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Burwell School Historic Site Task Force.Open the sourceAll sources
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Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1810s
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The Strudwick heirs' enslaved people are hired out under Dr. James Webb's guardianship
After Col. William F. Strudwick died in 1810, Dr. James Webb managed the estate for his widow and younger sons and hired out the people it held, listing them by name year after year. In 1819 two of those assigned to young Edmund Strudwick, Jim and Nelly, were sold or leased for $533 and $500.
- 1820s
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William H. Adams buys the lots that became the Burwell School site
Hillsborough sold lots in the old North Town Commons pasture, advertising the town as a healthy place to live and to school children. In November 1821 William H. Adams took the deed for lots 152 and 153, an acre each, for $216.
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Fanny Evans, a free woman of color, receives a town lot by the Eno
A land record gave Fanny Evans and her children Henry and Jane lot 135, a town lot running down to the Eno River. She also owned three lots at West Margaret Lane and Occoneechee Street. Her sons Henry and Wilson Bruce Evans became cabinetmakers in town.
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The Presbyterian session admonishes two men for trading in enslaved people
Hillsborough Presbyterian Church charged William Adams and John Wall with the "unchristian act of negro trading." Adams said he had sold people he held to pay his debts and taken friends' slaves to market with his own; the session admonished both men and did not punish them.
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Sarah Grove buys lots 152 and 153 for $800
Adams sold the two lots to Sarah Grove for $800, a rise that suggests he had built the first four-room house and its outbuildings. About eighteen months later she sold them to the attorney Nathaniel J. Palmer for $1,200.
- 1830s
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Godfrey and Isabella marry at St. Matthew's
The Rev. William Mercer Green married Godfrey and Isabella, the first couple in St. Matthew's register of people of color. Their infant son Milton Alexander was baptized there in November 1835.
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Job, later Rev. Job Berry, is baptized at St. Matthew's
Job, enslaved by George W. B. Burgwyn, was baptized at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church by William Mercer Green and confirmed the next April. As Job Berry he later led Hillsborough's first Black congregation.
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Six enslaved women are baptized into Hillsborough Presbyterian Church
The Rev. S. J. Price baptized six women held by the Nash, Watters, Scott and Waddell households, and Frederick Nash and William J. Bingham received them as members. In the twenty years that followed under Robert Burwell, the church took in only one communicant of color.
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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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Hillsborough Presbyterian Church buys the house as its manse
The church's trustees bought lots 152 and 153 in January 1836, renovated the house, and gave it to their minister, Robert Armistead Burwell, and his family, who had arrived from Virginia late the year before.
- 1840s
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A Female School House is built for the Burwells' school
As the school grew, subscribers in town paid for a 36-by-20-foot schoolhouse north of the Burwell home, built by the carpenter George A. Faucette.
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Free people of color make up most of Dr. Walter A. Norwood's Hillsborough household
In the 1840 census, as the Burwell School task force read it against the 1839 Bailey map of Hillsborough, Dr. Walter A. Norwood headed a household of five in which everyone but the doctor was a free person of color.
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Henry Evans, a free cabinetmaker of color, buys a shop lot on Churton Street
Evans paid $265 for old lot 6 on Churton Street, across from the courthouse then being built, and made furniture there, including chancel pieces for St. Matthew's, where he was baptized in 1842. The Bailey map marks his workshop.
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Hillsborough counts about 787 people, 333 of them enslaved
Reading the 1840 census against William Bailey's sketch map of the town in 1839, the Task Force counted about 787 people in the mapped households: 434 white, 333 enslaved and 20 free people of color. Dr. James Webb's household was the largest, and Dr. James S. Smith held the most people, 41.
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William Norwood's estate lists Rebecca Ruffin and her daughters
When William Norwood died, the inventory of his estate named Rebecca, wife of Judge Ruffin's coachman Jesse, and two of their daughters, Nancy and Julia, among 57 enslaved people.
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A Norwood and Tillinghast debt settlement prices enslaved people by name
To pay what was owed the Bank of Cape Fear, a settlement between J. W. Norwood and Samuel Tillinghast valued an estate at $15,433 by listing each enslaved person with a price, Eliza at $75 and Manley at $200.
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Frances Devereux deeds Primus to Dr. Edmund Strudwick
Five months after her husband died, Frances Devereux of Raleigh deeded Primus to Dr. Edmund Strudwick of Hillsborough. Primus later drove and gardened at the Burwell School and, after emancipation, worked at the Nash and Kollock School as Primus Smith.
