Chronology

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: William Churton

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: Rachel Wright

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Subject: Eno Presbyterian Church

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.

People: Arthur Dobbs

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.

Subject: Hawfields Presbyterian Church · Eno Presbyterian Church

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Part of Creation of Orange County and Hillsborough, 1752–1766 · 27 events

People: William Churton

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.

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.

People: William Few

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough · Orange County jail, Hillsborough

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Subject: David Faucette House (The Elms)

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.

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.

People: Edmund Fanning

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.

People: Francis Nash · William Tryon

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.

Northern Orange residents petition for a county of their own

They told the General Assembly that travel to the county's musters and courts was a heavy burden. Caswell County was not formed until 1777.

William Few conveys his home place near Hillsborough to John Butler

In debt and weighing a move to Georgia, Few deeded the Kirkland place east of town to his friend John Butler, sheriff that year. Butler in turn sold the tract to the Scottish merchant Ralph MacNair on July 23, 1771.

People: John Butler · Ralph McNair

Guilford County is formed from Orange and Rowan

Governor Tryon assented to the act creating Guilford County from parts of Rowan and Orange, a bill Edmund Fanning had brought in. Tryon told the Earl of Hillsborough the new county was meant to divide the Regulator districts.

People: William Tryon

Governor Tryon's army turns its horses onto the Few farm's crops

Back at Hillsborough in mid-June 1771 after the Battle of Alamance, Governor William Tryon's army turned its horses onto the wheat, barley and oats of the Few farm a mile east of town, where William Few Sr. had given bond for Regulator leaders. The family left for Georgia that winter.

People: William Tryon

William Courtney buys the East King Street lots from Ralph McNair

William Courtney bought from Ralph McNair the lots at 141 East King Street where the house later called William Courtney's Yellow House stands.

People: Ralph McNair

Christopher Barbee buys his brother Francis's share of their father's land grant east of Chapel Hill

Christopher Barbee buys from his brother Francis the western half of the 585-acre grant their father William Barbee took up in 1753, which included the hilltop later called The Mountain. Barbee made his plantation there, and a stone foundation at Meadowmont is thought to be his house.

Subject: The Mountain (Christopher Barbee plantation, now Meadowmont)

William Cain acquires the Pleasant Grove plantation on the Trading Path

William Cain acquired the Orange County property later called Pleasant Grove, beside the old Indian Trading Path, and held it until his death in 1834.

Subject: Pleasant Grove (William Cain plantation)

Samuel Strudwick asks the Assembly to stop taxing him on the whole Haw Fields

Strudwick petitioned for relief from taxes on the entire Haw Fields tract, saying settlers had blocked his court-ordered survey and, since the Revolution, had taken state patents on nearly all of the 30,000 acres, even his own house and plantation.

Jesse Benton's son Thomas Hart Benton is born near Hart's Mill

Thomas Hart Benton, later a U.S. senator from Missouri, was born in 1782 at Hart's Mill near Hillsborough, the son of Jesse and Ann Gooch Benton.

Jesse Benton of Orange County writes to Thomas Hart about legal disputes

Jesse Benton of Orange County wrote to Thomas Hart about legal disputes and the pursuit of enslaved people. The letter survives in the Jesse Benton Papers at the State Archives.

People: Thomas Hart

William Hooper divides enslaved people among his children

At Hillsborough, William Hooper gave his son Thomas Hogg Hooper a woman named Judah and her child Jack, in place of Tom, a man Robert Hogg had willed to Thomas and whom Hooper had sold to Samuel Campbell for 120 pounds. The same day, to put his children on an equal footing, he made over Pat and her son Alfred to his daughter Elizabeth and sold a girl named Molly to his son William, each transfer completed by handing a silver spoon to James Hogg as trustee.

People: William Hooper · James Hogg

Samuel Strudwick's long Haw Fields lawsuits come to an end

Litigation between Strudwick and settlers on the Haw Fields tract, begun a few years after his 1766 meeting with them, ended in 1788 with Strudwick having lost about a third of the property.

Simon Lindley and Anna Stanley make their home in Orange County

After marrying Anna Stanley in South Carolina on July 14, 1789, Simon Lindley settled with her in Orange County. The family moved to Christian County, Kentucky, in the mid-1790s.

