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Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1830s
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Seceders try to form a third literary society, the Delphian
Members who had left the Dialectic Society, joined by one from the Philanthropic, asked the trustees on November 29, 1838 to recognize a Delphian Society and give it a third of the society rooms. In January 1839 the trustees found a third society inexpedient, and after a hearing at Chapel Hill and an appeal by Charles Manly the Delphians disbanded.
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Alexander Dickson becomes owner of the house later called the Alexander Dickson House
Around 1839 Alexander Dickson acquired the late-Georgian frame farmhouse of about 1790 that stood near the later junction of Interstate 85 and NC 86 outside Hillsborough. Joseph E. Johnston used it as his headquarters in 1865, and it was moved to 150 East King Street in 1983.
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Job is sold with 25 other enslaved people to Hillsborough merchant Stephen Moore
To pay a debt to the Bank of Cape Fear for land bought in Tennessee, Francis Nash Waddell sold Job, later Rev. Job Berry, and 25 other enslaved people to the Hillsborough merchant Stephen Moore. Job probably kept painting for builder John Berry, his wages going to Moore.
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John R. Holt opens Union Academy in western Orange
In 1839 John R. Holt gave public notice of Union Academy, a school in western Orange County.
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Lucy Watts buys the hotel on Lot #13
Lucy Watts, widow of Thomas D. Watts, bought the hotel lot and the western half of Lot #15 from Dr. James Webb and kept the house open as the Watts Hotel until 1846.
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Maria L. Spear becomes principal of Hillsborough Female Seminary
After William M. Green's last announcement in 1838, the seminary's trustees named Maria L. Spear principal in 1839.
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Orange County voters approve the new state public school plan
When the 1839 school law put tax-supported common schools to a vote in each county, Orange approved. Approving counties raised $20 per district, matched two to one from the Literary Fund.
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Sidney Mulholland Barbee and L. S. Tower buy Zachariah Trice's store
After Trice, like Utley before him, failed as a storekeeper, he sold the store and house to Barbee and Tower. Barbee moved into the house and the partners made the business pay, the start of Barbee's run as one of the street's main merchants.
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Faculty appoints the first chief marshal of commencement
For the commencement of June 27, 1839, attended by every living former governor but one, the faculty named the first chief marshal, Thomas Davis Meares, who had led the Delphian seceders. The choice of marshal soon passed to the students.
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Elisha Mitchell preaches the university's first baccalaureate sermon
At the 1839 commencement Mitchell, chosen by the faculty, preached the first of the baccalaureate sermons to the graduating class. The choice of preacher was later given to the senior class.
- 1840s
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A Female School House is built for the Burwells' school
As the school grew, subscribers in town paid for a 36-by-20-foot schoolhouse north of the Burwell home, built by the carpenter George A. Faucette.
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A one-room log school is built beside St. Mary's Chapel
In the 1840s a one-room log schoolhouse went up next to St. Mary's Chapel. The brick St. Mary's School of 1931 was later built on the same site.
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A second stone chimney dated 1840 is added to the Strayhorn log house
The log house on the later Blackwood Farm has two stone chimneys side by side, a large one carved 1827 and a smaller one carved 1840, marking an enlargement of the house.
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A stage inn, later the Snipes House, is built near White Cross
The Snipes House near White Cross began in the 1840s as a stagecoach inn, with paired chimneys at each end. It has since been altered.
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Dennis Heartt's family adds a two-story wing to Heartsease
After buying Polly Burke's Queen Street house in 1837, the family of Recorder editor Dennis Heartt named it Heartsease and built a two-story Greek Revival wing on its west side about 1840.
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Faculty keeps students out of the Log Cabin campaign
During the 1840 presidential campaign the faculty asked the county candidates not to speak at Chapel Hill and forbade three students chosen to manage a Whig dinner in the village to serve.
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Free people of color make up most of Dr. Walter A. Norwood's Hillsborough household
In the 1840 census, as the Burwell School task force read it against the 1839 Bailey map of Hillsborough, Dr. Walter A. Norwood headed a household of five in which everyone but the doctor was a free person of color.
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Fresh Treat riot and a textbook rebellion bring dismissals
In the fall of 1840 a drinking feast paid for by new students turned into a riot in which tutors' windows were broken, faculty were stoned, classrooms were wrecked and professors' horses were ridden, and soon after all the blackboards were burned. Several students were dismissed, three more for defying James Phillips's rule against books in recitation, and the trustees approved a faculty resolution to prosecute serious outrages in the courts.
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Henry Evans, a free cabinetmaker of color, buys a shop lot on Churton Street
Evans paid $265 for old lot 6 on Churton Street, across from the courthouse then being built, and made furniture there, including chancel pieces for St. Matthew's, where he was baptized in 1842. The Bailey map marks his workshop.
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Hillsborough counts about 787 people, 333 of them enslaved
Reading the 1840 census against William Bailey's sketch map of the town in 1839, the Task Force counted about 787 people in the mapped households: 434 white, 333 enslaved and 20 free people of color. Dr. James Webb's household was the largest, and Dr. James S. Smith held the most people, 41.
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Historic Rogers Road neighborhood
The Rogers-Eubanks area grew from Black-owned farms and sawmills after emancipation, and in 1972 the county landfill was placed beside it. Residents organized through RENA and the Rogers-Eubanks Coalition from 2007, the landfill closed in 2013, and the neighborhood won a community center in 2014 and the sewer extension in 2019.
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Jesse Hargrave opens a general store whose upstairs room serves the Methodists
Jesse Hargrave, in Chapel Hill since 1835, had a general store on Franklin Street by 1840. The Methodists, who had no church yet, held services in a second-floor room of the store. Hargrave bought the Yancey house the same year.
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John Berry adds a rear ell to Peter Brown Ruffin's house on West King Street
Builder John Berry added at least one two-story rear ell, with a Federal-style stair typical of his work, to the 1820s house that Peter Brown Ruffin owned in the 1840s. The house's first owner is unknown.
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John Wall Norwood restores Poplar Hill
After his father's death, Norwood undertook a complete restoration of Poplar Hill, the Hogg and Norwood family home on the Eno, including the house, lawns and gardens.
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Jones serves as a trustee of the University of North Carolina
Jones was a trustee of his own university from 1840 until 1857, the years he was practicing law at Hillsborough.
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Orange County's free Black population reaches 631
Free people of color in Orange grew from 101 in 1790 to 631 in 1840, the most of any Piedmont county, before hostility toward free Black residents cut the number to 481 or 487 in 1850.
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Swain asks architect David Paton about coating the college buildings
In 1840 President David L. Swain wrote to David Paton, the Scottish architect then finishing the State Capitol in Raleigh, about covering the brick college buildings with a tinted mix of cement, lime and water. The coating began the stucco finish the campus buildings wore for the rest of the century.
