Chronology

Assessors announce the listing of Orange County property under the Confederate tax

H. M. Stroud and A. M. Angier advertised fourteen places and dates, August 18 to September 4, to list produce, goods and money under the Confederate tax act of April 24, 1863. A tax-in-kind notice followed in December 1864.

Fire destroys the block at the northwest corner of Churton and King streets

A fire that broke out about 1 a.m. destroyed seventeen buildings on the northwest corner of Churton and King streets in Hillsborough, among them the corner store owned by John U. Kirkland and occupied by W. F. and T. J. Strayhorn. The Recorder reported that few owners were insured.

People: Josiah Turner Jr.

Pastor Henry B. Pratt tells the Presbyterian session he will serve the army as a chaplain

Pratt informed the Hillsborough church that he expected to go into Confederate service for the rest of the war once he obtained a chaplain's commission. He returned as pastor in 1867-68.

Subject: Hillsborough Presbyterian Church

Black and Native American worshippers in Chapel Hill gather under a grape arbor and form the congregation that became St. Paul AME

A group that included William Thompson, Charles Craig, Jerry Hargraves, Kenny Brooks, Green Merritt and Green Cordal began meeting under a grape vine arbor, with Rev. Green Cordal preaching the first service. The congregation was received into the African Methodist Episcopal connection in 1870.

People: Green Cordal

Subject: St. Paul AME Church

Edwin W. Fuller studies at the university in Chapel Hill

Fuller entered the university as a freshman in the fall of 1864 and studied two years in Chapel Hill before going home to Louisburg to help in his father's business.

Hillsborough Baptists begin worshipping in the basement of their unfinished church

With its building money lost in the war, the congregation appears to have moved into the basement of the new Wake Street church around 1864 and met there for some years. The builder John Berry finished the building later.

People: John Berry

Josiah Turner Jr. of Hillsborough is elected to the Confederate Congress

Turner won as an anti-administration candidate in the same year Orange gave Zebulon Vance an 885-vote majority over the peace candidate William W. Holden. In Congress his resolutions supported Graham's push for the Hampton Roads peace conference.

People: Josiah Turner Jr. · Zebulon B. Vance · William W. Holden · William A. Graham

Orange County's roll of justices of the peace reaches 62

The county court had usually been small, and often only five or six magistrates sat at a term, but the number of justices rose sharply during the war. By 1864 Orange had 62.

Wartime woodcutting strips the university forests

To ease the faculty's hardship the trustees let professors, and the widow of tutor George B. Johnston, cut firewood from university land, extending the privilege in December 1864 with Bursar Fetter to mark trees. Neighbors cut freely as well, and many acres near the village were stripped of oaks and hickories.

People: Manuel Fetter · David L. Swain · William Horn Battle

William Bingham takes over the family school at the Oaks and incorporates it

With his brother Robert in the army and his father in declining health, William Bingham was running the school at the Oaks by 1864. That year he incorporated it as the Bingham School, a military and classical academy, and in December moved it to Mebaneville.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 102 events

People: William James Bingham

Subject: Bingham School

Confederate War Department refuses to exempt underclassmen

When the exemption Jefferson Davis had granted proved to cover only juniors and seniors, the trustees petitioned Secretary of War Seddon, showing that drafting the lower classes would add almost no soldiers. Seddon refused, and the students liable to conscription volunteered.

Bingham School moves from the Oaks to Mebaneville

William Bingham and Robert Bingham, sons of William James Bingham, moved the school that December to a site east of Mebane's Station on the North Carolina Railroad, after the legislature incorporated it in 1864 as a military and classical academy. The highway marker's 1865 may be when classes began at the new site.

People: Robert Bingham · William Bingham (1835-1873) · William James Bingham

Subject: Bingham School · North Carolina Railroad

Anderson's Confederate cavalry sign their paroles at Paul Cameron's house Highlands

At the end of the Civil War, Confederate troops used Highlands, Paul C. Cameron's house south of the Eno, and the paroles of Anderson's cavalry were signed in the old part of the house.

Part of Orange County during the Civil War, 1861–1865 · 42 events

People: Paul C. Cameron

Subject: Highlands (Paul Cameron house)

Emancipation frees about 6,000 people in Orange County, many of whom become tenants and sharecroppers

About 6,000 enslaved people in Orange County were freed at the end of the Civil War. Many Black families left for Durham and other towns, while some stayed on the land as tenant farmers or sharecroppers.

George Moses Horton leaves Chapel Hill with the Union cavalry

The enslaved poet George Moses Horton, who for decades had written verses for students, lived near Chapel Hill until Federal cavalry arrived in 1865. He left with them and went to Philadelphia with a Union officer after the war.

Orange County sends John Berry and Samuel F. Phillips to the 1865 convention

Orange would have elected Graham to the postwar convention, but his pardon was held up, so he withdrew and voters chose Berry and Phillips.

People: Samuel (Samuel Field) Phillips · William A. Graham · William W. Holden

Orange County voters ratify the ordinances abolishing slavery and repudiating secession

In the 1865 vote on the convention's work, Orange approved the abolition of slavery 169 to 73 and the repudiation of secession 170 to 55.

The legislature elects William A. Graham to the U.S. Senate, but Congress refuses to seat him

Elected to the state Senate in 1865, Graham could not take that seat without a pardon. The legislature then chose him for the U.S. Senate, and he was turned away with the rest of the state's delegation. His pardon arrived in 1867.

People: John Berry

Thomas Ruffin buys the Hillsborough house he called Little Hawfields

The house on East Orange Street, built about 1821 and enlarged in the 1830s, was sold to Thomas Ruffin in 1865. He named it Little Hawfields. The Town of Hillsborough acquired the property in 1972 and made it the Town Hall.

Subject: Ruffin-Roulhac House (Little Hawfields)

Washington Duke begins manufacturing smoking tobacco on his farm

Back from Confederate service, Washington Duke starts making smoking tobacco on his Orange County farm, the start of the business his sons later built into W. Duke and Sons.

Wilson Caldwell walks out with President Swain under a white flag to meet approaching Union troops

When Union troops approached Chapel Hill in 1865, Wilson Caldwell walked out under a white flag with President David L. Swain, Judge W. H. Battle and others to meet the incoming cavalry and seek protection for the town and the university.

People: William Horn Battle · David L. Swain

The county court sets its 1865 levy for poor relief and soldiers' families

The February court matched the state tax on land and polls and split the money: $15,000 for poor relief, $10,000 for county purposes and the rest for soldiers' families. The previous August, presiding justice James C. Turrentine had called all the justices together on the families' support.

