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September across every year, Antebellum and Civil War: 4 dated entries from the full dataset. Back to the highlights →
- Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
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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.
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Witherspoon dies at Tusculum and is buried in the Old Town Cemetery
He died penniless at the Tusculum farmhouse on the thirty-seventh anniversary of the organization of the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church. His funeral was held in that church and he was buried nearby in the Nash-Strudwick plot of the Old Town Cemetery, where the congregation and townspeople paid for the obelisk over his grave.
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Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation
After emancipation, Black residents of Orange County built their own institutions. Chapel Hill's First Baptist Church formed in September 1865; Job Berry and Philadelphia Quakers opened Hillsborough's freedmen's school in the old courthouse on June 5, 1866; Black residents bought land for a Chapel Hill school in 1866; and St. Paul AME bought its church lot in 1878.
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First Baptist Church organizes independently
The minute books of the church now called University Baptist record a unanimous vote on September 3, 1865 to let the colored patrons withdraw and organize a church of their own, and note that sixty-one colored members were dismissed that month for the purpose. The new congregation, later First Baptist Church of Chapel Hill, met at first in the old Quaker schoolhouse on Franklin Street under Rev. Eddie H. Cole.
The other dated entries wait behind a subject, a place, an era, a month, or the All dated entries switch, and each storyline’s page carries its own component entries. 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. Each card’s “Correct this” link opens the contact form with the entry already named. 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 September 14, 2026.
