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Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
- 1860s
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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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A trustee committee including Albion W. Tourgee finds the university not bound to pay its bank debt
On Edward Cantwell's motion the Reconstruction trustees named Cantwell, Justice E. G. Reade and Albion W. Tourgee to inquire into the university's debts. Their report held that the university was not legally or equitably bound to pay its debt to the bank, since it could not buy bank stock on credit, and that the Cameron and Swain debts should be scaled down.
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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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St. Mary's Chapel is reported as no longer entitled to representation as a parish
Long served once a month from Hillsborough and weakened as its old families' children drifted away, St. Mary's Chapel was reported to the 1868 diocesan convention as no longer qualifying for parish representation.
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The Baptist State Convention meets with the Hillsborough church
The Baptist State Convention of North Carolina held its session with the Hillsborough Baptist church, and townspeople of every denomination boarded the delegates. Thomas Ruffin asked in particular to host the evangelist Elias Dodson.
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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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The university gives Bartholomew F. Moore an honorary LL.D.
At the 1868 commencement, which Battle calls the last of the old regime, the university granted the degree of Doctor of Laws to ex-Governor Seymour and to Moore, a Raleigh lawyer and active trustee.
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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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St. Matthew's replaces its flat roof and builds a recessed chancel
Rector Moses Ashley Curtis reported in 1869 that the old flat roof of St. Matthew's had given way to a high open one and the east end had been extended for a recessed chancel, vestry room and organ room. The chancel was lit by a triple stained glass window, and the $1,600 cost came almost entirely from present and former members.
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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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Thomas Fitzgerald buys Woodside, where his son Robert builds a freedmen's school
In 1869 Thomas Fitzgerald, father of the freedmen's teacher Robert G. Fitzgerald, moved to Orange County from Delaware and bought a 158-acre farm for $1,200. The family place, Woodside, lay about six miles east of Hillsborough. Robert built a freedmen's school on the property, and his diaries record a tanning business and a brick kiln he set up with his brother.
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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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Arbitrators settle the builder's claim against the Hillsborough Baptist church
The contractor sought $1,400 plus interest from 1862 for the last payment on the church's brickwork, which the congregation said departed from the contract. Arbitrators awarded him $1,107, leaving a debt the war-weakened church had to raise money to pay.
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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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J. T. Hogan serves as an Orange County commissioner
J. T. Hogan signed the county records as one of Orange County's commissioners from 1870 to 1872. In 1872 he sat with W. N. Patterson and Jones Watson on the county Board of Education, which in March elected Samuel W. Hughes county examiner of teachers.
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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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Susan Washington Graham reports the Baptist church's building debt paid
Susan Washington Graham, wife of former governor William A. Graham, told the church that the last of the debt on its building was settled. Much of the money came through her appeals by letter to friends after the church's building savings were lost in the war.
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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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John H. Watson serves as Chapel Hill's magistrate of police
Watson headed the town government as magistrate of police in 1872 and again from 1876 to 1878, before the amended charter of 1879 created the office of mayor.
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Mrs. Curtis gives St. Matthew's a marble font in memory of her husband
After rector Moses Ashley Curtis died in April 1872, his widow gave the church a marble baptismal font as his memorial.
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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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Orange County elects John Wall Norwood to the state Senate
Norwood was elected state senator for Orange in 1872. His speech on the amnesty bill, given in the Senate on January 27, 1873, was printed as a pamphlet.
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Orange County names a three-man Board of Education and a panel of teacher examiners
Under the Reconstruction school law the county had a Board of Education of W. N. Patterson, J. T. Hogan and Jones Watson in 1872. Samuel W. Hughes and Charles Curtis were among the county examiners who licensed teachers that year.
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Paul C. Cameron buys the Hillsborough Military Academy at public sale
Two years after Elizabeth Tew's death in 1870, the academy property was sold at public auction to Paul C. Cameron. His heirs sold it to the Farmers' State Alliance in 1891.
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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.
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H. P. Jones ships two hundred cases of Tar Heel smoking tobacco from Hillsborough to Georgia
The Recorder reported that Jones had lately shipped two hundred cases of his Tar Heel brand smoking tobacco to Georgia and held orders for a hundred more.
