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Colonial and Regulator years · 1600–1774
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Indigenous communities occupy the Eno River Valley
Excavations at the Hogue and Wall sites on the Eno near Hillsborough show farming communities growing corn, beans and squash, first in small scattered settlements (Haw River phase, about 1000–1400) and then in compact palisaded villages (Hillsboro phase, about 1400–1600). The Wall site village held perhaps 100 to 150 people in the mid-1400s.
- 1670s
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John Lederer visits the Eno people near present Hillsborough
The German physician described an Eno town on the Eno River laid out around a playing field, with large grain harvests and a government guided by its elders. About fourteen miles away he also met the Shakori, placed by the book on the Haw River near the Haw Fields.
- 1680s
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Occaneechi Town and the Great Trading Path
Occaneechi Town on the Eno, occupied from about 1680 to 1710, was where John Lawson stopped in 1701 on the trading path that ran from Virginia to the Catawba. Archaeologists located the village at the Fredricks site in 1983, and the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, recognized by the state in 2002, rebuilt a replica village there and dedicated a highway marker in 2024.
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The Occaneechi settle on the Eno near Hillsborough
After leaving the Roanoke River valley in 1676, the Occaneechi built a town on the Eno River near present-day Hillsborough and lived there from about 1680 to 1710. It was a small stockaded village of ten or twelve houses and probably fewer than 75 people, and it was the town John Lawson visited in 1701. Archaeologists dug the whole village between 1983 and 1986 at a place they named the Fredricks site, and they call this period of Occaneechi life on the Eno the Fredricks phase.
- 1700s
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Enoe Will agrees at Occaneechi Town to guide John Lawson to the English settlements
Within two hours of John Lawson's arrival at Occaneechi Town on the Eno, Enoe Will came into the king's cabin and agreed to guide Lawson's party to the English, leaving his pay to their discretion. The next morning they set out for Adshusheer, his town about 14 miles east, which Lawson described as Shoccories mixed with Eno and Adshusheer people with Will as their chief man.
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John Lawson reached Occaneechi Town on the Eno and wrote about its people and the trading path
John Lawson visited Occaneechi Town on the Eno.
- 1710s
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Occaneechi Town on the Eno is largely abandoned
By 1713, when the Occaneechi signed a peace treaty with Virginia at Williamsburg, their town on the Eno near present-day Hillsborough was almost empty. They moved north to Fort Christanna in Virginia, and some Saponi families later resettled in North Carolina.
- 1720s
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Herman Husband, the Regulators’ pamphleteer, was born
Herman Husband was born in Cecil County, Maryland, to an Anglican family and later became a Quaker. He settled at Sandy Creek, then in Orange County and now in Randolph County, where he reprinted and circulated political pamphlets and became a leading voice of the protest against county officers.
- 1730s
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Virginia pays an interpreter to the Saponi and Occaneechi Indians
Charles Kimball petitioned the Virginia House of Burgesses for his allowance as interpreter to the Saponi and Occaneechi Indians. The petition shows the Occaneechi still named separately seventeen years after they left the Eno, and enough people speaking only their own language for an interpreter to be worth paying.
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The Saponi scatter between Virginia and the Catawba and a group settles in Granville County
After living briefly with the Catawba the Saponi returned to Virginia in 1733 and had to petition Lieutenant Governor Gooch for leave to resettle. Over the next twenty years they broke into small groups and moved south to the Catawba and back again, and by 1754 about twelve or fourteen Sapona men with as many women and children were living on Colonel William Eaton's land in Granville County, North Carolina.
- 1740s
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A log house, later the Weaver House, is built beside the Hillsborough wagon road
A story-and-a-jump house of hewn logs, one room on each floor, went up a few yards from the wagon road to Hillsborough, whose roadbed could still be traced in 1983. Tradition says it was first a tavern; it is the oldest building standing in Carrboro.
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Gilbert Strayhorn comes to the Hawfields from Pennsylvania
Gilbert Strayhorn, a Pennsylvania-born tailor of Scottish parentage, came to the Hawfields at about 25, went back north to marry Margaret Roan, and returned to a place about a mile south of the later Mebaneville. After two years there he moved into the New Hope bounds, where he became one of the church's founders.
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Settlers from Pennsylvania and Virginia come down the Great Wagon Road into the Haw and Eno country
From the 1740s families moving south from Pennsylvania, Maryland and western Virginia along the Great Wagon Road took up land in the Piedmont backcountry that became Orange County in 1752. Quaker families reached the Cane Creek country by this route, and German and Scotch-Irish families entered the colony the same way.
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Craig, Blackwood and Kirkland families come down from Pennsylvania to the Hawfields
A party of related Scotch-Irish families, among them William Craige, William Blackwood and Joseph Kirkland and probably the Freelands, left Pennsylvania in midwinter, driving their teams over frozen Virginia rivers, and settled in the Hawfields, where they stayed until about 1750. Craig says they left Pennsylvania because of hostile Indians and would not stop in Virginia because of its established church.
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William Hooper, signer of the Declaration and a Hillsborough resident, was born
William Hooper was born in Boston; he later lived in Hillsborough.
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Shearley Whatley buys 200 acres from the Earl Granville
Whatley paid thirty pounds for the grant, the first known private ownership of the land where the farmhouse later called Webb's Happy Acres stands. The grant document passed down through the family owners.
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Land grants on New Hope Creek are recorded in Bladen County
Bladen County records show grants on New Hope Creek, in what became eastern Orange, as early as 1745, seven years before Orange County existed.
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Mark Morgan is granted land in the New Hope Creek section
Morgan secured land in the New Hope Creek section of eastern Orange. By 1755 he held more enslaved people than anyone else in the county.
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The Granville District land office grants the land that became Orange County
The country on the Eno, Haw and Little River lay inside Earl Granville's one eighth share of Carolina, set off in 1742 and run from Edenton through agents including Francis Corbin and Thomas Child. Grants of unclaimed land were made from 1748 until Granville's death in 1763, and William Churton was the surveyor who mapped much of the district.
- 1750s
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Hawfields families move to New Hope Creek over doubts about their Granville titles
When word spread through the Hawfields that the land titles got through Earl Granville's agents were not genuine, William Craige, Gilbert Strayhorn and other families left and took up land on the waters of New Hope. Family tradition held that the settlers named the stream for the 'new hopes' they found there.
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Orange County tax lists record Bunch, Gibson and Collins families as mulatto
Several Orange County tax lists of the 1750s class families named Bunch, Gibson and Collins as mulatto, and Jeremiah and Henry Bunch took land grants near the Eno. The term then covered many people of mixed descent, and Hazel argues some of these families may have been Indian people who never left the region.