Wheeler's Confederate cavalry fought Union pursuers at New Hope Creek east of Chapel Hill

Retreating cavalry under Joseph Wheeler destroyed the bridge over the rain-swollen New Hope and the other bridges on the road toward Chapel Hill, then attacked Union cavalry trying to cross on fallen trees and driftwood at the Atkins plantation, about eight miles from the village. Cornelia Phillips Spencer, writing from Chapel Hill, called it the last skirmish and perhaps the last blood of the war and recorded that several men were killed on both sides.

Part of Orange County during the Civil War, 1861–1865 · 42 events

People: Cornelia Phillips Spencer · Smith D. Atkins

Wheeler's cavalry reaches Chapel Hill and posts a guard on the university

Confederate cavalry under General Joseph Wheeler reached Chapel Hill, and at the request of alumnus James P. Coffin, Wheeler detailed Lieutenant McBurney Broyles and fifteen men to report to President Swain and protect the university's books and apparatus. Wheeler's headquarters were opposite the Episcopal church.

Part of Orange County during the Civil War, 1861–1865 · 42 events

People: David L. Swain · Charles Phillips

Johnston accepts Sherman's basis of agreement at the Bennitt farm

At their second meeting at James and Nancy Bennitt's farm on the Hillsborough Road, then in Orange County, Joseph E. Johnston accepted the "basis of agreement" William T. Sherman submitted, which offered an armistice, disbanding of the armies, recognition of state governments and a general amnesty. Jefferson Davis approved the terms, but Washington rejected them.

People: William T. Sherman

Swain asks Sherman to stop the stripping of farms around Chapel Hill

President Swain wrote General Sherman that Wheeler's men and then the Federals had stripped the country of forage and horses, leaving families such as the Rev. George W. Purefoy's fifty people with no food and no work animals. Sherman replied on April 22 that seizures would stop when the war ended.

Part of Orange County during the Civil War, 1861–1865 · 42 events

People: David L. Swain · William T. Sherman

Johnston surrendered to Sherman at the Bennett farm, then in Orange County

After meetings on April 17 and 18 whose terms Washington rejected, Joseph E. Johnston and William T. Sherman met again at the farm of James and Nancy Bennitt and signed a military surrender covering forces in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. North Carolina Historic Sites describes the Bennitt farm as a 325 acre place in Orange County, on the Hillsborough road west of Durham Station.

Part of Orange County during the Civil War, 1861–1865 · 42 events

People: Joseph E. Johnston · William T. Sherman

Charles P. Mallett wrote that federal troops had held Chapel Hill for fourteen days

Writing from Chapel Hill, the merchant Charles P. Mallett reported that Union troops had held the village for fourteen days, that they had behaved tolerably where safeguards were posted but had stripped the surrounding countryside of horses and mules, and that General Judson Kilpatrick had held a review in the village the previous day.

Part of Orange County during the Civil War, 1861–1865 · 42 events

People: Smith D. Atkins

Hillsborough Military Academy sends its cadets home at the end of the Civil War

The academy, reopened in 1862 under Maj. William Gordon after Tew left for the war, dismissed its students in May 1865 after the surrender at Bennett Place. Raleigh Edward Colston reopened the campus in 1866 as the North Carolina Polytechnic and Military Institute.

Part of Orange County during the Civil War, 1861–1865 · 42 events

People: Charles Courtenay Tew

Subject: Hillsborough Military Academy

Paul Cameron complains that Jesse Ruffin is raising freedpeople's hopes of land

In May 1865, weeks after the Confederate surrender near Durham, Paul Cameron wrote to his father-in-law Thomas Ruffin that the judge's longtime coachman Jesse had stirred the freedpeople on his place to hope for a freehold in the land they worked, and asked that his name not be linked with Jesse's.

People: Paul C. Cameron · Thomas Ruffin

General Smith D. Atkins married Eleanor Swain, daughter of the university president

The courtship began during the occupation, when Atkins called on President David Lowry Swain, met his daughter Eleanor, had his regimental band serenade her and gave Swain two horses. Atkins was mustered out in June and the two married in Chapel Hill on August 23, 1865; many invited guests stayed away, students tolled the college bell for three hours and hanged Swain and Atkins in effigy.

Part of Orange County during the Civil War, 1861–1865 · 42 events

People: David L. Swain · Smith D. Atkins

Job Berry calls a fair to buy a building for a Black school

The Hillsborough Recorder printed Job Berry's notice that the colored citizens of Hillsborough would hold a fair on September 23 to raise money for a school building. The school later met in the old courthouse at Queen and Churton streets.

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough

Job Berry buys an acre on South Wake Street

Months after emancipation, Job Berry paid Henry N. Brown $300 for parts of lots 20 and 17 off South Wake Street, next to the Nash and Kollock School, where his wife Rebecca Nash had been enslaved.

Bricks at the Coachman's Quarters carry the date Dec 5, '65

Two bricks in a small outbuilding near the Burnside stable in Hillsborough carry the hand-cut inscription 'Dec 5, '65', found during the building's restoration after 2003. The owners and descendants connect it to Jesse Ruffin, a coachman once enslaved by Thomas Ruffin. According to family tradition he cut the date to mark the day after the General Assembly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally ended slavery.

People: Thomas Ruffin

Subject: Burnside

Cornelia Phillips Spencer publishes The Last Ninety Days of the War in North-Carolina

Encouraged by her friend, former governor David L. Swain, Spencer published her first book, an account of the war's last months in North Carolina that describes Wheeler's Confederate cavalry passing through Chapel Hill and the town's occupation by Union cavalry in April 1865.

People: David L. Swain

Fire destroys the Hargrave house on Franklin Street

The large house Dr. Charles Yancey built in 1822, owned by the Hargraves since 1840, burned. Jesse Hargrave's children Molly and Fred stayed on the lot in a much smaller building facing the street.

General Colston takes charge of the reopened Hillsborough Military Academy

After closing at the end of the war, the academy reopened with General R. C. Colston as superintendent. In 1868 he signed a lease with Col. Tew's widow to live in the superintendent's house, but his family later moved to Wilmington.

Subject: Hillsborough Military Academy

John U. Kirkland serves as Orange County's clerk and master in equity

In 1866 John U. Kirkland, as clerk and master in equity at his office in Hillsborough, advertised court-ordered sales of Orange County land.

John W. Graham serves as Orange County solicitor

After the Civil War, John W. Graham of Hillsborough was solicitor for Orange County from 1866 to 1868, before going as a delegate to the 1868 constitutional convention and into the state senate.

John Wall Norwood buys the brick law office facing the courthouse

Attorney Richard Ashe sold the one-room brick law office on Court Street, facing the Orange County Courthouse, to John Wall Norwood for $400. The office, already shown on an 1839 map, is now called the Norwood Law Office.

Orange County votes against the proposed state constitution of

Voters rejected the constitution submitted by the reconvened convention, 494 to 392.

