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Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1860s
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Historic Black neighborhoods of Chapel Hill and Carrboro
Northside, Pine Knolls, Tin Top and Pottersfield in Chapel Hill and the Lloyd–Broad neighborhood in Carrboro grew from land bought by freedpeople such as Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, around their churches, the Orange County Training School and Lincoln High. Urban renewal, campus growth and rising land prices pressed them from the 1970s, and conservation districts, a zoning overlay in Carrboro and the Jackson Center’s work have answered since 2004.
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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.
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Northside, Pine Knolls, and Tin Top
Chapel Hill’s historic Black neighborhoods took shape after emancipation around the West End church and school, the Orange County Training School and its Rosenwald campus of 1924, St. Joseph CME and First Baptist, and the tin-roofed houses that named Tin Top. Lincoln High opened on Merritt Mill Road in 1951, residents resisted urban renewal in the 1970s, and as the Black population fell by about 40 percent the conservation districts, the Jackson Center and the 2015 Northside initiative worked to keep the neighborhoods in place.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Freedpeople build a church and school at Chapel Hill's West End
After emancipation, Black families kept homes and small farms on Chapel Hill's west end. St. Paul's congregation, first gathered under an arbor in December 1864, built a log church on Merritt Mill Road and bought land in 1878, and in 1866 Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal bought an acre nearby for a freedmen's school.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Union troops occupy Chapel Hill
Wheeler's Confederates left Chapel Hill at midday on Easter Sunday, April 16, and a small Federal party rode in at sunset, met President David Lowry Swain and returned to camp. Smith D. Atkins's cavalry took possession about 8 a.m. on Monday, April 17, posting guards from the Ninth Michigan at houses that asked for them and quartering officers and horses in the college buildings.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Confederate leaders gather at Hillsborough
Wade Hampton and Joseph E. Johnston used the Dickson farm on the edge of Hillsborough as a temporary headquarters while Johnston negotiated with Sherman, and Confederate officials including Secretary of War John C. Breckinridge came there to work on terms. Johnston and his staff rode from the Dickson place along the old Hillsborough to Durham road to complete the surrender.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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First Baptist Church organizes independently
The minute books of the church now called University Baptist record a unanimous vote on September 3, 1865 to let the colored patrons withdraw and organize a church of their own, and note that sixty-one colored members were dismissed that month for the purpose. The new congregation, later First Baptist Church of Chapel Hill, met at first in the old Quaker schoolhouse on Franklin Street under Rev. Eddie H. Cole.
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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.
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Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation
After emancipation, Black residents of Orange County built their own institutions. Chapel Hill's First Baptist Church formed in September 1865; Job Berry and Philadelphia Quakers opened Hillsborough's freedmen's school in the old courthouse on June 5, 1866; Black residents bought land for a Chapel Hill school in 1866; and St. Paul AME bought its church lot in 1878.
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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.
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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.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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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.
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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.
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Freedpeople register their marriages in Orange County
An 1866 state law declared formerly enslaved couples who had lived together as husband and wife legally married and required them to register their unions, most often with the county register of deeds. Orange County’s cohabitation records from that registration survive at the State Archives and are digitized in North Carolina Digital Collections.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Orange County votes against the proposed state constitution of
Voters rejected the constitution submitted by the reconvened convention, 494 to 392.
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Quakers open a freedmen's school in Chapel Hill
In 1866 Philadelphia Friends opened a school for Black children in Chapel Hill; by early 1867 it had been running more than half a year with 248 pupils, in a rented house while the freedpeople built a school and house of worship on a fifty-dollar lot the Friends had bought. The school, which came to stand on the land near West Franklin Street and Merritt Mill Road that Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal bought in 1866, merged into Orange County Training School in 1917.
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The AME congregation later called Dickerson Chapel begins worshipping in the old courthouse
The AME congregation later known as Dickerson Chapel moved into the 1790 courthouse building on Queen Street in 1866, sharing it with the freedmen's school the Philadelphia Friends ran there. Lefler and Wager date its formal organization to 1873, and the Friends conveyed the building to the church's trustees in 1886.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal secure land for a Black school
At an estate auction in January 1866 Benjamin Craig, a local farmer, and Green Cordal, a formerly enslaved minister, bought one acre opposite the northwest end of Franklin Street for fifty dollars, and by August 1867 had conveyed it to three Philadelphia Friends for the relief of colored freedmen. The Friends sent George Dixon and his family to run the school, which stood at what is now 100 Merritt Mill Road on the edge of Northside.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Freedpeople hold a Black Fourth of July celebration
Cornelia Phillips Spencer's journal records that the Black residents of Chapel Hill marched in procession behind a banner, heard an address by Colonel J. J. Guthrie and a reading of part of the Declaration of Independence by Jurdon Swain, then sat down to a dinner they had provided themselves on the ground bought from the Craigs for their new school house. The banner mottoes were "Respect for Former Owners" and "Our Hope is in God".
