Chronology

St. Matthew's adds a gallery for Black worshippers under William Mercer Green

In 1835, during William Mercer Green's rectorship, a gallery was added to St. Matthew's Church in Hillsborough to seat Black worshippers. Green also held monthly services at Duncan Cameron's Salem Chapel, where he gave instruction to enslaved people.

People: Duncan Cameron

Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church

The Rev. Ira Ellis builds Little Ayr Mount, a two-story brick house west of Hillsborough

The Rev. Ira Ellis, who bought 300 acres on the Eno west of Hillsborough in 1835, built the plain two-story brick house later called Little Ayr Mount about that time. With Ayr Mount it is one of the few masonry houses the county survey found from the early nineteenth century.

Subject: Rev. Ira Ellis House (Little Ayr Mount)

The Rev. Ira Ellis buys 300 acres on the Eno near Hall's Mill Road

Ira Ellis, a minister and farmer then in his fifties, bought 300 acres on the Eno River and added 184 more four years later. His three-part Federal brick house, later called Little Ayr Mount, is usually dated to this purchase, and local tradition holds that it took in stagecoach travelers.

Subject: Rev. Ira Ellis House (Little Ayr Mount)

Thomas H. Taylor trades his Franklin Street house to the university

Taylor exchanged Lot #17 and his house for university land in Tennessee and left Chapel Hill. The university gave the Tom Taylor house to its new president, David L. Swain, whose wife disliked the old Caldwell house.

People: David L. Swain · Thomas H. Taylor

University trustees pay for a stone wall around the Chapel Hill graveyard

By 1835 about six more marked graves had joined George Clarke's, among them society members James Neal and James Smith, and the trustees set aside $64.41 to enclose the burying ground with a stone wall.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Trustees create an executive committee to run the university

At Duncan Cameron's instance the board placed management in a seven-member executive committee including the governor, with the powers of the land, appointments and building committees and the right to change studies and dismiss faculty. The first members were Cameron, George E. Badger, William McPheeters, Charles Manly, Frederick Nash, William A. Graham and Governor Swain.

People: Duncan Cameron · David L. Swain · Frederick Nash · William A. Graham · George E. Badger · Charles Manly · William McPheeters

President Joseph Caldwell dies

The university's first president died after years of a painful illness and was buried in the Chapel Hill village cemetery. The trustees' executive committee adopted a tribute on February 6, 1835, and the students resolved to wear badges of mourning.

People: Haywood Williams Guion · Helen Hogg Caldwell

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Trustees sell off the university's Tennessee lands

On resolutions drafted by Duncan Cameron, the executive committee sent Charles Manly to Tennessee to close out the lands with agent Samuel Dickens, and 42,345 acres plus the 20,000 Smith acres went to Orme and Gifford of Boston for $56,345.83. Manly's report of November 21, 1835 counted assets of $171,658, which he reckoned would carry the university's yearly costs with a surplus.

People: Duncan Cameron · David L. Swain · Charles Manly

James S. Smith of Orange moves to abolish borough seats at the 1835 convention

At the state constitutional convention in Raleigh, James S. Smith, one of Orange County's two delegates with William Montgomery, moved on June 11, 1835, to abolish borough representation entirely; the motion failed 61 to 67. The convention's committee later recommended taking the House seat from Hillsborough, Halifax and Salisbury while keeping it for four other towns.

People: William Montgomery

William Bingham, later head of the Bingham School, is born at Hillsborough

William Bingham, son of the schoolmaster William J. Bingham, is born in Hillsborough. He would teach in the family school for seventeen years and lead it through the Civil War and its move to Mebaneville.

People: William Bingham (1835-1873)

The Recorder prints a county meeting's warning to abolitionists

An Orange County meeting adopted a report warning "northern fanatics" not to stir up the enslaved and predicting lasting hostility between the sections if abolitionists pressed on. Its fourteen-man committee included Frederick Nash, William A. Graham, Hugh Waddell, John U. Kirkland, Dr. Edmund Strudwick and the paper's own editor, Dennis Heartt, as a secretary.

People: Frederick Nash · William A. Graham · Hugh Waddell · John U. Kirkland · Edmund Strudwick · Dennis Heartt

Subject: Hillsborough Recorder

Philanthropic Society has a cast made of Caldwell's features

In November 1835, at the Philanthropic Society's request, Caldwell's body was taken up so that the artist Alfred S. Waugh could make a plaster cast of his face. The bust made from it stands in Gerrard Hall.