The Collins women sell their shares of the Beehive to Dr. Thomas D. Warren

After the war the Collins relatives who had lived at the Beehive left Hillsborough, and the women sold their shares of the house to Dr. Thomas D. Warren, who had married Elizabeth Alethea Collins.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 102 events

Subject: Burwell School

The Methodist conference forms a Hillsborough District, with Hillsborough heading a station of five churches

In 1866 the Methodists created a Hillsborough District, under presiding elder W. H. Bobbitt, and made Hillsborough a station that also took in Cedar Grove, Walnut Grove, Lebanon and New Sharon. W. C. Wilson was pastor.

People: William H. (William Haywood) Bobbitt

Subject: Hillsborough Methodist Church

The Union League organizes Black voters in Orange County

The Republican Union League, organized in Orange, Alamance and Guilford by Albion W. Tourgee, its first state president, recruited nearly every Black man who would vote before the 1867 election. It had faded by the end of 1870.

People: Albion W. Tourgée · William W. Holden

Thomas and Anne Ruffin move from the Haw River plantation to Hillsborough

Thomas Ruffin and his wife Anne left their Haw River plantation early in 1866 and moved to Hillsborough, where he had bought the house he called Little Hawfields the year before.

People: Thomas Ruffin

Subject: Ruffin-Roulhac House (Little Hawfields)

Trustees mortgage all university property to settle its debts

Facing $103,000 of debt against worthless bank stock and Confederate securities, the trustees compromised with the Bank of North Carolina and other creditors at a quarter of the debt in gold, pledging all the university's property at Chapel Hill and its Buncombe County lands. The General Assembly also voted $7,000 for one year to pay the officers.

People: Thomas Bragg · David L. Swain

Trustees strike Confederate leaders from the commencement ball

The student ball managers named Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, John C. Breckinridge, Zebulon Vance and other Confederate figures as honorary managers without asking them. Fearing hostile action by Congress, the trustees ruled the choice improper.

People: Robert E. (Robert Edward) Lee · Zebulon B. Vance · David L. Swain

Twenty Black members leave First Baptist Church of Hillsborough and organize Mount Bright Baptist Church

Twenty Black members withdrew from First Baptist Church of Hillsborough in 1866 and organized a congregation of their own, named for its first pastor, Rev. Alfred E. Bright. The widow of Governor William A. Graham gave the group the West Union Street site where the congregation still worships.

Subject: Mount Bright Baptist Church

E. H. Pogue starts making tinware for the wholesale trade in Hillsborough

E. H. Pogue announced that he had begun manufacturing tinware in Hillsborough for merchants and retail dealers, and would also sell it to townspeople at wholesale rates. By early 1867 his store stood west of the courthouse, where he also sold groceries, stoves and tobacco and took country produce in barter.

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough

Thomas Lynch becomes stated supply at New Hope after James Phillips

Lynch took up the New Hope pulpit after Phillips stopped preaching there at the end of 1865 and served until the winter of 1867.

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

Charles Phillips is ordained at New Hope Church in Orange County

Phillips was ordained on 14 April 1866 at Orange County's New Hope Church, which had long been under the pastoral charge of his father James Phillips. Orange Presbytery had convened there on Wednesday, April 11, and ordained Phillips and Calvin H. Wiley during the meeting.

People: James Phillips

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

Bodies of Junius and Wesley Lewis Battle brought home for burial

The bodies of Corporal Junius C. Battle, mortally wounded at South Mountain, and Lieutenant Wesley Lewis Battle, killed at Gettysburg, sons of Judge William H. Battle and former students, were brought home to Chapel Hill. The village turned out to meet them, and they lay side by side in the Episcopal church before burial.

People: Cornelia Phillips Spencer · William Horn Battle

Subject: Chapel of the Cross

Calvin H. Wiley is ordained at New Hope

At the last meeting of Orange Presbytery held at New Hope, Calvin H. Wiley was ordained with Charles Phillips, both sine titulo, without a pastoral charge.

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

Jesse and Rebecca Ruffin register the marriage they made in

Jesse Ruffin, coachman to Judge Thomas Ruffin, and Rebecca, who had kept the keys of the Norwood household across the Eno, had married in 1828 while enslaved to different families. They recorded the marriage with the Freedmen's Bureau and later bought a farm.

Rev. Job Berry and the Philadelphia Friends open Hillsborough's first school for Black children and adults

Job Berry, who had advertised a fair in September 1865 to raise money for a school, worked with the Friends of Philadelphia to buy the former Orange County courthouse on Queen Street for twelve hundred dollars and open a freedmen's school in it on June 5, 1866. More than three hundred children and adults learned to read and cipher there.

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough

Sheriff H. B. Guthrie announces that the county treasury is empty

His notice to taxpayers said no county tax had been levied or collected for 1865, the treasury held not a dollar and the wardens of the poor were deep in debt. He set fifteen collection days in July.

Subject: Orange County poorhouse (County Home)

Peter and Diannah Benton acquire land south of Hillsborough

A deed from Frances Thompson conveyed land half a mile south of town, where the Chatham and Chapel Hill roads divided (today Mayo Street and Orange Grove Road), to Peter Benton, his wife Diannah and Jimmy Thompson. Peter Benton, a free man, had gardened at the Burwell School in 1855.

Subject: Burwell School

Thomas Ruffin buys six lots next to his Hillsborough house from Pride Jones

Thomas Ruffin bought lots 177, 178, 179, 204, 205 and 206, which adjoined the house he had acquired the year before, from Pride Jones.

People: Pride Jones

Subject: Ruffin-Roulhac House (Little Hawfields)

Allison and Corbin run a plug tobacco factory at Cedar Grove

By the late 1860s Cedar Grove had a plug tobacco factory run by Allison and Corbin that employed fourteen men, the largest workforce of any business in the area. Dr. John J. Allison, a large landowner, was also a partner in dry goods, hardware and grocery stores, and William W. Allison kept a hotel.

Andrew Green Ruffin Lloyd builds a log house on Old Hillsborough Road

Around 1867 Andrew Green Ruffin Lloyd raised the log core of a house that later generations of Lloyds enlarged several times. Frame outbuildings stand on the farm.

Civil War veteran William Couch builds a frame farmhouse east of Hillsborough

William Couch, a Confederate veteran, builds a two-story frame house around 1867 beside an older log house, and adds outbuildings to the farm. The farm is on the Study List, next to the Sam Couch farm.

Cornelia Phillips Spencer moves into Sam Phillips's house and takes in boarders

After her father's death the family had to leave their university-owned home, so Spencer, her widowed mother and her daughter moved into her brother Sam's empty house on East Franklin and took boarders to make ends meet.

J. Morrow and Sons grind flour and corn at Oaks

In the late 1860s and early 1870s J. Morrow and his sons ran a flour and corn mill at Oaks, where a dry goods store and a tannery also operated in the community that had grown up around the Bingham school.