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The Great Trading Path across the Eno becomes the settlers' wagon road
The Indian route that Virginia traders had used since the 1670s crossed the Flat and Little rivers, forded the Eno at the place where the county town was laid out, and crossed the Haw near Swepsonville. After colonists reached the Piedmont in the mid eighteenth century the path was widened into a wagon road, and it is drawn on the colonial maps of Moseley, Collet and Mouzon.
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Synnott's Mill is at work on the Eno River
A water mill known as Synnott's Mill was already running on the Eno before Orange County was formed. It is the earliest Eno mill Mattson names.
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Quakers set up Cane Creek Monthly Meeting in the country that became Orange County
About thirty Quaker families from Pennsylvania had settled near Cane Creek by 1751. Abigail Pike and Rachel Wright traveled 200 miles to the Perquimans County quarterly meeting for authority to organize, and the first monthly meeting was held on October 7, 1751. It is the oldest Quaker meeting in the North Carolina Piedmont.
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Alexander Mebane, the first sheriff, returns 1,113 taxables
As Orange County's first sheriff, Mebane returned 1,113 tithables for 1752 and 1753. The book reckons this at about 4,000 people when the county was formed.
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Creation of Orange County and Hillsborough
The General Assembly created Orange County in 1752 from parts of Granville, Johnston and Bladen counties. William Churton laid out its county seat in 1754 where trading paths crossed the Eno. The town was called Orange, then Corbin Town, then Childsburgh from 1759, and took the name Hillsborough in 1766.
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John Patterson is named one of the first vestrymen of St. Matthew's Parish
The act of the 1752 Assembly that created Orange County and the Parish of St. Matthew named John Patterson among the twelve vestrymen who were to serve until the first vestry election.
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Ludwig Clapp's 640-acre grant on the Alamance is recorded
Clapp was one of the German Lutheran pioneers who took up land west of the Haw River, in country that is now Alamance County.
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Marmaduke Kimbrough enters 640 acres on Pole Cat Creek
Kimbrough, who took the contract for the county's first courthouse, entered a 640-acre tract on Pole Cat Creek.
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Orange County begins with fifty taxable enslaved people
When the county was organized its tax lists showed fifty enslaved Black taxables, thirty-five men and fifteen women, a small number for a county of small farms.
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Orange County is created
The colonial assembly formed Orange County from portions of Bladen, Granville, and Johnston counties. Its original boundaries were far larger than those of present-day Orange County.
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The act creating Orange County names James Watson a boundary commissioner and vestryman
The 1752 act that created Orange County named James Watson one of three commissioners to run the dividing line between Orange and Granville, Johnston and Bladen counties, and one of the twelve first vestrymen of St. Matthew's Parish. Another act of the same session made him the county's receiver of the impost duty.
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William Blackwood's grant on Buffalo Creek is entered
Blackwood's Buffalo Creek tract was entered at the land grant office. Blackwoods were among the families who also settled the New Hope section of eastern Orange.
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St. Matthew’s Parish is established
The act of the spring 1752 General Assembly session that created Orange County also made it the Anglican Parish of St. Matthew, with its own vestry. The parish's first church stood in Hillsborough by about 1768, but today's St. Matthew's Episcopal Church descends from a congregation reorganized in 1824.
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The Orange County court holds its first session at John Gray's house
Eight justices of the peace held the county's first Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions at John Gray's house near the Eno River, with Alexander Mebane as sheriff and Richard Caswell as clerk. They named fifteen road commissioners and several constables and laid a poll tax of one shilling on each tithable.
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The county court contracts for a courthouse and prison near Piney Ford
The justices chose a site north of the Haw River within two miles of Piney Ford and gave Marmaduke Kimbrough the contract for a frame courthouse and a log prison. They met at the site in December, but the buildings were probably never finished.
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William Churton presents his commission as public register
At the December court, Lord Granville's surveyor William Churton showed the governor's commission naming him the county's public register, the office later called register of deeds. He went on to lay out the county seat.
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Mark Morgan sits in the General Assembly for Orange County
Mark Morgan, a justice of the peace and militia officer who had settled on Morgan Creek near present Chapel Hill, was a member of the colonial General Assembly for Orange County for the 1753-54 session.
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Presbyterians found Grier's Church at High Towers
Grier's Presbyterian Church at High Towers, in the part of Orange that later became Caswell County, was the first Presbyterian church in the new county.
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Richard Caswell serves as the first clerk of the Orange County court
Caswell, a deputy clerk in Johnston County, became the first clerk of the court of the newly formed Orange County. He held the post only briefly and resigned on being appointed high sheriff of Johnston.
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The Earl Granville grants 371 acres on the Eno to John Tinnin and James Taylor
The land that became the Faucette farm, lying on both sides of the Eno, began as a 371-acre Granville grant to John Tinnin and James Taylor.
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The creation of Rowan County gives Orange a western boundary
Orange had no fixed western line until Rowan was formed. The new county also left the planned courthouse site at Piney Ford only fifteen miles from Orange's western edge.
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Justices recommend John Gray for sheriff
With Alexander Mebane's term running out, the court sent the governor three names, with 10 votes for John Gray, 8 for Lawrence Thompson and 6 for James Dickey. Gray, the justices' favorite, was appointed.
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Alexander McCulloch gives up his commission in the Orange County militia
The 1754 return of the colony's militia records that McCulloch gave up his commission for Orange and recommended Sheriff John Gray as colonel. NCpedia says he resigned because he lived too far from the county.
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Cane Creek Quakers found the Eno Friends Meeting
Quakers from the Cane Creek meeting set up a meeting in the Eno River valley, the one Friends meeting Mattson places inside present Orange County.
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Clerk Richard Caswell reports the county's tithables
Caswell's return for 1754 counted 950 white taxable polls and 50 Black ones, 35 men and 15 women. At a shilling a poll, the county's share of the provincial tax came to no more than 50 pounds.
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Daniel Weldon settles as the county town's first lawyer
Daniel Weldon was the first lawyer to live in the new town. He came about 1754, stayed some six years and then drops out of the public records.
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Gilbert Strean takes the surname Strayhorn
About the time he got the deeds for his New Hope lands, Gilbert Strean, or Streaughan, changed his name to Strayhorn, saying he had put a 'horn' to it to make it sound. His nephews Alexander, John and James, who came south later to find him, kept the name Strain.
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Hillsborough is laid out
William Churton laid out a town and common on a 400-acre tract on the north side of the Eno that was granted to him in 1754, where the trading path crossed the river. Known as Corbinton by 1755, it was incorporated as Childsburg by an act of the 1759–60 session and renamed Hillsborough in 1766.
