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Searched the full chronology of 9,006 dated events and 77 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–4.Back to highlights
- Colonial and Regulator years · 1680–1774
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The county town becomes a courthouse village of stores, ordinaries and public buildings
William Few recalled that in 1764 the town was the metropolis of the county, where the courts were held and all public business done, a village of thirty or forty inhabitants with two or three small stores and two or three ordinary taverns, and that Scottish merchants then opened stores of European goods and a church, courthouse and jail were built. Claude Joseph Sauthier's 1768 plan of the town marks Canby's Ordinary, Nunn's Ordinary, McNair's Store, the market house, the first courthouse and the second jail.
People: William Few
Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough · Orange County jail, Hillsborough
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Town lot owners are required to build, and taxable men to work the streets
Building requirements enacted in 1766 gave the purchaser of a town lot two years to put up a brick, stone or frame house at least twenty feet long, sixteen feet wide and nine feet pitch in the clear, with a brick or stone chimney. A separate ordinance made all taxable males liable for street service under a penalty of two shillings eight pence for each day neglected.
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Orange is the most populous county in the province
In 1767 Orange County still ran over land later taken into Wake, Chatham, Guilford, Caswell, Person, Randolph, Rockingham, Alamance and Durham, and had the largest population of any county in North Carolina. Successive divisions cut it to about 7,560 people by 1779.
- Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
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The Assembly orders the sale of the ruinous St. Matthew's church building
An act of 1797 authorised the sheriff to sell the old Anglican church on Lot 98, described as in a ruinous and decayed situation and not used for divine worship for a number of years. The building went soon afterwards, and around 1800 the town had no church at all.
Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church
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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 4, 2026.