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The Hogan-Rogers House was built on the Hogan plantation on Purefoy Road
The two-story frame house on Purefoy Road, on land now owned by St. Paul AME Church, dates to the 1840s or 1850s; the 1992 township survey recorded it as the Lloyd-Rogers House at 1612 Purefoy Road, the only house in the township on a raised basement. A fireplace in that basement led the Preservation Society's director to conclude that enslaved people on the Hogan plantation probably lived and worked there. INDY Week reported in 2012 that many Rogers-Eubanks residents descend from people held on the plantation.
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The Morris Lloyd family builds its first home, a log house near White Cross
A log house of about 1840 near White Cross was the first home of the Morris Lloyd family. When Lloyd later put up a much larger timber-frame house in front of it, the log house stayed in use behind it as a kitchen and sleeping space.
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The two-story Wrenn log house is built near Cedar Grove
A two-story log house now called the Rosie Wrenn House is built near Cedar Grove around 1840. A large frame addition went on the back around 1869; the house is on the Study List.
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Three planters grow nearly all of Orange County's cotton
The 1840 agricultural census recorded 253,437 pounds of cotton in Orange County, about 90 percent of it from the plantations of Paul Cameron, John Lipscomb and Fendal Southerland in the east of the county, worked by enslaved labor. The county also grew 262,882 pounds of tobacco that year, mostly in the north.
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William A. Graham of Hillsborough is elected to the United States Senate
After seven years in the House of Commons, twice as Speaker, Graham was sent to the U.S. Senate in 1840. He left when Democrats controlled the Assembly of 1842-1843.
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Four elders are ordained at New Hope
George A. Faucett, David Craig, William C. Blackwood and Joseph Kirkland were added to the session. All but Faucett were great-grandsons of William Craige; Kirkland was the father of the Rev. Alexander Kirkland.
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Drs. Johnston Blakeley Jones and George Moore open a medical practice and teach medicine
Dr. Jones moved to Chapel Hill and took over the old medicine shop, and with Dr. George Moore ran a practice that also trained medical students. The maps show the two doctors' office there through 1868.
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Elizabeth Hobbs gives birth to her son George in Hillsborough
Elizabeth Hobbs gave birth to her only child, George, whose father was Alexander Kirkland. George later took the surname Kirkland.
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Hugh Waddell buys Job at auction after Stephen Moore's failure
When the merchant Stephen Moore went bankrupt, Job was offered to the highest bidder and bought for $800 by the Hillsborough attorney Hugh Waddell, who made him his personal servant at Twin Chimneys on West King Street. When Waddell was away Job was hired out, painting for John Berry, his wages going to the Waddells.
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Lemuel Lynch is appointed a justice of the peace
Lynch was appointed a justice of the peace in 1841 and afterward held court in Hillsborough.
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Walnut Grove Methodist Church begins
Walnut Grove Methodist Church began in 1841, when the circuit rider Sidney Bumpass started holding services there and the community soon built a log church on land given by Samuel Woods. By 1953 it had 400 members.
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Moses Ashley Curtis becomes rector of St. Matthew's Church in Hillsborough
Curtis, an Episcopal priest who had taught at the church school in Raleigh, accepted a call to St. Matthew's Church in Hillsborough in June 1841. He did his botanical and fungus research from the town while serving the parish.
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Orange County receives its first state Literary Fund money for public schools
The earliest record of a Literary Fund allotment to Orange is $670.14 in September 1841, the year the county first had school officials. By 1853 the allotment was $2,543.
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University buys the Vienna cabinet of minerals
Through John Randolph Clay, the American secretary of legation at Vienna, the university bought for about $1,500 a mineral collection that the curator of the emperor's cabinet valued at over 3,000 florins; Mitchell reported the invoice and insurance in November 1841. The trustees gave Clay an honorary master's degree in 1845.
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Chapel Hill Episcopalians buy a church lot from the university
William Mercer Green told the 1842 diocesan convention that the new Chapel Hill congregation, then fifteen communicants, had bought a lot from the university for its church and had let a contract for part of the building materials.
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Charles F. Deems joins the UNC faculty
President David L. Swain brought Deems, a young Methodist preacher, onto the faculty in 1842 as adjunct professor of rhetoric and logic, to have a Methodist among the professors. He resigned in 1848 for Randolph-Macon College.
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Charles F. Deems preaches to Chapel Hill Methodists in the hall he names Bethesda
While a professor, Deems preached to the village Methodists, at their invitation, in the upper story of Jesse Hargrave's store, a former Masonic lodge room he named Bethesda. After he left the university in 1848, ministers were regularly appointed to the Chapel Hill charge.
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Elizabeth Hobbs and her son are sent from Hillsborough back to Virginia
The Burwells sent Elizabeth Hobbs and her son George back to Dinwiddie County, Virginia, where she rejoined her mother in the household of Ann Burwell Garland and Hugh Garland. The Garlands later took the family to St. Louis, where she bought her freedom and George's in 1855.
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Fayetteville carver George Lauder makes Lewis Bowen Holt's tomb-table in the Dialectic Society plot
The marble tomb-table over Dialectic Society member Lewis Bowen Holt, who died in 1842, carries a carved desert scene of a broken fountain and cistern drawn from Ecclesiastes 12. It is unsigned but matches a signed Lauder stone in Fayetteville's Cross Creek Cemetery.
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Graduates receive Bibles at commencement for the first time
The 1842 commencement was the first at which each member of the graduating class was given a Bible bearing the president's autograph, a custom still kept in 1907.
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Hillsborough Literary Association forms with Dennis Heartt as secretary
A Literary Association was formed at Hillsborough in early 1842 with Frederick Nash as president; James S. Smith, Cadwallader Jones and Robert Burwell as vice presidents; Dennis Heartt as secretary; and Walter A. Norwood as treasurer. Heartt, a charter member, had helped organize it.
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Hugh Waddell opens a school for law students in Hillsborough
In 1842 Waddell opened a school in Hillsborough to prepare young men for the bar.
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Mitchell demonstrates electromagnetic motion at commencement
When the 1842 society orator could not come, Elisha Mitchell showed the audience electromagnetic apparatus the university had just bought in Boston and produced rapid motion by magnetism alone. He judged that the cost of copper and zinc would keep it from competing with steam.
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Person Hall is partitioned into four classrooms
With Gerrard Hall now the chapel, the old chapel, Person Hall, was divided by thick walls and chimneys into four recitation rooms for the professors of Latin, Greek and rhetoric and the tutor of ancient languages.
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William A. Graham builds a law office on his new Eno River property, Montrose
On buying the property in 1842, William A. Graham built a one-and-a-half-story frame law office there. It survives on the Montrose grounds; his son John W. Graham added a two-room rear ell around 1893.