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Black men vote in Orange County's first Reconstruction election
Under the 1867 Reconstruction Acts, Black men registered and voted alongside white men in the November 19-20, 1867 election for a state constitutional convention. Orange County elected E. M. Holt and J. W. Graham as delegates.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Governor Holden appoints Wilson Caldwell a justice of the peace
In 1868 Governor William W. Holden appointed Wilson Swain Caldwell a justice of the peace. Caldwell had been enslaved by university president David L. Swain and had worked at the university since boyhood; he taught school for a time before returning to the university in 1875.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Reconstruction Republicans reshape UNC governance
The 1868 constitution gave the choice of university trustees to the state Board of Education, controlled by Governor William W. Holden. In July 1868 the new trustees removed President David L. Swain and his faculty, and a Republican faculty under Solomon Pool reopened classes in March 1869 amid strong partisan opposition.
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The university closes and reopens
Reconstruction Republicans took control of the trustees in 1868 and dismissed the old faculty; Solomon Pool's presidency drew almost no students, and the university closed in February 1871. The legislature revived it in March 1875, Cornelia Phillips Spencer rang the bell, and it reopened in September under a rebuilt faculty.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Robert Fitzgerald and his brother start a brick kiln
Robert G. Fitzgerald, who came to Hillsborough in January 1868 to teach a freedmen's school, set up a brick kiln in partnership with his brother; his diaries through 1871 record its supplies and labor. His brother Richard was selling bricks in Durham by 1869.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Washington Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow and Daniel Morrow are lynched
Early on August 7, 1869, about 100 disguised white men took Washington Morrow and his brother Nelson from the Hillsborough jail, where they were held on barn-burning charges, and shot Washington as they fled; he died of the wound. On October 14 a mob hanged their father, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, and their uncle, Daniel Morrow.
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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.
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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.
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Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County
Six people are documented as lynched in Orange County: Washington Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, Daniel Morrow, Wright Malone and Cyrus Guy in 1869, and Manly McCauley in 1898. In September 2022 the county commissioners apologized for racial-terror lynchings and approved markers, citing five cases without naming the victims.
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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.
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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.
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Orange County in the Kirk–Holden War
Governor Holden named Orange County in his October 1869 warning about Klan violence, Hillsborough men were named in a Klan plot against Senator T. M. Shoffner, and Kirk's militia arrested Josiah Turner Jr. at Hillsborough in August 1870. Orange men Frederick N. Strudwick, William A. Graham and John W. Graham then helped bring, prosecute and decide Holden's impeachment.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
- 1870s
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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John and Mary Jane Pope build their farm near Cedar Grove
John S. Pope, a Confederate captain, and his wife Mary Jane McDade Pope built a two-story I-house on land she inherited from her father's estate in 1869; it was likely finished by 1874, when her brother's share brought the tract to about 73 acres. Tobacco was the farm's main cash crop, and its oldest surviving barn dates to about 1875.
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Mount Sinai Baptist Church is organized
Black Baptists organized Mount Sinai Baptist Church in 1870 with E. H. Cole as first pastor.
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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.
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St. Paul joins the African Methodist Episcopal Church
Six years after it began meeting under a grape arbor in 1864, the Chapel Hill Black Methodist congregation now known as St. Paul AME received word in 1870 that it had been accepted into the African Methodist Episcopal Church, headquartered in Philadelphia.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Rival claimants to Chapel Hill's town offices are told to stand down
On March 30, 1870, the Chapel Hill commissioners recorded that a group of residents claimed to be the village's officers, had taken some of the town's books and papers and had named A. Mickle magistrate of police. On April 1, Solomon Pool reported that their election had been held without any law authorizing it, on informal notice from T. M. Argo, and the board adopted his advice to take no action if they gave up the books.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Kirk's militia arrests Josiah Turner Jr. at Hillsborough
On August 5, 1870, a detachment of Kirk's state militia seized Raleigh Sentinel editor Josiah Turner Jr. at or near Hillsborough, took him by rail to Company Shops and then held him with Kirk's other prisoners in the Caswell County courthouse at Yanceyville. U.S. District Judge George W. Brooks ordered him discharged on August 19, 1870, on his habeas corpus petition.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Hillsborough constable describes Orange County Klan killings to a U.S. Senate committee
W. G. Turrentine, a Hillsborough constable, told the Senate select committee in Washington that five Black men had been killed in Orange County and many people whipped, some for voting Republican. He described how, in August 1869, 75 to 100 disguised men forced the Hillsborough jail and shot a prisoner held on a barn-burning charge, who died.
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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.
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U.S. Senate committee hears Orange County testimony on Klan violence
A Senate select committee created on January 19, 1871 took testimony in Washington on Klan violence in North Carolina. Orange County witnesses, including Hillsborough constable W. G. Turrentine, court clerk George Laws and editor Josiah Turner Jr., described the 1869 jail raid, hangings and whippings in the county. The committee reported on March 10, 1871.
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The University of North Carolina closes
Under President Solomon Pool and the Reconstruction board of trustees, the university shut down on February 1, 1871, after years of few students, little money and public opposition. It reopened on Monday, September 6, 1875.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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