Search and filters
Search and filters · 1 active
1,780 dated events and 13 storylines match your filters.
Searched the full chronology of 10,740 dated events and 77 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–200 of 1,793, 200 to a page.Back to highlights
Entries
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1800s
-
A great camp-meeting revival is held at New Hope
People came from long distances and camped on the church grounds for days, and the revival spread into other neighborhoods. Craig thought it did much to prompt the building of a third church.
-
A saddle-notched log house is built on the Webb Farm on St. Mary's Road
The Webb Farm's one-room log house, with a fieldstone chimney, dates from the early nineteenth century; a two-story frame house was built across its front late in the century with no inside door between them.
-
Francis Asbury visits Chapel Hill and the university
Bishop Francis Asbury stopped at Chapel Hill in 1800 and recorded a warm welcome from Joseph Caldwell, the students and people from the village and countryside. Nicholas Snethen, traveling with him, preached in the village, and Asbury baptized some children afterward.
-
Hillsborough counts 474 residents
The 1800 count put the county town at 474 people, small in number though it ranked with Salisbury and Salem among the region's main towns.
-
The General Assembly takes back the university's confiscated lands and escheats
Amid hostility to the university as a Federalist school, and anger at its suits over old McCulloch claims, the legislature repealed the 1794 grant of confiscated property and the 1789 grant of escheats. The courts later held the escheat repeal unconstitutional in University v. Foy.
-
The Gosling log house is built in eastern Orange County
A one-room log house, later known as the Gosling Log House, is raised in eastern Orange County in the early 1800s. The survey placed it on the state Study List.
-
The John Paisley Hughes House is built at Cedar Grove
The oldest part of the John Paisley Hughes House at Cedar Grove dates to the early nineteenth century. It was enlarged around 1860 and again around 1880, and is on the Study List.
-
The Patterson family builds a Federal-style house near Mount Moriah
A two-story center-passage house with Federal mantels was built for the Pattersons, who owned much land and the Patterson grist mill. Colonial Revival changes, probably in the 1920s or later, and 20th-century additions have hidden its early form.
-
The Rev. William Bingham teaches ancient languages at the university
The Rev. William Bingham, founder of the Bingham School, served as the university's professor of ancient languages in 1800. His son William J. Bingham and grandsons William and Robert Bingham all later graduated with first distinction.
-
The one-story house later called the Nathaniel Rochester House is built on West King Street
A one-story frame house, close in detail to the Ruffin-Roulhac House, was built at 225 West King Street around 1800; tradition makes Nathaniel Rochester, founder of Rochester, New York, an early owner.
-
William Cain is the largest landowner in Orange County, enslaving 30 people
By 1800 William Cain owned 4,417 acres, the most of any landowner in Orange County, and enslaved 30 people at Pleasant Grove, a number he increased to 95 by 1830.
-
Duncan Cameron builds a law office on Margaret Lane, later the Nash Law Office
Lawyer Duncan Cameron built a one-story Federal-style law office on his lots on Margaret Lane. In 1807 he sold the property to Frederick Nash, who kept his practice there and taught law students in it until his death in 1858.
-
Nancy Benton takes her family from Hartford to Tennessee
After two more years in North Carolina, Nancy Benton decided she could do better on the lands her husband had claimed in the Cumberland valley, and by 1801 she had settled her family on the Tennessee frontier.
-
Students stone steward Pleasant Henderson's house
Complaints about the food at Steward's Hall under stewards John Taylor and Pleasant Henderson helped fuel the student uprising of 1799. In 1801 Henderson's house was stoned, and he did not reapply for the stewardship.
-
The Paisley-Rice log house is built near Mebane
A log dwelling now called the Paisley-Rice Log House went up in western Orange County near Mebane, probably for the Rev. William D. Paisley after he bought the 200-acre tract from James Davis on February 7, 1801. It is one of the few county log houses already on the National Register by 1993.
-
The university builds a house for its Grammar School
Six years after the trustees ordered it, a one-story frame schoolhouse for the university's preparatory Grammar School was built in 1801. John M. Goodloe was paid about $320 for the work; until then the boys had been taught in a rented building.
-
The university raises money for the Main Building by lottery
The legislature of 1801 let the trustees raise up to $4,000 by lotteries. Two drawings, the first of 1,500 five-dollar tickets and the second in 1802, cleared $5,080.81, though agents were slow to account for tickets.
-
William Courtney Jr. deeds the Yellow House on East King Street to his brother Joseph
A 1801 deed from William Courtney Jr. to his brother Joseph is the first to call the property the "yellow house", the earliest evidence of a house on the lot. The two-story Georgian house still stands at 141 East King Street.
-
William D. Paisley becomes pastor of the Hawfields and Cross Roads churches
After serving the Union and Buffalo churches in Guilford County, Paisley took charge of the Hawfields and Cross Roads Presbyterian churches near present Mebane in 1801 and stayed until 1818. The Hawfields church historian credits him with organizing the first camp meeting in North Carolina there during the Great Revival.
-
William D. Paisley buys the farm where the Paisley-Rice log house stands
The Presbyterian minister William D. Paisley bought a 200-acre tract from James Davis in February 1801. Local tradition and the nomination hold that he built the dovetailed log house on this land in the early 1800s.
-
A communion service at Cross Roads church sets off the Great Revival in North Carolina
At a general communion at Cross Roads Presbyterian Church in March 1801, before a large crowd, the congregation broke into the outcries and physical frenzy of the western camp meetings just as an ordinary service was ending, and the ministers present let the demonstration run its course. The author dates the start of the Great Revival in the state from this meeting, followed a few weeks later by a five-day meeting at Hawfields that the author calls the first camp meeting in North Carolina.
-
Hillsborough Academy reopens for boys and girls under Andrew Flinn
The academy's trustees announced that it had reopened on a larger plan for youth of both sexes under the Rev. Andrew Flinn, teaching Latin, Greek, English, mathematics and bookkeeping.
-
Crowds camp for days at Hawfields for the fall communion
The revival that began at Cross Roads reached Hawfields at its fall communion. People came from long distances and, with too few houses nearby to take them in, camped on the church grounds in their wagons for several days. William Henry Foote's Sketches of North Carolina (1846) dates this to October 1802 in one chapter and to October 1801 in another, where he calls it the first camp meeting in North Carolina; a 1966 article in the North Carolina Historical Review puts the five-day Hawfields meeting a few weeks after the March 1801 Cross Roads communion.
-
Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies
Hillsborough Academy opened on a larger plan under Andrew Flinn in October 1801 and grew under William J. Bingham, principal from 1827 until 1844, when he left to open his own school at the Oaks. The Burwell School for girls ran from 1837 to 1857. The Nash and Kollock School opened in 1858 and Hillsborough Military Academy in January 1859. The military academy closed for a time in 1865 at the end of the Civil War.
