forage and horses, leaving families such as the Rev. George W. Purefoy's fifty people with no food and no work animals. Sherman replied on April 22 that seizures would stop when the war ended.
-
Johnston surrendered to Sherman at the Bennett farm, then in Orange County
After meetings on April 17 and 18 whose terms Washington rejected, Joseph E. Johnston and William T. Sherman met again at the farm of James and Nancy Bennitt and signed a military surrender covering forces in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. North Carolina Historic Sites describes the Bennitt farm as a 325 acre place in Orange County, on the Hillsborough road west of Durham Station.
-
Charles P. Mallett wrote that federal troops had held Chapel Hill for fourteen days
Writing from Chapel Hill, the merchant Charles P. Mallett reported that Union troops had held the village for fourteen days, that they had behaved tolerably where safeguards were posted but had stripped the surrounding countryside of horses and mules, and that General Judson Kilpatrick had held a review in the village the previous day.
-
A mortally wounded soldier from Selma, Alabama, dies in a Chapel Hill doctor's house
A Confederate soldier from Selma, Alabama, wounded in the fighting east of the village, was carried to the house of one of Chapel Hill's leading physicians and nursed for two or three days. He died after the Union troops arrived and was buried in the garden there.
-
Chapel Hill families feed paroled soldiers of Lee's army walking home
During the Union occupation, unarmed men from Lee's army passed through Chapel Hill on foot, alone or in small groups, each carrying only his parole. Residents called them in to eat, and Spencer adds that Union soldiers who met them also gave them food.
-
Confederate leaders gather at Hillsborough
Wade Hampton and Joseph E. Johnston used the Dickson farm on the edge of Hillsborough as a temporary headquarters while Johnston negotiated with Sherman, and Confederate officials including Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge came there to work on terms. Johnston and his staff rode from the Dickson place along the old Hillsborough to Durham road to complete the surrender.
-
Some freed household workers in Chapel Hill ask to be paid
Once Union troops held the village, the people held in slavery in Chapel Hill households were free. Spencer, writing from the employers' side, says that in one or two households they asked to be paid in coin, and that domestic work mostly went on but was understood on both sides to be voluntary.
-
Spencer records Chapel Hill prices in Confederate money on the eve of surrender
In the days before word of Richmond's fall reached the village, a yard of country jeans cost $25, calico $30 a yard, a bushel of meal $25, and having a tooth pulled $10, all in Confederate notes. Spencer notes that girls still met to knit socks for soldiers.
-
The university keeps up morning and evening prayers through the Union occupation
When Union cavalry took Chapel Hill, ten or twelve students, most of them village boys, were still keeping the college going. A professor rang the bell and prayers were held morning and evening while the troops stayed, though the two or three students from other counties walked home.
-
General Couch leads 12,000 Union troops through Chapel Hill
On May 5, 1865, a Union infantry column under General Darius N. Couch passed through Chapel Hill. Weeks put it at about 12,000 men; Spencer, writing in 1866, said twelve or fourteen thousand.
-
Paul Cameron complains that Jesse Ruffin is raising freedpeople's hopes of land
In May 1865, weeks after the Confederate surrender near Durham, Paul Cameron wrote to his father-in-law Thomas Ruffin that the judge's longtime coachman Jesse had stirred the freedpeople on his place to hope for a freehold in the land they worked, and asked that his name not be linked with Jesse's.
-
The 1865 commencement graduates one senior before a crowd of Federal soldiers
Of fifteen seniors on the rolls on June 1, 1865, only William Curtis Prout was allowed to finish the course, though three others who took part in the commencement exercises at President Swain's invitation were also given degrees. No visitors came from a distance; the only outsiders were about thirty Federal soldiers posted to keep order.
-
Freedpeople hold a Fourth of July celebration at Hillsborough
On the first Fourth of July after emancipation, freedpeople held a large celebration at Hillsborough, as others did at Raleigh. In Chapel Hill white residents held no observance, and Swain's plan for a short address was dropped.
-
General Smith D. Atkins married Eleanor Swain, daughter of the university president
The courtship began during the occupation, when Atkins called on President David Lowry Swain, met his daughter Eleanor, had his regimental band serenade her and gave Swain two horses. Atkins was mustered out in June and the two married in Chapel Hill on August 23, 1865; many invited guests stayed away, students tolled the college bell for three hours and hanged Swain and Atkins in effigy.
-
The university opens its first postwar session with twenty-two students
The university began its fall session with twenty-two students. The same day Swain told Spencer that the endowment was lost and the school had nothing but tuition to live on.