Sarah J. Woodson teaches at the freedmen's school in Hillsborough

Sarah J. Woodson, an Oberlin graduate from Ohio, was principal of the school for Black children in Hillsborough, which she taught with V. S. Williams. The Freedmen's Bureau's report of January 1868 named it among the large, well-run schools in North Carolina.

Part of Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation · 45 events

Legislature gives the university North Carolina's land-grant scrip

At President Swain's urging, the General Assembly transferred to the university the state's scrip under the federal Morrill Act, on condition that it set up at least two professorships in agriculture and the mechanic arts. Each county court could send one needy student free of tuition, and students could enter those branches without the usual classical preparation.

People: David L. Swain

James Phillips dies in the college chapel

On the morning of March 14, 1867, James Phillips went early to the college chapel to lead morning prayers and was found dead on the rostrum as the bell rang. He had taught at the university since 1826 and was buried in the Chapel Hill Cemetery.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery · Gerrard Hall

Job Berry is admitted as a preacher by the A.M.E. Church

Meeting in Greensboro, the church's North Carolina Conference admitted Job Berry on trial and sent him to Mebanesville and Graham, making formal the ministry he had carried on while state law barred Black preachers.

President Andrew Johnson attends commencement

Andrew Johnson came to the 1867 commencement with Secretary of State William H. Seward, Postmaster General Alexander Randall and General Daniel E. Sickles, the military governor under the Reconstruction Acts, and recalled passing through Chapel Hill on foot in 1826. Johnson joined the Dialectic Society and Seward the Philanthropic, but a minority of Dialectics blocked Sickles.

People: William H (William Henry) Seward · David L. Swain

Subject: Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies

Swain and the faculty resign as trustees plan a new university

At a meeting Governor Jonathan Worth called to face the university's collapse, Charles Phillips presented the resignations of President Swain, Professors Hubbard, Fetter and Smith, law professor William H. Battle and himself, and the trustees adopted Kemp P. Battle's resolution for a committee to plan an elective university system with higher standards.

People: David L. Swain · Charles Phillips · Jonathan Worth · Kemp Plummer Battle

Trustees sell the land-grant scrip at fifty cents an acre

The trustees accepted an offer from G. F. Lewis and Fisher, Booth and Company of Detroit to buy the scrip for 270,000 acres at fifty cents an acre, with most of the money due only after Congress let Southern scrip be located. On William A. Graham's motion $13,500 of the first payments went to general expenses, relieving unpaid officers.

People: William A. Graham

The wardens' yearly count finds 21 people in the poorhouse

The count listed three adult men, thirteen adult women and five children of color, three of whom had white mothers. In October the wardens kept James M. Bain as superintendent at $150 a year, with $25 for his wife.

Subject: Orange County poorhouse (County Home)

Trustees adopt an elective system of ten schools

Over William A. Graham's dissent, the trustees voted 18 to 3 for Kemp P. Battle's committee plan to replace the fixed four-year course with ten independent schools, from political science to modern languages, beginning in fall 1868. After the new state constitution put the university under a new board, the old trustees on June 4, 1868 reappointed Swain and the faculty and rescinded the plan.

People: William A. Graham · Kemp Plummer Battle

Charles Phillips is dismissed from the university faculty

When the state's Reconstruction government reorganized the University of North Carolina in 1868, Phillips was dismissed from the faculty. He took a professorship at Davidson College in February 1869.

Part of The university closes and reopens · 46 events

Dialectic and Philanthropic societies hide their books and papers

Believing the societies would not be run under their constitutions after the university changed hands, their last officers gave the Dialectic records to Alexander McIver and the Philanthropic records to William L. Saunders. The property lay safe until the societies revived in 1875.

People: Alexander McIver

Subject: Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies

Dr. Johnston Blakeley Jones sells his West Franklin home to banker William A. Wright

Bankrupt by 1865, Jones left for a new practice in Charlotte in 1868 and sold his house to William A. Wright, president of the Bank of Cape Fear, who wanted it as a refuge.

Hillsborough Methodist Church opens a lending library for its members

Around 1868 the church began a library of religious and general books, many donated by members and townspeople and some bought by Sunday school classes. Books went out on Sunday mornings, and the record book later counted 937 volumes.

Subject: Hillsborough Methodist Church

Josiah Turner Jr. wins Orange's Senate seat but is excluded under the Fourteenth Amendment

Turner won election as state senator in 1868 but was not seated, since his disabilities under the Fourteenth Amendment were still in force. John W. Graham was elected instead.

People: John W. Graham

Ned Strowd organizes Terrell Creek Baptist Church

Ned Strowd organized Terrell Creek Baptist Church, a Black congregation, on Atwater Road about two miles south of its later site.

Orange County votes against the 1868 constitution and for Thomas S. Ashe over Holden

Orange rejected the new Reconstruction constitution 1,863 to 1,324 and gave Conservative Thomas S. Ashe 1,834 votes to 1,310 for William W. Holden, who carried the state.

People: William W. Holden

Six freedmen's schools are running in Orange County

By 1868 six schools for freed people had been set up in the county, paid for mostly by the Freedmen's Bureau and Quaker missions, with Black families giving what they could.

People: Robert G. Fitzgerald

Solomon Pool's new faculty move into the old professors' houses

With Swain and the old faculty gone, the professors Pool brought in took over their Franklin Street homes: Fisk P. Brewer the Tom Taylor house, David Settle Patrick Swain's house, and James A. Martling the late James Phillips's house.

People: Fisk P. (Fisk Parsons) Brewer

The White Brotherhood, a Ku Klux order, appears in Orange County

The first Klan-type order to reach North Carolina, the White Brotherhood, set up camps including one at Hillsborough. Its Orange County chief was Colonel Joseph C. Webb, followed by Frederick N. Strudwick.

People: Frederick N. Strudwick

Robert G. Fitzgerald comes to Hillsborough to teach a freedmen's school

Fitzgerald, a Union Navy and cavalry veteran who had taught freedpeople in Amelia County, Virginia, came to Hillsborough through the Friends' Freedmen's Association of Philadelphia to teach at a new school for Black students.

Henry B. Pratt, a missionary to South America, supplies New Hope

Pratt preached at New Hope for six months with the Hillsborough church. On May 24, 1868, D. I. Craig, John T. Hogan and three women were received and baptized as members.

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

The Court of Wardens of the Poor holds its last meeting

The seven-member wardens' court, which had run poor relief and the county poorhouse, met for the last time before the new board of county commissioners took over its work.

Subject: Orange County poorhouse (County Home)

William H. S. Burgwyn graduates from the university with first honors

After the Civil War Burgwyn re-entered the University of North Carolina as a sophomore and graduated in June 1868 with first honors, delivering the Latin salutatory address. He was a member of the Philanthropic Society.