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Willie P. Mangum builds Walnut Hall at Red Mountain
Willie P. Mangum built Walnut Hall from 1842 to 1845 as an addition to his father's house of about 1800. His wife ran the 600-acre plantation, where Mangum enslaved 20 people in 1850.
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Charles Phillips joins New Hope church
James Phillips's son Charles, later a minister and teacher at the university, joined the church at New Hope. He often preached there with his father in later years.
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Willie P. Mangum serves as president pro tempore of the U.S. Senate
Mangum, by then a leading Whig, presided over the Senate as president pro tempore for three years. He had turned down the Whig vice-presidential nomination in 1840.
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William Mercer Green organizes an Episcopal parish in Chapel Hill
In May 1842 William Mercer Green presided over the organization of the Church of the Atonement, an Episcopal parish in Chapel Hill with fifteen communicants, which met in members' homes for five years while its church was built. A record of subscribers for building the church, dated 1843, survives in Green's papers.
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William Norwood's estate lists Rebecca Ruffin and her daughters
When William Norwood died, the inventory of his estate named Rebecca, wife of Judge Ruffin's coachman Jesse, and two of their daughters, Nancy and Julia, among 57 enslaved people.
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Dr. James Webb is declared bankrupt and his goods are auctioned
Dr. James Webb was declared bankrupt on November 1, 1842, and his possessions were sold at public auction on December 11. His friends and neighbors bought back nearly everything offered for him and his family.
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William A. Graham buys the Eno River house that became Montrose
Senator William A. Graham bought 59 acres on the Eno River east of Hillsborough from John U. Kirkland, with the house the Rev. William Mercer Green had built there, paying $3,200 plus his town residence and three lots. Graham named the place Montrose, and his son and grandson lived there after him until 1977.
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Trustees outlaw secret societies at the university
On Charles L. Hinton's motion the board declared secret societies and clubs harmful to the literary societies and to good morals, ordered the faculty to suppress them and barred admission to any student who would not pledge not to join one. The Dialectic and Philanthropic societies agreed to fine members who broke the rule.
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James Jackson Jr. buys the Hillsborough House tavern on King Street
James Jackson Jr. bought the tavern known as Faddis's old stand, lately kept by Thomas D. Crane as the Hillsborough House, and advertised it to travelers and drovers and to people with business at the court house. He promised low charges and a bar kept apart from the house.
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An armed posse captures Tom, a freedom seeker who had hidden for months in the woods east of Chapel Hill
Tom, enslaved by Samuel Morgan, ran away after being sold to a trader bound for the Southwest and hid in a rock shelter in the woods and in a cave on Morgan's Creek. Men with shotguns beat the woods, shot him in the legs and sent him south for sale; the shelter became known as the Robber's Den or Tom's Lair.
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John Wesley Carr buys his mother-in-law's Franklin Street house
Carr married Elizabeth, daughter of Martha Bullock, in 1839; the couple moved in with her in 1841, and in 1843 he bought Martha Bullock's house.
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Nathan Hooker buys ninety-four acres on the north side of Hillsborough
Nathan Hooker bought two tracts of just over ninety-four acres on the northern edge of town. A one-room Greek Revival cottage at 120 West Corbin Street, dated about 1843, is said to be the surviving wing of his house, which later burned.
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Samuel Phillips builds a law office with a Tudor entrance porch on East Franklin Street
About 1843 Samuel Phillips, a lawyer who taught at the university, put up a small law office on East Franklin Street; by 1847 a boys' preparatory school was meeting in it. Its stepped-gable Tudor porch matches the Eagle Hotel annex built for Polk's 1847 visit. Dabney Cosby probably built it, and the design may be his or A. J. Davis's.
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The Episcopal parish begins building the Chapel of the Cross on East Franklin Street
A year after organizing, Chapel Hill's Episcopal parish started work in 1843 on its Gothic Revival chapel at 302 East Franklin Street, designed by the architect Thomas U. Walter. The building took until 1848 to finish.
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William Horn Battle moves his family to Chapel Hill and buys a house beside the campus
Judge William H. Battle moved his family from Raleigh to Chapel Hill in 1843 so his sons could attend the university. He bought a house near the campus and enlarged it, adding quarters for the people the family enslaved.
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Alumni gather at Chapel Hill and organize the university's Alumni Association
Graduates meeting at commencement organized the Alumni Association with former governor Morehead in the chair. At the 1844 meeting they adopted a constitution and chose Morehead as the association's first president.
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A Norwood and Tillinghast debt settlement prices enslaved people by name
To pay what was owed the Bank of Cape Fear, a settlement between J. W. Norwood and Samuel Tillinghast valued an estate at $15,433 by listing each enslaved person with a price, Eliza at $75 and Manley at $200.
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Trustees tell Swain to ask Robert Donaldson about plans for society halls and a landscape gardener
In October 1843 the board directed President Swain to write to Robert Donaldson in New York about how best to get plans for new literary society halls and to find someone skilled in laying out the grounds, and at what price.
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Swain authorizes Donaldson to bring architect A. J. Davis to the university
In a letter from Raleigh dated November 28, 1843, Swain told Donaldson he might invite Alexander Jackson Davis to Chapel Hill to make working drawings and specifications, with $100 for travel. The letter opened Davis's service as the university's architect and planner of its grounds.
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Swain reports the Chapel of the Cross walls up to a plan by Thomas U. Walter
Writing to Charles Manly, university president David L. Swain noted that the Episcopalians had raised the brick walls of their church and that it was planned by Walter of Philadelphia. The nomination treats this letter as the main evidence that architect Thomas U. Walter designed the chapel, which had long been credited to Richard Upjohn.
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Chapel Hill's Presbyterians and Methodists circulate subscription papers for church buildings
Swain's letter of November 1843 reported that the village Presbyterians and Methodists each had subscription papers going round to pay for churches, while the Episcopalians already had the brick walls of theirs standing. The Presbyterian church was finished in 1848 and the Methodist in 1853.
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Dabney Cosby takes the masonry subcontract for the lengthening of Old East and Old West
Chapel Hill contractors Isaac J. Collier and Kendall B. Waitt subcontracted the masonry of the university additions to Cosby, who put enslaved workmen including the brothers Osborne and Albert on the job. Cosby and the architect Alexander Jackson Davis quarrelled over the drawings, and president David L. Swain asked the Hillsborough builder John Berry to look at the brickwork, which Berry reported was defective.
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Elias Dodson holds Hillsborough's first known Baptist services in the courthouse
Elias Dodson, a Virginia-born graduate of William and Mary, preached in the courthouse and is the first Baptist minister the authors could find holding services in town. When the county built a new courthouse he bought the old one for the Baptists.
