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Colonial and Regulator years · 1600–1774
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Indigenous communities occupy the Eno River Valley
Excavations at the Hogue and Wall sites on the Eno near Hillsborough show farming communities growing corn, beans and squash, first in small scattered settlements (Haw River phase, about 1000–1400) and then in compact palisaded villages (Hillsboro phase, about 1400–1600). The Wall site village held perhaps 100 to 150 people in the mid-1400s.
- 1730s
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Virginia pays an interpreter to the Saponi and Occaneechi Indians
Charles Kimball petitioned the Virginia House of Burgesses for his allowance as interpreter to the Saponi and Occaneechi Indians. The petition shows the Occaneechi still named separately seventeen years after they left the Eno, and enough people speaking only their own language for an interpreter to be worth paying.
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The Saponi scatter between Virginia and the Catawba and a group settles in Granville County
After living briefly with the Catawba the Saponi returned to Virginia in 1733 and had to petition Lieutenant Governor Gooch for leave to resettle. Over the next twenty years they broke into small groups and moved south to the Catawba and back again, and by 1754 about twelve or fourteen Sapona men with as many women and children were living on Colonel William Eaton's land in Granville County, North Carolina.
- 1740s
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Settlers from Pennsylvania and Virginia come down the Great Wagon Road into the Haw and Eno country
From the 1740s families moving south from Pennsylvania, Maryland and western Virginia along the Great Wagon Road took up land in the Piedmont backcountry that became Orange County in 1752. Quaker families reached the Cane Creek country by this route, and German and Scotch-Irish families entered the colony the same way.
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The Granville District land office grants the land that became Orange County
The country on the Eno, Haw and Little River lay inside Earl Granville's one eighth share of Carolina, set off in 1742 and run from Edenton through agents including Francis Corbin and Thomas Child. Grants of unclaimed land were made from 1748 until Granville's death in 1763, and William Churton was the surveyor who mapped much of the district.
- 1750s
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Orange County tax lists record Bunch, Gibson and Collins families as mulatto
Several Orange County tax lists of the 1750s class families named Bunch, Gibson and Collins as mulatto, and Jeremiah and Henry Bunch took land grants near the Eno. The term then covered many people of mixed descent, and Hazel argues some of these families may have been Indian people who never left the region.
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The Great Trading Path across the Eno becomes the settlers' wagon road
The Indian route that Virginia traders had used since the 1670s crossed the Flat and Little rivers, forded the Eno at the place where the county town was laid out, and crossed the Haw near Swepsonville. After colonists reached the Piedmont in the mid eighteenth century the path was widened into a wagon road, and it is drawn on the colonial maps of Moseley, Collet and Mouzon.
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Quakers set up Cane Creek Monthly Meeting in the country that became Orange County
About thirty Quaker families from Pennsylvania had settled near Cane Creek by 1751. Abigail Pike and Rachel Wright traveled 200 miles to the Perquimans County quarterly meeting for authority to organize, and the first monthly meeting was held on October 7, 1751. It is the oldest Quaker meeting in the North Carolina Piedmont.
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A law orders a road from Orange courthouse to the Cape Fear
The act was not carried out at once, and in the meantime farmers cut their own rough roads across the county.
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Cedar Grove and rural northern Orange
The crossroads communities north of Hillsborough grew around Eno Presbyterian, organized in 1755, the Hughes Academy of 1845, the Pope farm of the 1870s and Ellis Store of 1923, with nearly half the county’s Black-owned farms in Cedar Grove Township by 1940. The Schley Grange brought telephones in 1948, the schools were consolidated and desegregated in the 1960s, and the branch library came and went between 2004 and 2010.
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Hugh McAden preaches to the Eno and Hawfields settlements
The traveling Presbyterian licentiate Hugh McAden preached to the Eno settlement on the second Sabbath of August 1755, lodging at John Anderson's house, and rode on to preach at the Hawfields on the fourth Sabbath. His journal is the earliest surviving description of either settlement.
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Moravians record a visit from Indians living at a fort near the Haw River
The Moravian settlers near present Winston-Salem recorded a visit in 1756 from Indians described as Cherokees from the fort near Haw River. The Haw was then in Orange County and a long way from any known Cherokee town, and the entry places an Indian settlement in the county decades after the Piedmont was supposed to be empty of them.
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Barnaby McCabe settles on the Eno on land bought from William Few
Barnaby McCabe (later Cabe), a Presbyterian of Scots-Irish descent, settled in Orange County in 1758, bought 330 acres of William Few's tract on the northeast bank of the Eno, registered his cattle mark and took up farming with his wife Betsy Perkins.
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The Few family settles on the Eno with four enslaved people and builds a saw and grist mill
William Few brought his family from Maryland in the fall of 1758 to 640 acres bought from James Taylor, lying on both sides of the Eno about seven miles east of the county town. Four enslaved people came with them, and Few and his brother James built a saw and grist mill on the river.
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The town on the Eno is incorporated as Childsburg
The town William Churton had laid out in 1754 as Corbin Town or Corbinton was incorporated by act of assembly in 1759 as Childsburg, named for Thomas Child, the colony's attorney general. It was renamed Hillsborough in 1766.
- 1760s
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Little River Presbyterian Church is organized
Hugh McAden led the organization of Little River Presbyterian Church, with Henry Pattillo as its first pastor.
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Edmund Fanning settles in Hillsborough
Fanning, a New York-born Yale graduate, came to Hillsborough and soon became register of deeds for Orange County, the office whose fees made him the Regulators' chief target.
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Edmund Fanning qualifies as register of Orange County
Fanning, a lawyer who came to the county town in 1762, qualified as register in March 1763. He went on to buy several town lots and build a large house on the later site of the Masonic Lodge.
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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.
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William Few moves his family to a farm a mile from town and keeps a tavern
Few bought 200 acres near the town, later called the Kirkland place, and moved his family there from their mill farm lower down the Eno. He kept a tavern at the house while the family still ran the mill.
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The Regulator movement organizes in Orange County
Orange County farmers first organized in 1766 to question county officers about taxes and fees, a Sandy Creek effort that Herman Husband led and that lapsed in 1767. In early 1768 a new association, soon called the Regulation, pledged to pay no taxes or fees beyond what the law allowed.
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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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The Regulator crisis
Orange County farmers organized in 1766 against high fees, taxes and dishonest county officers, calling a meeting at Maddock's Mill that October. Protest turned violent at the Hillsborough court in September 1770 and ended with the Regulators' defeat at Alamance on May 16, 1771 and the hanging of six at Hillsborough on June 19.
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Farmers met at Maddock’s Mill to press the county’s officers to account for fees and taxes
Delegates from Orange County neighborhoods met at Maddock's Mill to ask their assemblymen and vestrymen how public money was spent. The officers refused to attend, and the meeting resolved that such conferences between voters and their representatives should be held every year.
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Edmund Fanning tells the November court he has answered the farmers' complaints
Speaking for the county officers, Fanning rejected the protest and reported that he had written its organizers a reply he expected to end the matter.
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Hillsborough is made the seat of a superior court district
An act dividing the province into six districts and establishing a superior court of justice in each set the court for the District of Hillsborough at Hillsborough, for the counties of Orange and Granville, on the twenty second day of March and September, each term to run ten days. Nash records that no superior court sat at Hillsboro until March 1768, the town having belonged first to the Halifax and then to the Salisbury district.
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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.
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William Few takes over management of a second family farm near Hillsborough
In 1767 William Few Sr. bought another farm about seven miles from Hillsborough, and his son William, then nineteen, took over its management.
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Orange farmers swear scores of depositions against county officers
They accused Sheriff William Nunn and his deputies of seizing deer skins, livestock, a gun and cloth, and one man swore he had paid clerk Francis Nash for letters of administration he never received.
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The governor's Council thanks Edmund Fanning and his men for their conduct against the Regulators
After Tryon read the Council his cold reply to the Regulators' petition, which forbade further meetings and told them to let the taxes be collected, Fanning was called into the room and formally thanked with his men for their behavior in the recent troubles.
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William Johnston offers Richard Bennehan a partnership in the Little River Store
William Johnston offered Richard Bennehan a one-third partnership in the Little River Store on his Snowhill plantation near Hillsborough. Bennehan moved to North Carolina in late 1768 or early 1769 to manage it.
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Orange farmers draw up Regulator Advertisement Number Four
The paper set out the members' pledges on taxes and officers' fees, attendance at meetings, shared costs and majority rule.
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Tenants on Samuel Strudwick's Haw Fields land meet to keep possession by force
Francis Nash reported to Edmund Fanning that Strudwick's tenants had formed an association to hold his lands against him and had met in the Haw Fields the day before he wrote.
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Edmund Fanning writes Governor Tryon that Orange is in revolt
Two weeks after Regulators rescued a seized horse at Hillsborough, Fanning reported people across the county binding themselves by oath to refuse taxes, and said he and other officers expected an attack.
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Tryon orders the Regulators home and puts seven counties' militia on alert
Answering Fanning, the governor issued one proclamation to the people and another to militia officers in Bute, Halifax, Granville, Rowan, Mecklenburg, Cumberland and Johnston counties to stand ready to march to his aid.
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The governor's secretary posts Tryon's proclamation at Hillsborough
On the day the Regulators met to choose their delegates, Governor Tryon's secretary Edwards reached Hillsborough and put up the governor's proclamation against the disturbances. Fanning set out for Sandy Creek with an armed party the next day.
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Orange militia is called out against the Regulators, and only 120 armed men appear
With Edmund Fanning away at the Halifax court, Lieutenant Colonel Gray reported the Hillsborough horse rescue and was ordered to raise seven militia companies. Only 120 men came with arms, and the officers judged that no more than 150 men in the county could be relied on, so they agreed to a truce and named three men to meet the Regulator leaders on April 20.
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James Hunter and Rednap Howell present the Regulators' petition to Tryon at Brunswick
The petition, Advertisement Number Nine, carried 474 names, 31 of them written in German. Tryon told the Regulators to give up their name and pay their taxes, but he also warned officers against excess fees and had the lawful fees published.
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Governor Tryon arrives at Hillsborough and stays into August
Tryon came to Hillsborough in early July 1768 and stayed until mid-August, hoping the county would submit, while the Regulators went on refusing their taxes. He left for Salisbury on August 17.
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Justice James Thackston reports William Butler vowing not to pay the palace tax
Thackston told former sheriff Tyree Harris that Butler said the Regulators would pay nothing toward the governor's house at New Bern for three years, and that some two hundred Regulators had threatened anyone who seized their goods.
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Sheriff John Lea brings the Regulators Tryon's demand for a 1,000 pound bond
On the day set for settling accounts, the former sheriff stayed away and the new sheriff, John Lea, brought a severe letter from Tryon, endorsed by three councillors at Hillsborough. It demanded that twelve leading Regulators meet him at Salisbury by August 25 and give a 1,000 pound bond that no one would try to rescue Butler and Husband at the September court; Tryon left for Salisbury the same day.
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Regulators refuse to give Tryon the bond he demanded
Two days after Lea delivered the demand, the Regulators answered that their peaceable leaders could restrain the rest only if they stayed free of such a bond, and that they had never meant to rescue the prisoners, only to ask the governor to dissolve the Assembly.
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William Chavis of Granville County sells 320 acres on the Haw River
William Chavis of Granville County, who held land beside the Saponi settlement on William Eaton's land and appears to have been of part Indian descent, sold Joseph Pritchit 320 acres on both sides of the Haw River from a 1751 grant. Hazel notes the tract lay near where Saponi families would settle about twenty years later.
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Presbyterian ministers, among them Henry Pattillo of Orange, write against the Regulation
While Tryon toured Rowan and Mecklenburg to raise troops, Presbyterian ministers Hugh McAden, James Creswell, Henry Pattillo and David Caldwell sent him a letter of loyalty condemning the Regulators, and the pastors also wrote to the colony's Presbyterians telling them to keep out of the movement. The letter was read to the Rowan militia and helped raise volunteers for the march on Hillsborough.
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Tryon musters about 400 militia at Hillsborough and swears them to allegiance
When the town was thought to be in danger, Tryon called out the militia but could gather only about 400 men, to whom he gave an oath of allegiance to the King and the provincial government before sending them home.
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Tryon's army gathers at Hillsborough to guard the superior court
Tryon reached Hillsborough on September 19 with 195 Rowan and 310 Mecklenburg volunteers, and two days later 699 Orange and 120 Granville militia joined them. With gentlemen volunteers, artillery and officers the force came to 1,461 men, a quarter of the Assembly among its officers.
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Tryon sends troops out to arrest the Regulator leaders
The day after the Regulators dispersed, Tryon sent a body of troops to seize the men he most wanted. Some gave themselves up and others resisted, but all who were taken were soon let go because no true bill could be found against them.
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The last of Tryon's militia leave Hillsborough
The troops stayed in town through the court term, began to be discharged on September 28, and the last detachment marched away on October 2. The expedition cost the province 4,844 pounds.
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Edmund Fanning resigns as register of Orange County after his conviction
Found guilty at the September court on five counts of taking excess fees for registering deeds, and fined a penny on each, Fanning at once gave up the office of register.
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Samuel Devinney and John Philip Hartzo are convicted over the horse rescue
Each was fined 25 pounds and given three months in jail, but Tryon soon freed the prisoners and put off collecting their fines for three months.
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Tryon pardons the 1768 protesters except thirteen named leaders
His proclamation left out men including James Hunter, Herman Husband, Ninian Bell Hamilton and William Payne.
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Tyree Harris reports the Regulators ready to pay their taxes
Writing to Tryon, Tyree Harris said that on recent visits to the Regulators in their homes he had found them willing to pay their taxes.
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The Assembly issues 20,000 pounds in paper money to pay the troops raised at Hillsborough
The Assembly that met in November 1768 first proposed 30,000 pounds in paper to pay the militia gathered at Hillsborough and other debts; after the governor and upper house objected it passed a 20,000 pound issue that was not legal tender. Tryon said he signed it because the militia would not turn out again unpaid.
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The Assembly pays for printing Micklejohn's sermon to the troops
The Assembly voted to repay the Orange parish minister George Micklejohn for printing the sermon he had preached to the troops at Hillsborough. Bassett, citing Foote's Sketches, reports that the sermon said at least twenty Regulators ought to have been hanged.
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Orange County inhabitants petition for a public inspection at Hillsborough
Francis Nash and twenty five other inhabitants petitioned Governor Tryon and the legislature for a public inspection station at Hillsborough. They argued that having to haul tobacco and hemp at least a hundred miles overland to be inspected discouraged farmers from growing crops their soil suited.
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Orange and Rowan Regulators petition the Assembly for reforms
Regulators of Orange and Rowan joined in a petition asking that lawyers and court clerks be barred from the Assembly, that officers be paid salaries, that taxes rest on property, that small debts be tried before one magistrate and a jury of six, and that the county be divided. It also asked that ministers of every denomination be allowed to marry couples and that Assembly votes be recorded.
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Regulators whip Orange County sheriff John Lea
The one serious disturbance Nash records in the county between October 1768 and the 1770 riot was the whipping of Sheriff John Lea in 1769.
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Simon Lindley is born in Orange County
Simon Lindley, the first son of John Lindley and Sarah Pyle, was born in Orange County on January 20, 1769. He later worked as a farmer, surveyor and Predestinarian Baptist minister, and his cipher book of 1786 to 1795 is held at UNC.
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The March 1769 superior court at Hillsborough hears the Regulators' cases against the officers
With no troops in town, many Regulators came to the March 1769 court to prosecute the officers, with little success. Herman Husband was tried and acquitted, James Hunter's case was continued, and Fanning was tried again on the old fee charge and formally convicted.
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Orange voters elect Regulators Herman Husband and John Pryor to the Assembly
In the elections set for July 18, 1769, Orange returned the Regulators Herman Husband and John Pryor to the Assembly over Edmund Fanning.
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Tryon issues a general pardon for the 1768 disturbances
The proclamation extended to fines and forfeitures for everyone involved in the Orange County troubles of the year before.
- 1770s
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Herman Husband publishes An Impartial Relation
His account of the Regulation traced the first disturbances to Orange County while granting that Granville and Halifax had been in the same dispute years earlier.
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Quaker settlers farm the future Blackwood property
A Quaker settler identified as Mr. Marlett had purchased the property and begun farming there.
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A mounted troop of Regulators rides through Hillsborough firing pistols
A troop of mounted Regulators, turned back from its march on New Bern, came down on Hillsborough, drove residents indoors, took liquor at the tavern and galloped through the streets firing pistols before riding off. Nash says they did no great damage.
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Regulators marching on New Bern turn back at Haw River
Regulators from Rowan, Orange and Granville gathered under James Hunter to march on New Bern, where Herman Husband was jailed. They broke up at Haw River on hearing that a grand jury had declined to indict him and he had been released on February 8.
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Governor Tryon's army turns its horses onto the Few farm's crops
Back at Hillsborough in mid-June 1771 after the Battle of Alamance, Governor William Tryon's army turned its horses onto the wheat, barley and oats of the Few farm a mile east of town, where William Few Sr. had given bond for Regulator leaders. The family left for Georgia that winter.
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The Hillsborough superior court holds its first term since the 1770 riot
For the first time in a year and a half the district court sat at Hillsborough, with Judges Maurice Moore and Richard Henderson presiding and about 300 cases on its dockets. Thomas Clark qualified as clerk, and a suit by James Few against Francis Nash was entered as abated by the plaintiff's hanging.
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Morgan Edwards reports 1,500 families have left since Alamance
The Baptist preacher and traveler wrote that many more were waiting to sell their farms and follow. The book says many former Regulators went to the Tennessee country.
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The upper house rejects a general amnesty for the Regulators
Although the British government advised a general amnesty act to close the Regulator prosecutions, the provincial upper house turned the bill down in 1773 because it did not except enough people.
Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
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The Allison family settles at Cedar Grove
The Allison family settles the Cedar Grove area in the late eighteenth century, and other families follow. Allisons still lived there when the survey was made.
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Richard Bennehan buys the land that began the Stagville plantation
Bennehan bought land northeast of Snow Hill on the west side of the Flat River, the start of what became the Stagville-Fairntosh plantation complex.
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William Cain acquires the Pleasant Grove plantation on the Trading Path
William Cain acquired the Orange County property later called Pleasant Grove, beside the old Indian Trading Path, and held it until his death in 1834.
- 1780s
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The oldest frame section of the Hill Farm house is built on St. Mary's Road
The earliest part of the Hill Farm house, a frame section on a stone foundation with a double-shouldered chimney nearly eight feet wide, may go back to the 1780s, making it one of the few eighteenth-century buildings along the road.
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Samuel Strudwick asks Thomas Burke for help as settlers threaten his Haw Fields plantation
Strudwick wrote Burke that a man named Bowles, who held a new patent for a small plantation in sight of his house, meant to take the peaches from his orchard to distill and said he could raise a posse to do it, and that another settler who had patented Strudwick's own house might drive the family into the woods. He asked Burke what he should do.
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William Cabe and thirty neighbors on the Eno post a warning against hunters
William Cabe published a broadside, signed by his brother John and 28 neighbors, warning that people hunting with dogs and guns on their land had driven off their cattle and hogs and would be prosecuted.
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Indian families from Virginia settle the Texas community in northern Orange County
Charles Whitmore, Jesse Whitmore and Jacob Jeffries appear on the Orange County return used for the 1790 federal census, which was compiled from a tax list of 1787. Families of the same names had moved southwest from Greensville County in Virginia, and by 1820 the settlement later called Texas, or Pleasant Grove, was intact, with the Corn and Jeffries families holding tracts of several hundred acres.
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Richard Bennehan buys land from Judith Stagg and opens the Stagville Store
After William Johnston's death in 1785 Bennehan opened his own store, on land he bought from Judith Stagg, which became the Stagville Store.
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Simon Lindley and Anna Stanley make their home in Orange County
After marrying Anna Stanley in South Carolina on July 14, 1789, Simon Lindley settled with her in Orange County. The family moved to Christian County, Kentucky, in the mid-1790s.
- 1790s
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John B. Tenney is said to build a farmhouse northeast of the village
Local tradition credits John B. Tenney with building the one-story frame farmhouse now at 381 Tenney Circle around 1791, and says it stayed in the family into the mid-twentieth century and took in boarders early in the 1800s.
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Faucett's grist mill is working at the Eno ford northwest of Hillsborough
The county's architectural survey records the Faucett Mill in operation by at least 1792, at a place where a wagon road forded the Eno River northwest of Hillsborough, and says it may have been built as early as the 1760s by the Quaker milling family of Isaac Lowe. Mills of this kind ground the corn and wheat that Orange farmers hauled north to Petersburg or south toward the Cape Fear, and doubled as gathering places; the Faucett family later added a house that served as an inn and tavern.
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Hillsborough builders add a Federal-style house at Cain's Pleasant Grove
The Cains commissioned the Hillsborough builders Martin Palmer and Samuel Hopkins to build a second, Federal-style house about ten feet from the original 1775 Georgian house at Pleasant Grove.
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Richard Bennehan gives shells for mortar for Old East
Bennehan donated fifty bushels of shells for making mortar for the university's first building. In 1796 he gave an air pump and thirty-two books.
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New Hope builds a parsonage with a farm on the church tract
At William F. Thompson's urging the congregation built a parsonage where William C. Claytor later lived and laid off much of Gilbert Strayhorn's two-hundred-acre gift as a farm to go with it.
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Richard Bennehan builds the Stagville house
Bennehan built the house he called Stagville. By then he owned about 4,000 acres, worked by 44 or more enslaved people. The same year he joined the university's board of trustees.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1800s
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A saddle-notched log house is built on the Webb Farm on St. Mary's Road
The Webb Farm's one-room log house, with a fieldstone chimney, dates from the early nineteenth century; a two-story frame house was built across its front late in the century with no inside door between them.
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The John Paisley Hughes House is built at Cedar Grove
The oldest part of the John Paisley Hughes House at Cedar Grove dates to the early nineteenth century. It was enlarged around 1860 and again around 1880, and is on the Study List.
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William Cain is the largest landowner in Orange County, enslaving 30 people
By 1800 William Cain owned 4,417 acres, the most of any landowner in Orange County, and enslaved 30 people at Pleasant Grove, a number he increased to 95 by 1830.
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William D. Paisley buys the farm where the Paisley-Rice log house stands
The Presbyterian minister William D. Paisley bought a 200-acre tract from James Davis in February 1801. Local tradition and the nomination hold that he built the dovetailed log house on this land in the early 1800s.
- 1810s
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Jacob Jackson Farm log dwelling is built
A single-pen hewn-log cabin, the oldest part of the Maple Hill house on St. Mary's Road about 2.8 miles northeast of Hillsborough, is dated to about 1810 or earlier. The National Register nomination credits it, perhaps, to yeoman farmer Jacob Jackson and finds no support for a local tradition dating it to 1750.
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A log house, later the Maynard farm kitchen, is built in southwest Orange
The half-dovetailed log building that became the kitchen on the William Maynard farm went up about 1814, and is said to have been the family's first dwelling.
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Ayr Mount is completed
Scottish-born merchant William Kirkland built Ayr Mount, a Federal-style brick plantation house near Hillsborough, in 1815. Its brick was made on the plantation, and carpenter John J. Briggs, a mason named Collier and joiner Elhannon Nutt worked on the house.
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Jacob Jeffries of the Texas community makes his will
The will of Jacob Jeffries, one of the first heads of household on the 1787 tax list, was witnessed by David Haitcock, and one of his daughters married into the Guy family. Hazel reads such ties among the Jeffries, Haitcock, Guy and Whitmore families as the marks of a single community that married within itself.
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Students James K. Polk and William Horn Battle board at the Tenney farmhouse
The one-story frame house at 381 Tenney Circle, a dwelling on John B. Tenney's farm northeast of the campus, was probably standing by 1818 and keeps much of its early interior. James K. Polk of the class of 1818 and William Horn Battle of the class of 1820 took room and board there and walked two miles to classes.
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William D. Paisley sells his Orange County farm to Elijah Pickard
Paisley left the Hawfields in 1818 to head the Greensborough Academy and in September 1819 sold the log house farm to Elijah Pickard. The chain of title is unclear for some years after the sale.
- 1820s
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A hall-and-parlor farmhouse is built on the Cabe land by the Eno
The one-and-a-half-story frame house, with unpainted heart pine walls and late Georgian mantels, was probably built in the 1820s by Jamima Cabe and her husband Jehu Brown, who married in 1827. It may instead date from before William Cabe's death in 1828.
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David Faucette builds his farmhouse above the Eno
David Faucette built a two-story frame farmhouse above the Eno about 1820. It gained Greek Revival trim in the mid-1800s and a front porch about 1880. Placed on the state Study List in April 1992, it was listed in the National Register in 1999 as the David Faucette House; the name The Elms was given by owners in 1977.
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Jeffries and other Texas community families move to Ohio and Indiana
From the 1820s to the 1840s a number of families left the Texas community for Greene County, Ohio, and some went on to Rush and Whitley counties in Indiana. There members of the Jeffries family won three court cases between 1842 and 1869 over whether, as people of Indian descent, they could vote.
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Maple Hill farmhouse is built
Jacob Jackson is thought to have built a two-story, weatherboarded log farmhouse in the Federal style about 1820, south of the earlier cabin on his farm northeast of Hillsborough. The date rests on its styling and on Jackson's documented residence there by 1822; a Greek Revival wing followed about 1855 and a connector joined the buildings in 1940.
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Texas community families leave Orange for Sugar Fork in Macon County
In the 1820s, after the Cherokee cession opened the land, a group of Guy, Whitmore, Jeffries and Gibson families from the Texas community moved to the mountains and formed the Sugar Fork settlement in Macon County. It stayed distinct for many years; letters of 1869 and 1872 to the Indian Office described its people as Catawba who had come from Orange County.
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Dr. Charles R. Yancey builds a house and farm buildings on Franklin Street
Dr. Yancey bought most of Lot #8 from William McCauley and put up a large house with a barn, carriage house, smokehouse, separate kitchen and quarters for enslaved people. Jesse Hargrave bought the place in 1840; the house burned in 1866.
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Duncan Cameron records tobacco sales of nearly 30,000 pounds
Cameron's accounts for 1826 show close to 30,000 pounds of tobacco sold from the Bennehan-Cameron plantations, where the crop was grown with the labor of enslaved people.
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James Strayhorn builds the Blackwood farmhouse
James Strayhorn built a new farmhouse on the future Blackwood Farm property.
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Fire destroys Witherspoon's farmhouse and the Orange Presbytery records
The fire burned the Witherspoons' rural home a mile and a half south of Hillsborough and its contents, including all but one volume of the old records of Orange Presbytery, which Witherspoon held as stated clerk. Losses were put at about 3,000 dollars and the house was rebuilt.
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Farmers of Orange, Chatham and Guilford meet to talk about a railroad
In 1828 farmers from Orange, Chatham and Guilford counties met to discuss building a railroad, the first such meeting in North Carolina. Public meetings on a line through the county went on into the early 1850s.
- 1830s
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A log homestead is built on the later William Couch farm
About 1830 a log house was built on the Cornwallis Road land where William Couch later put up his two-story frame house. It still stands next to the frame house with four log outbuildings.
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A two-story frame farmhouse is built on the land later called Webb's Happy Acres
The one-room-deep house with a pegged frame, log sills and end chimneys may have been built by Carolina Kirkland and her husband or by earlier owners. Her grandson J. Richard Webb and his wife moved in about 1954, restored it and named it Webb's Happy Acres.
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The census lists the Texas community families as free Negro heads of household
The 1830 federal census for the North District of Orange County listed the Whitmores, Jeffrieses, Corns, Burnettes, Haithcocks and Joneses among free Negro heads of household. Through the nineteenth century county and federal records almost always classed these families as free colored or mulatto, and almost never as Indian.
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Christopher Barbee turns over his home tract and blacksmith shop to his son William
In 1831 Christopher Barbee sold his son William the village blacksmith property and the tract where he lived, with all adjacent land. He died the next year, and his will left William more land on Morgan Creek and Bolin Creek.
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Cedar Grove Methodist Church is organized
The Cedar Grove Methodist Episcopal Church was organized on July 23, 1832.
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Cedar Grove Methodist Episcopal Church builds its first church
The congregation put up a small frame sanctuary facing east on what is now Efland-Cedar Grove Road, on land given by Joseph Allison and John Kelly. It was enlarged on the south side in 1876 and later torn down; its site lies just east of the 1939 stone church.
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Fairfield Presbyterian Church is organized
Fairfield Presbyterian Church was organized with Samuel Paisley as its first pastor.
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John Wall Norwood becomes treasurer and then a ruling elder of the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church
In 1834 Norwood succeeded the silversmith William Huntington as treasurer of the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church. In 1835 he was confirmed a ruling elder, a post he held until his death.
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A notice offers Christopher Barbee's livestock and household goods for sale at his late home
Two years after Christopher Barbee died, a public notice offered his horses, cattle, corn, farm tools and household and kitchen furniture for sale at his late residence on The Mountain. His son William was the executor.
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John A. Pettigrew sells the former Paisley farm to Lemuel Pettigrew
By 1835 the log house tract had passed to John A. Pettigrew, who sold it that year to Lemuel Pettigrew. Lemuel later sold it to (John) Elkins Pettigrew, a small farmer whose farm the 1860 census valued at $500.
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Paul C. Cameron moves to Fairntosh to manage the Cameron plantations
Paul C. Cameron gave up the bar and moved with his wife, Anne Ruffin Cameron, from Burnside in Hillsborough to Fairntosh to manage the Cameron plantations with his uncle Thomas D. Bennehan. They lived there until 1856.
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The Cane Creek Farmers and Mechanics Company starts a cotton mill
In 1837 the Cane Creek Farmers and Mechanics Company of Orange and Chatham Counties set up a cotton mill in southern Orange County, giving local farmers a place to have their raw cotton spun for sale.
- 1840s
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The Hogan-Rogers House was built on the Hogan plantation on Purefoy Road
The two-story frame house on Purefoy Road, on land now owned by St. Paul AME Church, dates to the 1840s or 1850s; the 1992 township survey recorded it as the Lloyd-Rogers House at 1612 Purefoy Road, the only house in the township on a raised basement. A fireplace in that basement led the Preservation Society's director to conclude that enslaved people on the Hogan plantation probably lived and worked there. INDY Week reported in 2012 that many Rogers-Eubanks residents descend from people held on the plantation.
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The Morris Lloyd family builds its first home, a log house near White Cross
A log house of about 1840 near White Cross was the first home of the Morris Lloyd family. When Lloyd later put up a much larger timber-frame house in front of it, the log house stayed in use behind it as a kitchen and sleeping space.
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Three planters grow nearly all of Orange County's cotton
The 1840 agricultural census recorded 253,437 pounds of cotton in Orange County, about 90 percent of it from the plantations of Paul Cameron, John Lipscomb and Fendal Southerland in the east of the county, worked by enslaved labor. The county also grew 262,882 pounds of tobacco that year, mostly in the north.
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John Wall Norwood restores Poplar Hill
Following his father's death in 1842, Norwood restored Poplar Hill, the Hogg and Norwood family home on the Eno, from the house to its lawns and gardens. Old roses were brought from Wilmington and new beds and hedges laid out.
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Paul C. Cameron sends enslaved people from the family farms to cotton plantations in Alabama and Mississippi
Paul C. Cameron bought a cotton plantation in Greene County, Alabama, in 1844 and land for another in Tunica County, Mississippi, in 1856, and sent more than 100 enslaved men and women from the family's North Carolina farms to them.
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The Smiths leave Hillsborough for Price Creek Plantation near Chapel Hill
After Cornelia's birth the Smiths sold their Hillsborough house and moved to the more remote Price Creek Plantation, about 1,500 acres southwest of Chapel Hill, where building of the main house, Oakland, began in 1845. Harriet and her children moved with them.
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Witherspoon's farm Tusculum is sold at the courthouse door
Dr. Edmund Strudwick, who had long held the mortgages, bought the farm at public sale. Susan Witherspoon was allowed to stay on at Tusculum by Strudwick's provision.
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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.
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Samuel Couch builds a two-story hall-parlor farmhouse near Durham
The Couch house is a tall frame dwelling with an off-center door and windows, Greek Revival trim and a corner stair in the main room. The farm also keeps a log granary.
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James Strayhorn's will names sixteen enslaved people
James Strayhorn’s will identifies sixteen people he enslaved.
- 1850s
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John Kirkland builds a two-story frame farmhouse near Calvander
A two-story frame house apparently built for John Kirkland in the 1850s stands at Old NC 86 and Homestead Road. It was enlarged about 1900 and later; three early log outbuildings remain.
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The 1850 census lists four enslaved people on Joseph Faucette's farm
Joseph Faucette, David's son, grew wheat, corn, oats, potatoes and hay on the home farm and held four enslaved people in one household, a number the nomination calls typical of a yeoman farmer.
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The 1850 census records 47 enslaved people on James H. Pratt's farm by the Eno
James H. Pratt and his wife Malvina worked a farm of 300 improved and 500 unimproved acres with 47 enslaved people, raising wheat, corn, oats, flax and livestock.
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The Lambert Hall House goes up near Caldwell
A two-story frame hall-and-parlor house with a chimney at each end was built near Caldwell in the 1850s, its inside walls lined with wide plain boards. Local informants told the surveyors that dwellings for the people enslaved on the farm once stood in a cluster close to the house.
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The Lindsey-Wilson farmstead takes shape on Damascus Church Road
A log farmhouse and log kitchen, a smokehouse, a barn for hay and a two-story frame granary that still holds its grain bins went up around the middle of the nineteenth century. A stretch of the old roadbed with a stone wall survives in the yard.
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The Mary Hughes House is built at Cedar Grove
About 1850 a center-hall cottage with Greek Revival touches, louvered shutters and sidelights at both front and back doors was built at Cedar Grove. When surveyed it was little altered outside but badly run down, and its mantels had been removed.
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The Morris Lloyd farmhouse is built near White Cross
A farmhouse is built around 1850 on the Morris Lloyd place near White Cross, a farm that keeps an early log house and a half-dovetailed log corn crib. The survey put it on the Study List.
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Three-quarters of Orange County farms hold under 100 acres
By 1850 most farms in the county were small: three in four had less than 100 acres, and only a few ran past 500.
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Paul C. Cameron builds new quarters for enslaved families at Horton Grove
In the decade before the Civil War Paul C. Cameron began a building campaign at the family's Horton Grove farm near Stagville. Four of the dwellings built to house families the Camerons enslaved still stand.
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Washington Duke completes the farmhouse now called Duke Homestead
Having built up more than three hundred acres from 1847, Washington Duke finished a house for his family on his Orange County farm in time for his marriage to Artelia Roney in December 1852. The house, in the part of the county that became Durham County in 1881, is now Duke Homestead.
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Paul Cameron tells the county agricultural society the railroad will wake Orange up
Speaking to the Orange County Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, the Mechanic Arts, and Manufactures, Cameron predicted the coming railroad would shake local farmers and businesses out of their old habits.
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Benjamin Hedrick is appointed the university's professor of analytical and agricultural chemistry
The university appointed Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick to its new chair of analytical and agricultural chemistry. He held it until the trustees' executive committee dismissed him in October 1856.
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Abner Burnette is twice prosecuted for carrying a gun and once recorded as Indian
Abner Burnette of the Texas community was indicted in Alamance County in 1855 for carrying a gun, which was unlawful for free persons of color. He pled guilty and was fined thirty one dollars. Indicted again in 1860 he pled not guilty, was convicted and was fined five cents. The 1860 census for Orange County recorded him as Indian, and the 1870 Alamance County census as mulatto.
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John and Louisa Turner inherit the Jackson farm on the Eno
Louisa Jackson Turner and her husband received the 140-acre Jackson farm outside Hillsborough, with its log and frame homeplace, from her widowed mother Mary Jackson. By 1860 the Turners farmed 713 acres on four tracts.
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Thomas Webb serves as Orange County's clerk and master in equity
Thomas Webb signed notices as clerk and master of the Court of Equity for Orange County, at his office in Hillsborough, from at least 1855 into 1862.
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The North Carolina Railroad reaches Hillsborough
The Hillsborough Recorder of Wednesday, April 4, 1855, announced that the North Carolina Railroad was finished to the Chapel Hill Road, a few hundred yards south of town, and that passenger cars would begin running there that day. The editor cheered the end of two-day trips over muddy roads to Raleigh and costly wagoning of farm produce.
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Orange County elects John Wall Norwood to the General Assembly
Norwood entered public life in 1856 when Orange County elected him a representative in the General Assembly, where he served until 1858.
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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.
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Orange County Agricultural Society holds its third fair near Hillsborough
At the society's third annual fair, on its grounds near Hillsborough, members elected Paul C. Cameron president and Thomas Webb secretary. Cameron, away in Alabama, had given the society a flag that flew from a pole more than eighty feet high.
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Brick mason William Maynard builds his frame farmhouse
William Maynard, a brick mason who also farmed, completed a story-and-a-half frame house two rooms deep in 1857, with a wide center hall and plain Greek Revival details. The older log dwelling behind it then became the kitchen. The 1993 form ranks it among the most intact antebellum farmhouses in the county.
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John Kimberly is elected the university's professor of agricultural chemistry
The university elected John Kimberly, a Harvard-trained chemist then teaching in eastern North Carolina, to the chair of agricultural chemistry in place of the dismissed Benjamin Hedrick.
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A small smoking-tobacco factory opens by the depot at Durham's Station
Built beside the tracks and worked by free Black and white laborers, the plant was the start of the tobacco industry that later made Durham a factory town.
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Farm labor in rural Orange County
Tobacco spread from Washington Duke’s turn to the crop in 1859, and after emancipation many freedpeople worked the land as tenants and sharecroppers; the 1930 census counted tenants on about a third of the county’s farms. Farm Security Administration loans reached Black farmers from 1938, tenancy fell sharply in the 1950s, and by 2022 the census counted 36 migrant workers on the county’s farms.
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Washington Duke turns from cotton to tobacco on his Orange County farm
After a failed cotton crop, Washington Duke began growing tobacco in 1859 on his farm, then in Orange County, following favorable publicity among Orange County farmers. The farm used the labor of an enslaved girl, Caroline, bought in 1855, and later a leased enslaved man, Jim, who worked in tobacco.
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Corporators organize the Hillsborough Savings Institution
The corporators of the Hillsborough Savings Institution, among them Thomas Webb, William A. Graham, James F. Cain and Pride Jones, met in the county court clerk's office on April 1, 1859, adopted the charter and appointed Webb and others to open subscription books. By December 1860 Webb was its cashier.
- 1860s
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A one-room log house goes up on the Bryant Nevilles farm near White Cross
By family tradition a one-room log house and log smokehouse on the Nevilles farm near White Cross date to about the Civil War years. Bryant Nevilles (1850-1931), who married Julia Lloyd in 1872, later farmed here, and a frame bungalow was added to the farmstead in 1926. The farm is on the Study List.