-
Archibald D. Murphey marries Jane Armistead Scott and settles at the Hermitage
After leaving the University to read law in Hillsborough under William Duffy, Murphey married Jane Armistead Scott on November 5, 1801, and made his home at the Hermitage, her father's farm on Great Alamance Creek about eighteen miles west of Hillsborough, in the part of Orange County that is now Alamance. He built his law practice around the Hillsborough courthouse.
-
A trustee committee reports on the examination at the 1802 commencement
Adlai Osborne, Henry Potter and Charles W. Harris made the trustees' report on the commencement examination, listing the preparatory school's classes from spelling and grammar through Latin authors and French.
-
Cameron becomes a trustee of the University of North Carolina
Cameron joined the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina in 1802, while he was practicing law at Hillsborough.
-
James H. Bowman becomes stated supply at New Hope
Bowman, whose charge in 1799 was Eno and Little River, went west as a missionary in 1800, returned in the fall of 1801 and probably came to New Hope in 1802. He preached and taught school there until he left the presbytery in 1815, and was perhaps the first to preach in the third church.
-
Pleasant Henderson gives up the stewardship and opens a store
Henderson gave up the university stewardship in 1802 and declined the trusteeship he was elected to. About this time he went into business as Henderson and Searcy, and he kept his Chapel Hill residence while serving as clerk of the House of Commons from 1807 to 1830.
-
William Gaston serves as a trustee of the university
William Gaston sat on the university's board of trustees from 1802 until his death in January 1844, some forty-two years.
-
Women of Raleigh give the university a new pair of globes
Hearing that the university's globes were too worn to use, sixteen Raleigh women, among them Sarah Polk, Anna White and Eliza Haywood, sent a new pair twelve inches across with a compass to Joseph Caldwell. The letter was written by Winifred Gales.
-
Edmund Strudwick is born at Long Meadow
Edmund Strudwick, later a physician and surgeon, was born on March 25, 1802, at Long Meadow, five miles north of Hillsborough. He went to Bingham School and earned his medical degree at the University of Pennsylvania.
-
A student duel brings expulsions and a trustee order against dueling
Quarrels in the spring of 1803 led to challenges and at least one meeting. Samuel G. Hopkins was expelled for fighting and John H. Hawkins for acting as second, and the trustees ordered that anyone in a duel be expelled and handed to the civil authorities.
-
Hatter Henry Shutt buys the West King Street lot where the Colonial Inn now stands
In 1803 Henry Shutt bought the vacant lot and built a house there, living in it and running a hatter's shop. The lot was offered at public sale in 1820, and Isaiah Spencer built his inn on it in 1838.
-
James Hogg sells Poplar Hill to his son-in-law William Norwood
James Hogg, who had built the house later called Poplar Hill on an 1,100-acre tract on the south bank of the Eno, sells the estate in 1803 to his son-in-law William Norwood. It later became the home of John Wall Norwood.
-
John McCauley builds a store on Franklin Street
By 1803 John McCauley had a store on the northeast corner of Lot #11, one of the village's first. James Hogg's large house, built on the same part of the lot a year or two later, may have grown out of it.
-
Mount Carmel Baptist Church is organized at Pritchard's Mill
Mount Carmel Baptist Church began at Pritchard's Mill in 1803 and moved to its later site in 1873, when it built the church still in use in 1953.
-
William Norwood gives $100 toward finishing South Building
William Norwood of Hillsborough contributed $100 toward finishing South Building at the university.
-
Gilbert Strayhorn, a founder and first elder of New Hope church, dies
Strayhorn died at 88 and was buried in the old New Hope graveyard, next to the church he had helped found on his own land.
-
Board president William Polk appeals for money to finish the Main Building and stock the library
With the lottery money not enough to finish the Main Building, Polk, as president of the trustees, issued an appeal over its roofless walls and nearly empty library shelves. The drive raised $1,664 in cash; Polk gathered gifts from about fifty donors and gave $100 himself.
-
Hillsborough Academy trustees engage Thomas Baron after George Johnston fails to arrive
The academy trustees, Walter Alves among them, announced that George Johnston had not taken charge as promised and that they had engaged Thomas Baron, a Harvard graduate, to teach languages, arithmetic, geography and mathematics.
-
Women of New Bern give the university a quadrant
Sixteen New Bern women, among them Susan Gaston and Mary Nash, sent a quadrant for the philosophical class to Joseph Caldwell. In his reply Caldwell blamed the university's unpopularity partly on disappointment over costs and on student misconduct.
-
Court rulings force the university to give up its McCulloch collections
In Ray's Executors v. McCulloch and Trustees v. Rice, the Court of Conference held that the 1783 peace treaty protected Henry Eustace McCulloch's claims. The General Assembly then ordered the money collected under the 1794 act refunded to the state treasury in trust for the debtors who had paid.
-
James Hogg builds a large house on Franklin Street
James Hogg acquired the eastern half of Lot #11 from William R. Davie when his son Gavin entered the university, and built a ten-room house there. Debts forced him to sell in 1806, though he kept living in it; the house later passed to merchants and became the core of the Central Hotel.
-
Joseph Caldwell is elected the first president of the university
When the trustees created the office of president in 1804 they elected Caldwell to it unanimously. He resigned the presidency in 1812 to teach and returned to it a few years later, holding it until his death in 1835.
-
Richard Henderson becomes head of Hillsborough Academy
In 1804 Hillsborough Academy announced Richard Henderson, formerly a professor at the university, as its head.
-
Suit by William Kirkland and others leads to the sale of Hannah and her children
Legal proceedings brought by William Kirkland, Catlett Campbell, Jacob Greer and Isaac Mordecai against Robert Bell placed Hannah and her children Jenny and David in the hands of the sheriff. Sheriff Samuel Turrentine sold the three at public auction at the Hillsborough Market House to Duncan Cameron for 200 pounds.
-
Trustees make Greek a requirement for a degree
After electing Caldwell president, the board ruled that no degree be granted without Greek, set Greek tests for entering the junior and freshman classes and repealed the degree for English and the sciences. It also ordered the president to wear a black gown at commencement.
-
Twelve-year-old William Hooper enters the university's preparatory school
William Hooper came to Chapel Hill in the winter of 1804 and entered the preparatory school taught by Matthew Troy and Chesley Daniel, boarding with Joseph Caldwell. The faculty then numbered three: Caldwell, Professor Bingham and tutor Henderson, and the only finished buildings were Old East and the chapel.
-
Nervous fever kills a student
A fever the doctors called nervous fever struck the university early in 1804. A student named Philips, of Edgecombe County, died and Lemuel Sessoms was not expected to live, and the dance planned for Washington's Birthday was dropped.