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Frederick Nash of Hillsborough is appointed to the North Carolina Supreme Court
Nash was named to the Supreme Court in 1844, following William Gaston's death. Eight years later his colleagues made him Chief Justice.
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Giles Mebane represents Orange County in the House of Commons
Giles Mebane sat for Orange County in the House of Commons from 1844 to 1849, until the western part of the county, where he was from, became Alamance County.
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Isaac J. Collier serves as contractor for the Chapel of the Cross
Chapel Hill woodworker and builder Isaac J. Collier was the contractor for the Episcopal Chapel of the Cross on East Franklin Street, built to a design by the Philadelphia architect Thomas U. Walter.
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John Berry builds the Orange County Courthouse
County magistrates ordered a new Hillsborough courthouse in early 1844 and set aside $6,000, and its cornerstone was set to be laid with Masonic ceremonies on September 7, 1844. John Berry designed and built the Greek Revival temple-form building, which was standing by May 1845; the town clock went into its cupola in July 1846.
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John Newlin and his sons build a cotton mill at Saxapahaw
The Quaker Newlins began a spinning mill on the Haw River at Saxapahaw in 1844, using enslaved labor to dig the millrace from a rock dam. The brick mill was ready to produce in 1848, the second cotton mill in the county.
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Juniors hold a mock funeral for Euripides's Medea
After Professor Manuel Fetter failed all but three of the junior class on the Medea, the class dressed the book in black crape, marched past his house and buried it near the Davie Poplar under a sandstone slab carved Hic Jacet Medea.
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Orange County's William A. Graham is elected governor
Graham, the Whig nominee chosen unanimously in 1843, won the governorship in 1844 and was re-elected in 1846. He served from 1845 to 1849.
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Paul C. Cameron sends enslaved people from the family farms to cotton plantations in Alabama and Mississippi
Paul C. Cameron bought a cotton plantation in Greene County, Alabama, in 1844 and land for another in Tunica County, Mississippi, in 1856, and sent more than 100 enslaved men and women from the family's North Carolina farms to them.
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Sidney Mulholland Barbee builds a house and three stores on Franklin Street
After buying out his partner, Barbee used the store's profits to buy land on the north side of the street, where he built a large house, two stores just west of it, and a third near the northeast corner of Franklin and Columbia.
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Students found the University Magazine at Chapel Hill
UNC students established the University Magazine in 1844. Apart from one short gap it ran for 104 years and was long the state's only cultural periodical; the Carolina Quarterly later carried on its tradition.
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The Union Church is moved off Franklin Street and becomes a school
When the university sold the Grand Avenue ground to Andrew Mickle and Richard James Ashe and the Presbyterians, the little Union Church was moved away from Franklin Street and later used as the village school.
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The county counts 57 common schools for white children in the 1844-45 term
In the 1844-45 term, 60 teachers at 57 Orange County common schools taught 1,347 boys and 945 girls, all of them white. The schools had been set up after the county board of superintendents divided the county into districts.
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University ends student commons at Steward's Hall
1844 was the last year the university ran Steward's Hall, the frame dining house in the middle of what is now Cameron Avenue where students had taken their meals. It was rented as a private house the next year and later sold, and part of it went into the village school building.
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David L. Swain organizes the Historical Society of the University of North Carolina
In January 1844 President David L. Swain announced the Historical Society of the University of North Carolina, with himself as president and the whole faculty as its executive committee. It set out to copy colonial records in British repositories and to collect North Carolina books, newspapers and papers at the university.
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Alexander Jackson Davis makes his first visit to the university
Davis came to Chapel Hill in February 1844, and that year trustee John Motley Morehead met with him and Swain there about the design of a new hall, later Smith Hall. Davis stayed in touch with Swain and the trustees about campus work until the mid-1850s.
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John U. Kirkland is elected a Warden of the Poor for Orange County
At an election in April 1844 Orange County chose Cadwallader Jones, Dr. James Webb, Green Jordan, Nathaniel Bain, James Faucett, John U. Kirkland and Samuel N. Tate as Wardens of the Poor.
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Charles Phillips returns to Chapel Hill as a tutor of mathematics
Phillips accepted a call from President David L. Swain in July 1844 to return to the University of North Carolina as his father's assistant. He held the post of tutor of mathematics until 1853.
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Eagle Lodge Masons lay the cornerstone of the new Orange County courthouse
Masons of Eagle Lodge, with brethren from University Lodge, laid the cornerstone of the new courthouse in Hillsborough, with Dr. James S. Smith acting as deputy grand master. The Rev. William M. Green gave the oration in the old courthouse nearby.
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William James Bingham opens his school at the Oaks
William James Bingham gave up Hillsborough Academy after its spring 1844 session and in May announced a select classical and mathematical school twelve miles southwest of Hillsborough, to open that November on the Oaks tract he bought the same year. It became known as the Bingham School and stayed at the Oaks until December 1864.
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The university awards Isaac J. Collier and Kendall B. Waitt the contract for the Old East and Old West additions
On December 23, 1844, Collier and Waitt won the contract to build A. J. Davis's three-story brick additions to Old East and Old West, at $9,360. They subcontracted the masonry to Dabney Cosby; the next day trustee secretary Charles Manly asked that they hire his enslaved carpenters.
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Frances Devereux deeds Primus to Dr. Edmund Strudwick
Five months after her husband died, Frances Devereux of Raleigh deeded Primus to Dr. Edmund Strudwick of Hillsborough. Primus later drove and gardened at the Burwell School and, after emancipation, worked at the Nash and Kollock School as Primus Smith.
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Brothers Albert and Osborne, enslaved by Dabney Cosby, plaster the lengthened Old East
The additions to Old East and Old West, contracted in December 1844 and finished in 1848, used the labor of Albert and Osborne, brothers enslaved by Dabney Cosby, who plastered the lengthened Old East in 1845 and 1846. Cosby praised Albert's plastering as first-rate work.
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Dennis Heartt prints The Poetical Works of George M. Horton
Dennis Heartt printed The Poetical Works of George M. Horton, the Colored Bard of North-Carolina at Hillsborough in 1845, with Horton's autobiography prefixed to the poems. It was the second book by Horton, who was still enslaved when it appeared.
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Faculty turns away a fencing and boxing instructor
A Major Roberts, backed by letters from leading trustees, asked to teach the students athletics including fencing and boxing. The faculty refused to let him form a class after learning he advertised teaching the bowie knife at the University of Virginia and boasted of having been a London prize fighter.
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Hillsborough citizens pay to refit the academy building for the Caldwell Institute
Townspeople paid for the repair and enlargement of the Hillsborough Academy building so that the Caldwell Institute could move in from Greensboro. The older school was absorbed into the institute under Alexander Wilson.
