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Entries
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
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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.
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The Hillsborough Recorder calls slavery a misfortune and urges colonization
Editor Dennis Heartt wrote that slavery harmed the state but argued against freeing people to remain in North Carolina. He proposed sending free Black people to Africa at public expense and asked the legislature to act.
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The Hillsborough Recorder shop prints The Discipline of Friends and A Solemn Address to Youth
Besides the weekly paper, Dennis Heartt's Recorder office printed pamphlets. Two surviving titles from 1823 are The Discipline of Friends, for Quaker use, and A Solemn Address to Youth.
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The Orange County Sunday School Union asks the Assembly to fund its schools
The Orange County Sunday School Union petitioned the General Assembly for 25 cents a year per pupil for its 22 Sunday schools, which taught 800 to 1,000 children, many from poor families, to read. John Scott of Hillsborough presented it in the House of Commons, which turned it down.
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William W. Holden serves as an apprentice printer at the Hillsborough Recorder
At about age ten Holden was apprenticed as a printer's devil to Dennis Heartt, editor of the Hillsborough Recorder, who was responsible for his early education and political views. He struck out on his own at about sixteen, working first for the Milton Chronicle.
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An Orange County mass meeting calls for state aid to roads and river navigation
A county meeting chaired by James Webb, with Dennis Heartt as secretary, adopted an address to the people of Orange in favor of internal improvements and had 500 copies printed for circulation in the county.
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William Mercer Green delivers the literary societies' oration before commencement
On June 22, 1831, the day before commencement, William Mercer Green delivered an oration at Chapel Hill on the influence of Christianity upon the welfare of nations, under the annual appointment of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies. Dennis Heartt printed it in Hillsborough the same year.
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The Recorder shop prints Letters on Popular Education
The Hillsborough Recorder office printed Letters on Popular Education Addressed to the People of North Carolina in 1832.
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Orange County votes overwhelmingly for a constitutional convention
Orange voted 1,648 to 111 for calling a convention to reform representation, and Hillsborough, which stood to lose its borough seat, voted 228 to 23 in favor.
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The Recorder prints a county meeting's warning to abolitionists
An Orange County meeting adopted a report warning "northern fanatics" not to stir up the enslaved and predicting lasting hostility between the sections if abolitionists pressed on. Its fourteen-man committee included Frederick Nash, William A. Graham, Hugh Waddell, John U. Kirkland, Dr. Edmund Strudwick and the paper's own editor, Dennis Heartt, as a secretary.
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Polly Burke's Queen Street house passes to Dennis Heartt's family
On May 4, 1837, Mary W. Burke, then living in Alabama, gave Dr. James Webb power of attorney to dispose of her remaining Hillsborough property. Her East Queen Street house was sold that year to the family of Recorder editor Dennis Heartt, who named it Heartsease and added a Greek Revival wing about 1840.
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Dennis Heartt's family adds a two-story wing to Heartsease
After buying Polly Burke's Queen Street house in 1837, the family of Recorder editor Dennis Heartt named it Heartsease and built a two-story Greek Revival wing on its west side about 1840.
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Hillsborough Literary Association forms with Dennis Heartt as secretary
A Literary Association was formed at Hillsborough in early 1842 with Frederick Nash as president; James S. Smith, Cadwallader Jones and Robert Burwell as vice presidents; Dennis Heartt as secretary; and Walter A. Norwood as treasurer. Heartt, a charter member, had helped organize it.
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Dennis Heartt prints The Poetical Works of George M. Horton
Dennis Heartt printed The Poetical Works of George M. Horton, the Colored Bard of North-Carolina at Hillsborough in 1845, with Horton's autobiography prefixed to the poems. It was the second book by Horton, who was still enslaved when it appeared.
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The 1850 census finds Dennis Heartt's printers and apprentices living at Heartsease
The 1850 census listed editor Dennis Heartt's household at Heartsease with his two daughters, his son Edwin with his wife and small daughter, two young printers, and four boys aged eleven to eighteen entered as students who were probably apprentices at the Hillsborough Recorder.
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A courthouse meeting in Hillsborough calls for a secession convention
Ten days after Fort Sumter, a large crowd from across the county met at the courthouse. With Dr. Edmund Strudwick presiding and Dennis Heartt as secretary, it adopted resolutions asking the legislature to call a convention at once to pass an ordinance of secession.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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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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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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The revived Hillsboro Recorder moves Dennis Heartt's old press into its office
The new Hillsboro Recorder reported that it had just moved the press and some wood type Dennis Heartt brought from Connecticut for the first Recorder of 1820 out of a Hillsborough cellar, where they had sat since 1867, and into its own office.
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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 2, 2026.