Swain protests his removal to Governor Holden

Learning that the new Reconstruction trustees had declared his 1867 resignation final, David L. Swain wrote Governor William W. Holden, as chairman of the board, that no charge had been made against him and that a resignation accepted by a board that no longer existed could not be revived. He asked for reconsideration, but died later that month.

People: David L. Swain · William W. Holden

Orange County's first elected board of commissioners takes office

Elected in April 1868 at the election that ratified the new constitution, five commissioners qualified at the courthouse and chose Lemuel Lynch chairman, replacing the old county court of justices. Within days the newly elected sheriff, treasurer, register of deeds and clerk of superior court gave their bonds.

People: John U. Kirkland · Jones Watson · David C. Parks

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough

David L. Swain dies after a buggy accident

Weeks after the Reconstruction board of trustees accepted his resignation, David L. Swain was thrown on August 11, 1868, from a buggy pulled by the horse General Sherman had given him. He seemed to be recovering but died on August 27 and was buried on August 29 in the garden of his Chapel Hill home; Charles Phillips preached his funeral sermon.

People: Charles Phillips

Commissioners hire Silas M. Link to divide the county into townships

Link was paid $75 to lay the school districts out into townships, and the board approved his plan of eight: Hillsboro, Little River, Mangum, Durham, Patterson, Chapel Hill, Bingham and Cedar Grove. In 1877 the board split Mangum at Little River to form Lebanon Township.

The new county commissioners name school committees for all 53 districts

Working from Silas Link's report, which listed the school districts in each new township, the board named three committeemen for every one of the county's 53 districts. Presumably they were meant to hold office until the townships could elect their own.

Reconstruction trustees vote down admitting women

The executive committee of the new Republican board of trustees recommended co-education, but the full board refused to admit women as students.

Trustees vote to found a university branch for Black students near Raleigh

On Victor C. Barringer's motion the Reconstruction trustees called for a school for Black students near Raleigh equal to the one at Chapel Hill, and on Albion W. Tourgee's motion made it a branch of the university, with Tod R. Caldwell moving that at least 100 acres be bought. Nothing came of it, nor of a later proposal to give Black students a third of the land-scrip money or of Tourgee's request for equal white and Black departments under one board.

People: Albion W. Tourgée · Tod Robinson Caldwell

Cornelia Phillips Spencer describes the emptied campus and village

In a letter to the Sentinel written under the Old Poplar, Spencer described the shut buildings and reported that nearly twenty of Chapel Hill's leading families were leaving and six places now sold liquor openly. She named the departing faculty, among them Judge William H. Battle, and called the town the Deserted Village of the South.

People: Cornelia Phillips Spencer · William Horn Battle

A school report finds 43 schoolhouses for nearly 6,000 children

A. Hooker, late chairman of the common schools board, counted 3,667 white and 2,235 Black children in the county and only 43 schoolhouses, most run down, to serve both races. He put the need at 63 new buildings of about $100 each.

A count of Chapel Hill finds 483 white and 454 Black residents

Four years after emancipation, Chapel Hill had 483 white and 454 Black residents, close to half and half. Freed families were making homes on the village's western side, on West Cameron Avenue, West Franklin Street and around Potter's Field west of Church Street.

Alexander Kirkland, a son of the congregation, supplies New Hope

The Rev. Alexander Kirkland, son of the New Hope elder Joseph Kirkland, supplied the church for part of 1869 and 1870 after Pratt.

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

Alexander McIver joins the reorganized faculty as professor of mathematics

McIver, a Moore County native who had graduated first in the class of 1853 and taught briefly as a tutor, came from Davidson College to teach mathematics on the Republican faculty that reopened the university under Solomon Pool.

People: Solomon Pool

An 1869 account finds Chapel Hill grown to about 1,000 people

By 1869 the village that had one store and one doctor in 1836 counted eight or ten stores, two drugstores, four churches and six schools, with about 1,000 people. The growth came mostly between the mid-1850s and the war, when new streets were opened and many houses built.

Black families make homes on Lot 16 on East Franklin Street

After E. Hunt closed his boarding house and Dr. Johnston B. Jones left town, Black families moved into both buildings: Tom Moore into the larger two-story house and the Burnett family into the small former medicine shop. Several other Black families settled on what had been Lot 16.

Court strikes down the act for a state-built railroad to Chapel Hill

An 1869 plan had the state build a line from the North Carolina Railroad to Chapel Hill through commissioners, paid for with $300,000 in state bonds. When the commissioners chose Henry C. Thompson as president over Governor Holden's choice, Holden refused to sign the bonds, and in the University Railroad Company's suit against him the court held the act unconstitutional over Judge Reade's dissent.

People: William W. Holden

Subject: North Carolina Railroad

David McCauley buys the Union Hotel and renames it the Chapel Hill Hotel

McCauley bought the Union Hotel, the house Nancy Hilliard had once kept as the Eagle Hotel, and gave it the name Chapel Hill Hotel. He also bought the building at the northeast corner of Franklin and Henderson streets where Richard Benbury Saunders had kept his drugstore.

People: Nancy Hilliard · David McCauley

Subject: Eagle Hotel (Chapel Hill)

David McCauley lets Nancy Hilliard live rent free in her old hotel

After losing her house and failing at hotel work in Raleigh, Nancy Hilliard came back to Chapel Hill destitute, and David McCauley, who now owned her former Eagle Hotel, let her live rent free in a room there. Former students sent her money until her death in 1873.

People: David McCauley

Subject: Eagle Hotel (Chapel Hill)

Dr. Abner B. Roberson opens a general store that specializes in drugs

With Saunders gone, the village's new druggist, Dr. Abner Benton Roberson, opened a general store on the south side of Franklin Street that dealt mainly in drugs and medical supplies. It stood on the property of his father-in-law, Haywood Stone.

People: Abner Benton Roberson

Former governor William A. Graham lives in the Nash-Hooper House

William A. Graham, former governor of North Carolina, made the Nash-Hooper House on West Tryon Street his home from 1869 until 1875.

Subject: Nash-Hooper House

J. W. Norwood of Hillsborough warns county farmers that their methods are ruining the land

In an 1869 talk to Orange County farmers, Norwood said the county's fields were exhausted because growers added no organic matter, rotated nothing and let rain wash the soil away. He urged a new system before ruin set in.

Nelson Hall runs a flour and grist mill near Caldwell

In 1869 Nelson Hall, a large landowner in the Caldwell area, was operating a flour and grist mill alongside his farm, one of several planters who took up a side business after the war.

Pleasant Green Methodist Church builds a frame church on the site of its log churches

In 1869 the Pleasant Green congregation in the Eno neighborhood replaced the second of its log churches, the first dating from the 1830s, with a frame building.