-
Young white men clash with freedmen meeting in Chapel Hill to choose convention delegates
Freedmen met in Chapel Hill to elect delegates to their state convention, which was to ask for the right to vote, and young white men of the village and the college fell into a fight with them. Spencer recorded broken heads and arms and fear in town that a Black guard would be sent in.
-
First Baptist Church organizes independently
The minute books of the church now called University Baptist record a unanimous vote on September 3, 1865 to let the colored patrons withdraw and organize a church of their own, and note that sixty-one colored members were dismissed that month for the purpose. The new congregation, later First Baptist Church of Chapel Hill, met at first in the old Quaker schoolhouse on Franklin Street under Rev. Eddie H. Cole.
-
Job Berry calls a fair to buy a building for a Black school
The Hillsborough Recorder printed Job Berry's notice that the colored citizens of Hillsborough would hold a fair on September 23 to raise money for a school building. The school later met in the old courthouse at Queen and Churton streets.
-
Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation
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.
-
Job Berry buys an acre on South Wake Street
Months after emancipation, Job Berry paid Henry N. Brown $300 for parts of lots 20 and 17 off South Wake Street, next to the Nash and Kollock School, where his wife Rebecca Nash had been enslaved.
-
Bricks at the Coachman's Quarters carry the date Dec 5, '65
Two bricks in a small outbuilding near the Burnside stable in Hillsborough carry the hand-cut inscription 'Dec 5, '65', found during the building's restoration after 2003. The owners and descendants connect it to Jesse Ruffin, a coachman once enslaved by Thomas Ruffin. According to family tradition he cut the date to mark the day after the General Assembly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally ended slavery.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
-
Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal secure land for a Black school
In 1866 Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal bought a plot of land near what is now the corner of West Franklin Street and Merritt Mill Road and gave part of it to the Philadelphia Quakers for a school for freedpeople and the rest for the church that became St. Paul AME. In the spring of 1867 the Friends reported that the freedmen were putting up a school and house of worship on a fifty-dollar lot.
-
Bingham School circular sets its year, board and tuition
The postwar circular describes a single forty-week session opening the first Wednesday of March in two terms, with board and tuition at $350 a year and $435 once uniform and book deposits are added. Boys lived in the superintendent's family, under a mile from the Mebaneville depot.
-
Cornelia Phillips Spencer publishes The Last Ninety Days of the War in North-Carolina
Encouraged by her friend, former governor David L. Swain, Spencer published her first book, an account of the war's last months in North Carolina that describes Wheeler's Confederate cavalry passing through Chapel Hill and the town's occupation by Union cavalry in April 1865.
-
Fire destroys the Hargrave house on Franklin Street
The large house Dr. Charles Yancey built in 1822, owned by the Hargraves since 1840, burned. Jesse Hargrave's children Molly and Fred stayed on the lot in a much smaller building facing the street.
-
Freedpeople register their marriages in Orange County
An 1866 state law declared formerly enslaved couples who had lived together as husband and wife legally married and required them to register their unions, most often with the county register of deeds. Orange County’s cohabitation records from that registration survive at the State Archives and are digitized in North Carolina Digital Collections.
-
General Colston takes charge of the reopened Hillsborough Military Academy
After closing at the end of the war, the academy reopened with General R. C. Colston as superintendent. In 1868 he signed a lease with Col. Tew's widow to live in the superintendent's house, but his family later moved to Wilmington.
-
George Laws chairs the stewards of the Hillsborough Methodist church
In 1866, when Hillsborough Station took in Hillsborough, Cedar Grove, Walnut Grove, Lebanon and New Sharon, Laws was chairman of its Board of Stewards. As treasurer in 1867 he told members that if they wanted preaching they must pay for it.
-
James Phillips pays Dilsey her first wages as a free woman
Dilsey and her husband Ben stayed with the Phillips family after emancipation, and in 1866 James Phillips paid Dilsey her first wages as a freedwoman with the first five-dollar gold piece he received after the war.
-
John U. Kirkland serves as Orange County's clerk and master in equity
In 1866 John U. Kirkland, as clerk and master in equity at his office in Hillsborough, advertised court-ordered sales of Orange County land.
-
John W. Graham serves as Orange County solicitor
After the Civil War, John W. Graham of Hillsborough was solicitor for Orange County from 1866 to 1868, before going as a delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention and into the state senate.
-
John Wall Norwood buys the brick law office facing the courthouse
Attorney Richard Ashe sold the one-room brick law office on Court Street, facing the Orange County Courthouse, to John Wall Norwood for $400. The office, already shown on an 1839 map, is now called the Norwood Law Office.