David Faucette buys the home tract and a grist mill from his father

David Faucette paid his father Richard 400 pounds for two adjoining tracts of 100 acres where he was already living, with a grist mill and other improvements. He later built the two-story frame house that still stands above the Eno.

Subject: David Faucette House (The Elms)

Hillsborough builders add a Federal-style house at Cain's Pleasant Grove

The Cains commissioned the Hillsborough builders Martin Palmer and Samuel Hopkins to build a second, Federal-style house about ten feet from the original 1775 Georgian house at Pleasant Grove.

Subject: Pleasant Grove (William Cain plantation)

Trustees fix the university at Chapel Hill and list its Orange County land donors

Meeting on December 5, 1792, the trustees voted unanimously to place the university at New Hope Chapel Hill and recorded nine donors of Orange County land, among them Matthew McCauley (150 acres) and William McCauley (100 acres). Each donor could have one student educated free of tuition.

People: John Hogan · Edmund Jones · Mark Morgan

James Hogg moves across the Eno to Poplar Hill

Hogg, who owned the land along the south bank of the Eno opposite the town, lived east of Hillsborough on the later Cameron property until 1793 or 1794. He then moved across the river to Poplar Hill, later the site of Julian S. Carr's Occoneechee Farm.

People: Julian S. Carr

Subject: Occoneechee Farm

William Kirkland opens his own store in Hillsborough

William Kirkland, who left Ayr, Scotland, to work in the mercantile trade, had married and opened his own store in Hillsborough by 1793.

William Cain is the largest landowner in Orange County, enslaving 30 people

By 1800 William Cain owned 4,417 acres, the most of any landowner in Orange County, and enslaved 30 people at Pleasant Grove, a number he increased to 95 by 1830.

Subject: Pleasant Grove (William Cain plantation)

James Hogg sells Poplar Hill to his son-in-law William Norwood

James Hogg, who had built the house later called Poplar Hill on an 1,100-acre tract on the south bank of the Eno, sells the estate in 1803 to his son-in-law William Norwood. It later became the home of John Wall Norwood.

People: William Norwood

Allan Bubberly sells the future Weaver House property to Thomas Weaver

In 1811 Allan Bubberly conveyed the old homestead and tavern property on the Hillsborough road to Thomas Weaver. Weaver's descendants kept it for ninety-nine years, and the house still carries the family name.

Subject: Weaver House

William Kirkland gives four enslaved people to Thomas and Anne Ruffin

Out of affection for his son-in-law Thomas Ruffin and his daughter Anne, William Kirkland of Ayr Mount conveyed to Ruffin a woman named Juley, her two children, John and an infant, and a young girl, all of them already in the Ruffins' household. The deed was proved at the Orange County court that August.

People: William Kirkland · Thomas Ruffin · Anne Kirkland Ruffin

Subject: Ayr Mount

Jacob Jeffries of the Texas community makes his will

The will of Jacob Jeffries, one of the first heads of household on the 1787 tax list, was witnessed by David Haitcock, and one of his daughters married into the Guy family. Hazel reads such ties among the Jeffries, Haitcock, Guy and Whitmore families as the marks of a single community that married within itself.

Willie P. Mangum represents Orange County in the House of Commons

In 1818, a year after his admission to the bar, Willie P. Mangum was elected to the House of Commons for Orange County, where he promoted constitutional reform.

Mary Walker is born into an enslaved family held by the Bennehans and Camerons

Mary Walker was born to Priscilla, whose mother Aggy had been one of the first enslaved children born on the Bennehan plantation in 1781. Her monument at Mount Auburn Cemetery records her birth in Orange County.

Jeffries and other Texas community families move to Ohio and Indiana

From the 1820s to the 1840s a number of families left the Texas community for Greene County, Ohio, and some went on to Rush and Whitley counties in Indiana. There members of the Jeffries family won three court cases between 1842 and 1869 over whether, as people of Indian descent, they could vote.

Texas community families leave Orange for Sugar Fork in Macon County

In the 1820s, after the Cherokee cession opened the land, a group of Guy, Whitmore, Jeffries and Gibson families from the Texas community moved to the mountains and formed the Sugar Fork settlement in Macon County. It stayed distinct for many years; letters of 1869 and 1872 to the Indian Office described its people as Catawba who had come from Orange County.