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The Hillsborough Presbyterian session asks that members be allowed to withdraw without church trial
The session resolved to ask presbytery to propose to the General Assembly a change in discipline, so that a member living outside the church's standards could leave its communion without a formal trial. After this, discipline cases disappear from the minutes.
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Job Berry is named a delegate to the Republican state convention
The Orange County Republican convention chose Rev. Job Berry as a Hillsborough delegate to the 1872 state convention, which backed Ulysses S. Grant and Governor Tod R. Caldwell.
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The county school board settles the school fund account with Treasurer David C. Parks
The Board of Education settled the school fund account with county treasurer D. C. Parks up to March 7, 1872. It showed $9,245.36 received from the state apportionments for 1869 to 1872 and the 1871 school poll tax, and $3,869.54 paid out to the townships.
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St. Matthew's rector Moses Ashley Curtis dies
Moses Ashley Curtis, rector of St. Matthew's for twenty-one years and a botanist of international standing, died at 64. The font and a south window in the church are his memorials.
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The school board refuses back pay to a Mangum Township teacher accused of misconduct
Thomas Anderson asked the board to pay him for two months he taught without a contract. The board sided with the township committee, finding he had no contract after March 7, 1872 and citing poor discipline and improper conduct toward girls in his school.
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Charles Jared Curtis takes charge of St. Matthew's after his father's death
Ordained deacon in St. Matthew's on August 7, 1872, Charles Jared Curtis took charge of the parish his father, Moses Ashley Curtis, had served, became rector on his ordination as priest on December 14, 1873, and stayed until he resigned in 1880.
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Jones Watson and Pride Jones are elected to the state House for Orange County
Running as Conservative (Democratic) candidates, Jones Watson and Dr. Pride Jones won Orange County's two seats in the state House of Representatives in the August 1872 election.
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Addison Holden builds the Holden–Roberts farmhouse
Addison Holden, a Confederate veteran and half-brother of Governor William W. Holden, built a tri-gable frame I-house in 1873 and 1874 on the farm about three miles east of Hillsborough that he bought from his uncle Isaac Holden in 1871. It is one of very few Orange County houses built during Reconstruction; George Cain Roberts bought the farm in 1908.
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Fuller's Sea-Gift, the first novel set partly in Chapel Hill, is published
Fuller turned his student years into Sea-Gift, which follows John Smith through the university and the Civil War and draws on the Dromgoole duel legend of Piney Prospect. Students later called it the Freshman's Bible.
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Harriet H. Strayhorn serves as Hillsborough's postmistress
Harriet H. Strayhorn, who with William F. Strayhorn owned Twin Chimneys on West King Street, was Hillsborough's postmistress from 1873 to 1881.
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Horner and Graves bring their boys' school to Hillsborough and open it in the old Military Academy buildings
Principals J. H. Horner and R. H. Graves Sr. moved their classical and military high school for boys to Hillsborough and set it up in the buildings Col. C. C. Tew had put up for the Hillsborough Military Academy, a mile and a half from town on the North Carolina Railroad. Their 1874-75 catalogue says the move had worked out better than they had hoped.
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Maj. D. H. Hamilton takes charge of the military department at Horner & Graves's School
D. H. Hamilton, a graduate of the Citadel in Charleston who had taught two years beside C. C. Tew at the old military academy and served as a Confederate major, ran the military department of Horner & Graves's School from its arrival in Hillsborough, carrying the academy's military drill into the new school.
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Robert Bingham takes charge of the Bingham School near Mebane
When his brother William died in 1873, Robert Bingham became headmaster of the Bingham School, which had moved from the Oaks to Mebane. In May 1879 he bought out his cousin William B. Lynch's interest and became sole proprietor.
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Robert F. Hoke obtains a charter for the Chapel Hill Iron Mountain Railroad
While the university was closed, Robert F. Hoke, owner of an iron mine north of Chapel Hill, obtained a state charter for a railroad to carry ore from Iron Mountain to the North Carolina Railroad.
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The women of St. Matthew's give a stained glass window in memory of Moses Ashley Curtis
In 1873 the ladies of the parish gave St. Matthew's a stained glass memorial window to its late rector Moses Ashley Curtis, who had died the year before.
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William Strowd of Chatham County buys land at the edge of Chapel Hill
The tract, where 51 Davie Circle now stands, stayed in his hands until he passed it to his son Robert L. Strowd in 1886.