-
Orange County votes against the proposed state constitution of
Voters rejected the constitution submitted by the reconvened convention, 494 to 392.
-
Quakers open a freedmen's school in Chapel Hill
In 1866 Philadelphia Friends opened a school for Black children in Chapel Hill; by early 1867 it had been running more than half a year with 248 pupils, in a rented house while the freedpeople built a school and house of worship on a fifty-dollar lot the Friends had bought. The school, which came to stand on the land near West Franklin Street and Merritt Mill Road that Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal bought in 1866, merged into Orange County Training School in 1917.
-
Spencer counts thirty-five Chapel Hill men dead in Confederate service
Spencer reckoned that thirty-five young men of the village died in the war, up from the fifteen in Swain's count of October 1863. Four companies were raised in and around the town, and the first left in 1861 with the Orange Light Infantry.
-
The AME congregation later called Dickerson Chapel begins worshipping in the old courthouse
The AME congregation later known as Dickerson Chapel moved into the 1790 courthouse building on Queen Street in 1866, sharing it with the freedmen's school the Philadelphia Friends ran there. Lefler and Wager date its formal organization to 1873, and the Friends conveyed the building to the church's trustees in 1886.
-
The Collins women sell their shares of the Beehive to Dr. Thomas D. Warren
After the war the Collins relatives who had lived at the Beehive left Hillsborough, and the women sold their shares of the house to Dr. Thomas D. Warren, who had married Elizabeth Alethea Collins.
-
The Methodist conference forms a Hillsborough District, with Hillsborough heading a station of five churches
In 1866 the Methodists created a Hillsborough District, under presiding elder W. H. Bobbitt, and made Hillsborough a station that also took in Cedar Grove, Walnut Grove, Lebanon and New Sharon. W. C. Wilson was pastor.
-
The Union League organizes Black voters in Orange County
The Republican Union League, organized in Orange, Alamance and Guilford by Albion W. Tourgee, its first state president, recruited nearly every Black man who would vote before the 1867 election. It had faded by the end of 1870.
-
The women of St. Matthew's organize a Ladies Sewing Society
Led by organist and choir director Lizzie Jones, the society met weekly for more than thirty years. Its money paid for enlarging the church, a steeple, the first stained glass window and the 1883 pipe organ.
-
Thomas and Anne Ruffin move from the Haw River plantation to Hillsborough
Thomas Ruffin and his wife Anne left their Haw River plantation early in 1866 and moved to Hillsborough, where he had bought the house he called Little Hawfields the year before.
-
Trustees mortgage all university property to settle its debts
Facing $103,000 of debt against worthless bank stock and Confederate securities, the trustees compromised with the Bank of North Carolina and other creditors at a quarter of the debt in gold, pledging all the university's property at Chapel Hill and its Buncombe County lands. The General Assembly also voted $7,000 for one year to pay the officers.
-
Trustees strike Confederate leaders from the commencement ball
The student ball managers named Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, John C. Breckinridge, Zebulon Vance and other Confederate figures as honorary managers without asking them. Fearing hostile action by Congress, the trustees ruled the choice improper.
-
Twenty Black members leave First Baptist Church of Hillsborough and organize Mount Bright Baptist Church
Twenty Black members withdrew from First Baptist Church of Hillsborough in 1866, or about 1868 by another account, and organized a congregation of their own, named for its first pastor, Rev. Alfred E. Bright. The widow of Governor William A. Graham gave the group the West Union Street site where the congregation still worships.
-
E. H. Pogue starts making tinware for the wholesale trade in Hillsborough
E. H. Pogue announced that he had begun manufacturing tinware in Hillsborough for merchants and retail dealers, and would also sell it to townspeople at wholesale rates. By early 1867 his store stood west of the courthouse, where he also sold groceries, stoves and tobacco and took country produce in barter.
-
Thomas Lynch becomes stated supply at New Hope after James Phillips
Lynch took up the New Hope pulpit after Phillips stopped preaching there at the end of 1865 and served until the winter of 1867.
-
Charles Phillips teaches a Sunday school for Black residents of Chapel Hill
Charles Phillips and his wife Laura taught a Sunday school for Black people in Chapel Hill, and in March 1866 a supply of books arrived from New York for it. When he left for Davidson College in 1868, a crowd of his scholars stood weeping at the gate.
-
Charles Phillips is ordained at New Hope Church in Orange County
Phillips was ordained on 14 April 1866 at Orange County's New Hope Church, which had long been under the pastoral charge of his father James Phillips. Orange Presbytery had convened there on Wednesday, April 11, and ordained Phillips and Calvin H. Wiley during the meeting.