Subject: Gerrard Hall · Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies

Clover Garden Methodist Church puts up its building

The Methodist congregation at Clover Garden, organized some time before, erected a church in 1836 with seats for about 150.

County voters defeat a plan to form a new county from western Orange

After more than ten years of agitation by residents of the industrial west, a county referendum rejected the proposal by a wide margin. Alamance County was not created until 1849.

Hugh Waddell of Orange serves as Whig Speaker of the state Senate

Waddell, who represented Orange in the Senate for three sessions between 1836 and 1846, presided over the Senate as its Whig Speaker in the 1836-1837 session.

Isaac J. Collier and Kendall B. Waitt go into partnership in a Chapel Hill cabinet shop

After his short-lived partnership with Jones Watson, Isaac J. Collier had joined Kendall B. Waitt, a Chapel Hill artisan from Massachusetts, in a cabinet shop by 1836. The two worked together for years, later as building contractors.

People: Kendall B. Waitt

James Phillips opens a female school in Chapel Hill

In 1836 mathematics professor James Phillips announced Phillips' Female School in Chapel Hill. Mrs. Phillips and a teacher from Emma Willard's seminary at Troy, New York, did most of the teaching.

People: James Phillips

John H. Rhodes advertises a barber shop beside the hotel

Barber John H. Rhodes advertised that his shop stood next to the hotel on Lot #13. The frontage maps show a Rhodes barber shop beside the hotel from 1838 to 1848.

John Norwood begins forty-eight years as clerk of the Hillsborough Presbyterian session

John Norwood kept the session records from 1836 to 1884, one of the two longest terms in the church's history.

People: John Wall Norwood

Subject: Hillsborough Presbyterian Church

Jones begins practicing law at Hillsborough

Jones began his legal career in Hillsborough in 1836 and practiced there until he moved his family to a cotton plantation near Rock Hill, South Carolina, in 1857. He sat in the House of Commons for the 1840, 1842, 1848 and 1850 sessions and became solicitor of the Fourth Judicial District in April 1843.

Orange County's Jacksonian majority narrows as leading men turn Whig

After many county leaders broke with Jackson, Orange gave Martin Van Buren 1,103 votes to 905 for the Whig Hugh L. White. From then until the Civil War the county's presidential majority went to the Whig candidate.

Orange Methodist Church replaces its burned log church with a frame building

By tradition the congregation first worshiped in a log cabin, which burned. A frame church took its place around 1836 to 1838 and served until 1924.

Schoolmaster William J. Bingham repeatedly beats Elizabeth Hobbs at Anna Burwell's urging

Anna Burwell had William J. Bingham, the Hillsborough schoolmaster, flog Elizabeth Hobbs over a period of weeks in an attempt to break her spirit. Her memoir says Robert Burwell also beat her, and that she was eighteen at the time.

People: Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly · Robert Armistead Burwell · William James Bingham · Margaret Anna Burwell

St. Matthew's pays off the debt on its church

Rector William Mercer Green reported in 1836 that St. Matthew's was free of the debt it had carried since the building went up, helped by weekly Lord's Day offerings, and that the parish was raising money for an organ.

People: William Mercer Green

Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church

Trustees ask Elisha Mitchell and William McPheeters to compare the university with leading colleges

The board named Professor Elisha Mitchell and the Rev. Dr. William McPheeters to study the courses of the leading American colleges and report what the university should change to match them. They found little difference in the terms of admission, and no change was made.

People: Elisha Mitchell

William Kirkland dies, leaving Ayr Mount to his widow

William Kirkland died in 1836 and left his estate to his wife, Margaret Scott Kirkland; their son John Umstead Kirkland later acquired Ayr Mount from her estate. The inventory taken after his death lists twenty enslaved people, some of whom worked at his store, tannery and other businesses in Hillsborough.

People: John U. Kirkland

Subject: Ayr Mount

David L. Swain moves to Chapel Hill as university president

Chosen to succeed the late Joseph Caldwell, former governor David L. Swain moved to Chapel Hill in January 1836 to become president and professor of national and constitutional law. He stayed at the university for the rest of his life, the longest term of any of its presidents.

