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Orange County Indexed

Chronology

Key events from Orange County history: 100 highlights to start, then the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, each connected to the index. A storyline gathers many dated events into one history, such as the Regulator crisis.

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5 dated events match your filters.

Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–5.Back to highlights

Entries

  1. Civil rights era · 1945–1975

  2. Award or honor · Roanoke, Virginia Annie Dillard wins the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction

    Dillard won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, drawn from her private writings about the surroundings of her home in Roanoke, Virginia. This was years before she lived in Hillsborough.

  3. Recent decades · 1976–2026

  4. Publication, speech or performance · Chapel Hill Annie Dillard reads at UNC during a two-week campus visit

    Dillard spent two weeks in Chapel Hill in March 1983 as a preliminary event of the student-run Fine Arts Festival, giving a poetry reading on March 16 and leading afternoon seminars. The festival's organizer later said she was shocked by the size of the audiences for Dillard and Robert Bly.

  5. Appointment, election or service · Chapel Hill Annie Dillard is UNC's Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence

    Dillard spent a week at UNC in the English department's Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence program, meeting creative writing students and giving a free public reading in Memorial Hall on February 1. The Daily Tar Heel reported a full house.

  6. Publication, speech or performance · Chapel Hill Annie Dillard joins the Rubin writers panel at the North Carolina Literary Festival

    At the North Carolina Literary Festival at UNC, Dillard sat on a panel of writers who had studied under Louis Rubin, with Lee Smith, Katie Letcher Lyle, Margaret Gibson, Sylvia Wilkinson and Elizabeth Seydel Morgan, in Hamilton Hall.

  7. Award or honor · Key West, Florida Annie Dillard receives the National Humanities Medal

    President Barack Obama presented Dillard with the 2014 National Humanities Medal at a White House ceremony for her reflections on human life and nature. The Associated Press identified her then as Annie Dillard of Key West, Florida.

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 1, 2026.

Two mice reading back to back against a leaf, with the hand-lettered words Friends of the Orange County Public Library
Illustration by Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell, gifted to the Friends 2026