-
Bodies of Junius and Wesley Lewis Battle brought home for burial
The bodies of Corporal Junius C. Battle, mortally wounded at South Mountain, and Lieutenant Wesley Lewis Battle, killed at Gettysburg, sons of Judge William H. Battle and former students, were brought home to Chapel Hill. The village turned out to meet them, and they lay side by side in the Episcopal church before burial.
-
Orange County's school board writes off its Confederate funds and rents out the schoolhouses
Meeting after the war, the Board of Superintendents of Common Schools found that its balance of about $3,190 in Confederate money and a state draft for $1,732 payable in the same currency were worthless. It told each district's committeemen to rent out their schoolhouses and pay the rents to the county chairman.
-
Calvin H. Wiley is ordained at New Hope
At the last meeting of Orange Presbytery held at New Hope, Calvin H. Wiley was ordained with Charles Phillips, both sine titulo, without a pastoral charge.
-
Jesse and Rebecca Ruffin register the marriage they made in
Jesse Ruffin, coachman to Judge Thomas Ruffin, and Rebecca, who had kept the keys of the Norwood household across the Eno, had married in 1828 while enslaved to different families. They recorded the marriage with the Freedmen's Bureau and later bought a farm.
-
Rev. Job Berry and the Philadelphia Friends open Hillsborough's first school for Black children and adults
Job Berry, who had advertised a fair in September 1865 to raise money for a school, worked with the Friends of Philadelphia to buy the former Orange County courthouse on Queen Street for twelve hundred dollars and open a freedmen's school in it on June 5, 1866. More than three hundred children and adults learned to read and cipher there.
-
Sheriff H. B. Guthrie announces that the county treasury is empty
His notice to taxpayers said no county tax had been levied or collected for 1865, the treasury held not a dollar and the wardens of the poor were deep in debt. He set fifteen collection days in July.
-
Zebulon Vance gives the commencement address on the duties of defeat
At a commencement with only three seniors but a large crowd, Zebulon B. Vance spoke on what a defeated people owed. Spencer hoped the speech would help answer the hostility then growing against the university and its faculty.
-
Freedpeople hold a Black Fourth of July celebration
Cornelia Phillips Spencer's journal records that the Black residents of Chapel Hill marched in procession behind a banner, heard an address by Colonel J. J. Guthrie and a reading of part of the Declaration of Independence by Jurdon Swain, then sat down to a dinner they had provided themselves on the ground bought from the Craigs for their new school house. The banner mottoes were "Respect for Former Owners" and "Our Hope is in God".
-
Peter and Diannah Benton acquire land south of Hillsborough
A deed from Frances Thompson conveyed land half a mile south of town, where the Chatham and Chapel Hill roads divided (today Mayo Street and Orange Grove Road), to Peter Benton, his wife Diannah and Jimmy Thompson. Peter Benton, a free man, had gardened at the Burwell School in 1855.
-
Thomas Ruffin buys six lots next to his Hillsborough house from Pride Jones
Thomas Ruffin bought lots 177, 178, 179, 204, 205 and 206, which adjoined the house he had acquired the year before, from Pride Jones.
-
Allison and Corbin run a plug tobacco factory at Cedar Grove
By the late 1860s Cedar Grove had a plug tobacco factory run by Allison and Corbin that employed fourteen men, the largest workforce of any business in the area. Dr. John J. Allison, a large landowner, was also a partner in dry goods, hardware and grocery stores, and William W. Allison kept a hotel.
-
Andrew Green Ruffin Lloyd builds a log house on Old Hillsborough Road
Around 1867 Andrew Green Ruffin Lloyd raised the log core of a house that later generations of Lloyds enlarged several times. Frame outbuildings stand on the farm.
-
Charles Phillips serves as stated supply for the Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church
Phillips, licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Orange in December 1857, succeeded his father James as stated supply of the Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church after James died in March 1867, and served until he left for Davidson College in February 1869. He taught and superintended the church Sunday school and with his wife started a Sunday school for Black residents.
-
Civil War veteran William Couch builds a frame farmhouse east of Hillsborough
William Couch, a Confederate veteran, builds a two-story frame house around 1867 beside an older log house, and adds outbuildings to the farm. The farm is on the Study List, next to the Sam Couch farm.
-
J. Morrow and Sons grind flour and corn at Oaks
In the late 1860s and early 1870s J. Morrow and his sons ran a flour and corn mill at Oaks, where a dry goods store and a tannery also operated in the community that had grown up around the Bingham school.