People: Joseph Caldwell

Hillsborough Presbyterian Church buys the house as its manse

The church's trustees bought lots 152 and 153 in January 1836, renovated the house, and gave it to their minister, Robert Armistead Burwell, and his family, who had arrived from Virginia late the year before.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 116 events

People: Robert Armistead Burwell

Subject: Hillsborough Presbyterian Church · Burwell School

Henry Harris, held as a suspected runaway, is charged with burning the Orange County jail

At the spring term of Superior Court the case against Henry Harris, a man of color charged with setting fire to the county jail, was moved to Caswell County for trial. He had been jailed as a runaway because he could not prove his freedom, and he escaped soon after.

Subject: Orange County jail, Hillsborough

James Phillips begins nearly thirty years as stated supply at New Hope

The university professor began preaching at New Hope in August 1836 and served it until December 1865, longer than any other minister. Because Chapel Hill long had no Presbyterian church, New Hope heard him almost every Sunday for years.

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

Alexander Gattis Sr. and Thomas King deed land to the Orange Methodist Church trustees

Each man deeded two acres to the trustees of Orange Church, giving the congregation its own ground. Gattis was himself a ruling elder of New Hope Presbyterian Church.

A trustee committee under William Gaston makes the faculty's liquor rule a university by-law

In 1837 the faculty made it a dismissable offence to bring liquor into the college buildings or to be publicly drunk. A trustee committee chaired by William Gaston recommended that the rule become a by-law of the university.

Alexander McKenzie Kirkland subjects Elizabeth Hobbs to about four years of sexual coercion

Alexander McKenzie Kirkland, a white man from a prominent Hillsborough merchant-planter family, repeatedly sexually assaulted Elizabeth Hobbs over about four years. In her memoir she did not name him and wrote that a white man pursued her for four years.

People: Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly

Alfred Moore the younger dies and leaves Moorefields to Francis Nash Waddell

On the death of Alfred Moore the younger, Moorefields passed to his son-in-law, Francis Nash Waddell.

Subject: Moorefields

Dr. Edmund Strudwick buys Archibald Haralson's house on West Queen Street and enlarges it

Dr. Edmund Strudwick bought the house from Archibald Haralson in 1837, enlarged it, and is thought to have built the brick kitchen that still stands in the rear yard. The house became known as the Haralson-Strudwick House.

Subject: Haralson-Strudwick House and brick kitchen

Dr. James Webb builds a house around Polly Burke's log schoolhouse

About twenty years after the one-room log schoolhouse went up on his East Queen Street land, Dr. James Webb built a house around it, with the log room as its living room.

Edwin Michael Holt builds a cotton mill on Alamance Creek, then in Orange County

During the panic of 1837 Holt opened a cotton mill on Alamance Creek, run as Holt and Carrigan and starting with 528 spindles. The book calls it the first cotton mill in the county, in country that became Alamance in 1849.

Enslaved plasterers, masons and laborers work on South Building's new roof

Thomas Waitt's bill for 1837 work on South Building, including its tin roof, lists wages for enslaved plasterers and masons Stewart, Chester, Peter, Calvin and Evans and laborers including Lewis, Tom, Redin, Abraham and Jordan.

People: Thomas Waitt

Subject: South Building

George Moses Horton's The Hope of Liberty is reprinted in Philadelphia and Boston

The 1829 collection by the enslaved Chapel Hill poet came out in a second edition in Philadelphia in 1837 and a third in Boston in 1838.

Gerrard Hall is finished and holds its first commencement

Gerrard Hall, the new chapel begun more than a decade earlier, was completed in 1837 under carpenter Thomas Waitt, and that year's commencement was held in it. The Raleigh Register described a roomy building with large galleries, and the old chapel, Person Hall, was soon given over to classrooms.

People: Thomas Waitt

Subject: Gerrard Hall · Person Hall

Isaac C. Partridge leaves Chapel Hill and his struggling University Hotel

Partridge, whose newspaper The Harbinger had already failed, ran off to New York and left the hotel, still unpaid for, in the hands of Elisha Mitchell.

People: Elisha Mitchell

John Berry completes a stone jail at Hillsborough

Building commissioners named in 1836 planned a two-story prison forty-five by twenty-four feet at a cost of no more than $4,000, and Berry won the contract.