Burials begin in the Matthew and Martha McCauley family cemetery

The family burial ground of Matthew and Martha McCauley, who gave land for the university, lies on Old Fayetteville Road near University Lake. Its graves date from about 1825 to 1850.

Planter William Cabe dies and is buried in the family graveyard on the Eno

William Cabe, who held 1,389 acres of corn and wheat land on the Eno, died without a will. His marked stone is one of two legible among twelve graves in the Cabe family cemetery south of the house.

Commissioners divide William Cabe's 1,389 acres among his heirs

Court-appointed commissioners split Cabe's land into nine lots. Lot three, 160 acres where the Cabe-Pratt-Harris House stands, went to his daughter Jamima, then married to Jehu Brown.

The census lists the Texas community families as free Negro heads of household

The 1830 federal census for the North District of Orange County listed the Whitmores, Jeffrieses, Corns, Burnettes, Haithcocks and Joneses among free Negro heads of household. Through the nineteenth century county and federal records almost always classed these families as free colored or mulatto, and almost never as Indian.

A notice offers Christopher Barbee's livestock and household goods for sale at his late home

Two years after Christopher Barbee died, a public notice offered his horses, cattle, corn, farm tools and household and kitchen furniture for sale at his late residence on The Mountain. His son William, the executor, had his own plantation and a house in the village, and no Barbee seems to have lived there afterward.

Subject: The Mountain (Christopher Barbee plantation, now Meadowmont)

Duncan Cameron gives his son Paul C. Cameron forty-one enslaved people

Duncan Cameron deeded his son Paul C. Cameron forty-one enslaved people, with any children the women would bear: Gabriel, Mima, Simeon and Sarah in Orange County, and families at the Mill Quarter plantation in Person County, among them Phillip and Jenny and their children Randol, Jim, Ellen, Nancy and Phill. Cameron acknowledged the deed before Justice William Gaston at Raleigh on January 1, 1835.

People: Duncan Cameron · Paul C. Cameron · William Gaston

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

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

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

William Kirkland dies, leaving Ayr Mount to his widow

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

People: John U. Kirkland

Subject: Ayr Mount

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

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

Commissioners seek bids to repair the Eno bridge at Hillsborough

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

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

Subject: Eno River road bridge, Hillsborough

Willie P. Mangum builds Walnut Hall at Red Mountain

Willie P. Mangum built Walnut Hall from 1842 to 1845 as an addition to his father's house of about 1800. His wife ran the 600-acre plantation, where Mangum enslaved 20 people in 1850.

Paul C. Cameron sends enslaved people from the family farms to cotton plantations in Alabama and Mississippi

Paul C. Cameron bought a cotton plantation in Greene County, Alabama, in 1844 and land for another in Tunica County, Mississippi, in 1856, and sent more than 100 enslaved men and women from the family's North Carolina farms to them.

Part of Slavery in Orange County · 102 events

John U. Kirkland is elected a Warden of the Poor for Orange County

At an election in April 1844 Orange County chose Cadwallader Jones, Dr. James Webb, Green Jordan, Nathaniel Bain, James Faucett, John U. Kirkland and Samuel N. Tate as Wardens of the Poor.

People: Cadwallader Jones · James Webb

Subject: Orange County poorhouse (County Home)

Caroline Mallett Walker conveys the Margaret Lane house to James M. Palmer

In 1846 Caroline Mary Walker conveyed the lateral-hall house at 173 West Margaret Lane, by deed of trust, to James M. Palmer. Palmer, bankrupt, gave it up in 1863, and a later owner, Tom Haise or Hayes, kept a shoemaker's shop there.

Most of Orange County's common surnames date back to the 1779 tax list

Forty-nine of the sixty surnames most common in Orange County in 1850 were already on the 1779 tax list, evidence that many families stayed put even as others moved west.

Paul C. Cameron builds new quarters for enslaved families at Horton Grove

In the decade before the Civil War Paul C. Cameron began a building campaign at the family's Horton Grove farm near Stagville. Four of the dwellings built to house families the Camerons enslaved still stand.