-
James Webb Jr. advertises his Cheap Cash Store in Hillsborough
Advertisements in the Hillsborough Recorder in 1867 offered garden seeds, white granite cups and saucers, coffee, sugar and candies at the Cheap Cash Store of James Webb Jr.
-
Rev. Job Berry officiates at more than forty weddings of freed people
Between 1867 and 1877 Job Berry officiated at more than forty weddings of Black couples in and around Hillsborough, among them one held at the Freedmen's School House on September 17, 1868. Orange County marriage books record him as minister, later as AME minister of Bethel.
-
Rock Spring Academy advertises under principal H. M. Cates
The Hillsboro Recorder in 1867 praised Rock Spring Academy, then headed by H. M. Cates, who was also Cane Creek's church clerk, and noted special terms for disabled Confederate veterans. The school did not last much longer.
-
Sarah J. Woodson teaches at the freedmen's school in Hillsborough
Sarah J. Woodson, an Oberlin graduate from Ohio, was principal of the school for Black children in Hillsborough, which she taught with V. S. Williams. The Freedmen's Bureau's report of January 1868 named it among the large, well-run schools in North Carolina.
-
Legislature gives the university North Carolina's land-grant scrip
At President Swain's urging, the General Assembly transferred to the university the state's scrip under the federal Morrill Act, on condition that it set up at least two professorships in agriculture and the mechanic arts. Each county court could send one needy student free of tuition, and students could enter those branches without the usual classical preparation.
-
James Phillips dies in the college chapel
On the morning of March 14, 1867, James Phillips went early to the college chapel to lead morning prayers and was found dead on the rostrum as the bell rang. He had taught at the university since 1826 and was buried in the Chapel Hill Cemetery.
-
Job Berry is admitted as a preacher by the A.M.E. Church
Meeting in Greensboro, the church's North Carolina Conference admitted Job Berry on trial and sent him to Mebanesville and Graham, making formal the ministry he had carried on while state law barred Black preachers.
-
President Andrew Johnson attends commencement
Andrew Johnson came to the 1867 commencement with Secretary of State William H. Seward, Postmaster General Alexander Randall and General Daniel E. Sickles, the military governor under the Reconstruction Acts, and recalled passing through Chapel Hill on foot in 1826. Johnson joined the Dialectic Society and Seward the Philanthropic, but a minority of Dialectics blocked Sickles.
-
The Chapel Hill Baptist Church goes without regular services
When the mission board could no longer help pay him, N. W. Wilson preached his last sermon on July 28, 1867, ending a six-and-a-half-year pastorate. The church then had about a hundred members, down from over two hundred, and its doors stayed practically shut until W. R. Gwaltney was called in 1869.
-
Swain and the faculty resign as trustees plan a new university
At a meeting Governor Jonathan Worth called to face the university's collapse, Charles Phillips presented the resignations of President Swain, Professors Hubbard, Fetter and Smith, law professor William H. Battle and himself, and the trustees adopted Kemp P. Battle's resolution for a committee to plan an elective university system with higher standards.
-
Trustees sell the land-grant scrip at fifty cents an acre
The trustees accepted an offer from G. F. Lewis and Fisher, Booth and Company of Detroit to buy the scrip for 270,000 acres at fifty cents an acre, with most of the money due only after Congress let Southern scrip be located. On William A. Graham's motion $13,500 of the first payments went to general expenses, relieving unpaid officers.
-
The wardens' yearly count finds 21 people in the poorhouse
The count listed three adult men, thirteen adult women and five children of color, three of whom had white mothers. In October the wardens kept James M. Bain as superintendent at $150 a year, with $25 for his wife.
-
Black men vote in Orange County's first Reconstruction election
Under the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, Black men registered and voted alongside white men in the November 19-20, 1867 election for a state constitutional convention. Orange County elected E. M. Holt and J. W. Graham as delegates.
-
Trustees adopt an elective system of ten schools
Over William A. Graham's dissent, the trustees voted 18 to 3 for Kemp P. Battle's committee plan to replace the fixed four-year course with ten independent schools, from political science to modern languages, beginning in fall 1868. After the new state constitution put the university under a new board, the old trustees on June 4, 1868 reappointed Swain and the faculty and rescinded the plan.
-
A trustee committee including Albion W. Tourgee finds the university not bound to pay its bank debt
On Edward Cantwell's motion the Reconstruction trustees named Cantwell, Justice E. G. Reade and Albion W. Tourgee to inquire into the university's debts. Their report held that the university was not legally or equitably bound to pay its debt to the bank, since it could not buy bank stock on credit, and that the Cameron and Swain debts should be scaled down.
