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Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–13.Back to highlights
Entries
Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
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Archibald D. Murphey graduates from the university and joins its faculty
Archibald D. Murphey graduated with honors from the University at Chapel Hill in 1799 and was hired at once as a tutor. The next year he became professor of languages, one of three faculty members, and also served as librarian before resigning to study law in Hillsborough.
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Students rise against the faculty and beat principal Gillaspie
In the term before the 1799 commencement students beat Gillaspie, waylaid and stoned tutor William E. Webb and threatened Caldwell and Archibald Murphey, and for a week exercises stopped. Three leaders were dismissed and the faculty offered to resign, and by that November Caldwell was chosen again to head the university.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
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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.
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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 The board repealed it unanimously in December, but few of the seceders came back.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Archibald D. Murphey offers forty enslaved people for sale
Murphey put forty people up for sale in 1821, a number the book calls unmatched in Orange sale notices, where most sales involved one or a few people.
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Archibald D. Murphey gives the first commencement-eve oration in Person Hall
On June 27, 1827, the day before commencement, Murphey delivered an oration in Person Hall at Chapel Hill under the appointment of the Dialectic Society. Addressing the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, he argued that a college course only prepared the mind for later learning; the speech was printed and reissued in 1843.
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Archibald D. Murphey dies in Hillsborough
Archibald D. Murphey died in Hillsborough, then his home, on February 1, 1832, after years of rheumatism and debt, and was buried in the town graveyard a few feet from the door of the Presbyterian church. No monument marked his grave when the memoir in his published papers was written.
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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.