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Alumni meet in Raleigh to plan the university's revival
At the invitation of trustees led by Superintendent Alexander McIver, fifty-five alumni met in the state Senate chamber with B. F. Moore in the chair. Their committee proposed that the alumni association nominate a new board for the Board of Education to appoint, but most of the 1868 trustees did not resign and the plan lapsed.
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William Bingham, head of the Bingham School, dies at thirty-seven
William Bingham, author of a Latin grammar and readers used across the South, dies in February 1873 after nine years running the school near Mebane. His brother and his widow then carry the school on together.
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The Board of Education divides the 1872 school fund among the townships by race
At its March 5, 1873 meeting the board named a teacher examining committee and apportioned the 1872 fund at the same rate per child for both races: $4,219.60 for 3,080 white children and $2,402.98 for 1,754 Black children across eight townships.
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John T. Hogan is chosen school committeeman for Hillsborough Township
When Alexander Dickens resigned as school committeeman for Hillsborough Township, the county Board of Education unanimously elected John T. Hogan in his place. At the same meeting it accepted Dr. Clop's resignation for Chapel Hill Township and chose John Hutchins.
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State educational convention calls for reviving the university
A convention called by the State Board of Education, with B. F. Moore presiding, resolved that the university should be revived as soon as practicable. It added that the revival was impossible except on a basis impartial between denominations and political parties, after Braxton Craven, Thomas H. Pritchard and A. W. Mangum argued over church representation.
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Lightning strikes the Davie Poplar
Lightning split the Old Poplar's bark from top to bottom while the university was closed, and its friends took it as an omen, but the tree survived. It then measured 14 feet 6 inches around at two feet above the ground, and Cornelia Phillips Spencer wrote a lament for it in a Raleigh paper.
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The Board of Education appoints Hazel Norwood county examiner
The board filled the county examiner's post with Hazel Norwood after Dr. Morgan Clop resigned, and settled its account with the treasurer, who held a balance of $7,686.92 from the state's 1872 apportionment.
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A constitutional amendment returns the election of university trustees to the General Assembly
An amendment taking the election of the university's trustees from the governor-controlled Board of Education and giving it back to the General Assembly became part of the state constitution in August 1873, after a vote of the people and a two-thirds vote of a second legislature. Friends of the university had first carried it through the General Assembly in 1871 by the required three-fifths, the credit going to two alumni and brothers-in-law, the Democrat Montford McGehee and the Republican Richard C. Badger.
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Nancy Hilliard, longtime Chapel Hill hotel keeper, dies
Nancy Segur Hilliard, whose family moved to Chapel Hill in 1817 and who fed students and stage travelers for decades, died on November 8, 1873. Cornelia Phillips Spencer appealed to alumni to help her in her last illness and to pay for her burial and a modest monument.
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Webb, Roulhac & Cameron prepare to move their tobacco business from Hillsborough to Durham
The Hillsborough Recorder reported that the tobacco firm of Webb, Roulhac & Cameron was about to move to Durham, where it had been offered better terms. The paper said the town could ill spare them.
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A county school census finds 24 more schoolhouses are needed
An 1874 count of school-age children by township found 2,380 Black children and set the need at 24 additional schoolhouses, ten of them in Hillsboro Township.
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Andrew Mickle serves as Chapel Hill's magistrate of police
Under the town charter the commissioners chose a magistrate of police to preside at their meetings, and Andrew Mickle held the office in 1874 and 1875. In March 1870 a rival group of citizens claiming to be the town's officers had named him to the post, which the sitting board said was without authority of law.
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Calvin E. Parish is elected state senator for Orange County
Orange County elected Parish to the state Senate in 1874, with Joseph W. Latta and Matthew Atwater in the House. He was elected to the House in 1876 and to the Senate again in 1880.
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Commissioner's report keeps the campus and 600 acres for the university
Commissioner George H. Snow inspected Chapel Hill in the summer of 1874 with trustees Paul C. Cameron, John Manning and Kemp P. Battle, and on Judge Bond's advice to be liberal the court left the university its campus, faculty houses, libraries and 600 acres. The outlying land, including about seventy acres at Piney Prospect, was sold, and Cameron bought the parcels along with the escheated mountain lands to secure his sister Mildred Cameron's debt.