Subject: Pleasant Green Methodist Church

Robert K. Rice buys the Pettigrew log house farm

Elkins Pettigrew sold the farm to his son-in-law Robert K. Rice, husband of his daughter Martha, for $375 in 1869. Rice improved the place, which the 1880 census valued at $1,500, and it stayed in the Rice family for more than a century.

Subject: Paisley-Rice Log House

Samuel F. Phillips sells his East Franklin Street house to Henry J. Hogan

Samuel Phillips sold his East Franklin Street house and lot to Henry J. Hogan, who moved to Tennessee right away and left the place to his father, William J. Hogan. The sale sent Phillips's mother and his sister Cornelia Phillips Spencer to live in Charles Phillips's house.

Solomon Pool accepts the presidency of the university

Pool accepted the presidency of the University of North Carolina in 1869 at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars and was permitted to keep his federal appraiser post at the same time. Governor William W. Holden had taken charge of the board of trustees to secure a president with Republican affiliations.

Part of The university closes and reopens · 46 events

People: William W. Holden

Solomon Pool buys Nancy Hilliard's house, the Crystal Palace, at a sheriff's sale

When the hotel keeper Nancy Hilliard went bankrupt, university president Solomon Pool bought her Franklin Street home, known as the Crystal Palace, at a sheriff's sale for $150. He let Col. Hugh B. Guthrie and his wife Jane, a daughter of Hudson Cave, move in, which Bryant reads as a way of forcing Hilliard out.

People: Solomon Pool · Nancy Hilliard

The sheriff auctions the former Burwell School to David C. Parks

Dr. Thomas D. Warren was deep in local debt, and the Orange County sheriff sold the house at auction to David C. Parks for $600. Parks and his brother Charles traded the property between them for the next quarter century.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 102 events

People: David C. Parks

Subject: Burwell School

University treasurer puts the land-grant fund into railroad bonds later repudiated

Treasurer Robert W. Lassiter invested the $125,000 land-scrip fund in North Carolina bonds, including $160,000 face value of special tax bonds issued for the Western North Carolina Railroad. The legislature repealed the acts behind those bonds on March 8, 1870, and the fund earned nothing until 1875.

Wilson Caldwell resigns from the university and founds a school for Black children

In 1869 Wilson Caldwell, who had worked at the university as an enslaved servant and janitor, resigned and started a school for children of color in Chapel Hill.

People: Wilson Swain Caldwell

New Hope's present graveyard is begun

Because the old graveyard lay so low that winter graves filled with water, James Newton Craig and elder David Craig chose a dry site a little south of east of the church. His nine-month-old son Vernon, who died on December 31, 1868, was buried there on January 1, 1869 as its first grave.

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

Dennis Heartt gives up the Hillsborough Recorder after nearly fifty years

In the Recorder of January 11, 1869, Dennis Heartt announced that his connection with the paper would end with that number, thirteen months short of fifty years after its first issue. An 1899 history of the paper says he sold it to Capt. C. N. B. Evans of the Milton Chronicle.

Subject: Hillsborough Recorder

Thomas Fitzgerald buys Woodside, where his son Robert builds a freedmen's school

Thomas Fitzgerald, whose son Robert had persuaded the family to move from Pennsylvania, bought Woodside, a 158-acre plantation six miles east of Hillsborough, from Robert J. Jeffreys for $1,200 in April 1869, with Robert writing the deed. Robert built a freedmen's school on the property, and the family also farmed and ran a tannery and brick making there.

Federal court dismisses the state's suit to void the university's bank mortgage

The Reconstruction trustees had the state sue in the United States Circuit Court, returnable at the June 1869 term, to cancel the university's mortgage to the Bank of North Carolina, but Judges Hugh L. Bond and George W. Brooks dismissed the bill for want of jurisdiction. On July 20, 1871 the trustees present advised against an appeal.

The Pool faculty holds its first commencement

After a first term that began March 3, the university reported on June 10, 1869 three sophomores and seven freshmen and gave an A.B. to Abdel Kader Tenney. At the thinly attended commencement Governor William W. Holden argued for educating both races in one university, whites at Chapel Hill and Black students elsewhere.

People: Solomon Pool · William W. Holden

Chapel Hill's town board holds the earliest meeting with surviving minutes

The oldest surviving town minutes record a meeting of commissioners H. C. Thompson, James F. Craige and Greene Brewer. The town census taker, W. S. Guthrie, reported 937 residents, 483 white and 454 Black.

Orange County holds its first township elections

Voters in each township chose magistrates, a clerk, a constable and school committeemen for the first time. In Chapel Hill Township 540 of 565 registered voters cast ballots.

People: William Kirkland · Jones Watson · Andrew Mickle · John Wesley Carr

Robert G. Fitzgerald marries Cornelia Smith of Chapel Hill

Fitzgerald married Cornelia Smith, a niece of Mary Ruffin Smith, the Chapel Hill benefactor of the university. Their granddaughter Pauli Murray later told the family's story in Proud Shoes.

People: Pauli Murray

Klansmen take two Black prisoners from jail and shoot one of them

A few nights after three barns burned in late July 1869, two Black men accused of another barn burning were taken from jail. One was let go; the other was shot and died.

Subject: Orange County jail, Hillsborough

Wright Malone is abducted and lynched near Little River

On the night of September 6, 1869, four mounted men took Wright Malone, a young Black farmer, from the coal kiln he was burning with his father near Little River in eastern Orange County. A neighbor found his body hanging from a tree on September 12, and the coroner concluded the killing had been planned in advance.

People: Wright Malone

Governor Holden warns Orange County it may be declared in insurrection

Holden's proclamation of October 20, 1869, named Lenoir, Jones, Orange and Chatham counties and said that in Orange the jail had been forced, two Black prisoners taken out and shot, and three other Black men hanged. He warned that he would declare those counties in a state of insurrection and use the whole power of the state if the violence continued.

People: William W. Holden

Bursar reports the plundering of university property

Professor David Settle Patrick reported that when exercises were suspended in 1868 many in Chapel Hill believed the university's property belonged to the people. Books had been taken from the libraries and tools carried off, and only some had been returned.

Cyrus Guy is lynched by a masked mob in western Orange County

A masked mob seized Cyrus Guy, a 24-year-old Afro-Indigenous farmer from a free family of color, and hanged him from a tree on the High Rock Road near the Alamance County line, above the county poorhouse. The Hillsborough Recorder reported that an inquest held under Sheriff Turner found out nothing, and Ben Johnson recalled in 1937 that the body was left hanging for four days.