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The Assembly moves the county seat to the Eno crossing of the Western path
Judging the Piney Ford site too far west, the Assembly directed that the courthouse, prison and stocks stand where the Western path crossed the Eno, on land where James Watson lived. The site, just east of the present courthouse, was the start of Hillsborough.
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The Orange County court moves to the new town on the Eno
Nash dates the county court's first sitting at the new county town to 1754, the year Churton laid off the town.
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The burying ground beside the town church lot is laid out
The cemetery next to the site of the present Presbyterian church, later called the Old Town Cemetery, was laid out in 1754, the year the town itself was laid off.
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The county court names trustees for Corbin Town
James Watson, Josiah Dixon and Lawrence Thompson became commissioners and trustees of the county seat, then called Corbin Town after Francis Corbin, Earl Granville's land agent.
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The house later called William Reed's Ordinary is built on East King Street
The two-story main block of the house at 157 East King Street, on the lot first owned by town official and tavern keeper William Reed, was probably built around 1754, and early owners kept a tavern in its basement rooms. A one-story west wing was added around 1830.
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The county court sets the price of county-made beer in the ordinaries
The justices ordered that beer brewed in the county sell for four pence a quart in Orange County's ordinaries until further notice. Fixing tavern prices was one of the court's regular powers.
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Former governor George Burrington pledges 30,000 acres of the Haw Old Fields to Samuel Strudwick
To secure a debt then grown to about 2,000 pounds, Burrington conveyed 40,000 acres to Strudwick by lease and release with a mortgage clause, 30,000 of them in the Haw Old Fields. General John Guise, who acquired Burrington's right of redemption, passed it to Strudwick on September 28, 1761.
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William Craig and Richard Caswell take up land in the New Hope area
William Craig took Granville grants on New Hope Creek on September 6, 1754 (475 acres on Batts Creek) and March 13, 1755 (280 acres on Richland Fork), in the section of eastern Orange where Scotch-Irish families were settling. Richard Caswell held 640 acres at the forks of New Hope Creek by June 1756, when he sold them to William Blackwood.
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Town treasurer John Patterson is told to hold back ten shillings a lot for public use
The county court directed Patterson to keep ten shillings sterling from the price of each Corbin Town lot for public purposes.
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A law orders a road from Orange courthouse to the Cape Fear
The act was not carried out at once, and in the meantime farmers cut their own rough roads across the county.
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Alexander Mebane, Josiah Dixon and William Churton lay out Hillsborough's first prison
Lot No. 1 in the town was set aside for the market house, courthouse, prison, pillory and stocks.
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Cedar Grove and rural northern Orange
The crossroads communities north of Hillsborough grew around Eno Presbyterian, organized in 1755, the Hughes Academy of 1845, the Pope farm of the 1870s and Ellis Store of 1923, with nearly half the county’s Black-owned farms in Cedar Grove Township by 1940. The Schley Grange brought telephones in 1948, the schools were consolidated and desegregated in the 1960s, and the branch library came and went between 2004 and 2010.
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Eight percent of Orange families hold people in slavery
In 1755 only 8 percent of the county's families held enslaved people, and the largest holder, Mark Morgan, held six.
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Gilbert Strayhorn's grant on Prestwood Creek is entered
Strayhorn's Prestwood Creek tract was one of many grants entered along the county's streams in its first years.
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Hugh McAden preaches to the Eno Presbyterian settlers
On August 10, 1755 the missionary Hugh McAden preached at Eno to a Presbyterian community already settled near the river, southeast of present Cedar Grove; the congregation counts its beginning from these years. The settlers asked Hanover Presbytery for supply preachers in 1756, and by church tradition the congregation was formally organized during the Synod mission of 1764.
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James Watson succeeds Richard Caswell as clerk of the Orange County court
Watson, one of the town's first residents, was the second clerk of the county court from 1755 to 1763. He was named register of the county in 1772 and was reappointed under the state government shortly before his death.
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Lawrence Thompson is appointed sheriff of Orange County
In 1755 the county court sent the governor three names for sheriff, John Patterson, Lawrence Thompson and Alexander Mebane, and Thompson received the appointment. He had run second to John Gray in the justices' vote two years before.
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Orange counts 950 white taxables but only 490 men on its militia list
The book explains the gap by the county's many Quakers, whose pacifism kept them off the muster rolls.
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Presbyterians found Hawfields Church
Hawfields Presbyterian Church was founded in the part of Orange County that is now eastern Alamance. Henry Pattillo later served as its pastor.
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Shubal Stearns gathers the first Baptist congregation in Orange County at Sandy Creek
In 1755 Shubal Stearns organized a Baptist church at Sandy Creek, then in Orange County and now in Randolph. Within a few years it counted more than six hundred people, and Baptist churches followed at Haw River, Rock Spring, Rocky River and Cane Creek.
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The first Orange County courthouse is built at Hillsborough
A frame courthouse went up at the new county seat in 1755. Until then the court had met in private homes.
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Mark Morgan fails to qualify for his captaincy at the Orange regiment's general muster
Reporting on the Orange regiment's general muster, Lieutenant Colonel Josias Dickson told Governor Arthur Dobbs that Mark Morgan had notice of his appointment as captain but did not attend to be qualified. Major Alexander Mebane listed Morgan among captains who refused to act and proposed Thomas Loyd in his place.
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Hugh McAden preaches to the Eno and Hawfields settlements
The traveling Presbyterian licentiate Hugh McAden preached to the Eno settlement on the second Sabbath of August 1755, lodging at John Anderson's house, and rode on to preach at the Hawfields on the fourth Sabbath. His journal is the earliest surviving description of either settlement.
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Herman Husband buys two town lots from William Churton
Years before he became a Regulator leader, Herman Husband bought two lots in Corbinton from William Churton and built a house on them. He lived in the town only a few months.
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Hugh Laughlin and Thomas Lindley start a grist mill on Cane Creek
In 1756 Laughlin and Lindley started grinding at a mill on Cane Creek, the first mill in that part of the county. For more than a century people called it Lindley's Mill, and afterward Sutphin Mill.
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Moravians record a visit from Indians living at a fort near the Haw River
The Moravian settlers near present Winston-Salem recorded a visit in 1756 from Indians described as Cherokees from the fort near Haw River. The Haw was then in Orange County and a long way from any known Cherokee town, and the entry places an Indian settlement in the county decades after the Piedmont was supposed to be empty of them.