Part of Slavery in Orange County · 102 events

Baptist minister James Pleasant Mason marries Mary Elizabeth Morgan

Mary Elizabeth Morgan (1825-1894) had inherited a tract south of Chapel Hill that came down from early settler Mark Morgan through his son John and grandson Solomon P. Morgan. The couple had four daughters, two of whom died as infants.

Peter Brown Ruffin buys the land that became Margaret Lane Cemetery

According to the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, Peter Brown Ruffin, owner of Occoneechee Farm, bought the land now called Margaret Lane Cemetery as a burial ground for people enslaved by him and his neighbor Cadwalader Jones. Plaques placed in 1987 date burials there from before 1852, and it remained a burial ground for Black residents of Hillsborough until 1931.

Subject: Margaret Lane Cemetery · Occoneechee Farm

Ralph Graves sells the West King Street lot later the Parks-Richmond House to John J. Freeland

In 1854 Ralph Graves, husband of Emma Taylor, sold Lot 18 on West King Street, for many years the home of clerk of court John Taylor, to John J. Freeland. Elbert H. and Emily Pogue owned it from the 1870s.

Abner Burnette is twice prosecuted for carrying a gun and once recorded as Indian

Abner Burnette of the Texas community was indicted in Alamance County in 1855 for carrying a gun, which was unlawful for free persons of color. He pled guilty and was fined thirty one dollars. Indicted again in 1860 he pled not guilty, was convicted and was fined five cents. The 1860 census for Orange County recorded him as Indian, and the 1870 Alamance County census as mulatto.

Paul C. Cameron repurchases Burnside and moves back to Hillsborough

Paul and Anne Ruffin Cameron left Fairntosh in 1856, bought back Burnside, the Hillsborough house where they had first lived after their 1832 marriage, and moved back to town.

Subject: Burnside

James H. Pratt buys the Jehu Brown tract and a second share of the Cabe land

John Burton, Jamima Cabe's son by her first marriage, sold the 160-acre Jehu Brown tract with the house to Pratt by a deed dated 1860. The same year Pratt bought 130 adjoining acres that had been Nancy Cabe's share of her father's land.

Most white male household heads in Orange County own no land

Citing Robert Kenzer's study of the county, the report says that in 1860 some 59 percent of white men heading households held no land and 71.5 percent held no slaves. A third held between 1 and 250 acres, and 21.6 percent held from one to nine enslaved people.

John Newman acquires the old Federal house on West Queen Street that his family keeps for generations

John Newman acquired the one-story Federal house at 230 West Queen Street in the mid-1860s. It passed to his son William Henry Newman in 1917 and then to his daughters Estelle, Josie and Gertrude, and late 1940s wings were added on each side.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

The Turner family goes bankrupt and its North Churton Street estate is sold at auction

In 1872 the Turner family goes bankrupt and its estate around the house at 404 North Churton Street is sold at auction. Edmund Strudwick of Norfolk bought the house in 1887.

Subject: Turner-Strudwick House

Anne Ruffin dies and Little Hawfields passes to her heirs

Anne Kirkland Ruffin, who had inherited the Hillsborough house on Thomas Ruffin's death in 1870, died on October 28, 1875. The estate passed to her children and a grandchild.

Subject: Ruffin-Roulhac House (Little Hawfields)

Nelson P. Hall buys the Ellis house and 267 acres on the Eno

Nelson Parrish Hall bought 267 acres of the Ellis land with the brick house, though his family may have lived there since about 1870, when his son Simeon was listed as a miller. The mill on the Eno across the road took the Hall name as Hall's Mill.

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

William Cole buys the Smith plantation seat on Smith Level Road

The Smith family held its large plantation south of Carrboro until the 1880s, when William Cole bought the 1845 house. No bigger pre-war house survives in the township, and in 1992 it stood almost unchanged on 130 acres.

Typhoid kills the two surviving Mason daughters, and their father sets aside a family burial ground

Martha James Mason and Carolina Varina Mason both died of typhoid fever in 1881; their father caught it as well but recovered. James P. Mason marked off a small plot on the family land where all four daughters and later both parents were buried inside an iron fence, beside the graves of Solomon and Ann Morgan.