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Richard Mayo, a free cabinetmaker of color, buys three town lots
Richard Mayo paid $200 for three lots on Occoneechee Street between West Tryon and West Queen streets, and in 1849 gave them to Levi McCollum to settle a debt. His brother William later waited tables at the Burwell School.
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Mitchell asks the Burwells to sell his wife Mary Ann with him
Mitchell, an enslaved man who had run from his owner, came to Robert Burwell asking that he and his wife Mary Ann, enslaved in the Burwell household, be sold together. He worked at the house for a week; then Burwell told him to go back to his master, and he left on February 17.
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Smallpox at the Turner house sends students out of town
Anna Burwell wrote that William Turner had caught smallpox from the clothes of a brother back from medical lectures in Philadelphia. Twenty or thirty students of the Institute left town, and both Burwell boarders went home, though no second case followed.
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Robert Burwell buys the house and has John Berry enlarge it
Burwell resigned his pulpit and bought the two lots from the church for $800 and back pay. The builder John Berry added a central hall and two rooms and turned the house to face Churton Street. A deed of trust of July 16, 1850 shows Burwell still owing Berry $2,500 and the church trustees $800, secured on the lots and on enslaved members of the household.
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Sarah Kollock becomes the Burwell School's teacher of French and drawing
Sarah Kollock, one of the Burwell School's first pupils, had helped teach the younger children and in 1848 became its full-time teacher of French and drawing. By September 1851 Molly Burwell had taken her place and she was in Oxford.
- 1850s
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A free man is jailed in Hillsborough for giving his free papers to an enslaved man
The 1850 census taker listed the town jail's inmates with their charges. John McAndless, a free laborer of 22, was held for "giving his free papers to a slave".
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Robert Burwell pledges Mary Ann and her children against his building debts
A deed of trust set out Burwell's debts of $2,500 to the builder John Berry and $800 to the Presbyterian trustees, and offered as security the enslaved seamstress Mary Ann, her four children and any children born to her, and a girl named Ann.
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Hillsborough Presbyterian Church sells the people it held in trust for the Witherspoons
People once held by John Knox Witherspoon had passed to the church in trust for the care of his ailing daughter. The session refused a sale in August 1852, but after Witherspoon's death it agreed, and part of the money went to Mary Witherspoon. The names of those sold are not recorded.
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The Evans families leave Hillsborough for Oberlin, Ohio
Squeezed by laws that stripped free people of color of the vote, the right to preach and schooling, the cabinetmakers Henry and Wilson Bruce Evans took their families to Oberlin, where their sister Delilah Copeland had settled in 1843. Both brothers were jailed there for their part in the 1858 Oberlin-Wellington rescue of a man taken as a fugitive.
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William Nelson goes into partnership in the Alpha Woolen Mills
The Hillsborough merchant William Nelson entered a partnership with John C. Shields in 1854 to operate the Alpha Woolen Mills on the Eno River, some six miles downstream from Hillsborough.
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Aunt Fariby saves Jane from burning
Jane, a young enslaved servant at the Burwell School, caught fire. Anna Burwell wrote that she would have burned to death but for Aunt Fariby, who saved her life.
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The Burwells resolve to sell their cook Hannah
Hannah, who had come from Virginia with the family and cooked for the school, had been drinking heavily through 1855. Anna Burwell wrote to her daughter Fanny that she had made up her mind: Hannah would be sent to Richmond to be sold.
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Anne Call Cameron, piano teacher to Burwell School students, dies
A widow known as Nancy, she gave piano lessons at the Burwell School to help pay for the care of her daughter Anna McKenzie Kirkland, whose illness followed her husband's death in 1843. She died in Hillsborough in June 1856.
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A Black child and then a student die of illness at the Burwell School
Writing to her mother, the student Lizzie Glass mentioned a small Black boy who had died at the school the previous day, at a time when Nannie Burwell and three of the Burwell children lay sick. Within a few weeks Lizzie Glass herself died at the school.
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Alves, an enslaved man sentenced to death, is baptized at St. Matthew's
St. Matthew's register records the baptism of Alves, "a slave under sentence of death," with James Waddell as witness.
- 1860s
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A courthouse meeting in Hillsborough calls for a secession convention
Four days after Fort Sumter's surrender, 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. The meeting also pledged that the citizens of Orange would provide for the families of the Orange Guards while the company was in state service.