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New Hope Presbyterian Church traces its beginning to
New Hope Presbyterian Church, south of Hillsborough on the road to Chapel Hill, counts 1756 as its founding year, when the Hawfields and Eno Presbyterians, with whom the New Hope families then worshiped, first asked Hanover Presbytery for preachers. Its early records burned in 1827; D. I. Craig judged it was formally organized later, most likely under Henry Pattillo after his 1765 call, and it first appears with its own minister in the 1795 Orange Presbytery minutes.
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The Assembly re-creates Orange County and St. Matthew's Parish by a new act
The 1752 act that made Orange a county and the parish of St. Matthew's appears to have been voided by royal proclamation, so the colonial Assembly passed a fresh act in 1756 setting up both again.
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Hugh McAden returns to preach at the Hawfields and on the Eno
Heading home at the end of his year-long mission, McAden stopped again at John Anderson's on the Eno, preached at the Hawfields on Tuesday, April 27, 1756, and at Eno the next day, then rode on to the Hico settlement.
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Hillsborough's first courthouse is ready for use
Until it opened, the county court met at the home of James Watson. It was the first of the four courthouses Hillsborough has had.
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James Hunter holds land on Stinking Quarter and Sandy creeks
Hunter, later a leader of the Regulators, had land on these creeks in western Orange by 1757.
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Joseph Maddock builds Hillsborough's first prison
Maddock had the log prison pinned to the ground to make it more secure.
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The sheriff is ordered to provide stocks, a pillory and a whipping post
The order for these instruments of public punishment at the county seat came the same year the first prison was built.
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Thomas Lloyd is appointed a justice of the peace
Thomas Lloyd, a settler of Welsh descent with a land grant on Mark Creek, was made a justice of the peace in 1757 and later sat in the North Carolina Assembly. He founded the large Lloyd family of southern Orange; by 1850 nineteen of his grandsons and great-grandsons lived around White Cross.
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Thomas Lloyd's grant on Mark Creek is entered
Lloyd, one of Orange County's first members in the General Assembly, led the Welsh settlers who made homes between Hillsborough and present Chatham County.
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Baptists form the Sandy Creek Association
Baptist churches in the Sandy Creek country, then part of Orange County, joined in the Sandy Creek Association. During the Regulation the association expelled members who joined the movement.
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Barnaby McCabe settles on the Eno on land bought from William Few
Barnaby McCabe (later Cabe), a Presbyterian of Scots-Irish descent, settled in Orange County in 1758, bought 330 acres of William Few's tract on the northeast bank of the Eno, registered his cattle mark and took up farming with his wife Betsy Perkins.
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Slavery in Orange County
Enslaved people worked the county’s farms, households, courts and university from the first settlements, building Old East and South Building, appearing in the 1790 tax list and the 1860 census count of more than 5,000, and passing through the courts in the Kirkland suit of 1804 and State v. Mann in 1829. Emancipation in 1865 freed about 6,000 people; the recovery of their graves and names, from Margaret Lane Cemetery to the university’s list of 119, has continued since 1987.
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The Few family settles on the Eno with four enslaved people and builds a saw and grist mill
William Few brought his family from Maryland in the fall of 1758 to 640 acres bought from James Taylor, lying on both sides of the Eno about seven miles east of the county town. Four enslaved people came with them, and Few and his brother James built a saw and grist mill on the river.
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James Craig buys back the Richland Fork tract on New Hope Creek
William Craige's Richland Fork tract, surveyed in December 1754 and deeded in September 1755, was sold to John Reaney in June 1756 and bought back from him by Craige's son James in June 1758. It was still in the family in 1891.
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Land later farmed by the Allison family near Caldwell is granted
The tract under the Joseph Allison house near Caldwell comes from a 1759 land grant, one of the few colonial grants the survey tied to a surviving farm.
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St. Mary's congregation is established
Anglicans established St. Mary's Chapel about 1759 on land given by Thomas Holden, about seven miles northeast of Hillsborough, to serve northern Orange County. The congregation joined the Episcopal convention in 1819 and built the present brick chapel, consecrated in 1859; regular services ended in the early 1930s.
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The town on the Eno is incorporated as Childsburg
The town William Churton had laid out in 1754 as Corbin Town or Corbinton was incorporated by act of assembly in 1759 as Childsburg, named for Thomas Child, the colony's attorney general. It was renamed Hillsborough in 1766.
- 1760s
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German settler David Ephland comes to Orange County
David Ephland, later spelled Efland, arrived with other German settlers in the 1760s. His descendants still lived in the railroad town that carries the family name when the county was surveyed in 1993.
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Glasgow merchants Buchanan, Hastie and Company run a store in Orange County
Scottish traders began doing business in the county in the 1760s, and this Glasgow firm kept one of its many North Carolina stores here.
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New Hope congregation builds its first meetinghouse
Settlers still attached to the Hawfields congregation built a rough first meetinghouse about five miles south of Hillsborough and a quarter mile east of the road to Chapel Hill. An octagonal log church on higher ground replaced it, which the church dates to 1775.
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William Few attends a school opened in his Eno neighborhood
A schoolteacher came to the Few family's neighborhood on the Eno in 1760 to teach local children, and William Few Jr. attended. He later recalled the school with pleasure.
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Little River Presbyterian Church is organized
Hugh McAden led the organization of Little River Presbyterian Church, with Henry Pattillo as its first pastor.
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Abner Nash settles briefly in Hillsborough and builds the town's first mill on the Eno
The Virginia lawyer Abner Nash moved to Hillsborough, then called Childsburgh, in 1762 or early 1763 with his younger brother Francis. He bought town lots, dammed the Eno River and built the town's first mill before moving to Halifax by 1764.
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Francis Nash becomes clerk of the Orange County court
Having settled at Childsburgh (Hillsborough), where he kept a store and a law practice, Francis Nash became clerk of the Orange County court in 1763. A superior court clerkship at Hillsborough was possible only after the 1767-68 act made the town a district court seat, with its first term in March 1768.
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Edmund Fanning qualifies as register of Orange County
Fanning, a lawyer who came to the county town in 1762, qualified as register in March 1763. He went on to buy several town lots and build a large house on the later site of the Masonic Lodge.
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A second jail with a stockade goes up at Hillsborough
A ten-foot stockade was built around the jail and stocks for twenty-four pounds, with Thomas Hart and Francis Nash overseeing the work.
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John Armstrong contracts with Henry McCulloh to run a mill on the Haw River
John Armstrong of Orange County and Henry McCulloh of Halifax County made a contract about the operation of a mill on the Haw River.
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The county town becomes a courthouse village of stores, ordinaries and public buildings
William Few recalled that in 1764 the town was the metropolis of the county, where the courts were held and all public business done, a village of thirty or forty inhabitants with two or three small stores and two or three ordinary taverns, and that Scottish merchants then opened stores of European goods and a church, courthouse and jail were built. Claude Joseph Sauthier's 1768 plan of the town marks Canby's Ordinary, Nunn's Ordinary, McNair's Store, the market house, the first courthouse and the second jail.