-
William Hooper recalls student 'General' Thomas Brown's Fourth of July parade in
Hooper, then a preparatory pupil, recalled that the students elected Thomas Brown of Bladen their general and orator for the Fourth of July, with Hyder Ally Davie as his aide, and that Brown in uniform marched them to the Big Poplar to speak from a rostrum. The faculty's printed program for that summer named other students as the Fourth of July speakers and set commencement about a week later, so Brown's parade, as Battle noted, was a student addition if Hooper's memory was right.
-
A quarrel at the 1804 commencement ball ends in a stabbing and a trial before the trustees
At the commencement ball in Steward's Hall, Hyder Ally Davie twice trod on the toes of Henry Chambers of Salisbury while dancing. Outside, Chambers struck him and Davie stabbed Chambers in the neck with a penknife. The trustees, among them William R. Davie and William Polk, tried the case in the chapel the next day.
-
The Hillsborough Races are run over three days
The Hillsborough Races opened on a Thursday in October 1804 with three-mile heats, followed by two-mile and one-mile heats on the next two days. A Raleigh paper printed the winners, among them General Benton's Junius and Major Strudwick's Tom Jefferson.
-
James Hogg dies and is buried in Hillsborough
James Hogg, the Scottish merchant who came to North Carolina in 1774 and pressed the trustees to put the university at Chapel Hill, died on November 9, 1804. He is buried in Hillsborough two blocks north of the site of his state highway marker on Churton Street.
-
A bill in the House would let Hillsborough's commissioners enclose the public spring
Mr. Holt brought in a bill in the House of Commons letting the commissioners of Hillsborough enclose the public spring lot and the school house lot, and also the churchyard, and improve them.
-
A brick house is built on West Queen Street for Rhody Berry, mother of builder John Berry
The one-and-a-half-story Federal house, the oldest surviving brick dwelling in the original town, was built about 1805 for Mrs. Rhody Berry. Tradition credits her son John Berry, but he was seven that year, and the 2014 nomination suggests neighbor Samuel Hancock, the brickmason who later became his partner.
-
Betsy Nunn carries on the tavern and inn after her husband's death
When William Nunn died, his widow Betsy kept the tavern lot and went on running the inn. She held it until her death in her nineties, and the frontage maps label it Nunn's Tavern and Inn through 1848.
-
New Hope builds its third church
The third house of worship went up about two hundred yards southeast of the second, beside a spring that rises from rock. It had a high pulpit at the west end and a gallery at the east end for Black worshippers, and it stood until fire destroyed it in 1862.
-
The General Assembly restores the university's escheats
The bill passed the House 82 to 35 and the Senate 32 to 23, returning escheated property whose Tennessee land warrants later became the university's endowment. Maurice Moore, one of the first students, was among its strongest advocates.
-
The governor becomes ex officio president of the university's trustees
The act restoring the escheats made the governor president of the board and gave the General Assembly, on joint ballot, the power to fill vacancies. A trustee absent from meetings for two years could lose his seat.
-
Pleasant Henderson writes to trustee Walter Alves about a student secession at the university
Pleasant Henderson wrote to Walter Alves that about 45 students had left the university in protest over the trustees' rule requiring student monitors to take an oath, and urged Alves and the board to act.
-
Trustees repeal the monitor ordinance that set off the student secession
The 1805 law made student monitors swear to report every breach of the rules, and forty-five students signed a remonstrance and left when it was only softened. The board repealed it unanimously in December, but few of the seceders came back.
-
Cane Creek Baptists organize the Haw River Mountain Church, later Antioch
Cane Creek Baptist Church set up a new congregation called Haw River Mountain Church, which moved in 1830 and became Antioch Baptist Church.
-
Cane Creek Baptists replace their first meeting-house with a larger building
The church's history committee judges that the log meeting-house of 1789 was probably replaced by a larger and more lasting building around 1806, the year the Sandy Creek Baptist Association held its meeting at Cane Creek.
-
Hillsborough dines Orange County's members for opposing the new court law
The 1806 act ordering a superior court session in every county twice a year ended the old court towns' hold on the circuit, and lawyers, court officers and the court towns fought it. At Hillsborough the representatives of Orange County were given a dinner and toasted as a testimonial of approval for their firm opposition to the new judiciary system.
-
The name Franklin Street appears in Chapel Hill documents
The village's main road was being called Franklin Street in written records by 1806, about thirteen years after the first lots along it were sold.
-
William Norwood represents the borough of Hillsborough in the House of Commons
Hillsborough lawyer William Norwood was elected to the House of Commons for the borough of Hillsborough in 1806 and reelected in 1807.
-
Frederick Nash is elected a trustee of the University of North Carolina
Nash was elected a trustee of the University of North Carolina in 1807 and remained an active supporter of the university. It awarded him an LL.D. in 1853.
-
Frederick Nash moves from New Bern to Hillsborough
Nash and his wife left New Bern for Hillsborough in 1807 seeking a healthier climate. There he bought a small one-story house, an office and cabins for slave quarters from Duncan Cameron.
-
Methodists organize a church in Hillsborough
A Methodist congregation was organized in Hillsborough about 1807.
-
Saddler James Phillips builds a brick kitchen on the school-house lot on East Tryon Street
James Phillips, a Hillsborough saddler, buys the old school-house lot at the east edge of town and builds a two-room brick kitchen beside the house, where he lives until 1847. The kitchen, with his name scratched in a window pane, still stands beside BelleVue.
-
Trustees bar students expelled from other colleges
An ordinance sent to every college president in the country refused admission to anyone expelled from another college or who had left it to avoid trial, and required applicants to declare they had not. Colleges were asked to exchange lists of expelled students.
-
The Faucett family builds a two-story house and inn beside their Eno mill
After buying the mill at the Eno ford northwest of Hillsborough, the Faucetts put up a two-story house next to it that also served travelers as an inn and tavern. It still stands beside the mill.
-
Thirty-eight students petition the faculty over food at Steward's Hall
Signers including John Branch complained of too little butter and of beef often unsound and full of vermin. The faculty found the wording defiant and had it rewritten, and suspended John R. Stokes and Elias Foord for refusing to sign the milder version.
-
Thomas Ruffin qualifies to practice law and settles at Hillsborough
Ruffin finished his legal studies under Archibald D. Murphey in Rockingham County and qualified to practice law in 1808. He moved to Hillsborough on June 9, 1809, and built his practice there; William A. Graham later read law with him.
-
Mason Hall has a small inn and a post office on the Hillsborough road west
By 1809 the hamlet of Mason Hall, on the main wagon road west from Hillsborough toward Guilford, consisted of a small inn and a post office.
-
President Joseph Caldwell marries Helen Hooper and moves to her Franklin Street house
Caldwell married Helen Hogg Hooper and left the President's House on campus for her home on Lot #19, which he appears to have owned already. The house stayed in the family until 1849, when the university bought it as President Swain's residence.
-
The university divides the state into ten escheat districts with its own attorneys
To collect the restored escheats, the trustees named attorneys in ten districts, among them Archibald D. Murphey for the district beginning with Chatham, paid by commission on sales and collections. The same year the legislature gave the university estate balances unclaimed for seven years.