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Josiah Turner Jr. is admitted to the bar after studying law in Hillsborough
After schooling at the Caldwell Institute in Greensboro and a year at the University of North Carolina, Josiah Turner Jr. studied law for two years in Hillsborough and was admitted to the bar in about 1845. He soon built a large practice.
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Richard Mayo, a free cabinetmaker of color, buys three town lots
Richard Mayo paid $200 for three lots on Occoneechee Street between West Tryon and West Queen streets, and in 1849 gave them to Levi McCollum to settle a debt. His brother William later waited tables at the Burwell School.
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Samuel F. Phillips opens a law practice in Chapel Hill
Phillips, who had grown up in Chapel Hill after his family moved there in 1826, studied law under President David L. Swain and in the new university law school, then began practising in Chapel Hill when he came of age in 1845.
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The Joseph Allison house is built near Caldwell
A frame side-gable house is built in 1845 on the Joseph Allison place near Caldwell, on land that goes back to a 1759 grant. It had been remodeled by 1993.
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The Mallette-Wilson-Maurice House is built on West Cameron Avenue
A story-and-a-half Greek Revival house with a low gable roof and short upper windows went up about 1845 at 215 West Cameron Avenue, one of the oldest houses on the street. A small guest house stands beside it facing Wilson Street.
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The Old Orange County Courthouse is moved up Churton Street to Queen Street
After the county built a new courthouse, its commissioners advertised the old wooden courthouse for sale at the November 1845 county court, to be removed from the court square. The Baptist missionary Elias Dodson bought it, and by about 1847 it stood at the corner of Churton and Queen streets as a church. The building later became the freedmen's school and then the home of Dickerson Chapel AME Church.
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The Smith-Cole House is built for a Hillsborough planter
Built in 1845 for a Hillsborough planter, the frame house stands two stories over a center-hall plan two rooms deep and five bays across, with a chimney at each gable end and a porch on thin columns.
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Trustees bar students from bringing their own enslaved servants to the university
After 1845 the trustees prohibited students from bringing enslaved people of their own to Chapel Hill. The university went on hiring enslaved college servants by the year from local slaveholders.
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William Horn Battle becomes the university's professor of law
After teaching law from his office in Chapel Hill, Battle was professor of law at the university by 1845, and the university began offering the bachelor of law degree.
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Samuel Wellwood Hughes opens a classical school for boys near Cedar Grove
Samuel Wellwood Hughes opened his own academy in northern Orange County in January 1845. First called Cedar Grove Academy and later Hughes' Academy, it offered classical and mathematical courses modeled on the Bingham School and ran until his death in 1884.
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Thomas W. Holden, now living in Milton, offers Enoe Mills for sale
Thomas W. Holden advertised all or half of Enoe Mills, five miles below Hillsborough, for sale. The works had about 300 acres, a threshing machine, saw mill, cotton gin, two wool-carding machines, an oil mill and a corn and flour mill, with his partner J. F. Lyon on the premises.
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Lemuel Lynch becomes Hillsborough's first mayor
The silversmith Lemuel Lynch takes office as the first mayor of Hillsborough, which until then had been run by town commissioners and a magistrate of police.
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Osborne begins the masonry on the additions to Old East and Old West
Dabney Cosby, who held the masonry subcontract for the university additions, sent Osborne to Chapel Hill carrying a letter to the main contractors saying that Osborne would have his mortar made up. Cosby ordered meal and bacon for him and wrote that what Osborne said could be relied on.
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Enslaved workers build and tend the Battle household in Chapel Hill
Letters between Lucy and William H. Battle in March 1845 describe enslaved men at their Chapel Hill house: Ben planted shrubs and flowers, Harry worked on the outbuildings and was hired out, and Billy was also at work. The well-house, servants' houses, barn and bath house were built almost entirely by enslaved labor.
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University trustees name the burying ground the College Graveyard
After Judge William Gaston died in 1844, faculty members asked the trustees for a separate burying ground in sight of the campus for eminent men of the university, starting with Gaston's body brought from Raleigh. The trustees let the petition lapse and in June 1845 named the existing ground the College Graveyard instead.
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Caldwell Institute reopens in Hillsborough after leaving Greensboro
The Orange Presbytery's Caldwell Institute, founded at Greensboro, moved to Hillsborough and began its first session there on July 9, 1845, with Alexander Wilson as president. It used the Hillsborough Academy building and absorbed that school.
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James S. Smith offers his estate for sale to pay his debts
In a notice dated August 19, 1845, in the Hillsborough Recorder, James S. Smith offered property he valued at not less than $35,000 to cover debts of $15,000 or $16,000, saying he would act as his own trustee and salesman. NCpedia says he went bankrupt that year and probably then moved from Hillsborough to a house on Smith Level Road outside Chapel Hill.
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Witherspoon's farm Tusculum is sold at the courthouse door
Dr. Edmund Strudwick, who had long held the mortgages, bought the farm at public sale. Susan Witherspoon was allowed to stay on at Tusculum by Strudwick's provision.
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Julian Shakespeare Carr, later Carrboro's namesake, is born in Chapel Hill
Julian S. Carr was born in Chapel Hill on October 12, 1845, the son of the Franklin Street merchant John Wesley Carr, and later studied at the university. He built tobacco, banking and textile fortunes in Durham, and his Durham Hosiery Mills went on to own both Carrboro mills; the town took his name in 1913.
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David L. Swain and Charles Phillips transfer from New Hope to the Chapel Hill church
University president David L. Swain, who first joined a church at New Hope, and Charles Phillips were released by letter to the Presbyterian church at Chapel Hill.
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Andrew Mickle turns the log schoolhouse at Highlands into a house
The log school built south of the Eno around 1844 was converted to a residence, and Andrew Mickle added a three-bay, two-story side-hall section in 1846. Paul C. Cameron enlarged it again in 1857.
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Bartholomew F. Moore gives the annual address before the two literary societies
At the 1846 commencement, Moore, an 1820 graduate, was the annual orator before the two student societies. His subject was the claims of the university on her sons for cultivating truth and universal justice.
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Builder John Berry enlarges a St. Mary's Road farmhouse into Sunny Side, his country home
John Berry, the Hillsborough brickmason and builder, enlarged and remodeled an older farmhouse on St. Mary's Road as a home for himself and named it Sunny Side. He kept his library there and lived there until his death in 1870.
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Caroline Mallett Walker conveys the Margaret Lane house to James M. Palmer
In 1846 Caroline Mary Walker conveyed the lateral-hall house at 173 West Margaret Lane, by deed of trust, to James M. Palmer. Palmer, bankrupt, gave it up in 1863, and a later owner, Tom Haise or Hayes, kept a shoemaker's shop there.
