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Orange County Courthouse Mural.Open the sourceAll sources
Searched the full chronology of 9,006 dated events and 77 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–3.Back to highlights
Entries
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
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Emancipation frees about 6,000 people in Orange County, many of whom become tenants and sharecroppers
About 6,000 enslaved people in Orange County were freed at the end of the Civil War. Many Black families left for Durham and other towns, while some stayed on the land as tenant farmers or sharecroppers.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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Lisbon Berry becomes Orange County's first Black lawyer
Lisbon Payne Berry, born enslaved in Hillsborough in 1850, studied law in Hillsborough and was admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1882. On October 2, 1882 he sat at the bar of the Orange court as a practicing lawyer, the first Black attorney in Orange County.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
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The Efland family opens an excelsior plant at Efland
The Efland family founded one of North Carolina's first excelsior, or wood wool, plants at Efland in 1906, with Mack P. Efland as manager. By 1911 the Orange Manufacturing Company was listed as an excelsior maker at Efland.
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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.