-
Charles Phillips is dismissed from the university faculty
When the state's Reconstruction government reorganized the University of North Carolina in 1868, Phillips was dismissed from the faculty. He took a professorship at Davidson College in February 1869.
-
Dialectic and Philanthropic societies hide their books and papers
Believing the societies would not be run under their constitutions after the university changed hands, their last officers gave the Dialectic records to Alexander McIver and the Philanthropic records to William L. Saunders. The property lay safe until the societies revived in 1875.
-
Dr. Johnston Blakeley Jones sells his West Franklin home to banker William A. Wright
Bankrupt by 1865, Jones left for a new practice in Charlotte in 1868 and sold his house to William A. Wright, president of the Bank of Cape Fear, who wanted it as a refuge.
-
Governor Holden appoints Wilson Caldwell a justice of the peace
In 1868 Governor William W. Holden appointed Wilson Swain Caldwell a justice of the peace. Caldwell had been enslaved by university president David L. Swain and had worked at the university since boyhood; he taught school for a time before returning to the university in 1875.
-
Hillsborough Methodist Church opens a lending library for its members
Around 1868 the church began a library of religious and general books, many donated by members and townspeople and some bought by Sunday school classes. Books went out on Sunday mornings, and the record book later counted 937 volumes.
-
Josiah Turner Jr. wins Orange's Senate seat but is excluded under the Fourteenth Amendment
Turner won election as state senator in 1868 but was not seated, since his disabilities under the Fourteenth Amendment were still in force. John W. Graham was elected instead.
-
Judge William H. Battle pays off the Chapel of the Cross rectory lot
Largely through Battle's efforts the parish had bought property for a rectory sometime between 1851 and 1868. In 1868 he paid the $500 still owed on it with interest, and in October 1878 the vestry agreed to repay him $600 at six percent from the start of 1879.
-
Ned Strowd organizes Terrell Creek Baptist Church
Ned Strowd organized Terrell Creek Baptist Church, a Black congregation, on Atwater Road about two miles south of its later site.
-
Orange County votes against the 1868 constitution and for Thomas S. Ashe over Holden
Orange rejected the new Reconstruction constitution 1,863 to 1,324 and gave Conservative Thomas S. Ashe 1,834 votes to 1,310 for William W. Holden, who carried the state.
-
Six freedmen's schools are running in Orange County
By 1868 six schools for freed people had been set up in the county, paid for mostly by the Freedmen's Bureau and Quaker missions, with Black families giving what they could.
-
Solomon Pool's new faculty move into the old professors' houses
With Swain and the old faculty gone, the professors Pool brought in took over their Franklin Street homes: Fisk P. Brewer the Tom Taylor house, David Settle Patrick Swain's house, and James A. Martling the late James Phillips's house.
-
St. Mary's Chapel is reported as no longer entitled to representation as a parish
Long served once a month from Hillsborough and weakened as its old families' children drifted away, St. Mary's Chapel was reported to the 1868 diocesan convention as no longer qualifying for parish representation.
-
The Baptist State Convention meets with the Hillsborough church
The Baptist State Convention of North Carolina held its session with the Hillsborough Baptist church, and townspeople of every denomination boarded the delegates. Thomas Ruffin asked in particular to host the evangelist Elias Dodson.
-
The Chapel of the Cross nearly empties while the university is closed
When the university shut in 1868 most parishioners left Chapel Hill, and for a time the parish had too few men to form a vestry. Lay readers and a monthly visit from R. B. Sutton kept services going until Joseph Blount Cheshire came as rector in 1878.
-
The White Brotherhood, a Ku Klux order, appears in Orange County
The first Klan-type order to reach North Carolina, the White Brotherhood, set up camps including one at Hillsborough. Its Orange County chief was Colonel Joseph C. Webb, followed by Frederick N. Strudwick.
-
The university gives Bartholomew F. Moore an honorary LL.D.
At the 1868 commencement, which Battle calls the last of the old regime, the university granted the degree of Doctor of Laws to ex-Governor Seymour and to Moore, a Raleigh lawyer and active trustee.
-
Cornelia Phillips Spencer moves into Sam Phillips's house and takes in boarders
After her father's death Spencer moved with her daughter into her brother Sam's empty house on East Franklin Street, sleeping there first on January 13, 1868, so that she could take student boarders to make ends meet. Her widowed mother would not come with her.
-
Robert G. Fitzgerald comes to Hillsborough to teach a freedmen's school
Fitzgerald, a Union Navy and cavalry veteran who had taught freedpeople in Amelia County, Virginia, came to Hillsborough through the Friends' Freedmen's Association of Philadelphia to teach at a new school for Black students.