Subject: Orange County jail, Hillsborough

Paul C. Cameron moves to Fairntosh to manage the Cameron plantations

Paul C. Cameron gave up the bar and moved with his wife, Anne Ruffin Cameron, from Burnside in Hillsborough to Fairntosh to manage the Cameron plantations with his uncle Thomas D. Bennehan. They lived there until 1856.

The Cane Creek Farmers and Mechanics Company starts a cotton mill

In 1837 the Cane Creek Farmers and Mechanics Company of Orange and Chatham Counties set up a cotton mill in southern Orange County, giving local farmers a place to have their raw cotton spun for sale.

Trustees put the endowment into Bank of the State stock

After paying pressing debts the trustees bought 100 state certificates of $1,000 each and in 1837 exchanged them for 1,000 shares of the Bank of the State of North Carolina. The dividends, about eight percent, with tuition made up the university's income until the Civil War.

Trustees raise a sandstone monument to Caldwell on the campus

The trustees adopted a design by Thomas Waitt, the master mechanic in charge of university repairs, for a shaft of local sandstone cut by J. B. Turney. It soon crumbled, and the marble slab meant for its Latin inscription arrived so badly cut that it was smashed, so the monument never bore a name.

People: Frederick Nash · William McPheeters · Thomas Waitt

Orange County citizens gather at Mount Willing each January to celebrate Jackson's New Orleans victory

Citizens met at the Mount Willing crossroads in western Orange County on January 7, 1837, to mark Andrew Jackson's 1815 victory at New Orleans with toasts, cheers and gunfire. The Recorder called the gathering an annual custom by 1842, when about 200 attended, and reported it again in 1844 with a procession from the crossroads.

Polly Burke's Queen Street house passes to Dennis Heartt's family

Mary W. Burke, daughter of Governor Thomas Burke, moved to Alabama in 1837. On May 4 of that year James Webb, acting as her attorney, sold her East Queen Street house for $750 to Caroline and Henrietta Heartt, daughters of the Hillsborough Recorder editor Dennis Heartt. The whole Heartt family lived there, the house came to be known as Heartsease, and the Heartts added the two-story west wing soon after the purchase.

People: James Webb · Dennis Heartt

Subject: Hillsborough Recorder · Heartsease

Anna Burwell opens a school for girls in Hillsborough

Anna Burwell advertised that she would open a female school in Hillsborough on July 17, 1837, teaching the usual English branches, with music available. She and her husband, the Rev. Robert Burwell, ran it in their home until 1857.

People: Robert Armistead Burwell · Margaret Anna Burwell

Subject: Burwell School

Manuel Fetter is elected professor of ancient languages

The trustees chose Manuel Fetter of New York to succeed William Hooper as professor of ancient languages. President Swain had first favored Henry Tutwiler of Alabama, but when Tutwiler withdrew he named Fetter over William E. Anderson of Hillsborough.

People: David L. Swain

Mount Pleasant Academy, later Junto Academy, operates under Daniel W. Kerr

Daniel W. Kerr ran an academy in northern Orange County, advertised as Mount Pleasant Academy in 1837 and by 1838 as Junto Academy, twelve miles northwest of Hillsborough and six miles south of Mason Hall.

Caldwell's abandoned observatory is burned

The observatory, stripped of its instruments and judged not worth repairing, was set on fire, by a student according to tradition. President Swain reported it to the executive committee in December 1838 and asked whether to bring a criminal prosecution; the sound bricks went into a kitchen for Swain.

People: David L. Swain

Charles Manly gives the address before the alumni at commencement

At the 1838 commencement in Chapel Hill, Charles Manly, secretary and treasurer of the university's trustees, gave the address before the alumni, an earnest plea for pride in the university. Congressman William B. Shepard gave the annual address.

Elisha Mitchell builds stone walls around the campus

To keep out the cattle that ran at large, Mitchell, who had charge of the grounds, began in 1838 to quarry stone on university land and build rock walls around the campus buildings. By about the end of 1843 he had put up 212 rods of wall, and the trustees settled his account in 1844. Professors and villagers copied the walls around their own lots.

Henry H. Prout becomes minister at St. Matthew's

Henry H. Prout took charge at St. Matthew's after William Mercer Green left for Chapel Hill. The parish's unbroken run of vestry records begins the same year.

Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church

Isaiah Spencer builds the Hillsborough inn later called the Colonial Inn

Isaiah Spencer built the two-story inn on West King Street in 1838. Known locally as Spencer's Tavern and advertised as the Orange Hotel, a name it kept for fifty years, it was later the Occoneechee Hotel, the Corbinton Inn and, from 1946, the Colonial Inn. Local lore and a 1953 plate caption put it in the eighteenth century.

Subject: Colonial Inn

James P. Clark opens Fairfield School northwest of Hillsborough

In 1838 James P. Clark gave public notice of Fairfield School, which lay six miles northwest of Hillsborough.

Matthew McCauley Jr. sells Elisha Mitchell a lot on West Franklin Street

Professor Elisha Mitchell bought a West Franklin Street lot from Matthew McCauley in 1838 and sold it in 1847 to Patterson H. McDade.

People: Elisha Mitchell · Patterson H. McDade

Senior tutor becomes the university's librarian

Until 1838 the faculty chose a librarian every half year; after that the senior tutor held the office, and in 1838 Tutor William H. Owen, librarian since 1836, was voted a salary of $100 a year. Owen had counted about 1,900 books in the library in December 1836.

Subject: South Building · UNC Libraries

Students' Ugly Club raids the campus at night

On the first Saturday night of the 1838 session a group calling itself the Ugly Club rang the college bell and made a din with horns and tin pans; nineteen were caught and made to sign pledges. That summer members blacked with lampblack insulted villagers, threatened faculty and damaged private property, and their leader was dismissed.

The St. Matthew's vestry grants William Mercer Green's request to be buried in its churchyard

On resigning as first rector to move to Chapel Hill, William Mercer Green formally asked the vestry that he be buried in St. Matthew's churchyard when he died, and the vestry recorded a resolution granting it.

Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church

Thomas W. Holden opens Holden's English School

In 1838 Thomas W. Holden gave public notice of Holden's English School, kept at his home in Orange County.

William Mercer Green leaves St. Matthew's to become university chaplain and professor

William Mercer Green accepted a post at the University of North Carolina as chaplain and professor and gave up St. Matthew's in Hillsborough the same year. The Hillsborough congregation had grown from seventeen communicants in his first year to sixty-seven when he left.

Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church

Elizabeth Hobbs writes to her mother from Hillsborough

Elizabeth Hobbs wrote to her mother Agnes Hobbs in Virginia asking for news of home and saying she did not expect to see her family again. She wrote that Anna Burwell planned to go to Petersburg without her and that she had been told she would belong to Elizabeth Burwell once that daughter married. She also wrote that she had been a bridesmaid at Ann Nash's wedding a week before Christmas 1837.

Part of The Burwell School and the Burwell household · 37 events

People: Margaret Anna Burwell

Frances Armistead Burwell is born to Robert and Anna Burwell of Hillsborough

Frances Armistead Burwell, called Fanny, was the fourth of the twelve children of Robert and Margaret Anna Burwell.

People: Robert Armistead Burwell · Margaret Anna Burwell

Matthew McCauley Jr. deeds five enslaved people to his mother, Martha McCauley

By a deed of May 26, 1838, Matthew McCauley conveyed to Martha McCauley a man named Abram, a woman named Patsey, a girl named Sarah, a boy named Ben and an infant boy named Isaac, with a sorrel horse and a bay mare.

Paul Cameron sells Burnside to Cadwallader Jones Jr.

Paul Cameron sold Burnside, his three-year-old Hillsborough house, to Cadwallader Jones Jr. for $2,000. Jones sold it back to Cameron in the 1850s when he ran into money trouble.

People: Cadwallader Jones

Subject: Burnside

Navy captain Jesse D. Elliott gives Greek and Egyptian antiquities to the university

Writing from the USS Constitution at Norfolk, Elliott presented a piece of a column from Marathon and the top of a sarcophagus from Memphis, collected on his Mediterranean cruise, sent by the hand of Sailing Master William P. Muse.

Trustees split ancient languages into separate chairs of Greek and Latin

In August 1838 the professorship of ancient languages was abolished and separate chairs of Greek and Latin created, with Manuel Fetter in Greek and John DeBerniere Hooper in Latin, while modern languages became a chair of French taught by Charles Marey. The faculty were also told to introduce civil engineering, which was not done.