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Dialectic and Philanthropic societies draw lots for the east and west buildings
The trustees had the society presidents, William M. Howerton and Matt W. Ransom, cast lots before Governor Graham, President Swain and Charles Manly; the Philanthropic won the east side and the Dialectic the west, and South Building rooms facing north went to the Phis and those facing south to the Dis. The arrangement lasted until 1868.
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James Phillips buys the Village Chapel lot for the Presbyterian church
Professor James Phillips, as trustee, bought for $200 the lot where the Union or Village Chapel stood, as a site for the Presbyterian church, on condition that no burials be made there. The old chapel was moved a few hundred yards north, enlarged, and long served as the village public school.
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John Christmas builds new gallows at Hillsborough
The county's new gallows went up in 1846 and were moved four years later.
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Lemuel Lynch is paid to repair the courthouse clock
The old town clock, in storage since the market house came down, was repaired for the new courthouse, where it still hangs in the cupola. Lemuel Lynch was paid $250 for the work and afterward $25 a year to keep it running on time.
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Nancy Hilliard buys the Watts Hotel from Lucy Watts
Lucy Watts sold the hotel and the land beside it to Nancy Hilliard, already known as a Chapel Hill hotel keeper. A year later Hilliard enlarged it for President Polk's commencement visit.
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Students circulate the Literary Trumpet, a handwritten paper
William M. Howerton edited the Literary Trumpet, a pen-and-ink paper for private circulation, with a lady as nominal co-editor. Battle calls it the first of the university's informal student sheets.
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The two-story Pickett log house is built near Cedar Grove
The Pickett House near Cedar Grove is a large log dwelling of two full stories, a size uncommon among the county's log houses. The survey could not settle whether it went up in 1846 or 1864.
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University sells the Franklin and Columbia street oak grove to John W. Carr
The trustees conveyed to the merchant John W. Carr, for $300, the oak grove at the northwest corner of Franklin and Columbia streets where villagers gathered to hear candidates speak. It was one of several sales of university land to villagers in the middle 1840s.
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Mitchell asks the Burwells to sell his wife Mary Ann with him
Mitchell, an enslaved man who had run from his owner, came to Robert Burwell asking that he and his wife Mary Ann, enslaved in the Burwell household, be sold together. He worked at the house for a week; then Burwell told him to go back to his master, and he left on February 17.
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Smallpox at the Turner house sends students out of town
Anna Burwell wrote that William Turner had caught smallpox from the clothes of a brother back from medical lectures in Philadelphia. Twenty or thirty students of the Institute left town, and both Burwell boarders went home, though no second case followed.
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Albert joins his brother Osborne to plaster the halls at the university
Cosby sent Albert from Smithfield in Virginia to Chapel Hill, where Osborne was already at work on the additions to Old East and Old West. Albert carried a letter to university president David L. Swain saying he came to help his brother plaster the halls and would judge the sand to be used together with Osborne.
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Morehead gives the Alumni Association address in Gerrard Hall
With no orator found from the class of thirty years before, the association's president, former governor Morehead, delivered the address at the meeting of 36 alumni in Gerrard Hall.
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William Mercer Green pledges fifteen enslaved people and his Bolin Creek land for a loan
To secure 2,500 dollars borrowed from John H. Bryan, with David L. Swain and Duncan Cameron as his sureties, William Mercer Green conveyed to William H. Battle in trust his land on Bolin Creek near Chapel Hill and fifteen enslaved people: Jenny, Nancy, Lucy, Frances, Ellen, Celia, Anne, Julia, Rachel, Margaret, Peter, Sam, Aaron, Cain and Robert. If the debt went unpaid, they were to be advertised in the Hillsborough Recorder and sold at Chapel Hill to the highest bidder.
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False alarm sets off a panic in the chapel at commencement
During the 1846 commencement someone shouted that the gallery was falling, and the packed crowd rushed for the doors while some jumped from windows, until President Swain, Governor Graham and other trustees calmed it. No one was hurt, and more pillars were placed under the galleries before the next commencement.
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Union Grove Methodist Church is organized
Union Grove Methodist Church was organized on September 23, 1846. The cornerstone of its later building was laid on the centennial of that day.
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Helen Caldwell dies and is buried with her husband at his monument
Helen Hogg Caldwell, widow of President Caldwell and a leader of village society, died at Chapel Hill on October 30, 1846 while visiting John DeBerniere Hooper. Caldwell's remains were taken up on October 31 and laid beside hers at the base of his monument, with the president and faculty as pallbearers.
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A boys' preparatory school meets in Samuel Phillips's law office
Samuel Phillips's small stuccoed law office on East Franklin Street reportedly housed a preparatory school for boys in 1847. Later in the century William Horn Battle taught law classes in the same building.
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Alumni start a fund for a marble monument to Caldwell
Troubled by the crumbling sandstone monument, the alumni at the 1847 commencement voted on John Y. Mason's motion, supported by President Polk, to raise a marble memorial by gifts of three dollars each, and $210 was subscribed at once. By 1849 only $600 of an estimated $1,000 was in hand and the limit on gifts was dropped.
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Dabney Cosby builds the Presbyterian church on Franklin Street
After the university work Cosby built a small Tuscan style church designed by Alexander Jackson Davis for the Chapel Hill Presbyterian congregation, whose members included university president David L. Swain. In March 1848 the congregation member Charles Phillips wrote to Davis that the mason could not match the lilac gray color specified for the outside. The building no longer stands.
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John Wesley Carr builds a home and store at Franklin and Columbia
Carr built his house west of the middle of Lot #7 and a store on its southeast corner at Columbia Street. The store burned partly in the January 1862 fire but stayed in business, and the maps show Carr's general merchandise there through 1868.
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Jones Watson buys Barbee's old store and house for a drugstore
Jones Watson acquired Sidney Barbee's former house and store on the south side of the street, the old James Hogg property, and probably ran his drugstore from the store before remodeling both buildings. By 1858 they had become his Central Hotel.
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Moses Ashley Curtis leaves St. Matthew's for Society Hill, South Carolina
Rector and botanist Moses Ashley Curtis moved from Hillsborough to Society Hill, South Carolina, ending his first period at St. Matthew's.
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Nancy Hilliard adds a castellated annex to the Eagle Hotel for President Polk's visit
For President James K. Polk's visit to the 1847 commencement, Nancy Hilliard, who kept the Eagle Hotel, added a stuccoed two-story wing with a battlemented porch in a medieval manner. The annex stood on the site of today's Graham Memorial; Dabney Cosby likely built it, perhaps to his own design or one by A. J. Davis.