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George Trice turns Tom Moore's former house into a restaurant and shoe shop
George Trice made the East Franklin Street house where Tom Moore had lived into a restaurant and ice cream parlor with a shoe shop. He gave up the restaurant after his wife died in 1899, and by 1903 a tailor and a shoe shop were in its place.
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Hillsborough Methodist Church finishes paying for its building
The Civil War interrupted work on the brick church John Berry designed and built on West Tryon Street, and the congregation did not finish paying for it until 1874.
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Horner & Graves's School lists 114 students for the 1874-75 year
The school's catalogue for 1874-75 names 114 students, most from eastern and central North Carolina towns and some from Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. Board, tuition, washing and lights cost $157.50 a session, plus a $10 book deposit, over two twenty-week sessions beginning in January and July.
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Horner & Graves's School organizes a School of Applied Mathematics and Engineering
The school set up a department of applied mathematics and engineering, citing the growing weight of technical training, to prepare boys as surveyors, levelers, draftsmen and machinists through field practice in surveying and road and railroad building, drawing and practical mechanics.
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James A. Graham serves on the university's board of trustees
James A. Graham was one of only two members of the Reconstruction board elected again to the new board of trustees in 1874, and he served until 1883 and again from 1885 to 1889. In May 1875 he sat on the five-man committee whose plan for reopening the university the trustees adopted.
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John Manning serves on the university's Board of Trustees
John Manning became a trustee of the University of North Carolina in 1874 and held the post for two decades, through the university's 1875 reopening.
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Maj. John W. Graham builds a twelve-room house at Montrose on his father's old foundation
In 1874 William A. Graham gave the vacant Montrose land to his son Maj. John W. Graham, who built a twelve-room house on the foundation of the first house. It burned in 1893.
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Pine Street is cut through Lot 16 from Franklin Street to Rosemary
A new street, Pine Street, was opened through the old Lot 16, running from Franklin Street to Rosemary Street.
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R. H. Graves Jr. begins teaching engineering and drawing at Horner & Graves's School
R. H. Graves Jr., a former University of North Carolina student who had earned a science degree and the civil and mining engineer's degree at the University of Virginia, joined the faculty at the start of the school's second session of 1874 to teach engineering and drawing. The next year he joined the reopened university's faculty.
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Seaton Barbee opens a drugstore on Franklin Street
Seaton Barbee, a son of merchant Sidney Mulholland Barbee, opened a drugstore on the south side of Franklin Street across from his father's house, with Tom Dunstan's barbershop on the floor above.
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The General Assembly elects sixty-four trustees, who organize under William A. Graham with Kemp Battle as secretary and treasurer
By an act of January 28, 1874, the legislature elected sixty-four university trustees by joint ballot, only two of them from the Reconstruction board, and fourteen of them men removed in 1868. The new board first met on February 18, 1874, in the Citizens National Bank in Raleigh, elected William A. Graham of Hillsborough its president and Kemp P. Battle its secretary and treasurer, named an executive committee, and the next day sent a committee to inspect Chapel Hill, after Governor Tod R. Caldwell declined to preside because he held the legislature had no power to elect trustees.
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Walter Steele and Paul Cameron inspect the derelict campus and Solomon Pool refuses to surrender the keys
On April 3, 1874, trustees Walter L. Steele and Paul C. Cameron came to Chapel Hill for the new board. Solomon Pool declined their written request for the keys and possession of the buildings, since the governor had not recognized the board, but let them inspect as visitors. Their report to the trustees on April 9 described broken doors and fallen plaster, the lower passage of Old West fouled by cattle and horses, rotted gates and axe-scarred oaks, 7,490 books in the Dialectic library and 6,901 in the Philanthropic, and recommended an immediate suit against Pool for possession.
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Haywood Beverly and Lewis Jenkins run for Hillsborough town commissioner as Black Republicans
In the Hillsborough town election, Black Republicans Haywood Beverly, a tanner, and Lewis Jenkins ran for town commissioner. Both lost, and the board elected was Conservative except for H. N. Brown, who ran on both tickets.
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The new trustees sue Solomon Pool and Alexander McIver at Orange Superior Court and win possession of the university in the Supreme Court
At the May 1874 term of Orange Superior Court the new board brought one action against Superintendent Alexander McIver, who held the university's seal and books and had agreed to a friendly test suit, and another against Solomon Pool for the buildings. Judge Albion W. Tourgee ruled against the trustees; John W. Graham and James A. Graham of Hillsborough argued for them without fee, as did B. F. Moore and William H. Battle on appeal in June 1874. At its January term 1875 the state Supreme Court decided for the university on every point, and possession passed to Andrew Mickle, the board's agent, with the seal, books and papers going to Treasurer Kemp Battle.
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Federal court rules the campus cannot be sold for the bank debt
In the suit of Charles Dewey, assignee in bankruptcy of the Bank of North Carolina, to sell the university's property under its mortgage, Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite with Judges Hugh L. Bond and George W. Brooks held the debt valid. They ruled that neither the trustees nor a creditor could sell the property that made up the life of the institution, as distinct from its endowment.
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Pleasant H. Dalton becomes stated supply at New Hope
Dalton, who had joined New Hope as a university student in 1842, began supplying the church in August 1874. By his own count at least fifty members were added in his twelve years there.
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Joseph Blount Cheshire marries Annie Huske Webb at St. Matthew's
Joseph Blount Cheshire Jr., later Episcopal bishop of North Carolina, married Annie Huske Webb of Hillsborough at St. Matthew's Church.
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Adolphus W. Mangum joins the faculty of the reopened university
When the university reopened in 1875 Mangum became professor of mental and moral science, history and English language and literature. He taught until he died in Chapel Hill in May 1890 and was buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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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 in 1875. The estate passed to her children and a grandchild.
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Archibald Jordan completes an Italianate house at Caldwell
Archibald C. Jordan, later Caldwell's physician, finished a two-story Italianate house there in 1875, with a projecting center pavilion, a bracketed cornice and arched windows. Inside is a curved staircase in a diagonally sheathed hall.
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Bartholomew F. Moore gives $1,000 toward reopening the university
Moore's $1,000 was among the largest gifts on the list of subscriptions paid in 1875 for the revival of the university.
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Charles Phillips returns to Chapel Hill and chairs the faculty
When the University of North Carolina reopened in 1875, Phillips was invited back as professor of mathematics and served as chairman of the faculty during his first year. Illness forced his retirement in 1879, when he became the first professor emeritus named by the trustees.
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George Tayloe Winston joins the faculty of the reopened university
Winston, a Cornell graduate who had also studied at UNC, came to Chapel Hill in 1875 as professor of Latin and German when the university reopened.
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Herbert McCauley builds an I-house off Old Greensboro Road
Around 1875 a two-story frame house mixing Greek Revival and Victorian trim was built for Herbert McCauley, with a log house and smokehouse on the place. Neighbors know it as the house where the singer James Taylor grew up.
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James A. Cheek builds an Italianate house on North Churton Street
James A. Cheek built a five-bay Italianate I-house with an ornate sawnwork porch on Lot 78, on a rise above North Churton Street. His family kept it until 1908; a brick kitchen and an 1880s barn survive behind it.
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John DeBerniere Hooper returns as professor of Greek and French when the university reopens
When the university reopened in 1875 Hooper was appointed professor of Greek and French. He resigned in October 1885 because of illness and died at his Chapel Hill home in January 1886.
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John Kimberly returns as professor of agriculture at the reopened university
When the university reorganized and reopened in 1875, John Kimberly was elected professor of agriculture. He resigned the next year to return to his farm in Buncombe County.
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John W. Carr gives $100 toward reopening the university
John W. Carr of Chapel Hill paid $100 to the subscription of nearly $20,000 raised to revive the university in 1875, alongside $500 from his son Julian S. Carr of Durham.
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Joseph B. Martin builds an I-house on East Rosemary Street
The two-story I-house at 401 East Rosemary Street, with end chimneys and a three-bay front, is credited to Joseph B. Martin, who probably put it up sometime from 1875 to 1885. W. M. Dey, who owned it later, gave the house its name.
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Mount Bright Baptist Church builds its church in Hillsborough
Mount Bright Baptist Church, the Black Baptist congregation in Hillsborough led by Alfred Bright, erected its church building in 1875.
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Ralph Henry Graves joins the faculty of the reopened university
Ralph Henry Graves returned to Chapel Hill in 1875 as professor of engineering at the newly reopened University of North Carolina. He later taught mathematics and held his professorship until his death in 1889.
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