-
Thomas H. Taylor builds and runs a shoe store on Franklin Street
Tom Taylor, son of John Taylor Sr., put up a shoe store on the western half of Lot #14, which his father bought in 1812. The building later housed Dr. Walter Norwood's medicine shop.
-
Grammar school under William Paisley opens west of Hillsborough
A grammar school under the Rev. William Paisley was announced to open in January 1809 about ten miles west of Hillsborough, teaching Latin, Greek, geography and philosophy for sixteen dollars a year.
- 1810s
-
Cameron builds Fairntosh east of the Stagville house
On land beside Stagville that Richard Bennehan gave the couple at their 1803 marriage, Duncan Cameron began building Fairntosh in 1810, finished the main house in 1811 and added a large wing about 1818 to 1821. Its dependencies included his law office, a chapel and a family burying ground, and he went on to hold more than a thousand people in slavery.
-
Dr. James Webb serves as Hillsborough agent of the Bank of Cape Fear
In 1810 Dr. James Webb was appointed Hillsborough agent, or cashier, of the branch of the Bank of the Cape Fear, a post he held until 1846. The branch rented a small building on West King Street, and many of its stockholder lists, dividend records and at least one ledger survive.
-
Jacob Jackson Farm log dwelling is built
A single-pen hewn-log cabin, the oldest part of the Maple Hill house on St. Mary's Road about 2.8 miles northeast of Hillsborough, is dated to about 1810 or earlier. The National Register nomination credits it, perhaps, to yeoman farmer Jacob Jackson and finds no support for a local tradition dating it to 1750.
-
Polly Burke buys her house on East Queen Street
Mary Williams Burke, the only child of Governor Thomas Burke, bought a modest house on East Queen Street in Hillsborough for four hundred dollars on June 5, 1810, when she was twenty-eight. She added the east bay to the house, which was later enlarged and named Heartsease.
-
The university makes David Caldwell of Guilford a Doctor of Divinity
At the 1810 commencement the university gave honorary doctorates of divinity to David Caldwell, James Hall and James McRee. Caldwell's Latin diploma, dated in Person Hall, calls Chapel Hill Sacrarii Mons, the hill of the chapel.
-
Justice Alfred Moore dies and leaves Moorefields to his son
Former U.S. Supreme Court justice Alfred Moore, builder of Moorefields, died and willed the house to his son Alfred, a lawyer who went on to serve in the House of Commons and as its speaker in 1823-1824.
-
A log house said to date from 1811 is built for the Craig family near New Hope
Local tradition puts the building of this story-and-a-half log house on New Hope Church Road in 1811, for the Craigs; the Blackwoods owned it for many years and added to it around 1900. If the date holds it is the oldest log house in the survey.
-
A student outbreak leaves the university with no graduates
After an insubordination whose details are lost, every senior except John A. Ramsey forfeited his diploma, and the 1811 commencement conferred only an honorary A.B. on Ramsey. Three of the six who later passed examinations received diplomas in 1813.
-
Allan Bubberly sells the future Weaver House property to Thomas Weaver
In 1811 Allan Bubberly conveyed the old homestead and tavern property on the Hillsborough road to Thomas Weaver. Weaver's descendants kept it for ninety-nine years, and the house still carries the family name.
-
The Strudwick heirs' enslaved people are hired out under Dr. James Webb's guardianship
After Col. William F. Strudwick died in 1810, Dr. James Webb managed the estate for his widow and younger sons and hired out the people it held, listing them by name year after year. In 1819 two of those assigned to young Edmund Strudwick, Jim and Nelly, were sold or leased for $533 and $500.
-
William R. Davie receives the university's first honorary Doctor of Laws
The University of North Carolina awarded William R. Davie an honorary LL.D. in 1811, the first Doctor of Laws it conferred; honorary master's degrees had gone to Joseph Caldwell and others in 1799. Davie had sat on the board of trustees from 1789 to 1807.
-
William Kirkland gives four enslaved people to Thomas and Anne Ruffin
Out of affection for his son-in-law Thomas Ruffin and his daughter Anne, William Kirkland of Ayr Mount conveyed to Ruffin a woman named Juley, her two children, John and an infant, and a young girl, all of them already in the Ruffins' household. The deed was proved at the Orange County court that August.
-
A sacred music society forms and an organ is ordered for the university chapel
The Raleigh Register reported a new society for the study of sacred music at the university and an organ, paid for by private gifts, already built in New York. The trustees later paid $50 to bring it to Chapel Hill.
-
A summer school of military training is advertised at Chapel Hill
Amid the war spirit of the years before and during the War of 1812, summer schools of military training were advertised during 1812 at Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Louisburg. Boyd counts them among early military schools that did not flourish in North Carolina.
-
Archibald D. Murphey serves Orange County in the state senate
Archibald D. Murphey was elected to the legislature from Orange County in 1812 and sat in the state senate until 1818. There he proposed a publicly financed system of schools in a report he finished on November 29, 1817, and in 1819 he followed it with his memoir on internal improvements.
-
John H. Pickard is principal of Hawfield Academy
Hawfield Academy, about ten miles west of Hillsborough, had John H. Pickard as principal from 1812 to 1814. The school had earlier been led by William Paisley.
-
Professor Andrew Rhea buys the Hillsborough Street land where the log "Old Tavern" stands
In 1812 professor Andrew Rhea bought a tract a few blocks north of the campus, and he may have built the log house still standing at 419 Hillsborough Street as his own home. The house goes by the name Old Tavern, although nothing shows it was ever used as one.
-
Robert H. Chapman leads the organizing of a Presbyterian church at Chapel Hill
Kemp Battle credited Robert H. Chapman, president of the university from 1812 to 1816, as the chief factor in organizing a Presbyterian church at Chapel Hill; Chapman required students to study the Bible as a textbook, and the tutor James E. Morrison credited him with a moral change in the university. Cornelia Phillips Spencer wrote that the village's first church organization was Presbyterian, under either Chapman or Caldwell, and that Orange Presbytery's records for 1812-1827 had burned, so the church's first record is from 1827.
-
Upperclassmen shut out of the literary societies form the Kappa Alpha order
When the Dialectic and Philanthropic societies stopped taking juniors and seniors to make room for new members, older students met in new secret clubs, the first being an order of Kappa Alpha.
-
Rev. William Bingham takes charge of Hillsborough Academy
The trustees announced that the Rev. William Bingham had taken charge of Hillsborough Academy, with exercises to begin on February 3 and Elizabeth Russell in charge of a female department.
-
Robert H. Chapman is elected president as Caldwell returns to teaching mathematics
Caldwell asked to give up the presidency to finish his geometry and study astronomy. The board accepted his resignation, elected the Presbyterian minister Chapman president at $1,200 a year and kept Caldwell as professor of mathematics at $1,000.