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William Few moves his family to a farm a mile from town and keeps a tavern
Few bought 200 acres near the town, later called the Kirkland place, and moved his family there from their mill farm lower down the Eno. He kept a tavern at the house while the family still ran the mill.
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Henry Pattillo becomes pastor of the Hawfields, Eno and Little River churches
Henry Pattillo moved to Orange County as pastor of the Hawfields, Eno and Little River Presbyterian churches and served them for nine years, becoming known as "Father Pattillo." He was the first regularly installed minister at Eno.
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Henry Pattillo keeps a classical school in his Orange County home
While pastor of the Hawfields, Eno and Little River churches, Pattillo began a classical school for men in his home.
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The Granville District land office is closed
The office that granted land across Orange County for the Granville proprietary stayed shut from about 1765. Governor Tryon wrote in 1770 that it had been closed for more than five years and that newcomers to Rowan and Orange, finding no land to buy, settled on vacant land, which fed their discontent.
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William Nunn serves as sheriff of Orange County
William Nunn, one of the most prominent of the first residents of Hillsborough, was sheriff of Orange County in 1765.
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A Deep River meeting drafts Regulator Advertisement Number Two
Meeting in Herman Husband's neighborhood, settlers wrote a second paper and chose William Cox and William Masset to attend the Maddock's Mill meeting on October 10. It asked the county's assemblymen, vestrymen and officers to come and answer their questions.
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Childsburgh is renamed Hillsborough
Childsburgh was renamed Hillsborough in honor of Wills Hill, Earl of Hillsborough.
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Orange County's 1766 tax return counts 3,324 white and 649 Black taxables
The return of taxables for 1766 counted 3,324 white men and 649 Black and mulatto men and women in Orange County, 3,973 taxables in all. These were people liable for the poll tax, not the whole population, and the returns do not show the Black population growing faster than the white.
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Samuel Strudwick meets the settlers on his Haw Fields land
Strudwick, who came over with Governor Tryon in 1764 to take up the Haw Fields tract, found it held by people claiming under Burrington and by squatters. Near the end of 1766 he met a large number of them, and those present agreed to recognize his title.
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The Regulator movement organizes in Orange County
Orange County farmers first organized in 1766 to question county officers about taxes and fees, a Sandy Creek effort that Herman Husband led and that lapsed in 1767. In early 1768 a new association, soon called the Regulation, pledged to pay no taxes or fees beyond what the law allowed.
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Town lot owners are required to build, and taxable men to work the streets
Building requirements enacted in 1766 gave the purchaser of a town lot two years to put up a brick, stone or frame house at least twenty feet long, sixteen feet wide and nine feet pitch in the clear, with a brick or stone chimney. A separate ordinance made all taxable males liable for street service under a penalty of two shillings eight pence for each day neglected.
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Orange County's first Regulator paper invokes the Stamp Act resistance
An Orange County notice of August 1766, later called Regulators' Advertisement No. 1, praised the Sons of Liberty for resisting the Stamp Act and asked each neighborhood to send men to a meeting at Maddock's Mill to question local officers.
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The Regulator crisis
Orange County farmers organized in 1766 against high fees, taxes and dishonest county officers, calling a meeting at Maddock's Mill that October. Protest turned violent at the Hillsborough court in September 1770 and ended with the Regulators' defeat at Alamance on May 16, 1771 and the hanging of six at Hillsborough on June 19.
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Farmers met at Maddock’s Mill to press the county’s officers to account for fees and taxes
Delegates from Orange County neighborhoods met at Maddock's Mill to ask their assemblymen and vestrymen how public money was spent. The officers refused to attend, and the meeting resolved that such conferences between voters and their representatives should be held every year.
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James Watson brings Edmund Fanning's answer to the Regulators' meeting at Maddock's Mill
When none of the county's officers came to the meeting, Watson arrived alone late in the day with word from Fanning that he considered it an insurrection. The delegates drew up Regulator Advertisement Number Three in his presence; Watson called it just and reasonable and promised to give copies to the county officials.
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Edmund Fanning tells the November court he has answered the farmers' complaints
Speaking for the county officers, Fanning rejected the protest and reported that he had written its organizers a reply he expected to end the matter.
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The Assembly fixes the Orange County court at Hillsborough for good
Twelve years after the county court first sat at the town, the colonial Assembly made that location permanent in November 1766, the same month the town took the name Hillsborough.
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Hillsborough is made the seat of a superior court district
An act dividing the province into six districts and establishing a superior court of justice in each set the court for the District of Hillsborough at Hillsborough, for the counties of Orange and Granville, on the twenty second day of March and September, each term to run ten days. Nash records that no superior court sat at Hillsboro until March 1768, the town having belonged first to the Halifax and then to the Salisbury district.
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Orange is the most populous county in the province
In 1767 Orange County still ran over land later taken into Wake, Chatham, Guilford, Caswell, Person, Randolph, Rockingham, Alamance and Durham, and had the largest population of any county in North Carolina. Successive divisions cut it to about 7,560 people by 1779.
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Sandy Creek men challenge the register's deed fees in the Orange County court
Using a copy of the province's revised laws bought jointly by two men, one of them a county justice, two Sandy Creek men copied the lawful fees for registering deeds and objected in court to what they were charged. Threatened with arrest for contempt, they gave up, and the justice who half owned the book was soon put out of his commission.
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William Few takes over management of a second family farm near Hillsborough
In 1767 William Few Sr. bought another farm about seven miles from Hillsborough, and his son William, then nineteen, took over its management.
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Governor Tryon reports that Hillsborough has hardly twenty families
Writing to the colonial secretary about the town's new name, Tryon put its resident households at scarcely twenty but predicted it would soon be the leading inland town of the province.
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George Micklejohn is sent to St. Matthew's Parish in Hillsborough
Governor William Tryon sent the Rev. George Micklejohn, a Society for the Propagation of the Gospel missionary first assigned to Rowan County, to St. Matthew's Parish in Orange County.
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Thomas Hart buys Joseph Maddock's mill on the Eno
Joseph Maddock, a Quaker who had run the grist mill on the Eno west of Hillsborough since 1755, sold it to Thomas Hart, a friend of Governor William Tryon, who built it up with a sawmill, oil mill, fulling mill, distillery, tannery and other works. This is the mill, known as Hart's Mill, that a British guard held in February 1781.