-
Ben and Dilsey leave the Phillips household to live on their own
Ben and Dilsey, held by the Phillips family since the 1820s and kept on as servants after emancipation, left Cornelia Phillips Spencer's household in February 1868. Spencer wrote that she hoped the parting was only for a time.
-
Henry B. Pratt, a missionary to South America, supplies New Hope
Pratt preached at New Hope for six months with the Hillsborough church. On May 24, 1868, D. I. Craig, John T. Hogan and three women were received and baptized as members.
-
The Court of Wardens of the Poor holds its last meeting
The seven-member wardens' court, which had run poor relief and the county poorhouse, met for the last time before the new board of county commissioners took over its work.
-
William H. S. Burgwyn graduates from the university with first honors
After the Civil War Burgwyn re-entered the University of North Carolina as a sophomore and graduated in June 1868 with first honors, delivering the Latin salutatory address. He was a member of the Philanthropic Society.
-
Reconstruction Republicans reshape UNC governance
The 1868 constitution gave the choice of university trustees to the state Board of Education, controlled by Governor William W. Holden. In July 1868 the new trustees removed President David L. Swain and his faculty, and a Republican faculty under Solomon Pool reopened classes in March 1869 amid strong partisan opposition.
-
The university closes and reopens
Reconstruction Republicans took control of the trustees in 1868 and dismissed the old faculty; Solomon Pool's presidency drew almost no students, and the university closed in February 1871. The legislature revived it in March 1875, Cornelia Phillips Spencer rang the bell, and it reopened in September under a rebuilt faculty.
-
Swain protests his removal to Governor Holden
Learning that the new Reconstruction trustees had declared his 1867 resignation final, David L. Swain wrote Governor William W. Holden, as chairman of the board, that no charge had been made against him and that a resignation accepted by a board that no longer existed could not be revived. He asked for reconsideration, but died later that month.
-
Orange County's first elected board of commissioners takes office
Elected in April 1868 at the election that ratified the new constitution, five commissioners qualified at the courthouse and chose Lemuel Lynch chairman, replacing the old county court of justices. Within days the newly elected sheriff, treasurer, register of deeds and clerk of superior court gave their bonds.
-
David L. Swain dies after a buggy accident
Weeks after the Reconstruction board of trustees accepted his resignation, David L. Swain was thrown on August 11, 1868, from a buggy pulled by the horse General Sherman had given him. He seemed to be recovering but died on August 27 and was buried on August 29 in the garden of his Chapel Hill home; Charles Phillips preached his funeral sermon.
-
Commissioners hire Silas M. Link to divide the county into townships
Link was paid $75 to lay the school districts out into townships, and the board approved his plan of eight: Hillsboro, Little River, Mangum, Durham, Patterson, Chapel Hill, Bingham and Cedar Grove. In 1877 the board split Mangum at Little River to form Lebanon Township.
-
The new county commissioners name school committees for all 53 districts
Working from Silas Link's report, which listed the school districts in each new township, the board named three committeemen for every one of the county's 53 districts. Presumably they were meant to hold office until the townships could elect their own.
-
Reconstruction trustees vote down admitting women
The executive committee of the new Republican board of trustees recommended co-education, but the full board refused to admit women as students.
-
Trustees vote to found a university branch for Black students near Raleigh
On Victor C. Barringer's motion the Reconstruction trustees called for a school for Black students near Raleigh equal to the one at Chapel Hill, and on Albion W. Tourgee's motion made it a branch of the university, with Tod R. Caldwell moving that at least 100 acres be bought. Nothing came of it, nor of a later proposal to give Black students a third of the land-scrip money or of Tourgee's request for equal white and Black departments under one board.
-
Cornelia Phillips Spencer describes the emptied campus and village
In a letter to the Sentinel written under the Old Poplar, Spencer described the shut buildings and reported that nearly twenty of Chapel Hill's leading families were leaving and six places now sold liquor openly. She named the departing faculty, among them Judge William H. Battle, and called the town the Deserted Village of the South.
-
A school report finds 43 schoolhouses for nearly 6,000 children
A. Hooker, late chairman of the common schools board, counted 3,667 white and 2,235 Black children in the county and only 43 schoolhouses, most run down, to serve both races. He put the need at 63 new buildings of about $100 each.
-
A Chapel Hill town meeting passes resolutions against Solomon Pool's administration
Townspeople met and adopted resolutions against Pool's running of the university, an outburst of a year of pent-up anger. Shaken, Pool told the merchant Andrew Mickle that he had bought property and settled in the village and would find it hard to move.