-
Hillsborough men organize a company to build a cotton and woolen factory
Citizens of Hillsborough and Orange County met in 1813 to set up a joint-stock company for a cotton and woolen factory in or near the town, with at least a hundred shares at $25 each. Calling it the Hillsborough Manufacturing Company, the stockholders adopted rules that gave large holders proportionally fewer votes. John Umstead chaired and John Taylor Jr. was secretary; subscription books went to James Mebane, John Craig, Michael Holt and Duncan Cameron of Orange and to Frederick Nash, William Whitted and John Taylor Jr. of Hillsborough, with agents in a dozen other places. The author found no sign the company went beyond organizing.
-
Thomas Ruffin represents Hillsborough in the House of Commons
Ruffin sat for the town of Hillsborough in the North Carolina House of Commons in 1813, 1815 and 1816, until he was elected a Superior Court judge at the age of twenty-nine.
-
Thomas Ruffin serves on the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees
Ruffin served on the university's Board of Trustees from 1813 to 1831 and again from 1842 to 1868. The residence hall completed in 1922 was named for him and for his son Thomas Ruffin Jr.
-
William Cain builds Sans Souci
William Cain probably built Sans Souci, his Hillsborough town house, about 1813, soon after he bought the thirty-acre tract in 1812; a 1953 plate caption had dated it about 1760. It was the home of S. T. Latta Jr. in 1953.
-
William Watson and William Barbee open a lumber yard
William Watson came to Chapel Hill in 1813 to work on South Building and went into the lumber business with William Barbee. Their yard supplied much of the lumber used in village building; its site is not known.
-
A log house, later the Maynard farm kitchen, is built in southwest Orange
The half-dovetailed log building that became the kitchen on the William Maynard farm went up about 1814, and is said to have been the family's first dwelling.
-
Christopher Barbee opens a blacksmith shop on Franklin Street
Christopher Barbee, the university's largest land donor, rented the southwest corner of Matthew McCauley's Lot #8 for a smithy with a 33-foot front on the street. He bought the corner in 1824, and William D. Kirksey was advertising as the village blacksmith by 1833.
-
Dr. Alexander Long practises medicine in Hillsborough
Alexander Long, born in Salisbury in 1789 and a University of North Carolina graduate of 1811, took his M.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1814 and began practice at Hillsborough. He stayed until 1818, when he settled in Salisbury.
-
Frederick Nash represents Orange County in the House of Commons
Nash sat for Orange County in the House of Commons in 1814, 1816 and 1817. He was speaker of the house in 1814.
-
George Allen Jr. and Solomon Debow deed seven acres to Hawfields Church
A 1914 history of the church, quoted by Carrington, says George Allen Jr. and Solomon Debow deeded seven acres to Hawfields Church in 1814, on the north side of the Great Road from Gilbreth's bridge to Hillsborough in the Haw Creek drainage, where the present church stands. Another account credits Thomas White with giving the site.
-
Hillsborough Academy is rechartered
Hillsborough Academy received a new charter from the General Assembly in 1814.
-
James Thompson and George Trice build a store on Franklin Street
Thompson and Trice bought a 20-by-30-foot piece of Matthew McCauley's Lot #8 and put up a store on its narrow street front. Known later as Trice's store, it was held back when McCauley's heir sold the rest of the lot in 1822.
-
Margaretta Chapman's marble headstone becomes the oldest surviving monument in the Chapel Hill graveyard
The Baroque-style marble headstone of sixteen-year-old Margaretta Chapman, who died in 1814, was probably set soon after her death and is thought to be the oldest stone monument in the cemetery. Like other early stones it was likely shipped in, since no gravestone carvers worked in North Carolina before the 1820s.
-
Professor William Hooper builds a house on East Franklin Street
About 1814 William Hooper, professor of ancient languages, put up a plain two-story Federal house at 504 East Franklin Street, one block east of the campus, with brick chimneys at the gable ends and a center door under a transom. It is one of only two houses from the village of that decade still standing.
-
Students move into the finished South Building
Subscriptions Caldwell gathered on tours of the state in 1809 and 1811, about $8,220, let contractor John Close finish the Main Building begun in 1798. Students moved in during 1814.
-
The earliest part of the Walker House is built off St. Mary's Road
The heavy-timber rear section of the Walker House on the Robert Walker farm, on Schley Road just off St. Mary's Road northeast of Hillsborough, is said to date from 1814.
-
Thomas H. Taylor buys Lot #17 and builds the Tom Taylor house
Taylor bought Lot #17 from Frances Benton, enlarged the log cabin on it, and later built a much larger house around it, moving in about 1817. The university acquired the house in 1835, and it became President Swain's home and then housing for faculty.
-
Caldwell takes students before a justice of the peace over attacks on President Chapman's property
After night raids on Chapman's stable, cart and gate, and tar and feathers on his gatepost, Caldwell asked justice Pleasant Henderson for a general warrant. Refused, he named five students, and a hearing questioned the student body under oath.
-
A Mr. Graham and Miss Farley take charge of Hillsborough Academy
After William Bingham left in 1815, Hillsborough Academy was run for a time by a teacher named Graham, with Miss Farley presumably over the female department.
-
Ayr Mount is completed
Scottish-born merchant William Kirkland built Ayr Mount, a Federal-style brick plantation house near Hillsborough, in 1815. Its brick was made on the plantation, and carpenter John J. Briggs, a mason named Collier and joiner Elhannon Nutt worked on the house.
-
Orange County's enslaved people are valued at nearly two thirds of its land
The 1815 valuation put the county's enslaved population at $1,216,347 and all its land at $1,917,993.
-
Robert H. Chapman serves New Hope as stated supply
After James H. Bowman left, Chapman supplied the New Hope pulpit about 1815.
-
The Hillsborough Presbyterian Church is built on the old St. Matthew's church lot with lottery money
The brick church on West Tryon Street was built in 1815 and 1816 near the site of the colonial St. Matthew's church, lost in the 1790s, with money raised by a lottery the state authorized. The brickmasons John Berry and Samuel Hancock are credited with the work.
-
William Bingham runs his school at Mount Repose northwest of Hillsborough
After leaving Hillsborough Academy, the Rev. William Bingham kept his own academy at Mount Repose, in a house on Back Creek about ten miles northwest of Hillsborough. His son William James Bingham closed it in 1826 when he took over Hillsborough Academy.
-
William Huntington opens his own silversmith business in Hillsborough
Trained by his father, the engraver Roswell Huntington, William Huntington sets up his own Hillsborough shop, selling silver along with gravestones, flour and medicine and running a blacksmith shop.
-
Edward Robson keeps a store and the post office on Franklin Street
Before selling the property to Thomas H. Taylor in 1816, Edward Robson ran a store on the eastern half of Lot #10 and kept the village post office in it.