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A house is built for Catherine Lockhart at Churton and Tryon streets
A one-and-a-half-story frame house is built for Catherine Lockhart on the northeast corner of Churton and Tryon streets. In the early 1800s shoemaker William H. Brown lived in it and kept his shop there; its front half survives next door at 103 East Tryon Street.
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Clerk Francis Nash is cleared of charging illegal fees
In the first Regulator complaints against Orange County officials in 1768, the clerk Francis Nash was accused of taking illegal fees. He was exonerated.
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Deputy attorney general John Williams signs the order jailing Herman Husband and William Butler
Appointed deputy attorney general for the Hillsborough district in 1768, Williams signed the order that sent the Regulator leaders Husband and Butler to jail after the April disturbance in Hillsborough. NCpedia suggests this is why the rioters beat him in 1770.
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George Micklejohn carries messages between the Regulators and the authorities
During the 1768 unrest the Hillsborough rector acted several times as a courier between the Regulators and the authorities, seeking a peaceful settlement. The Regulators called him "our Rector."
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Members of the Eno Friends Meeting move to Georgia
A group of Eno Quakers left for Georgia in 1768, one of the losses that weakened the meeting in the late colonial years.
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Nathaniel Rochester goes to work for a Hillsborough merchant
At sixteen Rochester took employment with James Monroe, a Scottish merchant in Hillsborough, the seat of Orange County. Within two years he was made clerk of the vestry of St. Matthew's Parish.
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New Sharon Methodist Church is organized
The church list dates New Sharon Methodist Church in Orange County to 1768, making it the oldest Methodist congregation the chapter names.
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Orange farmers swear scores of depositions against county officers
They accused Sheriff William Nunn and his deputies of seizing deer skins, livestock, a gun and cloth, and one man swore he had paid clerk Francis Nash for letters of administration he never received.
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Regulator William Butler serves as an Orange County tax collector and deputy sheriff
William Butler, a farmer living near Sandy Creek, was appointed a county tax collector in Orange County in 1768 and a deputy sheriff in 1770, in the same years he emerged as a principal leader of the Regulators.
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Richard Faucette buys part of the Tinnin and Taylor land on the Eno
The Faucettes, a Huguenot family by way of Ireland, reached Orange County in the 1760s. In 1768 Richard Faucette bought part of the Tinnin and Taylor grant, where his family would farm for two centuries.
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The governor's Council thanks Edmund Fanning and his men for their conduct against the Regulators
After Tryon read the Council his cold reply to the Regulators' petition, which forbade further meetings and told them to let the taxes be collected, Fanning was called into the room and formally thanked with his men for their behavior in the recent troubles.
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Thomas Hart begins a term as Orange County sheriff and is made militia captain and commissary
Thomas Hart began his second term as sheriff of Orange County in 1768. The same year he was made a captain in the Orange County militia and commissary for the troops of Orange and Granville counties.
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William Johnston and James Thackston go into business as Hillsborough merchants
Johnston, a Scottish merchant of means related to the Johnston governors, came to Hillsborough and formed a partnership with James Thackston. Their store stood at the southwest corner of King and Churton streets.
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William Johnston offers Richard Bennehan a partnership in the Little River Store
William Johnston offered Richard Bennehan a one-third partnership in the Little River Store on his Snowhill plantation near Hillsborough. Bennehan moved to North Carolina in late 1768 or early 1769 to manage it.
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Orange farmers draw up Regulator Advertisement Number Four
The paper set out the members' pledges on taxes and officers' fees, attendance at meetings, shared costs and majority rule.
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Settlers west of the Haw River call Orange County's representatives and vestry to a settlement at the courthouse
Inhabitants on the west side of the Haw River addressed Orange County's Assembly men and vestrymen, asking them to fix a day before the next court to meet at the courthouse and settle accounts of taxes and officers' fees, and declaring they would pay no more taxes until they had a full settlement.
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The superior court sits at Hillsborough for the first time
Nash writes that no superior court was held at Hillsborough before the March 1768 term. Until then Orange lay first in the Halifax and later in the Salisbury district.
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Regulators ask Orange County's late sheriff and a vestryman to bring the tax accounts
Meeting again, the Regulators asked the former sheriff and a vestryman to meet their committee with lists of taxables, insolvents and public spending, and asked the county's assemblymen to come and show the law for the fees charged on deeds. Two men were chosen to carry the request, but the seizure of a Regulator's mare days later overtook it.
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Regulators rescue a seized horse at Hillsborough
After the sheriff seized a Regulator's horse for an unpaid levy, about 100 Regulators rode into Hillsborough, took the horse back and fired shots into the roof of Edmund Fanning's house. Officials sought the arrest of William Butler, Peter Craven and Ninian Bell Hamilton as ringleaders.
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Tenants on Samuel Strudwick's Haw Fields land meet to keep possession by force
Francis Nash reported to Edmund Fanning that Strudwick's tenants had formed an association to hold his lands against him and had met in the Haw Fields the day before he wrote.
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Edmund Fanning writes Governor Tryon that Orange is in revolt
Two weeks after Regulators rescued a seized horse at Hillsborough, Fanning reported people across the county binding themselves by oath to refuse taxes, and said he and other officers expected an attack.
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Tryon orders the Regulators home and puts seven counties' militia on alert
Answering Fanning, the governor issued one proclamation to the people and another to militia officers in Bute, Halifax, Granville, Rowan, Mecklenburg, Cumberland and Johnston counties to stand ready to march to his aid.
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A general Regulator meeting agrees to send twelve men to meet county officials at Thomas Lindley's
The meeting agreed to send twelve men and then named thirteen, among them Herman Husband, James Hunter and Rednap Howell, to gather at Lindley's on May 11 in hope of meeting representatives of the officers. The arrests of Husband and William Butler broke up the plan.
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More than 400 Orange County inhabitants sign a petition to the governor and council
At the April 30 meeting the Regulators drew up a petition to the governor and council in the name of the inhabitants of Orange County, to be held back unless the officers failed to settle. Herman Husband, not yet a Regulator, was among more than 400 signers.
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The governor's secretary posts Tryon's proclamation at Hillsborough
On the day the Regulators met to choose their delegates, Governor Tryon's secretary Edwards reached Hillsborough and put up the governor's proclamation against the disturbances. Fanning set out for Sandy Creek with an armed party the next day.
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Orange militia is called out against the Regulators, and only 120 armed men appear
With Edmund Fanning away at the Halifax court, Lieutenant Colonel Gray reported the Hillsborough horse rescue and was ordered to raise seven militia companies. Only 120 men came with arms, and the officers judged that no more than 150 men in the county could be relied on, so they agreed to a truce and named three men to meet the Regulator leaders on April 20.