People: Cyrus Guy

Klansmen from Hillsborough ride to kill Senator T. M. Shoffner and turn back

A Klan party coming from Orange County that included Hillsborough legislator Frederick N. Strudwick and A. Hedgepeth of Hillsborough gathered at a Bradshaw home in Alamance County to kill state senator T. M. Shoffner, author of the anti-Klan militia bill. Dr. John A. Moore, sent by James E. Boyd, told them Shoffner had gone to Greensboro, and they turned back.

People: Frederick N. Strudwick

The remains of David L. Swain and his daughter Annie are taken from Chapel Hill to Raleigh for reburial

An undertaker, K. P. Waitt, carried the coffins of the former governor and university president and his daughter Annie from their graves in Chapel Hill to Raleigh, where they were buried side by side in the old city cemetery with only family and a few friends present.

People: David L. Swain

A two-story frame house, later known as the Pool-Patterson House, goes up on West Cameron Avenue

The survey dates the L-plan frame house at 403 West Cameron Avenue to about 1870. Its bracketed roofline and wraparound porch reflect the later Victorian remodeling.

Anne Ruffin buys the last two lots and the Ruffin place fills a whole town block

Completing a purchase begun before her husband's death, Anne M. Ruffin bought lots 202 and 203. The Ruffin property then took in an entire block of about ten acres, which was still intact in 1971.

Subject: Ruffin-Roulhac House (Little Hawfields)

Archibald Lynch builds a farmhouse on Mount Hermon Church Road

Around 1870 a rear wing was built for the farmer Archibald Lynch, and about 1890 a small frame I-house was added in front of it.

Baptists form the Mount Zion Association

The Mount Zion Baptist Association was formed. By 1953 nearly every Baptist church in Orange County belonged to it, replacing the older Sandy Creek Association.

Black-owned family farms and sawmills made up the Rogers-Eubanks area

By the late nineteenth century the area between Homestead and Eubanks roads, north of Carrboro and Chapel Hill, was a neighborhood of Black-owned family farms and sawmills set among forest. RENA and the Town of Carrboro both date settlement of the wider area to the 1700s.

Subject: Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association

Eliza Beaty keeps a boarding house in the William Whitted House

In the late nineteenth century Mrs. Eliza Beaty runs a well-known boarding house in the old William Whitted House at East Queen and North Churton streets. The Italianate wing facing Churton Street may have been added for her.

Subject: William Whitted House

James Tilley builds a small frame farmhouse on the NC 54 corridor

About 1870 James Tilley built a modest frame I-house with a separate frame kitchen, which remains in good shape. He lies in a family graveyard on the farm.

Mount Sinai Baptist Church is organized

Black Baptists organized Mount Sinai Baptist Church in 1870 with E. H. Cole as first pastor.

Orange County reports on its poorhouse to the new Board of Public Charities

Orange County's report to the state Board of Public Charities described two one-story brick buildings of six rooms each on a 400-acre tract five miles from Hillsborough. The poorhouse held 41 people, ten able to do light work, with ten deaths since July 1868.

People: Edmund Strudwick

Subject: Orange County poorhouse (County Home)

T. U. Faucett becomes stated supply at New Hope

Thomas U. Faucett served the church as stated supply from 1870 until the fall of 1872.

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

The 1870 census records Orange County's losses since

Against 1860, farm values fell from $2,141,690 to $977,308, improved acreage from 101,354 to 73,745 and livestock value by nearly half, while manufacturing establishments rose from 61 to 92. The population was 17,507, including 6,420 Black residents.

The Camerons move a two-story building thought to be slave quarters to Burnside

In the late nineteenth century the Cameron family moves a two-story frame building, thought to have been built as quarters for enslaved people, to the southeast corner of the Burnside house at 201 South Cameron Street. It was joined to the main house at the second floor in the 1950s.

Subject: Burnside

The Dukes move their tobacco business into a wooden factory in Durham

The Duke family's smoking tobacco business outgrows the farm and moves into a wooden factory at Durham, then still part of Orange County.

The Reilly Log House is built near Rougemont

A one-room log farmhouse with half-dovetailed corners, a rock chimney, and a log kitchen joined by a breezeway was built near Rougemont in the 1870s. Mattson treats it as one of the county's best late log dwellings.

The Watson family builds an ornate I-house near Cedar Grove

An ornate I-house is built on the Watson farm on NC 86 near Cedar Grove in the 1870s; the farm also keeps three log tobacco barns. It is on the Study List.

Trustees refuse land for a Black school in Chapel Hill

The Chapel Hill school committee of Morgan Closs, W. H. Bunch and H. C. Andrews asked the trustees for two acres on the Pittsboro Road next to the Hubbard lot for a school for Black children, saying friends of education would pay for a schoolhouse. The board declined because the land was under mortgage.

Builder John Berry dies at Sunny Side while starting the Berry Building

John Berry, the self-taught builder of the Orange County Courthouse and a longtime state legislator, died of pneumonia at his home Sunny Side at 72. He had caught cold that winter while beginning his last project, a two-story brick store and ballroom downtown known as the Berry Building.

Subject: Sunnyside (John Berry farm)

Thomas Ruffin dies at his Hillsborough home

Ruffin died in the northeast room of the house on January 15, 1870, and his widow Anne inherited the estate. He was buried at St. Matthew's Church in Hillsborough, on ground he had given for the church, where he had served on the vestry.

Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church · Ruffin-Roulhac House (Little Hawfields)

Joseph E. Pogue clerks in his brother E. H. Pogue's Hillsborough store

At 18, Joseph Ezekiel Pogue left East Tennessee for Hillsborough, where he clerked in the general store of his brother, E. H. Pogue, until September 1871. He then became a traveling salesman for a tobacco factory, the start of a tobacco career that took him to Henderson in 1875 and Raleigh in 1885.

People: E. H. Pogue

Frederick Strudwick takes an unexpired Orange County seat in the House

In February 1870 Strudwick, a Democrat, was chosen to fill the unexpired term of J. J. Allison in the North Carolina House of Representatives. He was elected to a full two-year term that August.

Hillsborough men ask Governor Holden to commission Pride Jones against the Klan

On March 5, 1870 six Hillsborough men, among them J. W. Norwood, James Webb and Henry K. Nash, recommended to Governor Holden that Pride Jones be made a militia captain to put down night riding. Holden sent the commission on March 7 and Jones accepted on March 9. The raids soon stopped, and Jones resigned after four weeks.

People: William W. Holden · Pride Jones

Disguised men whip residents of the county poorhouse

Men in disguise entered the poorhouse at night and whipped several of the men and women living there. On March 10 the commissioners offered a $200 reward for the attackers, over the written protest of commissioner W. N. Patterson, who defended the raiders' motives.

Subject: Orange County poorhouse (County Home)

Henrietta Heartt is appointed Hillsborough's postmaster

Henrietta Heartt becomes the first woman on the list of Hillsborough postmasters, succeeding Dennis Heartt. Harriet H. Strayhorn in 1873 and Mary E. Berry in 1882 followed her.

