Chronology

Search and filters

Entries

1. Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865

2. about 1818
   Construction or physical change · Thomas Ruffin Law Office, 201 South Cameron Street, Hillsborough Thomas Ruffin's law office is built beside his Hillsborough house

   A one-room frame law office with a rubble stone chimney was built for Thomas Ruffin, later chief justice of North Carolina, near his house on what became the Burnside lawn. It still stands on its original site.

3. 1835
   Construction or physical change · Burnside, 201 South Cameron Street, Hillsborough Paul C. Cameron builds Burnside on the foundation of Thomas Ruffin's old house

   Paul Cameron built the town house he named Burnside on South Cameron Street, on the stone foundation of his father-in-law Thomas Ruffin's earlier house. Enslaved workers from Cameron's Fairntosh plantation built it under his master carpenter Jack, and John Berry laid the brick.

4. May 27, 1838
   Property or economic transaction · Burnside, 201 South Cameron Street, Hillsborough Paul Cameron sells Burnside to Cadwallader Jones Jr.

   Paul Cameron sold Burnside, his three-year-old Hillsborough house, to Cadwallader Jones Jr. for $2,000. Jones sold it back to Cameron in the 1850s when he ran into money trouble.

5. 1856
   Property or economic transaction · Burnside, Hillsborough Paul C. Cameron repurchases Burnside and moves back to Hillsborough

   Paul and Anne Ruffin Cameron left Fairntosh in 1856, bought back Burnside, the Hillsborough house where they had first lived after their 1832 marriage, and moved back to town.

6. about 1857
   Construction or physical change · Cameron Ice House, south of Cameron Park Elementary School (200 East King Street parcel), Hillsborough An octagonal brick ice house is built for Burnside

   A mostly underground octagonal brick ice house with a conical shingled roof was built for Burnside, the Cameron family estate on South Cameron Street; the brickwork is said to be John Berry's. It stands in the woods south of Cameron Park Elementary School and was restored around 2002.

7. 1857
   Construction or physical change · Cameron Park, Burnside grounds, South Cameron Street, Hillsborough Paul Cameron brings English gardener Thomas A. Adams to plant the Burnside grounds

   Paul Cameron hired Thomas A. Adams, a landscape gardener from Chester, England, to plant the twenty-acre front yard of Burnside with trees ordered from Parsons and Co. of Long Island. The grounds became known as Cameron Park, and many of the trees still stand.

8. Inscribed December 5, 1865
   Statistic or record · Coachman's Quarters, South Cameron Street, Hillsborough Bricks at the Coachman's Quarters carry the date Dec 5, '65

   Two bricks in a small outbuilding near the Burnside stable in Hillsborough carry the hand-cut inscription 'Dec 5, '65', found during the building's restoration after 2003. The owners and descendants connect it to Jesse Ruffin, a coachman once enslaved by Thomas Ruffin. According to family tradition he cut the date to mark the day after the General Assembly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, which formally ended slavery.

9. Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899

10. late nineteenth century
    Construction or physical change · Burnside, 201 South Cameron Street, Hillsborough The Camerons move a two-story building thought to be slave quarters to Burnside

    In the late nineteenth century the Cameron family moves a two-story frame building, thought to have been built as quarters for enslaved people, to the southeast corner of the Burnside house at 201 South Cameron Street. It was joined to the main house at the second floor in the 1950s.

11. Early twentieth century · 1900–1944

12. 1940s
    Closing or ending · Burnside grounds, South Cameron Street, Hillsborough The James Hogg House on the Burnside grounds is torn down

    The house associated with James Hogg, the Revolutionary-era merchant, was demolished in the 1940s. The remains of one chimney still stand northeast of Burnside.

13. Recent decades · 1976–2026

14. about 2010
    Construction or physical change · Coachman's Quarters, 209 South Cameron Street, Hillsborough The Cameron coachman's quarters on South Cameron Street are restored

    The one-room brick coachman's quarters built about 1830 for Paul Cameron's Burnside estate, which had lost its roof and chimney, is carefully restored around 2010 at 209 South Cameron Street.

Suggest a correction to an entry →

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 1, 2026.