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Regulators confront officials at Hillsborough
Edmund Fanning and 27 armed men arrested Herman Husband and William Butler at Sandy Creek on May 2, 1768. The next day hundreds of Regulators and neighbors marched on Hillsborough; officials released the prisoners, and the governor's secretary read a proclamation promising to hear their grievances, after which the crowd dispersed.
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Regulators meeting at George Sally's appoint a committee of eight to petition Governor Tryon
Having agreed after the May confrontation to submit their case to the governor, the Regulators met at George Sally's in Orange County, declared their loyalty to King George and named William Moffitt, William Cox, Harmon Cox, John Low, John Marshall, James Hunter, Rednap Howell and George Hendry to gather the complaints into a petition and to implore the governor's pardon in the most submissive manner.
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Orange Regulators send their papers to the Regulators of Anson County
Asked by the Anson County Regulators how to organize, the Orange Regulators sent them a copy of their May 21 proceedings, to keep them from running into errors, and promised more papers. Bassett thinks this advice helped turn the Anson movement toward petitioning that August.
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Ralph McNair presses Herman Husband to adopt a petition written by the officers
After the May confrontation at Hillsborough, the county officers sent Husband, through Ralph McNair, a petition of their own drafting in which the Regulators would call their conduct illegal and withdraw their charges. McNair warned that Fanning would report the case to Tryon as treason if it was refused, and the Regulators instead named their own committee to lay their papers before the governor.
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James Hunter and Rednap Howell present the Regulators' petition to Tryon at Brunswick
The petition, Advertisement Number Nine, carried 474 names, 31 of them written in German. Tryon told the Regulators to give up their name and pay their taxes, but he also warned officers against excess fees and had the lawful fees published.
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Governor Tryon arrives at Hillsborough and stays into August
Tryon came to Hillsborough in early July 1768 and stayed until mid-August, hoping the county would submit, while the Regulators went on refusing their taxes. He left for Salisbury on August 17.
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Regulators hear the governor's letter from the sheriff and resolve to petition the Assembly
At a Regulator meeting called to answer Tryon's reply, the Orange sheriff read a letter and proclamation telling them to submit to tax collection. The sheriff and his deputy swore the crowd refused and threatened them; Husband said the people only told the sheriff they would take the matter to the Assembly, and the meeting sent Tryon an answer saying so.
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Justice James Thackston reports William Butler vowing not to pay the palace tax
Thackston told former sheriff Tyree Harris that Butler said the Regulators would pay nothing toward the governor's house at New Bern for three years, and that some two hundred Regulators had threatened anyone who seized their goods.
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James Hunter and John Low deliver a Regulator letter to Governor Tryon at Hillsborough
Hunter and John Low waited on Governor Tryon at Hillsborough with a letter from the Regulators. Tryon told them he would answer it on August 17, after consulting his Council.
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Eight Regulator leaders meet Governor Tryon at Hillsborough and are refused a committee to examine the county's taxes
A week after their letter was delivered, eight principal Regulators met Tryon in Hillsborough and asked that their grievances be settled by a committee reviewing the county's tax accounts. Tryon refused, telling them the law was the only channel for redress, and the next day sent a letter to the inhabitants south of the Haw.
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Sheriff John Lea brings the Regulators Tryon's demand for a 1,000 pound bond
On the day set for settling accounts, the former sheriff stayed away and the new sheriff, John Lea, brought a severe letter from Tryon, endorsed by three councillors at Hillsborough. It demanded that twelve leading Regulators meet him at Salisbury by August 25 and give a 1,000 pound bond that no one would try to rescue Butler and Husband at the September court; Tryon left for Salisbury the same day.
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Regulators refuse to give Tryon the bond he demanded
Two days after Lea delivered the demand, the Regulators answered that their peaceable leaders could restrain the rest only if they stayed free of such a bond, and that they had never meant to rescue the prisoners, only to ask the governor to dissolve the Assembly.
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William Chavis of Granville County sells 320 acres on the Haw River
William Chavis of Granville County, who held land beside the Saponi settlement on William Eaton's land and appears to have been of part Indian descent, sold Joseph Pritchit 320 acres on both sides of the Haw River from a 1751 grant. Hazel notes the tract lay near where Saponi families would settle about twenty years later.
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Hillsborough's town commissioners sign the earliest town deed on record
James Watson, William Nunn, Edmund Fanning and Francis Nash, acting as commissioners for the town, sign the earliest of the Hillsborough town deeds kept by the Orange County register of deeds.
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Presbyterian ministers, among them Henry Pattillo of Orange, write against the Regulation
While Tryon toured Rowan and Mecklenburg to raise troops, Presbyterian ministers Hugh McAden, James Creswell, Henry Pattillo and David Caldwell sent him a letter of loyalty condemning the Regulators, and the pastors also wrote to the colony's Presbyterians telling them to keep out of the movement. The letter was read to the Rowan militia and helped raise volunteers for the march on Hillsborough.
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Tryon musters about 400 militia at Hillsborough and swears them to allegiance
When the town was thought to be in danger, Tryon called out the militia but could gather only about 400 men, to whom he gave an oath of allegiance to the King and the provincial government before sending them home.
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Tryon's army gathers at Hillsborough to guard the superior court
Tryon reached Hillsborough on September 19 with 195 Rowan and 310 Mecklenburg volunteers, and two days later 699 Orange and 120 Granville militia joined them. With gentlemen volunteers, artillery and officers the force came to 1,461 men, a quarter of the Assembly among its officers.
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At the Hillsborough camp, Robert Palmer is named one of six lieutenants general
Palmer, whom Governor Tryon had made adjutant general of the militia marching on Hillsborough, was named a lieutenant general of the army in orders issued at the Hillsborough camp on September 20, 1768. The same orders posted a town guard of a hundred men, with the court house and market house as guard rooms.
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Chief Justice Martin Howard and two associate justices hold the Hillsborough superior court term
Martin Howard, Maurice Moore and Richard Henderson sat at the Hillsborough District Superior Court term in which Edmund Fanning was found guilty and Regulators including William Butler were tried.
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Eight hundred Regulators gather within a mile of Hillsborough, face Tryon's militia and disperse
With the superior court sitting under guard of more than a thousand militia, upwards of eight hundred Regulators appeared within a mile of Hillsborough on September 22. A council of war set terms: surrender nine leaders, lay down arms and promise to pay taxes. The Regulators asked for the night to answer and by the next morning had dispersed, about thirty coming in to give up their arms.
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Tryon sends troops out to arrest the Regulator leaders
The day after the Regulators dispersed, Tryon sent a body of troops to seize the men he most wanted. Some gave themselves up and others resisted, but all who were taken were soon let go because no true bill could be found against them.