People: Dennis Heartt · Mary E. Strayhorn Berry

Dennis Heartt dies in Hillsborough

Dennis Heartt died at his home in Hillsborough on the morning of May 13, 1870, in his eighty-seventh year, and his funeral was held at the Presbyterian church the next day while the town's stores closed. The Recorder noted that Governor W. W. Holden, once his apprentice in the Recorder office, had him appointed Hillsborough postmaster after the war.

People: William W. Holden

Subject: Hillsborough Presbyterian Church

Historical society reorganized at the university's 1870 commencement

During commencement on June 8 and 9, 1870, a meeting with Professor Alexander McIver in the chair organized the North Carolina Historical Society with Col. John H. Wheeler as president and McIver as secretary and treasurer. A committee was named to recover from Eleanor H. Swain the books and manuscripts the society claimed.

People: Alexander McIver

The trustees vote to suspend the university's exercises and stop faculty salaries from February 1

On the motion of the Rev. James Reid of Franklin County, the Reconstruction board of trustees voted on December 1, 1870, to suspend the university's exercises until further orders, and on James B. Mason's motion fixed February 1, 1871, as the day the faculty's salaries ended. The same day President Solomon Pool laid before the board a plan to lease the Chapel Hill property and bring the state's colleges under the university, which its committees dropped on February 1.

People: Solomon Pool · James Augustus Graham

Orange County representative Frederick N. Strudwick moves to impeach Governor Holden

Frederick N. Strudwick of Orange introduced the House resolution to impeach Governor William W. Holden, which the House adopted on December 14, 1870. On December 19 he chaired the Committee of the Whole that adopted the eight articles of impeachment and elected the seven House managers.

People: William W. Holden · Frederick N. Strudwick

Strudwick is kept off the impeachment managers because of his Klan reputation

After guiding the impeachment resolution through the house judiciary committee and the full house, Strudwick was not chosen as a manager for the senate trial. It was feared that his widely known association with the Ku Klux Klan would make the proceedings look like a Klan prosecution.

Part of Kirk-Holden War connections, 1870 · 11 events

People: William W. Holden

Joseph Blount Cheshire studies law under William K. Ruffin at Hillsborough

Cheshire read law for several months under William K. Ruffin of Hillsborough, a son of Chief Justice Thomas Ruffin. He then worked three months in a Tarboro law office and was licensed in January 1872.

Land is bought for Hillsborough's (New) Town Cemetery on Corbin Street

The six-acre cemetery just north of the old town limits stands on land bought in 1871, though its earliest graves date from the 1860s. It now holds more than 3,000 graves in regular rows behind a brick wall on East Corbin Street, including military markers for both Confederate and Union soldiers.

William L. Saunders of Chapel Hill refuses to answer the congressional Klan committee

Called before the joint committee on affairs in the insurrectionary states, Saunders, whom the book names as head of the Invisible Empire in North Carolina, declined to answer 53 questions about the Ku Klux.

McIver moves that the faculty step aside for the university's revival

At a faculty meeting without President Pool, McIver offered a resolution that no member wished to stand in the way of reviving the university, since the faculty lacked public confidence. It passed with McIver and Patrick for and Brewer against.

People: Solomon Pool

William A. Graham of Hillsborough joins the prosecution of Governor Holden

The House managers announced to the impeachment court that former governor William A. Graham of Hillsborough, with Thomas Bragg and Augustus S. Merrimon, would act as their counsel. Graham argued points of evidence for the prosecution through the trial.

People: William A. Graham · Thomas Bragg · Thomas Sparrow

Solomon Pool asks alumni and friends to pay the university's debts

In January 1871 Pool addressed alumni and friends of the university and pleaded for money to pay off its debts. The appeal came too late, and the trustees decided that the institution should close on 1 February 1871.

Part of The university closes and reopens · 46 events

Lucinda Morrow of Hillsborough testifies at Governor Holden's impeachment trial

Called by Holden's defense, Lucinda Morrow, then living in Hillsborough, described disguised men breaking into her Cane Creek home in Orange County in the fall of 1869 and hanging her husband, Thomas Jefferson Morrow. Prosecution counsel William A. Graham objected to her evidence, and Augustus S. Merrimon argued it was irrelevant unless tied to Alamance County.

People: William A. Graham · Jefferson Morrow

Senate convicts Holden on the article charging Turner's arrest in Orange County

The state Senate found Governor Holden guilty, 37 to 12, on Article III, which charged him with the unlawful arrest of Josiah Turner Jr. in Orange County on August 5, 1870, and also convicted him on Articles IV through VIII. Senator John W. Graham of Orange then offered the order of judgment removing Holden from office and barring him from state office, which the Senate adopted.

People: William W. Holden · Josiah Turner Jr. · John W. Graham

Mary Pauline Fitzgerald is baptized at St. Matthew's

The seven-month-old daughter of the freedmen's teacher Robert G. Fitzgerald and his wife Cornelia was baptized at St. Matthew's, her mother standing as sponsor. As Pauline Fitzgerald Dame she later raised her niece, Pauli Murray.

People: Robert G. Fitzgerald

Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church

John T. Hogan and Samuel D. Blackwood are ordained elders at New Hope

The two men were ordained and added to the session. Hogan descended from the early elder John Freeland, and Blackwood from John Craig.

Subject: New Hope Presbyterian Church

John U. Kirkland is appointed a magistrate of Hillsborough township

When James B. McDade resigned as one of the township's magistrates, the board of trustees appointed John U. Kirkland to fill the vacancy, a choice the Recorder called admirable.

Bill Crabtree's grandfather builds a log homestead on Damascus Church Road

A log house was raised around 1872 for the grandfather of Bill Crabtree, the later owner. About 1900 a frame I-house with fashionable trim was built in front, and the log house became its rear ell.

David McCauley buys out his store partner Thomas A. Long

Merchant David McCauley bought out his partner, Thomas A. Long, and kept the Franklin Street general store on his own. Bryant credits the store's success, and McCauley's 1873 marriage to a daughter of Sidney Mulholland Barbee, for the property he was able to buy afterward.

People: David McCauley

John D. Cameron becomes editor and publisher of the Recorder

John Donald Cameron took over the Recorder from the Evans family, who kept only their Milton Chronicle. His masthead in January 1879 read 'J. D. Cameron, Editor and Proprietor', New Series Vol. 7, Old Series Vol. 58.

Subject: Hillsborough Recorder

November Caldwell, once enslaved by President Joseph Caldwell, dies

November Caldwell (1791-1872), held in slavery by Joseph Caldwell, brought firewood to the students, who were fond of him for his humor. A memorial in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery on the campus honors him.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery