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1. Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899

2. August 1869, the morning after the jail raid
   Law, policy or court · Hillsborough and the roads southwest toward Alamance and Chatham counties Orange sheriff's posse tracks the Hillsborough jail raiders' horses toward Alamance

   On the morning after disguised men broke open the Orange County jail and shot two Black prisoners, the sheriff summoned Hillsborough men to follow the raiders' horse tracks from the bridge where the prisoners were shot. About three miles out, where the road forked, the tracks split toward Chatham and toward the Oaks in Alamance; Empson Moore counted forty or fifty tracks and picked up a stuffed cloth horn with blood on it, and Haywood Beverley followed twelve or fifteen riders about ten miles, to within two miles of Webb's store in Alamance. Both men described the pursuit at Governor Holden's impeachment trial on March 8, 1871.

3. March 5, 1870
   Law, policy or court · Orange County Hillsborough men ask Governor Holden to commission Pride Jones against the Klan

   On March 5, 1870 six Hillsborough men, among them J. W. Norwood, James Webb and Henry K. Nash, recommended to Governor Holden that Pride Jones be made a militia captain to put down night riding. Holden sent the commission on March 7 and Jones accepted on March 9. The raids soon stopped, and Jones resigned after four weeks.

4. August 3-4, 1870
   Publication, speech or performance · Hillsborough Josiah Turner Jr. dares Governor Holden in print to arrest him

   In a card dated at Hillsborough on August 3, 1870 and printed in his Raleigh Sentinel, Josiah Turner Jr. dared Holden to arrest him and charged that Holden's followers, stirred by talk of Turner as head of the Klan, had shot powder in Mrs. Turner's face and thrown a rock through her window near one of his children. Kirk's militia arrested Turner at Hillsborough two days later; Holden's counsel read the card at the impeachment trial on March 13, 1871 to show the spirit in which Turner had invited arrest. In a second letter dated at Hillsborough on August 4 and printed in the Sentinel on August 6, read by the House managers on February 18, he told Holden to come on with his chains.

5. February 24, 1871
   Law, policy or court · North Carolina Senate chamber, Raleigh Impeachment court admits Holden's 1870 letters with Pride Jones on the Orange Klan

   The Senate, sitting as the court of impeachment, voted 25 to 19 to admit Governor Holden's March 1870 correspondence with Dr. Pride Jones of Hillsborough, which the defense offered to show that Holden tried peaceful means against the Klan in Orange before he used troops in Alamance. The managers objected that the court had already shut out evidence of Klan activity outside Alamance and Caswell; the presiding officer let it in as bearing on Holden's motive, noting Holden's answer that Josiah Turner Jr.'s arrest was justified by the excitement Turner had stirred in Orange. Holden's secretary John B. Neathery then read Jones's March 4 letter, the March 5 recommendation by six Orange men and Holden's March 7 commission.

6. March 2, 1871
   Law, policy or court · North Carolina Senate chamber, Raleigh Ned Strowd of Orange testifies that disguised men whipped him in Alamance

   Ned Strowd, a Black man then living in Orange County with a Mr. Mebane, testified for Holden's defense that about three weeks before Christmas 1869 sixteen to eighteen disguised men called him out of his house on William Thompson's place in Alamance, broke his gun across a tree and made his family carry their goods out into the yard. They whipped him twenty to thirty licks while he hugged a tree and threatened to come back and kill him if he told.

7. March 7, 1871
   Law, policy or court · North Carolina Senate chamber, Raleigh Lucinda Morrow of Hillsborough testifies at Governor Holden's impeachment trial

   Called by Holden's defense, Lucinda Morrow, then living in Hillsborough, described disguised men breaking into her Cane Creek home in Orange County in the fall of 1869 and hanging her husband, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, together with her brother, at the time of fall oat sowing. She said she had not named the men at the inquest because she feared they would come back and kill her. Prosecution counsel William A. Graham objected to her evidence, and Augustus S. Merrimon argued it was irrelevant unless tied to Alamance County.

8. March 8, 1871
   Law, policy or court · North Carolina Senate chamber, Raleigh Three Black witnesses from Orange testify at Holden's trial on the Morrow hanging and the jail raid

   Anderson Morrow, who had lived on Cane Creek half a mile from the Orange line, testified that about twenty-five horsemen passed his house toward Orange around nine or ten o'clock on the night Jefferson Morrow was hanged and came back before day, and that he saw many fresh horse tracks on the Mount Willing road the morning after the Hillsborough jail raid, though he heard no one pass that night. Empson Moore and Haywood Beverley of Hillsborough then told of following the raiders' tracks with the sheriff. Holden's counsel offered the testimony to tie the Orange killings to Alamance men; the managers objected that the roads led elsewhere, and the presiding officer ruled that the jail raid was not yet connected to Alamance, so Moore was withdrawn.

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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 4, 2026.