-
Samuel Paisley begins an eighteen-year pastorate at Eno
Paisley followed Bowman in 1816 and stayed until he moved to Moore County in 1834. He was buried in the Old Eno cemetery.
-
Senator Archibald D. Murphey of Orange moves for a legislative committee on public schools
Following Governor Miller's 1816 message, Orange County senator Archibald D. Murphey won a joint committee to study public education. Its report led to a second committee, also under Murphey, whose plan Pender credits as the groundwork of the later state school system.
-
Thomas Ruffin of Hillsborough is chosen Speaker of the House of Commons
Ruffin, sitting for the borough of Hillsborough, was elected Speaker in the 1816 session, his last in the legislature before he became a superior court judge.
-
University enrollment rises from eighty to ninety-one during
The university had eighty students at the beginning of 1816, rising to ninety-one by the end of the year. In 1815 its faculty numbered five: President Robert Chapman, Professor Joseph Caldwell, senior tutor William Hooper and two other tutors.
-
William Norwood becomes a trustee of Hillsborough Academy
William Norwood was a trustee of Hillsborough Academy by 1816 and chaired its board in 1826.
-
Witherspoon takes charge of the Hillsborough Academy
Returning to Hillsborough at twenty-five, Witherspoon took a double charge: the pastorate of the newly built Presbyterian church and the principalship of the closely allied Hillsborough Academy. He gave up the academy sometime after 1819.
-
James K. Polk is admitted to the university's sophomore class
James K. Polk of Tennessee reached Chapel Hill in the fall of 1815 and was examined by the faculty in Latin and Greek grammar, Caesar, Sallust, Virgil, the Gospel of John in Greek and Murray's English Grammar. He was credited with all the freshman and half the sophomore work and entered the sophomore class when the second term opened in January 1816.
-
John Craig, a founder and first elder of New Hope church, dies
John Craig, eldest son of William Craige, died at about 90. Craig names him with Gilbert Strayhorn as the church's original founders and first elders.
-
Senior William B. Shepard speaks forbidden political passages and sets off a student revolt
Chapman had struck Republican passages from Shepard's oration and ordered him to sit when he spoke them anyway, but students cheered him on and the next day met in the chapel to back him. The trustees expelled Shepard and George C. Dromgoole, others were suspended, and most of the rest signed apologies.
-
Polly Burke helps organize the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church
In September 1816 Mary W. Burke joined eight other people and the Rev. John Knox Witherspoon to organize the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church, which acquired the town's brick church built in 1810. She rented pew 13 on the first pew list and supported the church for the next eighteen years.
-
A gunpowder bomb explodes outside tutor John Patterson's door
Apparently in revenge for the Shepard suspensions, someone filled a brass door knob with powder, lit a match fuse and left it at Patterson's door. A student picked it up and dropped it moments before it went off, and no one was hurt.
-
Robert H. Chapman resigns the university presidency
At the first board meeting after the Shepard affair Chapman resigned, saying he wished to give himself to the ministry. The trustees made it effective at once, paid him half a year's salary and let him keep the president's house to the end of the session.
-
Joseph Caldwell is elected president a second time
After William Neill and Lewis von Schweinitz declined the office, the trustees returned the presidency to Caldwell by a commission taking effect January 1, 1817.
-
Archibald D. Murphey submits his Report on Education to the General Assembly
While state senator for Orange, Murphey laid before the Assembly a plan for primary schools, academies and more state support for the university. The book calls it the first definite plan for public education offered in North Carolina.
-
John Motley Morehead serves as a tutor at the university
After graduating in 1817, Morehead was one of the university's two tutors for that year, with Priestly Hinton Mangum.
-
Nancy Hilliard's family moves from Granville County to Chapel Hill
William and Lucy Walker Hilliard moved their family, including their daughter Nancy, from Granville County to Chapel Hill in 1817. She later kept the village's main hotel for students and travelers.
-
The Rev. John Knox Witherspoon adds the paired end chimneys to his West King Street house
While he owned the house now called Twin Chimneys, the Presbyterian minister and schoolmaster built the Flemish-bond pairs of chimneys at each gable end that gave it its name. The two-story front porch dates from about 1816.
-
Hillsborough physician James S. Smith serves in Congress
James Strudwick Smith, an Orange County-born physician who had studied medicine with Dr. James Webb of Hillsborough, represented the Hillsborough district in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Congresses from March 4, 1817, to March 3, 1821. He was defeated when he sought a third term.
-
New Hope's elders sell seventeen acres of church land for repairs
After what the deed calls mature deliberation, the elders and subscribers sold seventeen acres at the southwest corner of the church tract to Samuel Strayhorn to pay for church repairs. Seventy acres of Gilbert Strayhorn's gift remained.
-
Dr. James Webb deeds land for Polly Burke's log schoolhouse
On November 6, 1817, Dr. James Webb deeded to his neighbor Mary W. Burke a strip of his lot on East Queen Street, where a log schoolhouse was built for her to teach the Webb children. Known as Miss Polly Burke's School, it took neighborhood children from about 1818 to 1834 and is cited as a forerunner of the Burwell School.
-
Trustees order the faculty to prosecute students for damage to the buildings and grove
Angered by "the late outrages on the buildings of the University & grove," the trustees ordered the faculty to prosecute the offenders in the courts.
-
A student of 1818 recalls the village's two stores and Hilliard's tavern
Writing to Elisha Mitchell in 1853, William D. Moseley of the class of 1818 remembered about a dozen houses on the main street in his student years, with two stores, Trice's and Tom Taylor's, and Hilliard's tavern. Of the private buildings he named, only two houses on East Franklin Street survive.
-
Archibald D. Murphey becomes a Superior Court judge
Archibald D. Murphey left the state senate, where he had represented Orange since 1812, to become a judge of the Superior Court in 1818.
-
George E. Badger serves as a trustee of the university
George E. Badger sat on the university's board of trustees from 1818 to 1844. He was one of the first members of its executive committee in 1835, served on its land committee and as its counsel in the Tennessee land suits, and moved the creation of a chair of modern languages.
-
George Moses Horton begins selling poems to UNC students
By about age twenty, George Moses Horton, enslaved on a Chatham County farm, was carrying fruit to the UNC campus on Sundays, and students began paying him to compose love poems and acrostics. His first printed poem appeared in April 1829, the year The Hope of Liberty was published.
-
Jacob Jeffries of the Texas community makes his will
The will of Jacob Jeffries, one of the first heads of household on the 1787 tax list, was witnessed by David Haitcock, and one of his daughters married into the Guy family. Hazel reads such ties among the Jeffries, Haitcock, Guy and Whitmore families as the marks of a single community that married within itself.
-
Mary Mendenhall keeps Union School near Woody's Ferry on the Haw
In 1818 Union School, about a mile south of Woody's Ferry on the Haw River in Orange County, was in the charge of Mary Mendenhall.