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Robert Loder and William Watson run a dry goods store near Franklin and Columbia
Loder and his father-in-law kept a dry goods store near the corner, probably in a building of Sidney Barbee's. By 1858 Loder was selling men's clothing there on his own, until fire destroyed the store in 1862.
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The Eno Friends Meeting closes
The Eno meeting, which never recovered the membership it lost in the eighteenth century, came to an end in 1847.
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The Moorefields estate is divided and the house goes to Augusta Moore
The Moorefields lands were divided, and the tract with the house went to Augusta, a daughter of Alfred Moore the younger. The family kept it until 1913.
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The Rev. William Mercer Green buys an East Franklin Street lot and builds a house
Episcopal minister William Mercer Green bought the lot at 513 East Franklin Street in 1847 and had a two-story frame house built there before he sold it, two years later, to Charles Phillips, professor of engineering and mathematics.
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Trustees dispose of Steward's Hall
In 1847 the wings of Steward's Hall, the old college dining hall, were given to President Swain to build a servants' house and the main building was sold. For some years before, it had been rented to keepers who boarded any students who chose to eat there.
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Robert F. Morris buys the Hillsborough House from James Jackson
Robert F. Morris, who said he had kept taverns for several years, bought the Hillsborough House, lately run by James Jackson, and promised to be ready for guests by the February court. He advertised a good table and stables and a bar stocked with liquors.
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President James K. Polk returns to Chapel Hill for the university commencement
Polk came from Raleigh by carriage with Sarah Polk and a large party, lodged at the hotel where Nancy Hilliard had built an annex for his stay, was greeted by Elisha Mitchell, the only professor left from his own student days, visited the college room he had lived in, and stayed through commencement on June 3.
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Caldwell Institute enrollment peaks at 100 in Hillsborough
Under Alexander Wilson the school reached a peak enrollment of 100 students in 1848. Attendance fell back to 68 the next year, and in 1850 the trustees voted to discontinue it.
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Fordyce M. Hubbard is elected professor of Latin
After John DeBerniere Hooper resigned the Latin chair, the trustees elected the Rev. Fordyce M. Hubbard, an Episcopal clergyman then heading Trinity School near Raleigh, professor of Latin. He took up the work the following year and held the chair until 1868.
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Free Black cabinetmaker Thomas Day supplies woodwork and furniture for the new society halls
Thomas Day, the free Black cabinetmaker of Milton, North Carolina, supplied woodwork and furniture for the halls and libraries of the Dialectic and Philanthropic societies in A. J. Davis's north additions to Old East and Old West. Little names him, with the Virginia builder Dabney Cosby, among the craftsmen who carried out Davis's design.
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James B. Connelly serves as rector of St. Matthew's
James B. Connelly took charge of the parish in 1848 and served until his death late in 1855.
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James Webb Jr. and his wife buy Over-the-River from the Norwoods and enlarge it
John Wall Norwood and his wife sold Over-the-River to James Webb Jr. and his wife, who added to the two-story wing. The house stayed in the family and passed to James Webb Cheshire in 1936.
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Literary societies move into new halls in the enlarged Old East and Old West
The northward extensions of Old East and Old West, designed by A. J. Davis and built by Isaac J. Collier and Kendall B. Waitt for $9,360, were finished in 1848 with debating halls and library alcoves for the two societies. At the Dialectic opening James Mebane, the society's first president in 1795, sat beside the student president, Kemp P. Battle.
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Robert Burwell buys the house and has John Berry enlarge it
Burwell resigned his pulpit and bought the two lots from the church for $800 and back pay. The builder John Berry added a central hall and two rooms and turned the house to face Churton Street. A deed of trust of July 16, 1850 shows Burwell still owing Berry $2,500 and the church trustees $800, secured on the lots and on enslaved members of the household.
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Samuel Couch builds a two-story hall-parlor farmhouse near Durham
The Couch house is a tall frame dwelling with an off-center door and windows, Greek Revival trim and a corner stair in the main room. The farm also keeps a log granary.
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Sarah Kollock becomes the Burwell School's teacher of French and drawing
Sarah Kollock, one of the Burwell School's first pupils, had helped teach the younger children and in 1848 became its full-time teacher of French and drawing. By September 1851 Molly Burwell had taken her place and she was in Oxford.
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The literary societies ask the trustees for a building for dances and alumni meetings
The Dialectic and Philanthropic societies petitioned the university trustees to put up a building for dances and alumni gatherings. The request led to Smith Hall, finished in 1850 and later the Playmakers Theatre.
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Mount Hermon Baptist Church is organized
Mount Hermon Baptist Church was organized on June 24, 1848, with Jesse Howell as its first pastor. Its later church was built about 1913.
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The Chapel of the Cross is consecrated
Bishop Levi Silliman Ives consecrated the Episcopal church at Chapel Hill as the Chapel of the Holy Cross. Designed by Thomas U. Walter for the parish William Mercer Green organized in 1842, it was built of bricks fired by enslaved people at kilns on Green's farm and included a wooden gallery for enslaved worshippers.
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Albert M. Shipp elected to the new chair of history and English literature
When William Mercer Green's retirement opened the faculty, the trustees created a professorship of history and English literature and elected the Methodist minister Albert M. Shipp to it. He held the chair until 1859.
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Charles Phillips buys the house William Mercer Green built on East Franklin
Professor Charles Phillips bought the house at 513 East Franklin, just east of his father's, from the Rev. William Mercer Green, who had built it a few years earlier and was leaving to become Episcopal bishop of Mississippi. Phillips lived there until his death in 1889.
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Dr. Edmund Strudwick leads the revival of the state medical society
Edmund Strudwick of Hillsborough proposed and helped call the 1849 meeting that revived the North Carolina Medical Society, and he became its first president. His teacher James Webb was made an honorary charter member.
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English gardeners lay out the campus grounds
The trustees began spending $1,000 a year on the still wild campus under gardeners trained in England, first Loader and then Paxton, with Black laborers. They cleared useless trees, macadamized much of Cameron Avenue and the main walks, lined walks with roses and screened the hotel stables with hedges.
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James Strayhorn's will names sixteen enslaved people
James Strayhorn’s will identifies sixteen people he enslaved.
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Solomon Pool studies at the university in Chapel Hill
Solomon Pool entered the University of North Carolina in 1849 at the age of seventeen and graduated in 1853 as the second honor student in a class of fifty-nine. He was a member of the Philanthropic Society while in Chapel Hill.
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The North Carolina Railroad is chartered and built
The General Assembly chartered the North Carolina Railroad in 1849, after Senate speaker Calvin Graves cast the deciding vote. The state built the 223-mile line from Goldsboro to Charlotte between 1851 and 1856, running it through Hillsborough, and the first train ran its full length in January 1856.