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Census counts more than 5,000 enslaved people in Orange County
The 1860 census recorded more than 5,000 enslaved people in Orange County, whose labor sustained the county's farms. At emancipation they made up roughly a third of the county's population.
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Four in ten Orange farms now grow bright-leaf tobacco
Between 1850 and 1860 the share of county farms growing bright leaf rose from about 11 to about 41 percent and the crop grew fivefold to over a million pounds. Farms raising 100 bushels of wheat or more rose from 26 to 39 percent.
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John Kirkland builds a log house on Kirkland Road
John Kirkland built a log house east of NC 86 that was widened with a frame section around 1900 and given a Triple-A roof. A kitchen joined by a breezeway, a smokehouse and a dairy on posts stand in the yard.
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The Pitard Place is built near Cedar Grove
A two-story frame house with a very low hip roof, widely spaced windows and a two-tier entry porch, the broadest local take on the Greek Revival.
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The Tally family I-house is built near Cedar Grove
The main house at the Tally Homeplace near Cedar Grove, a two-story I-house, goes up around 1860 and is altered in the 1880s. The farm keeps tobacco barns, two tenant houses of about 1900 and an office, and is on the Study List.
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Thomas and Mary Hogan build a farmhouse at Calvander
About 1860, around the time Thomas J. Hogan married Mary, the couple built a story-and-a-half frame farmhouse with Greek Revival trim on the old Hillsborough Road at Calvander; family tradition has their first child born there in 1862. Thomas served in the Civil War, and about 1890 the Hogans raised the house to two stories in the Queen Anne style.
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Webb and Whitted's plug tobacco factory is Hillsborough's largest works
The firm made plug tobacco in Hillsborough with 15 workers, the biggest manufacturing concern in present Orange County in the 1860 census.
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John Wall Norwood and Paul C. Cameron run relief for Orange County soldiers' families
Through the Civil War, Norwood and Paul C. Cameron oversaw aid to the families of Orange County men in the army, working out of Norwood's law office. In August 1864 they reported that between 1,500 and 2,000 county men had served.
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Young men enroll at Chapel Hill in the Orange Light Infantry
William F. Strowd and other young men of the area, who had begun organizing a volunteer company on April 6, 1861, met at Chapel Hill on April 22 and enrolled for six months. As the Orange Light Infantry they were mustered into state service at Raleigh on May 13.
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Hillsborough meeting resolves to erect a monument to Col. Charles C. Tew
A Hillsborough meeting chaired by M. E. Manly resolved to raise a monument to Col. Tew, killed at Sharpsburg, at or near the front of his Military Academy, and named Dr. Edmund Strudwick, Dr. Pride Jones and Thomas Webb to collect funds and build it.
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Jim, an enslaved tobacco worker leased to Washington Duke, flees toward Union lines
Jim, an enslaved man whose labor Washington Duke leased to grow and cure tobacco, ran away with three others in June 1863 trying to reach Union lines. After the war he took the surname Cox and became a tobacco sharecropper in the Durham area.
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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.
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Washington Duke begins manufacturing smoking tobacco on his farm
Back from Confederate service, Washington Duke starts making smoking tobacco on his Orange County farm, the start of the business his sons later built into W. Duke and Sons.
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Sherman and Johnston first meet at the Bennitt farm on the Hillsborough Road
William T. Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston met midway between their lines on the Hillsborough Road, seven miles from Durham Station, and moved to James Bennitt's nearby farmhouse. Before talks began Sherman showed Johnston a telegram announcing President Lincoln's assassination; Sherman offered military terms only, and Johnston asked for terms of a permanent peace.
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Johnston accepts Sherman's basis of agreement at the Bennitt farm
At their second meeting at James and Nancy Bennitt's farm on the Hillsborough Road, then in Orange County, Joseph E. Johnston accepted the "basis of agreement" William T. Sherman submitted, which offered an armistice, disbanding of the armies, recognition of state governments and a general amnesty. Jefferson Davis approved the terms, but Washington rejected them.
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Swain asks Sherman to stop the stripping of farms around Chapel Hill
President Swain wrote General Sherman that Wheeler's men and then the Federals had stripped the country of forage and horses, leaving families such as the Rev. George W. Purefoy's fifty people with no food and no work animals. Sherman replied on April 22 that seizures would stop when the war ended.
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Johnston surrendered to Sherman at the Bennett farm, then in Orange County
After meetings on April 17 and 18 whose terms Washington rejected, Joseph E. Johnston and William T. Sherman met again at the farm of James and Nancy Bennitt and signed a military surrender covering forces in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida. North Carolina Historic Sites describes the Bennitt farm as a 325 acre place in Orange County, on the Hillsborough road west of Durham Station.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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Thomas and Anne Ruffin move from the Haw River plantation to Hillsborough
Thomas Ruffin and his wife Anne left their Haw River plantation early in 1866 and moved to Hillsborough, where he had bought the house he called Little Hawfields the year before.
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E. H. Pogue starts making tinware for the wholesale trade in Hillsborough
E. H. Pogue announced that he had begun manufacturing tinware in Hillsborough for merchants and retail dealers, and would also sell it to townspeople at wholesale rates. By early 1867 his store stood west of the courthouse, where he also sold groceries, stoves and tobacco and took country produce in barter.
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Allison and Corbin run a plug tobacco factory at Cedar Grove
By the late 1860s Cedar Grove had a plug tobacco factory run by Allison and Corbin that employed fourteen men, the largest workforce of any business in the area. Dr. John J. Allison, a large landowner, was also a partner in dry goods, hardware and grocery stores, and William W. Allison kept a hotel.
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Civil War veteran William Couch builds a frame farmhouse east of Hillsborough
William Couch, a Confederate veteran, builds a two-story frame house around 1867 beside an older log house, and adds outbuildings to the farm. The farm is on the Study List, next to the Sam Couch farm.
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J. W. Norwood of Hillsborough warns county farmers that their methods are ruining the land
In an 1869 talk to Orange County farmers, Norwood said the county's fields were exhausted because growers added no organic matter, rotated nothing and let rain wash the soil away. He urged a new system before ruin set in.
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Robert K. Rice buys the Pettigrew log house farm
Elkins Pettigrew sold the farm to his son-in-law Robert K. Rice, husband of his daughter Martha, for $375 in 1869. Rice improved the place, which the 1880 census valued at $1,500, and it stayed in the Rice family for more than a century.
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A Quaker teacher named Dickson is reported elected to the university's agricultural chair
Word went round Chapel Hill that a new professor had been chosen for the university's agricultural college: Dickson, an English Quaker known as a teacher and agent for Black schools. Two months later Spencer learned that the appointment had never been put before the trustees.