People: John DeBerniere Hooper · Manuel Fetter

The Hillsborough Recorder argues against dividing Orange County

The paper held that a large county was harder for any family, town or company to control and would keep the tax rate low.

Subject: Hillsborough Recorder

Commissioners seek bids to repair the Eno bridge at Hillsborough

John U. Kirkland was one of five commissioners, with Cadwallader Jones, Edmund Strudwick, Josiah Turner and Catlett Campbell, who advertised for proposals to repair the bridge over the Eno at Hillsborough, with bids due in November.

People: Edmund Strudwick · Cadwallader Jones · Josiah Turner Jr.

Subject: Eno River road bridge, Hillsborough

Lemuel Lynch signs a Hillsborough town deed as a commissioner

Lynch is among the Hillsborough town commissioners whose names appear on the town's deeds in the county register's records, first on November 3, 1838, before the town had a mayor.

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.

People: Charles Manly

Subject: Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies

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.

People: Alexander Dickson

Subject: Alexander Dickson House (Johnston’s headquarters)

David Parker and William Nelson keep a general store in Hillsborough

The partners David Parker and William Nelson ran a general merchandise business in Hillsborough. Their daybooks and ledgers for 1839 to 1853 survive at UNC's Southern Historical Collection.

People: David Parker

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.

People: John Berry

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.

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.

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.

People: James Strudwick Smith · Cadwallader Jones · Hugh Waddell · William Mercer Green

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.

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.

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.

Subject: Gerrard Hall

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.

Subject: Gerrard Hall

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.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 116 events

Subject: Burwell School

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.

Subject: St. Mary's School

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.

Subject: Blackwood Farm

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.

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.

Subject: Heartsease

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.

People: David L. Swain

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.

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.

People: James Phillips · David L. Swain · Elisha Mitchell

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.

People: Henry Evans

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough · St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church

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.

People: James Webb · James Strudwick Smith

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, and bought the Yancey house the same year. In the 1840s (from about 1843) the Methodists, who had first met in Miles Davis's house, used the store's upstairs room, a former Masonic hall that Charles Deems named Bethesda.

People: Jesse Hargrave

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: David Paton

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: Paul C. Cameron

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.

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.

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

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.

People: Johnston Blakeley Jones

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.

People: George Kirkland · Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly

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.

People: Hugh Waddell · John Berry

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.

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.

Subject: Walnut Grove Methodist Church

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.

Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church

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.

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.

People: Elisha Mitchell

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.

People: William Mercer Green

Subject: Chapel of the Cross

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.

People: David L. Swain

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.

People: Jesse Hargrave

Subject: University United Methodist Church

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.

People: George Kirkland · Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly

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.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery · Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies

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.

People: David L. Swain

Subject: Gerrard Hall

Hawfields walls off part of its church for Black worshippers

Black members, most of them enslaved, already sat in the end gallery of the frame church. In 1842 part of the west end was partitioned for them as well, and the book says the gallery and that section were often full.

Subject: Hawfields Presbyterian Church

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.

People: Frederick Nash · Cadwallader Jones · Robert Armistead Burwell · James Strudwick Smith · Walter A. Norwood

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.

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.

Subject: Gerrard Hall

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.

Subject: Person Hall · Gerrard Hall

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.

People: John W. Graham

Subject: Montrose

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.

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.

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

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.

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.

Subject: Chapel of the Cross

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.

People: William Norwood · Jesse Ruffin

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.

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.

People: John U. Kirkland · William Mercer Green

Subject: Montrose

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.

People: Charles Lewis Hinton

Subject: Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies

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.

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.

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.

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.

People enslaved by William Mercer Green work on the Church of the Atonement

Green contributed to the building through the labor of several people he enslaved and a pair of his mules. He also meant to give a kiln of bricks made on his land, but had the fires put out at midnight on a Saturday to keep the Sabbath, and the half-fired bricks, worth about $250, were lost.

Subject: Chapel of the Cross

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.

People: Dabney Cosby

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.

Subject: Chapel of the Cross

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.

People: Kemp Plummer Battle

Subject: Senlac (Battle house)

Matthew McCauley Jr.'s assignee in bankruptcy sells his land and six enslaved people to John W. Carr

After McCauley was declared bankrupt in October 1842, his assignee conveyed to John W. Carr 450 acres in the possession of his mother, Martha McCauley, next to Ilai W. Nunn; 160 acres next to W. H. Merritt; and six enslaved people, Abram, Patsey, Ben, Sarah, Isaac and Charity.

People: John Wesley Carr

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.

People: William A. Graham · Charles Phillips · William Horn Battle · Charles Manly

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.

People: John Wall Norwood

Anderson G. Hughes, born near Eno, is installed pastor of Hawfields and Cross Roads

Orange Presbytery allowed the two churches to take Hughes as stated supply in May 1843 and installed him that October. His thirty-year pastorate, the longest in Hawfields history, ended when he collapsed in the Cross Roads pulpit in June 1873.

Subject: Hawfields Presbyterian Church

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.

People: Robert Donaldson Jr.

Subject: Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies

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.

People: Alexander Jackson Davis · Robert Donaldson Jr.

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.

People: Charles Manly

Subject: Chapel of the Cross

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.

Subject: University Presbyterian Church · University United Methodist Church

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.

People: John Berry · David L. Swain · Alexander Jackson Davis · Isaac J. Collier · Kendall B. Waitt

Subject: Old East · Old West

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.

People: Elias Dodson

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.

People: William Gaston

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.

Harriet, enslaved by the Smith family in Hillsborough, gives birth to Cornelia after Sidney Smith rapes her

Harriet, bought by James Strudwick Smith in 1834 as a maid for his daughter Mary Ruffin Smith, was raped by his son Sidney and gave birth to Cornelia in 1844, while the family's home was in Hillsborough. Cornelia's granddaughter Pauli Murray told the story in Proud Shoes.

People: James Strudwick Smith · Mary Ruffin Smith · Pauli Murray · Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald

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.

Subject: Chapel of the Cross

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.

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.

People: Manuel Fetter

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.

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.

Part of Slavery in Orange County · 108 events

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.

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.

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.

People: Andrew Mickle

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.

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.

Subject: Steward’s Hall

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.

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.

People: David L. Swain · John Motley Morehead

Subject: Smith Hall (Playmakers Theatre)

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.

People: Cadwallader Jones · James Webb

Subject: Orange County poorhouse (County Home)

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.

People: David L. Swain · James Phillips

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.

People: James Strudwick Smith · William Mercer Green

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough · Eagle Lodge

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.

People: William James Bingham

Subject: Hillsborough Academy · Bingham School

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.

People: Alexander Jackson Davis · Dabney Cosby · Charles Manly · Kendall B. Waitt

Subject: Old East · Old West

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.

People: Edmund Strudwick · Frances (Pollock) Devereux

Subject: Burwell School · Nash and Kollock School

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.

People: Albert · Osborne · Dabney Cosby · Alexander Jackson Davis

Subject: Old East · Old West

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.

People: George Moses Horton

Subject: Hillsborough Recorder

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.

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.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 116 events

Subject: Hillsborough Academy · Caldwell Institute

James Strudwick Smith sells Harriet, Julius and Cornelia to Mary Ruffin Smith

Shielding his property from creditors, James Strudwick Smith passed most of the family's holdings to his daughter Mary Ruffin Smith, including Harriet and her children Julius and Cornelia, whom he sold to her in 1845. Cornelia had been born in 1844 after Sidney Smith raped Harriet.

People: James Strudwick Smith · Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald

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.

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.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 116 events

Subject: Burwell School

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.

People: David L. Swain

Subject: UNC School of Law

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.

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.

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.

People: Elias Dodson

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough · Dickerson Chapel AME Church

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.

The Smiths leave Hillsborough for Price Creek Plantation near Chapel Hill

After Cornelia's birth the Smiths sold their Hillsborough house and moved to the more remote Price Creek Plantation, about 1,500 acres southwest of Chapel Hill, where building of the main house, Oakland, began in 1845. Harriet and her children moved with them.

People: James Strudwick Smith

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.

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.

Subject: UNC School of Law

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.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 116 events

Subject: Bingham School · Hughes Academy (Cedar Grove Academy)

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.

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.

People: Lemuel Lynch

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.

People: Dabney Cosby

Subject: Old East · Old West

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.

Part of Slavery in Orange County · 108 events

People: David L. Swain

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.

People: William Gaston

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

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.

People: Alexander Wilson

Subject: Hillsborough Academy · Caldwell Institute

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.