-
Mrs. Frederick Nash plants the double row of cedars that forms Hillsborough's Cedar Walk
Mrs. Frederick Nash planted two rows of cedar trees along a path of about ten feet running north from West Margaret Lane toward West King Street, linking the Nash house with the John H. Witherspoon house. The walk survives and several houses face onto it.
-
St. Jude's Church on Stony Creek is admitted to the Episcopal diocesan convention
A small Episcopal congregation meeting at the Union Meeting House near Stony Creek in Orange County, organized as St. Jude's Church, was received into union with the new Diocese of North Carolina at its 1818 convention, with Robert Davis seated as its lay delegate. Murphy counts it, with St. Mary's a year later, as an old colonial mission revived and long grouped with Hillsborough.
-
Students James K. Polk and William Horn Battle board at the Tenney farmhouse
The one-story frame house at 381 Tenney Circle, a dwelling on John B. Tenney's farm northeast of the campus, was probably standing by 1818 and keeps much of its early interior. James K. Polk of the class of 1818 and William Horn Battle of the class of 1820 took room and board there and walked two miles to classes.
-
The Puckett house stands on East Franklin Street across from Hooper's
John Puckett, a former postmaster, bought the lot at 501 East Franklin Street from John Craig in 1817, and by early 1818 his widow lived in a two-story Federal house there; Denison Olmsted bought it from her about 1820 and remodeled it. Before the Civil War it was the home of mathematics professor James Phillips, whose family held Ben and Dilsey Craig in slavery; the Craigs lived in a brick kitchen in the back yard.
-
Thomas Ruffin's law office is built beside his Hillsborough house
A one-room frame law office with a rubble stone chimney was built for Thomas Ruffin, later chief justice of North Carolina, near his house on what became the Burnside lawn. It still stands on its original site.
-
Trustees add a professorship of rhetoric and logic
Counting on money from Tennessee land warrants, the board created a chair of rhetoric and logic and an adjunct chair of moral philosophy over one dissenting vote. Shepard K. Kollock took the rhetoric chair in the fall of 1819, and critics complained that the faculty was filling with Presbyterian ministers.
-
Willie P. Mangum represents Orange County in the House of Commons
In 1818, a year after his admission to the bar, Willie P. Mangum was elected to the House of Commons for Orange County, where he promoted constitutional reform.
-
Elisha Mitchell arrives in Chapel Hill as professor of mathematics
Elisha Mitchell, a Yale graduate from Connecticut, arrived at the University of North Carolina in January 1818 as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. He taught at Chapel Hill until his death in 1857, moving to chemistry, geology and mineralogy in 1825.
-
Mary Walker is born into an enslaved family held by the Bennehans and Camerons
Mary Walker was born to Priscilla, whose mother Aggy had been one of the first enslaved children born on the Bennehan plantation in 1781. Her monument at Mount Auburn Cemetery records her birth in Orange County.
-
Drunken students break into a Chapel Hill kitchen and beat an enslaved man
On a Sunday three students full of corn whiskey shouted through the village, broke into a kitchen, beat a Black man there and insulted his owner and family. They were suspended for four months.
-
William Woods Holden is born near Hillsborough
William Woods Holden, later editor of the North Carolina Standard and governor, was born near Hillsborough to Thomas Holden and Priscilla Woods. His grandfather had moved to Orange County to farm, and from age six he was raised by his stepmother, Sally Nichols Holden.
-
Elijah Graves preaches at New Hope as stated supply
Graves, who was teaching at Hillsborough, preached at New Hope from November 1818 until April 1820. A temperance reformer, he persuaded many hearers to sign a pledge.
-
Hillsborough Academy publishes its rules for students
Under principal John Witherspoon, Hillsborough Academy printed its rules of conduct in the Raleigh Register. Students had to attend daily worship, stay out of stores and taverns, avoid liquor, and keep the Sabbath.
-
A sitting-room wing and a separate kitchen are added at the Nash-Hooper House
A one-story frame sitting room, later the dining room, was built on a log base at the rear of the Nash-Hooper House, giving it an L shape. A detached frame kitchen went up just east of the house at the same time.
-
Amendments drawn by Bartlett Yancey reshape the university's board of trustees
The act raised the board to 65, the number of counties, left vacancies to the General Assembly, fixed a quorum of seven and let an annual meeting of fifteen remove a trustee for improper conduct. Special meetings could not undo votes of an annual meeting.
-
An auxiliary Colonization Society is reported active in Chapel Hill
The Reverend William Meade reported a thriving Chapel Hill branch of the American Colonization Society, which promoted sending free Black people to Liberia.
-
Denison Olmsted begins teaching chemistry at Chapel Hill
Appointed in November 1817 to the university's new professorship of chemistry, Olmsted spent a year studying with Benjamin Silliman at Yale and began teaching at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1819. He stayed until the end of 1825, when Elisha Mitchell succeeded him.
-
Eagle Lodge is revived at Hillsborough after twenty dormant years
Eagle Lodge, silent since 1799, was revived under a new number, 71. The Grand Lodge restored its original number, 19, in 1932.
-
Elijah Graves announces Mrs. Graves' Female School at Long Meadows
In 1819 the Rev. Elijah Graves announced Mrs. Graves' Female School at Long Meadows, six miles northwest of Hillsborough.
-
Ezekiel B. Currie takes charge of the Hawfields and Cross Roads churches
Currie came from Nutbush and Grassy Creek and served Hawfields and Cross Roads for nearly twenty-five years, until age and illness ended his pastorate in 1843. He died in 1851 and was buried in the Hawfields graveyard.
-
General Assembly appoints commissioners for the Town of Chapel Hill
The General Assembly named Joseph Caldwell, Pleasant Henderson, Thomas Taylor, Ezekiel Trice and William Barbee commissioners for the town of Chapel Hill, with power to fix its boundaries and make bylaws. Elected commissioners and a corporate charter followed in the 1850-51 session.
-
Samuel Hancock buys lots near the Eno for a brickyard
With a $50 loan from Dr. James Webb, brickmason Samuel Hancock bought lots near the Eno River for a brickyard, which became known as the Webb-Hancock brickyard. Webb's 1842 bankruptcy papers say the two men ran it as partners.
-
St. Mary's Chapel is admitted to the Episcopal convention
The St. Mary's congregation in eastern Orange County was received into the Episcopal convention of North Carolina, two years after the diocese was formed.
-
The university closes its grammar school and makes Hillsborough Academy its preparatory school
When Abner W. Clopton gave up the grammar school the university dropped it. Caldwell arranged for Hillsborough Academy, under John Witherspoon with John Rogers teaching, to prepare boys for the university, whose faculty could attend its examinations and admit its top pupils on certificate.
-
The university stops running Steward's Hall and lets students board where they choose
Ending the old commons, the trustees rented Steward's Hall to Mrs. Burton, who had to feed students for no more than $9 a month the first year and allow the commencement ball in the dining room free. Board there had risen from $30 a year in 1795 to $95 in 1818.
