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Orange County Indexed

Chronology

Key events from Orange County history: 100 highlights to start, then the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, each connected to the index. A storyline gathers many dated events into one history, such as the Regulator crisis.

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4 dated events match your filters.

Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–4.Back to highlights

Entries

  1. Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865

  2. Construction or physical change · Sunny Side, St. Mary's Road (100 Baldwin Road), near Hillsborough Builder John Berry enlarges a St. Mary's Road farmhouse into Sunny Side, his country home

    John Berry, the Hillsborough brickmason and builder, enlarged and remodeled an older farmhouse on St. Mary's Road as a home for himself and named it Sunny Side. He kept his library there and lived there until his death in 1870.

  3. Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899

  4. Life event · Sunny Side, near Hillsborough Builder John Berry dies at Sunny Side while starting the Berry Building

    John Berry, the self-taught builder of the Orange County Courthouse and a longtime state legislator, died of pneumonia at his home Sunny Side at 72. He had caught cold that winter while beginning his last project, a two-story brick store and ballroom downtown known as the Berry Building.

  5. Hillsborough The Berry family moves to Sunnyside south of Hillsborough

    Dr. John and Mary Strayhorn Berry moved from their West King Street house, now known as Two Chimneys, to Sunnyside, the Berry family plantation two miles south of town. Mary Berry tutored her daughter Harriet at home until she was twelve.

  6. Recent decades · 1976–2026

  7. Naming or commemoration · Sunnyside, St. Mary's Road, near Hillsborough Sunnyside, the John Berry farm, joins the Study List

    The National Register Advisory Committee placed Sunnyside, the farm of the builder John Berry east of Hillsborough (later the Baldwin farm), on North Carolina's Study List, its list of properties likely to qualify for the National Register. It came to the committee as a public request.

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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 2, 2026.

Two mice reading back to back against a leaf, with the hand-lettered words Friends of the Orange County Public Library
Illustration by Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell, gifted to the Friends 2026