-
A count of Chapel Hill finds 483 white and 454 Black residents
Four years after emancipation, Chapel Hill had 483 white and 454 Black residents, close to half and half. Freed families were making homes on the village's western side, on West Cameron Avenue, West Franklin Street and around Potter's Field west of Church Street.
-
Alexander Kirkland, a son of the congregation, supplies New Hope
The Rev. Alexander Kirkland, son of the New Hope elder Joseph Kirkland, supplied the church for part of 1869 and 1870 after Pratt.
-
Alexander McIver joins the reorganized faculty as professor of mathematics
McIver, a Moore County native who had graduated first in the class of 1853 and taught briefly as a tutor, came from Davidson College to teach mathematics on the Republican faculty that reopened the university under Solomon Pool.
-
An 1869 account finds Chapel Hill grown to about 1,000 people
By 1869 the village that had one store and one doctor in 1836 counted eight or ten stores, two drugstores, four churches and six schools, with about 1,000 people. The growth came mostly between the mid-1850s and the war, when new streets were opened and many houses built.
-
Baptists form the Mount Zion Association
The Mount Zion Baptist Association was formed, with the Chapel Hill Baptist church a charter member. Howell, working from the church's minute book, says it was established in 1869 and first met formally at Chapel Hill in 1870. By 1953 nearly every Baptist church in Orange County belonged to it, replacing the older Sandy Creek Association.
-
Black families make homes on Lot 16 on East Franklin Street
After E. Hunt closed his boarding house and Dr. Johnston B. Jones left town, Black families moved into both buildings: Tom Moore into the larger two-story house and the Burnett family into the small former medicine shop. Several other Black families settled on what had been Lot 16.
-
Chapel Hill's Black school holds a commencement with a Fayetteville brass band
The village school for Black children held its own commencement, with a procession, speeches, a dialogue and a supper, and music by a brass band from Fayetteville. Spencer printed a note on it to mock the poorly attended commencement of Pool's university.
-
Chapel Hill's new commissioners levy a tax of fifty cents on the hundred dollars
The village's new board of commissioners laid a property tax of fifty cents on each hundred dollars of value, at a time when, with the university nearly empty, residents could hardly find the money to pay their town taxes.
-
Court strikes down the act for a state-built railroad to Chapel Hill
An 1869 plan had the state build a line from the North Carolina Railroad to Chapel Hill through commissioners, paid for with $300,000 in state bonds. When the commissioners chose Henry C. Thompson as president over Governor Holden's choice, Holden refused to sign the bonds, and in the University Railroad Company's suit against him the court held the act unconstitutional over Judge Reade's dissent.
-
David McCauley buys the Union Hotel and renames it the Chapel Hill Hotel
McCauley bought the Union Hotel, the house Nancy Hilliard had once kept as the Eagle Hotel, and gave it the name Chapel Hill Hotel. He also bought the building at the northeast corner of Franklin and Henderson streets where Richard Benbury Saunders had kept his drugstore.
-
Dr. Abner B. Roberson opens a general store that specializes in drugs
With Saunders gone, the village's new druggist, Dr. Abner Benton Roberson, opened a general store on the south side of Franklin Street that dealt mainly in drugs and medical supplies. It stood on the property of his father-in-law, Haywood Stone.
-
Former governor William A. Graham lives in the Nash-Hooper House
William A. Graham, former governor of North Carolina, made the Nash-Hooper House on West Tryon Street his home from 1869 until 1875.
-
Great oaks are cut down in the faculty yards under the Pool administration
After the Reconstruction faculty took over the old professors' houses, old oaks in their yards were felled for firewood, among them a large tree at the Swain house that Mrs. Swain said she would not have sold for $2,000. Timber cutting later spread to the woods behind the college.
Suggest a correction to an entry →
A dated event is a fact, filed on the page of the subject it belongs to: a person, a place, a theme, or a named event or history. Pages are subjects, with their own works and sources; the Place, community, or institution filter also gathers the institutions that recur in the entries without a page of their own. The page opens on the highlights; a search or any filter looks through every dated event and storyline, and each filter’s counts say how many entries choosing it would show alongside the others. A storyline is a longer history that gathers related dated events, and each storyline’s page lists its own. Counts give dated events and storylines separately. Dates come from the sources named on the cards and from the index’s event pages; where sources disagree, the card follows the county records. Entries marked approximate or needing research say so on the card; the rest were checked against the source named on it. The correction link under the entries opens the contact form; name the entry and its date and the Friends will check the source. Suggest an event →
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 3, 2026.