The Berry family moves to Sunnyside south of Hillsborough

Dr. John and Mary Strayhorn Berry moved from their West King Street house, now known as Two Chimneys, to Sunnyside, the Berry family plantation two miles south of town. Mary Berry tutored her daughter Harriet at home until she was twelve.

People: Harriet Morehead Berry

Subject: Sunnyside (John Berry farm)

Memorial Hall rises at UNC under Paul C. Cameron's building committee

The cornerstone of Swain Memorial Hall was laid on September 25, 1883, and the hall was dedicated on June 3, 1885, honoring President David L. Swain, faculty and the university's Confederate dead. Paul C. Cameron, president of the Alumni Association and chairman of the building committee, raised money for it and gave money himself.

People: Kemp Plummer Battle · David L. Swain

Subject: Memorial Hall

James H. Pratt's will leaves the Cabe farm to the family of Lucinda Harris

Pratt left the 140-acre Cabe tract and the 160-acre Jehu Brown tract to Lucinda Harris for life and then to her daughters Emma and Jane, keeping a promise to provide for the family after her husband Benton Harris died in the Civil War. The Harrises held the farm until 1942.

A Hogan family log house goes up on Homestead Road

In the 1890s a one-room log house was built for one of the Hogans, a family with homes all along the road. About 1935 it was built over and enlarged.

The name Texas appears on William Spoon's map of Alamance County

William Spoon's 1893 map of Alamance County labels a road in northern Pleasant Grove Township the Texas Road and the section below it Texas, the earliest dated use of the community's name that Hazel found. The 1928 county map uses the name as well; its origin is unknown.

The Texas community builds Jeffries Cross Church and Martin's Chapel Baptist Church

Around the turn of the twentieth century the community built two churches on land given by Joe and Levi Jeffries and by Sam Martin, in place of the circuit riding preachers who had served the settlement before. Social life in the community turned on its churches and its school.

William Edgar Shambley builds a log house near his grandfather's

About 1900 William Edgar Shambley, grandson of William Shambley, built a one-room log house of the usual local type at Cornwallis and Mount Hermon Church roads, a sign that log building went on into the new century.

Commissioners create Cheeks and Eno townships

Acting on a 1903 act, the county board carved Cheeks Township out of western Hillsboro Township and formed Eno River Township out of pieces of Hillsboro and Little River.

Martha Hall sells the Ellis house to Sheriff R. D. Baine

After Nelson Hall died, his widow Martha bought the house and farm from his estate and sold them two years later to Orange County sheriff R. D. Baine.

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

Patterson Mill miller George Brown buys a farm on Mount Moriah Road

In 1905 George Brown, the miller at Patterson Mill, acquired the 1885 farmstead; his children still owned it in 1992.

William D. Hogan builds a frame I-house on Homestead Road

In 1908 a small two-story frame house was built for William D. Hogan near Calvander. It was still well kept in 1992, with two later outbuildings.

Brothers John and Page Couch add a frame front to a log house on Cornwallis Road

Around 1910 a small frame house was built onto the front of a one-room log house for the brothers John and Page Couch. A log barn and a log building that may have housed tenants stand behind.

Orange County mobilizes for World War I

Orange County organized a Council of Defense, Red Cross chapters in Chapel Hill (May 28, 1917) and Hillsborough (June 1, 1917), Liberty Loan and War Savings drives, and food conservation committees. On October 1, 1918, 650 UNC students were inducted into the Student Army Training Corps, and volunteers nursed the sick during the influenza epidemic.

The Sparrow family takes over a Blackwood farm near Mount Carmel Church Road

A farm first held by the Blackwood family passed to the Sparrows in the 1920s. It keeps a much-changed two-story house and a good group of log outbuildings.

The Mayo family's quarry land near Hillsborough is sold to Duke's land agent for $500

A deed at the Orange County courthouse records that Duke land agent Murray Jones paid the Mayo family $500 in March 1925 for land with a working stone quarry, the source of the stone for Duke's new campus. According to family accounts, George Mayo refused to sell until he was jailed and signed so his family would not go hungry.