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The Collins family buys the former Burwell School and calls it the Beehive
Members of the Collins family of Somerset Place, who had left Union-held eastern North Carolina, paid Robert Burwell $3,500 for the house and four lots. By 1863 about forty family members and enslaved servants lived there, and the family named it the Beehive.
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Paul Cameron complains that Jesse Ruffin is raising freedpeople's hopes of land
In May 1865, weeks after the Confederate surrender near Durham, Paul Cameron wrote to his father-in-law Thomas Ruffin that the judge's longtime coachman Jesse had stirred the freedpeople on his place to hope for a freehold in the land they worked, and asked that his name not be linked with Jesse's.
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Job Berry calls a fair to buy a building for a Black school
The Hillsborough Recorder printed Job Berry's notice that the colored citizens of Hillsborough would hold a fair on September 23 to raise money for a school building. The school later met in the old courthouse at Queen and Churton streets.
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Job Berry buys an acre on South Wake Street
Months after emancipation, Job Berry paid Henry N. Brown $300 for parts of lots 20 and 17 off South Wake Street, next to the Nash and Kollock School, where his wife Rebecca Nash had been enslaved.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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The Collins women sell their shares of the Beehive to Dr. Thomas D. Warren
After the war the Collins relatives who had lived at the Beehive left Hillsborough, and the women sold their shares of the house to Dr. Thomas D. Warren, who had married Elizabeth Alethea Collins.
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Jesse and Rebecca Ruffin register the marriage they made in
Jesse Ruffin, coachman to Judge Thomas Ruffin, and Rebecca, who had kept the keys of the Norwood household across the Eno, had married in 1828 while enslaved to different families. They recorded the marriage with the Freedmen's Bureau and later bought a farm.
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Peter and Diannah Benton acquire land south of Hillsborough
A deed from Frances Thompson conveyed land half a mile south of town, where the Chatham and Chapel Hill roads divided (today Mayo Street and Orange Grove Road), to Peter Benton, his wife Diannah and Jimmy Thompson. Peter Benton, a free man, had gardened at the Burwell School in 1855.
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Job Berry is admitted as a preacher by the A.M.E. Church
Meeting in Greensboro, the church's North Carolina Conference admitted Job Berry on trial and sent him to Mebanesville and Graham, making formal the ministry he had carried on while state law barred Black preachers.
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The sheriff auctions the former Burwell School to David C. Parks
Dr. Thomas D. Warren was deep in local debt, and the Orange County sheriff sold the house at auction to David C. Parks for $600. Parks and his brother Charles traded the property between them for the next quarter century.
- 1870s
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Mary Pauline Fitzgerald is baptized at St. Matthew's
The seven-month-old daughter of the freedmen's teacher Robert G. Fitzgerald and his wife Cornelia was baptized at St. Matthew's, her mother standing as sponsor. As Pauline Fitzgerald Dame she later raised her niece, Pauli Murray.
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Job Berry is named a delegate to the Republican state convention
The Orange County Republican convention chose Rev. Job Berry as a Hillsborough delegate to the 1872 state convention, which backed Ulysses S. Grant and Governor Tod R. Caldwell.
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A Presbyterian church for Hillsborough's Black members is founded
More than a decade after emancipation, a Presbyterian church for people of color was established on land from the Brodie family at the corner of Orange and Wake streets.
- 1880s
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David S. Payne marries Eliza Mayo
The marriage joined two Black Hillsborough families tied to the Burwell School: Eliza was a granddaughter of the school's laundress Eliza Chavious, and David was the son of Bettie Payne and a grandson of Rev. William Payne, a founder of Dickerson Chapel.
- 1890s
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Dr. John S. Spurgeon buys the former Burwell School
The dentist paid Charles Parks $2,500 for lots 152 and 153. The Spurgeons, whose household included Carrie Waitt Spurgeon, daughter of a Burwell student, lived there for about seventy years and added electricity and plumbing.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
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Jesse Ruffin, coachman and stagecoach driver, dies
Jesse Ruffin died in his nineties at his grandson Lindsey Faucette's house, out between Hillsborough and Durham. The Durham Sun remembered him as Judge Ruffin's servant and later Paul Cameron's, and a stagecoach driver before the railroad came; he was carried to Hillsborough by train for burial.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
- 1970s
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The Burwell School opens to visitors
The restored house has been open to visitors every year since 1977.
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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.