- 1870s
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Archibald Lynch builds a farmhouse on Mount Hermon Church Road
Around 1870 a rear wing was built for the farmer Archibald Lynch, and about 1890 a small frame I-house was added in front of it.
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Black-owned family farms and sawmills made up the Rogers-Eubanks area
By the late nineteenth century the area between Homestead and Eubanks roads, north of Carrboro and Chapel Hill, was a neighborhood of Black-owned family farms and sawmills set among forest. RENA and the Town of Carrboro both date settlement of the wider area to the 1700s.
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James Tilley builds a small frame farmhouse on the NC 54 corridor
About 1870 James Tilley built a modest frame I-house with a separate frame kitchen, which remains in good shape. He lies in a family graveyard on the farm.
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John and Mary Jane Pope build their farm near Cedar Grove
John S. Pope, a Confederate captain, and his wife Mary Jane McDade Pope built a two-story I-house on land she inherited from her father's estate in 1869; it was likely finished by 1874, when her brother's share brought the tract to about 73 acres. Tobacco was the farm's main cash crop, and its oldest surviving barn dates to about 1875.
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The 1870 census records Orange County's losses since
Against 1860, farm values fell from $2,141,690 to $977,308, improved acreage from 101,354 to 73,745 and livestock value by nearly half, while manufacturing establishments rose from 61 to 92. The population was 17,507, including 6,420 Black residents.
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The Dukes move their tobacco business into a wooden factory in Durham
The Duke family's smoking tobacco business outgrows the farm and moves into a wooden factory at Durham, then still part of Orange County.
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The Watson family builds an ornate I-house near Cedar Grove
An ornate I-house is built on the Watson farm on NC 86 near Cedar Grove in the 1870s; the farm also keeps three log tobacco barns. It is on the Study List.
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Bill Crabtree's grandfather builds a log homestead on Damascus Church Road
A log house was raised around 1872 for the grandfather of Bill Crabtree, the later owner. About 1900 a frame I-house with fashionable trim was built in front, and the log house became its rear ell.
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Orange County elects John Wall Norwood to the state Senate
Norwood was elected state senator for Orange in 1872. His speech on the amnesty bill, given in the Senate on January 27, 1873, was printed as a pamphlet.
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Paul C. Cameron buys the Hillsborough Military Academy at public sale
Two years after Elizabeth Tew's death in 1870, the academy property was sold at public auction to Paul C. Cameron. His heirs sold it to the Farmers' State Alliance in 1891.
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H. P. Jones ships two hundred cases of Tar Heel smoking tobacco from Hillsborough to Georgia
The Recorder reported that Jones had lately shipped two hundred cases of his Tar Heel brand smoking tobacco to Georgia and held orders for a hundred more.
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Addison Holden builds the Holden–Roberts farmhouse
Addison Holden, a Confederate veteran and half-brother of Governor William W. Holden, built a tri-gable frame I-house in 1873 and 1874 on the farm about three miles east of Hillsborough that he bought from his uncle Isaac Holden in 1871. It is one of very few Orange County houses built during Reconstruction; George Cain Roberts bought the farm in 1908.
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Webb, Roulhac & Cameron prepare to move their tobacco business from Hillsborough to Durham
The Hillsborough Recorder reported that the tobacco firm of Webb, Roulhac & Cameron was about to move to Durham, where it had been offered better terms. The paper said the town could ill spare them.
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John Kimberly returns as professor of agriculture at the reopened university
When the university reorganized and reopened in 1875, John Kimberly was elected professor of agriculture. He resigned the next year to return to his farm in Buncombe County.
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County commissioners and township trustees adopt a uniform tax scale for livestock
Meeting with a trustee from each township, the board fixed values such as $100 for a first-class horse or mule, $20 for first-class cattle and $1 a head for sheep and goats. In May and June it sat sixteen days as a board of equalization to revise the tax list.
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James Cole Taylor works as an assistant at the state experiment station in Smith Hall
James C. Taylor and William B. Phillips, Chapel Hill graduates of 1877, worked as assistants at the state's fertilizer control and experiment station at the university, with W. Warnecke of Germany and A. D. Mickle of Chapel Hill. The station had four rooms in Smith Hall.
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State experiment station opens at Chapel Hill
After Kemp P. Battle pressed for it with the State Grange and farm societies, the legislature created a Board of Agriculture, taxed commercial fertilizers and placed an experiment station at the university, whose trustees elected Albert R. Ledoux its chemist in 1877. Working in Smith Hall it analyzed fertilizers, seeds, soils and waters until it moved to Raleigh in 1881.
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Louisa Turner sells Maple Hill and 140 acres to her brother-in-law Israel Turner
Louisa Jackson Turner, widow of John Turner, sold her father Jacob Jackson's home tract and the house where she lived to Israel Turner Jr. for $10,500. Israel Turner later ran a government-licensed distillery on the farm.
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E. H. Pogue moves his tobacco manufacturing from Hillsborough to Durham
Pogue, a tobacco dealer since 1866 alongside his tinware and general merchandise trade, began making plug tobacco at a factory in Hillsborough in 1872 or 1873. In 1879 he moved the business to Durham, where E. H. Pogue & Son made granulated and long-cut smoking tobacco, while Pogue kept his home in Hillsborough.
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John Joseph Whitfield builds a farmhouse on Whitfield Road
About 1879 John Joseph Whitfield built an I-house with a rear ell; a tall Mount Vernon style porch was added later. Its well house and other domestic buildings survive.
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Baptist minister James P. Mason speaks at University Day
At the 1879 University Day exercises, after President Kemp Battle's historical address, short talks were given by the Rev. Joseph Blount Cheshire, the Rev. James Pleasant Mason, the Methodist minister Mr. Heitman and several professors.
- 1880s
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Five custom grist mills work the creeks of Cedar Grove Township
The 1880 manufacturing census found five flour and grist mills in Cedar Grove Township on Back, Eno and Lynch creeks and the South Little River, grinding local farmers' grain about six months a year. James Allen, who owned the township's largest farm, ran one of the smaller mills on Lynch Creek; two sawmills on the Little River ran five months a year.
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Pender Store is built at Cedar Grove
The two-story weatherboarded Pender Store, with a classical gable front and a hip-roofed porch, was built at Cedar Grove in the 1880s. Its shelves and display cases were still in place in 1996.
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The Caine Roberts farm is built near Hillsborough
A farm complex centered on a two-story frame Triple-A I-house is built around 1880 on the Caine Roberts place near Hillsborough. The survey put it on the Study List.
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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 3, 2026.