-
Visiting Episcopal clergy hold the first recorded services of the revived church in Hillsborough
In the convention year 1819-20, John Phillips of Tarboro and G. T. Bedell of Fayetteville became the first clergy recorded as officiating in Hillsborough, Bedell preaching in the Presbyterian church lent by its pastor John Witherspoon and baptizing nine children in Orange County. Eight of the baptisms took place at Thomas Latta's house four miles from town and were entered in the Latta family Bible, which Murphy found still kept in the same room in 1890.
-
William A. Graham enters Hillsborough Academy to prepare for the university
Joseph Graham of Lincoln County sent his youngest son, William A. Graham, then nearly fifteen, to Hillsborough Academy in 1819 as his last step before the university. The academy was under the Rev. John Witherspoon, assisted by John Rodgers, and Graham studied there about eighteen months.
-
Students give up pistols and dirks after a Washington's Birthday brawl
After Walker Anderson's oration a dinner ended in drunken fighting, a dirk was drawn and a peacemaker was stabbed in the arm. The students were made to hand in their weapons, six pistols and two dirks, to be held while they remained at the university.
-
William D. Paisley sells his Orange County farm to Elijah Pickard
Paisley left the Hawfields in 1818 to head the Greensborough Academy and in September 1819 sold the log house farm to Elijah Pickard. The chain of title is unclear for some years after the sale.
- 1820s
-
A Federal house is built on West Queen Street for Eliza Hasell
Eliza G. Hasell bought the lots from Archibald D. Murphey on July 27, 1819, and the two-story house with pedimented one-story wings, modeled on a plate in Robert Morris's Rural Architecture, was built for her about 1820. After her marriage to William S. Plumer she sold it to Samuel Simpson, and his daughter Mary Simpson Nash's family held it into the twentieth century.
-
A hall-and-parlor farmhouse is built on the Cabe land by the Eno
The one-and-a-half-story frame house, with unpainted heart pine walls and late Georgian mantels, was probably built in the 1820s by Jamima Cabe and her husband Jehu Brown, who married in 1827. It may instead date from before William Cabe's death in 1828.
-
David Faucette builds his farmhouse above the Eno
David Faucette built a two-story frame farmhouse above the Eno about 1820. It gained Greek Revival trim in the mid-1800s and a front porch about 1880. Placed on the state Study List in April 1992, it was listed in the National Register in 1999 as the David Faucette House; the name The Elms was given by owners in 1977.
-
Eagle Lodge votes money toward a male academy in Hillsborough
A year after its revival, Eagle Lodge voted to put money toward building a male academy in Hillsborough.
-
Jeffries and other Texas community families move to Ohio and Indiana
From the 1820s to the 1840s a number of families left the Texas community for Greene County, Ohio, and some went on to Rush and Whitley counties in Indiana. There members of the Jeffries family won three court cases between 1842 and 1869 over whether, as people of Indian descent, they could vote.
-
Lebanon Methodist Church is organized
Lebanon Methodist Church was organized in rural Orange County in 1820.
-
Maple Hill farmhouse is built
Jacob Jackson is thought to have built a two-story, weatherboarded log farmhouse in the Federal style about 1820, south of the earlier cabin on his farm northeast of Hillsborough. The date rests on its styling and on Jackson's documented residence there by 1822; a Greek Revival wing followed about 1855 and a connector joined the buildings in 1940.
-
Professor Denison Olmsted buys the Widow Puckett house on East Franklin Street
In 1820 Denison Olmsted bought the two-story Federal house and lot at 501 East Franklin Street from the Puckett family. From 1826 it was home to the family of mathematics professor James Phillips.
-
Saddler James Phillips walls in the Lockhart-Phillips family cemetery
James Phillips probably built the fieldstone wall around the small family graveyard on East Tryon Street, where Catherine Lockhart was buried in 1792 and Phillips himself in 1847.
-
Texas community families leave Orange for Sugar Fork in Macon County
In the 1820s, after the Cherokee cession opened the land, a group of Guy, Whitmore, Jeffries and Gibson families from the Texas community moved to the mountains and formed the Sugar Fork settlement in Macon County. It stayed distinct for many years; letters of 1869 and 1872 to the Indian Office described its people as Catawba who had come from Orange County.
-
The 1820 census counts 23,492 people in Orange County
The fourth federal census counted 23,492 people in Orange County: 16,777 white residents, 6,153 enslaved people and 562 free people of color. It listed 7,315 people engaged in agriculture, 483 in manufactures and 43 in commerce.
-
The Beasley House is built on a hall-and-parlor plan
Thought to date from the 1820s, the Beasley House ranks among the finest hall-and-parlor houses left in Orange County. Its early story-and-a-half section keeps its original room layout and its hewn, pegged frame, though the house was changed and enlarged late in the nineteenth century.
-
The Miller log house is built near Rougemont
The Miller house is a log dwelling with a second log pen behind it, joined by a covered breezeway; the rear pen served as the kitchen and has a stone chimney about eight feet wide.
-
The core of the Saunders-Pritchard House is built on land that later became Northside
The two-story I-house at 208 Pritchard Avenue stands at right angles to the street because it is older than the street. Local tradition carries its core back as far as 1820; an early owner was the Civil War veteran, preacher and farmer Joseph Hubbard Saunders, and merchant and landowner William N. Pritchard owned it later.
-
A. Mason opens the Eagle Hotel at Mason Hall
Mason advertised in February 1820 that his seven-room house at Mason Hall was nearly finished and open to travelers and summer visitors. Guests could read newspapers from across the country in his hall.
-
Hillsborough has 437 white residents as the Recorder begins
Hillsborough was a town of 437 white people in February 1820, when Dennis Heartt, lately of Philadelphia, issued the first number of the Hillsborough Recorder.
-
The Hillsborough Recorder begins publication
Dennis Heartt began publishing the weekly Hillsborough Recorder in February 1820, at three dollars a year. The paper ran until 1879, and its surviving issues are a main record of nineteenth-century Hillsborough and Orange County.
Suggest a correction to an entry →
A dated event is a fact, filed on the page of the subject it belongs to: a person, a place, a theme, or a named event or history. Pages are subjects, with their own works and sources; the Place, community, or institution filter also gathers the institutions that recur in the entries without a page of their own. The page opens on the highlights; a search or any filter looks through every dated event and storyline, and each filter’s counts say how many entries choosing it would show alongside the others. A storyline is a longer history that gathers related dated events, and each storyline’s page lists its own. Counts give dated events and storylines separately. Dates come from the sources named on the cards and from the index’s event pages; where sources disagree, the card follows the county records. Entries marked approximate or needing research say so on the card; the rest were checked against the source named on it. The correction link under the entries opens the contact form; name the entry and its date and the Friends will check the source. Suggest an event →
Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated October 8, 2026. Download the full chronology as a spreadsheet (CSV).