Subject: Duke land purchases in Orange County · Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough

Patrick L. Clayton sells his farm northwest of Hillsboro to James B. Duke's agents for $4,000

The Chapel Hill Weekly reported that Patrick L. Clayton, who had paid $200 for a 70-acre farm about a mile northwest of Hillsboro twenty years earlier, had sold it to representatives of James B. Duke for $4,000 for its building stone. Architects and builders had judged the stone suitable for the new Duke University.

Subject: Duke land purchases in Orange County

Alexander H. Graham inherits Montrose on the death of his father, John W. Graham

When John W. Graham died in 1928, Montrose passed to his son Alexander H. 'Sandy' Graham, later lieutenant governor.

People: John W. Graham

Subject: Montrose

The Martin School is consolidated into Pleasant Grove Union School

The Martin School, attended almost entirely by Indian children, was merged in 1930 with several other small schools to form Pleasant Grove Union School. The change was unpopular in the community because the school would no longer be exclusively Indian, though it brought better facilities and was in time accepted.

Mary Strayhorn Berry's recollections of antebellum Hillsborough are typed

A typed transcription of Mary Elizabeth Strayhorn Berry's "Reminiscences of the Old South" records the names, family ties and skills of many people enslaved by the Strayhorn, Nichols and other Hillsborough families, and her father's store and cobbler shop.

The Williams family buys a 38-acre farm on Mount Carmel Church Road

In 1935 the Williams family acquired a farm whose buildings were already old: an antebellum frame hall-and-parlor house, two log outbuildings of the same age and two log tenant houses.

Archaeologists excavate the wall site believing it to be Occaneechi Town

Joffre Coe began digging a village site on a bend of the Eno at Hillsborough in 1938 in the belief that it was the town John Lawson visited in 1701, and Robert Wauchope carried the work on in 1940 and 1941 with federal funding. A state highway marker for the Occaneechi village was erected at Hillsborough in 1941. The village Coe had found was in fact an earlier settlement of about 1400 to 1600.

Joffre Coe publishes an archaeological survey of the Occoneechee Hills area

Coe's study The Cultural Sequence of the Carolina Piedmont, in a volume edited by James B. Griffin, reported a survey and excavation near the Occoneechee Hills outside Hillsborough carried out under the Archaeological Society of North Carolina.

Eno Mill houses are relocated

Most company houses moved into nearby neighborhoods.

Subject: Eno Mill

Mary Claire Engstrom and her husband buy the Nash-Hooper House in Hillsborough

In 1959 Mary Claire Engstrom, who had earned a UNC doctorate in English literature in 1939, and her husband, UNC French professor Alfred G. Engstrom, bought the Nash-Hooper House in Hillsborough. From then on she turned her research to the history of Hillsborough and its surroundings.

People: Alfred G. Engstrom

Subject: Nash-Hooper House

Mary Claire Engstrom documents 122 Hillsborough sites for the Historic American Buildings Survey

From 1963 to 1965 Mary Claire Engstrom documented 122 old structures and historic sites in and around Hillsborough for the Historic American Buildings Survey. Her research helped many of them reach the National Register, including the Nash-Hooper House as a National Historic Landmark, and helped establish two Hillsborough historic districts.

Subject: Nash-Hooper House

Mary Claire Engstrom helps found the Hillsborough Historical Society

Mary Claire Engstrom was instrumental in founding the Hillsborough Historical Society, which filed National Register applications for local buildings, led walking tours and published newsletters and journals. It merged with the Orange County Historical Museum in 2007.

Subject: Orange County Historical Museum

Mary Claire Engstrom chairs the Historic Hillsborough Commission

Mary Claire Engstrom chaired the Historic Hillsborough Commission, a state-appointed body created in 1963, from 1964 to 1966 and again from 1976 to 1983. Her research files for the commission and other projects cover deeds, cemeteries, mills, inns, Quaker settlements and schools such as the Hillsborough Academy and the Burwell School.

Subject: Burwell School

The state puts the Occoneechi village site in Orange County on the Study List

At its July 12, 1979 meeting the State Professional Review Committee looked at slides of four archaeological sites, one of them the Occoneechi Village Site in Orange County. It deferred a Mecklenburg cabin site for lack of documentation and placed the other three, the Orange County site among them, on the Study List.