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The Presbyterian church on Franklin Street is finished and dedicated
Built with money and effort from James and Charles Phillips, Elisha Mitchell and President Swain, the small Presbyterian church on the old Grand Avenue ground was completed and formally dedicated.
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The university buys the old Caldwell house as President Swain's residence
William Hooper sold his stepfather's former house to the university, which renovated it heavily for President David L. Swain. Professor John Thomas Wheat moved into Swain's old quarters in the Tom Taylor house.
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Giles Mebane introduces the bill to form Alamance County from western Orange
On January 1, 1849, Giles Mebane, a member for Orange County, introduced a bill to create a new county from part of Orange. It passed, and he named the county Alamance.
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The legislature passed the act creating Alamance County from western Orange
The General Assembly ratified an act on January 29, 1849, to lay off Alamance County from the part of Orange west of a line nine miles west of Hillsborough, if Orange voters approved. They voted for division 1,257 to 1,001 on April 19, and Governor Charles Manly proclaimed the act in force on April 24, 1849.
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William Whitted advertises Lochiel for sale
William Whitted offered Lochiel, his place a mile northwest of Hillsborough, for sale: an eleven-room house with barn, ice house and kitchen on 205 acres, with 140 more acres to the northeast. The notice ran in the Recorder into early 1851.
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Trustees let student church members worship at their own churches
Petitions from several denominations reached the board in December 1849 asking to ease compulsory Sunday worship in the college chapel. On January 4, 1850 the trustees voted down a broader plan and adopted Samuel F. Patterson's rule letting communicants attend the church of their choice while all others still attended chapel, a rule that stood about ten years.
- 1850s
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A free man is jailed in Hillsborough for giving his free papers to an enslaved man
The 1850 census taker listed the town jail's inmates with their charges. John McAndless, a free laborer of 22, was held for "giving his free papers to a slave".
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Builder John Berry holds 44 enslaved people, most working in his building trade
By 1850 the Hillsborough brick mason and builder John Berry held 44 enslaved people, most of them working with him in masonry and construction. Some, including his head carpenter Joseph Nichols, stayed with him after emancipation, and much of the carpentry in Berry's buildings after 1840 was likely Nichols's.
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Caldwell Institute closes in Hillsborough
The Caldwell Institute ended in 1850 after five years in Hillsborough.
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Circuit rider Alson Gray organizes Orange Chapel Methodist Church
Orange Chapel Methodist Church was organized and built its first church in 1850 under the circuit rider Alson Gray.
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Dr. Johnston Blakeley Jones builds a Gothic Revival cottage on West Cameron Avenue
In the 1850s Dr. Jones, one of the village's two physicians before the war, built a board-and-batten cottage at 321 West Cameron with Gothic windows in its front gable, a bay window and a porch of arched latticework. It is the only Gothic Revival cottage known in Chapel Hill, probably based on a pattern book such as Downing's.
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English landscape designer Thomas Paxton lays out the Montrose grounds for Mrs. William A. Graham
The terraced landscape at Montrose, running down to the Eno, was first shaped in the 1850s by the English landscape architect Thomas Paxton, working under the direction of Mrs. William A. Graham.
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Enslaved workers build the stone dam at Trimm's Mill near Cedar Grove
Enslaved laborers build a large stone dam for Trimm's Mill near Cedar Grove in the 1850s. The dam is all that survived of the mill by 1993.
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Ira Ellis's mill, later Hall's Mill, is working on the Eno west of Hillsborough
A mill stands on the Eno west of Hillsborough by the middle of the nineteenth century, part of the Rev. Ira Ellis's home place; it took the name Hall's Mill after Nelson P. Hall acquired the Ellis house and land. Only its stone dam, a stone foundation and the trace of the race survived.
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John Kirkland builds a two-story frame farmhouse near Calvander
A two-story frame house apparently built for John Kirkland in the 1850s stands at Old NC 86 and Homestead Road. It was enlarged about 1900 and later; three early log outbuildings remain.
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Most of Orange County's common surnames date back to the 1779 tax list
Forty-nine of the sixty surnames most common in Orange County in 1850 were already on the 1779 tax list, evidence that many families stayed put even as others moved west.
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Orange County has 15 academies with 470 pupils
The count for 1850 found fifteen private academies in the county, teaching 470 students.
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Orange County residents put up $100,000 for the North Carolina Railroad
Orange County people pledged $100,000 in 1850 toward building the North Carolina Railroad, planned to cross the state from Goldsboro through Hillsborough to Charlotte. Its first rails went down at Greensboro in 1851.
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Signed marble obelisks go up in the Dialectic and Philanthropic plots
George Lauder signed obelisks for Philanthropic members David White Fisher (died 1850) and Mark Bennett (died 1851) and for Dialectic member John Alexander Smith (died 1855), and the Raleigh firm of Maunder & Campbell signed the obelisk of Joshua P. Perry (died 1856). Signed stones are rare in the cemetery.
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Smith Hall is built to Alexander Jackson Davis's design as the university library and ballroom
The New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis designed Smith Hall, built from 1850 to 1852 for just over $10,300 and named for the trustee and former governor Benjamin Smith. It served as library and ballroom and is now the Playmakers Theatre.
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The 1850 census finds Dennis Heartt's printers and apprentices living at Heartsease
The 1850 census listed editor Dennis Heartt's household at Heartsease with his two daughters, his son Edwin with his wife and small daughter, two young printers, and four boys aged eleven to eighteen entered as students who were probably apprentices at the Hillsborough Recorder.
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The 1850 census lists four enslaved people on Joseph Faucette's farm
Joseph Faucette, David's son, grew wheat, corn, oats, potatoes and hay on the home farm and held four enslaved people in one household, a number the nomination calls typical of a yeoman farmer.
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The 1850 census records 47 enslaved people on James H. Pratt's farm by the Eno
James H. Pratt and his wife Malvina worked a farm of 300 improved and 500 unimproved acres with 47 enslaved people, raising wheat, corn, oats, flax and livestock.
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The Lambert Hall House goes up near Caldwell
A two-story frame hall-and-parlor house with a chimney at each end was built near Caldwell in the 1850s, its inside walls lined with wide plain boards. Local informants told the surveyors that dwellings for the people enslaved on the farm once stood in a cluster close to the house.
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The Lindsey-Wilson farmstead takes shape on Damascus Church Road
A log farmhouse and log kitchen, a smokehouse, a barn for hay and a two-story frame granary that still holds its grain bins went up around the middle of the nineteenth century. A stretch of the old roadbed with a stone wall survives in the yard.
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The Mary Hughes House is built at Cedar Grove
About 1850 a center-hall cottage with Greek Revival touches, louvered shutters and sidelights at both front and back doors was built at Cedar Grove. When surveyed it was little altered outside but badly run down, and its mantels had been removed.
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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 2, 2026.