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Tryon hands John Rutherford command of the army at Hillsborough
Made a lieutenant general on September 20 to lead the right wing, the Orange Brigade, Rutherford took command of the whole army at the Hillsborough camp when Tryon's illness worsened, and ordered the next day's sermons to the troops.
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George Micklejohn preaches to Tryon's militia at Hillsborough
Before Governor Tryon and the troops raised against the Regulators, Micklejohn preached on the important duty of subjection to the civil powers. Tryon had the sermon printed and distributed, and it cost Micklejohn favour with opponents of royal authority.
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A Hillsborough jury finds Edmund Fanning guilty on an indictment
In the same superior court term that tried the Regulator leaders, the King's indictment against Edmund Fanning went to a jury on September 27, which found him guilty. The day before, Herman Husband had surrendered William Butler to the court, and both men entered 500 pound bonds to abide its sentence.
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The last of Tryon's militia leave Hillsborough
The troops stayed in town through the court term, began to be discharged on September 28, and the last detachment marched away on October 2. The expedition cost the province 4,844 pounds.
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Grand jury indictments for rout against James Hunter are quashed at the Hillsborough superior court
The grand jury returned three indictments for rout naming James Hunter with William Butler, Ninian Hamilton and other Regulators. The court quashed all three for an irregular return and ordered the attorney general to prepare new bills.
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Dennis Bradley is acquitted at Hillsborough of burning the Granville jail
At the September 1768 superior court at Hillsborough, which also tried the Regulator cases, Dennis Bradley was tried for burning the Granville County jail and acquitted.
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Edmund Fanning resigns as register of Orange County after his conviction
Found guilty at the September court on five counts of taking excess fees for registering deeds, and fined a penny on each, Fanning at once gave up the office of register.
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Henry Pattillo preaches to Tryon's troops at Hillsborough
While the militia were quartered in Hillsborough, the Presbyterian minister Henry Pattillo preached to them and was publicly thanked. The German minister Suther was ordered to preach to the German troops as well.
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Samuel Devinney and John Philip Hartzo are convicted over the horse rescue
Each was fined 25 pounds and given three months in jail, but Tryon soon freed the prisoners and put off collecting their fines for three months.
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William Butler is convicted of riot at the Hillsborough superior court
With Governor Tryon's militia in Hillsborough for the September 1768 term, the superior court tried the Regulator cases. Herman Husband was acquitted; William Butler was found guilty on two counts and sentenced to a fine of 50 pounds and six months in prison, but Tryon released him and suspended the fines.
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Tryon pardons the 1768 protesters except thirteen named leaders
His proclamation left out men including James Hunter, Herman Husband, Ninian Bell Hamilton and William Payne.
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Tyree Harris reports the Regulators ready to pay their taxes
Writing to Tryon, Tyree Harris said that on recent visits to the Regulators in their homes he had found them willing to pay their taxes.
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The Assembly issues 20,000 pounds in paper money to pay the troops raised at Hillsborough
The Assembly that met in November 1768 first proposed 30,000 pounds in paper to pay the militia gathered at Hillsborough and other debts; after the governor and upper house objected it passed a 20,000 pound issue that was not legal tender. Tryon said he signed it because the militia would not turn out again unpaid.
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The Assembly lets reform bills sought from Orange die
A bill for trying debts under 5 pounds before one justice, asked for in an Orange petition and brought in by Fanning, failed when the two houses split over a rider on riot trials. Bills to form new counties out of Orange and Johnston and out of Orange and Rowan were also rejected, though many people had to travel as far as 60 miles to court.
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The Assembly pays for printing Micklejohn's sermon to the troops
The Assembly voted to repay the Orange parish minister George Micklejohn for printing the sermon he had preached to the troops at Hillsborough. Bassett, citing Foote's Sketches, reports that the sermon said at least twenty Regulators ought to have been hanged.
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An unsigned address urges Orange County voters to change their assemblymen
When Tryon dissolved the Assembly and called a new election in 1769, an address appeared in Orange, perhaps by Husband, that set out the people's wrongs and told voters the remedy was in their own hands. Orange went on to replace its whole delegation, electing Husband and John Pryor.
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Episcopalians build Hillsborough's first church
Members of the Church of England put up the town's first church at the corner of Churton and Tryon streets, under George Micklejohn, the parish minister Governor Tryon had appointed. It later held the 1788 convention and its lot passed to the Presbyterians.
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Orange County inhabitants petition for a public inspection at Hillsborough
Francis Nash and twenty five other inhabitants petitioned Governor Tryon and the legislature for a public inspection station at Hillsborough. They argued that having to haul tobacco and hemp at least a hundred miles overland to be inspected discouraged farmers from growing crops their soil suited.
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Orange and Rowan Regulators petition the Assembly for reforms
Regulators of Orange and Rowan joined in a petition asking that lawyers and court clerks be barred from the Assembly, that officers be paid salaries, that taxes rest on property, that small debts be tried before one magistrate and a jury of six, and that the county be divided. It also asked that ministers of every denomination be allowed to marry couples and that Assembly votes be recorded.
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Regulators whip Orange County sheriff John Lea
The one serious disturbance Nash records in the county between October 1768 and the 1770 riot was the whipping of Sheriff John Lea in 1769.
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Simon Lindley is born in Orange County
Simon Lindley, the first son of John Lindley and Sarah Pyle, was born in Orange County on January 20, 1769. He later worked as a farmer, surveyor and Predestinarian Baptist minister, and his cipher book of 1786 to 1795 is held at UNC.
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The March 1769 superior court at Hillsborough hears the Regulators' cases against the officers
With no troops in town, many Regulators came to the March 1769 court to prosecute the officers, with little success. Herman Husband was tried and acquitted, James Hunter's case was continued, and Fanning was tried again on the old fee charge and formally convicted.
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Orange voters elect Regulators Herman Husband and John Pryor to the Assembly
In the elections set for July 18, 1769, Orange returned the Regulators Herman Husband and John Pryor to the Assembly over Edmund Fanning.
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Governor Tryon buys county land and two Hillsborough lots
Tryon bought a large tract in the county and two lots in the town, and put up a house on the lots. His private secretary, Isaac Edwards, also bought and built in Hillsborough.
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Tryon issues a general pardon for the 1768 disturbances
The proclamation extended to fines and forfeitures for everyone involved in the Orange County troubles of the year before.
- 1770s
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Herman Husband publishes An Impartial Relation
His account of the Regulation traced the first disturbances to Orange County while granting that Granville and Halifax had been in the same dispute years earlier.
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