The Fredricks site is found and excavated and Occaneechi Town is located

UNC archaeologists trying to relocate the Wall site in the spring of 1983 found European trade goods among Indian pottery in a garden about a hundred yards away, and dug there for four seasons. They uncovered a palisaded village of about a quarter of an acre with ten to twelve houses set around a plaza, a sweat lodge and a cemetery outside the stockade, and identified it as the Occaneechi town Lawson visited in 1701.

People: Roy S. Dickens

State reviewers approve adding the Frederick archaeological site to the Hillsborough Historic District

The Office of State Archaeology brought site 31Or231, listed on the agenda as the Frederick Site, to the State Professional Review Committee as an amendment to the Hillsborough Historic District. On April 12, 1984 the committee approved it with the day's other National Register nominations, without separate discussion.

Subject: Hillsborough Historic District

Cane Creek Conservation Authority members go to the General Assembly to oppose an OWASA bill

Fifteen members of the Cane Creek Conservation Authority traveled to the legislature to oppose a bill OWASA sought to settle its outstanding court cases and widen its authority.

Part of Water for the towns: University Lake, the 1976–77 drought, and OWASA · 31 events

Carrboro adds sexual orientation to its equal employment opportunity policy

The Board of Aldermen unanimously amended the town's personnel ordinance to add sexual orientation to the characteristics protected in its merit principle and equal employment opportunity policy. On November 13, 1990 the Board had written a sexual orientation nondiscrimination clause into a planning grant agreement with the City of Durham and asked for the code amendment to be scheduled.

People: Jacquelyn Gist

Gold family donates future park land

The donation supplied land later developed as Gold Park.

Mary Claire Engstrom dies

Mary Claire Engstrom, born in Kansas City in 1906, died on May 20, 1997. She had lived in Hillsborough and continued her historical research there until her death.

Mayor Mike Nelson proclaims June Lesbian and Gay Pride Month in Carrboro

At the Board of Aldermen meeting of June 3, 1997, Mayor Michael Nelson issued a proclamation naming June Lesbian and Gay Pride Month in the Town of Carrboro.

People: Mike Nelson

The Earnhardt family gives Triangle Land Conservancy an easement on the Andrews farm

Jean and John Earnhardt, Troy and Robin Andrews's daughter and son-in-law, and their sons' families donated a conservation easement to Triangle Land Conservancy in March 1998, protecting 120 acres of the old Andrews farm around Bolin Creek from development.

Subject: Bolin Brook Farm (Troy and Roberta Andrews House)

Lydia Lavelle takes office as Carrboro mayor, the first openly lesbian mayor in North Carolina

Lydia Lavelle, who ran unopposed for mayor in the fall 2013 election, was sworn in on December 3, 2013 as North Carolina's first openly lesbian mayor. Aldermen Randee Haven-O'Donnell, Sammy Slade and Jacquelyn Gist were sworn in for new terms at the same meeting.

People: Lydia Lavelle · Jacquelyn Gist · Randee Haven-O'Donnell · Sammy Slade

Carrboro Board of Aldermen calls for the repeal of House Bill 2 at a Saturday special meeting

Three days after the General Assembly passed and Governor Pat McCrory signed House Bill 2, the Board met in special session and adopted a resolution affirming the dignity of LGBT people, calling for the law's repeal and urging other North Carolina governments to use it as a model, then adopted a second resolution condemning by name the legislators and governor who enacted it. Both passed six to none with Jacquelyn Gist absent, and the Board asked staff to raise the town's rainbow pride flags on March 28.

People: Lydia Lavelle · Randee Haven-O'Donnell · Sammy Slade

Carrboro Town Council adopts a nondiscrimination ordinance covering sexual orientation and gender identity

Six weeks after the state's moratorium on local employment and public accommodation ordinances expired on December 1, 2020, the Council unanimously adopted Ordinance No. 10/20-21, adding to Chapter 8 of the Town Code a ban on discrimination in employment and places of public accommodation that covers sexual orientation and gender identity or expression. The ordinance took effect on adoption and cited the town's March 26, 2016 pledge to seek such protections.

People: Lydia Lavelle · Jacquelyn Gist · Randee Haven-O'Donnell · Sammy Slade · Barbara Foushee