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Colonial and Regulator years · 1680–1774
- 1760s
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William Few attends a school opened in his Eno neighborhood
A schoolteacher came to the Few family's neighborhood on the Eno in 1760 to teach local children, and William Few Jr. attended. He later recalled the school with pleasure.
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Henry Pattillo keeps a classical school in his Orange County home
While pastor of the Hawfields, Eno and Little River churches, Pattillo began a classical school for men in his home.
Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
- 1770s
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The new state constitution provides for public schools and a university
Section 41 of the constitution adopted at Halifax, modeled on Pennsylvania's, told the legislature to establish schools and to promote learning in one or more universities. Orange's delegates voted on it, and it became the legal basis for chartering UNC.
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Rochester serves as clerk of the Orange County court
Rochester resigned his seat in the first General Assembly of the state to become clerk of court. He was also commissioned to supervise the building of a new courthouse and to help establish an academy in the Hillsborough area, and he gave up the clerkship in 1778 because its fees did not cover the expenses of the office.
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General Assembly charters an academy near Hillsborough named Science Hall
Meeting at Halifax, the General Assembly passed an act to establish an academy in the neighborhood of Hillsborough, naming William Hooper, Thomas Burke, Nathaniel Rochester, James Hogg and others as trustees. The act named the school Science Hall and gave its trustees the same powers as those of Liberty Hall in Mecklenburg County.
- 1780s
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Hillsborough Academy opens in the old Anglican church
The school chartered as Science Hall opened as Hillsborough Academy in the old Anglican church, which an act of the 1784 Hillsborough session had ordered repaired for a school and a free meeting house. It never thrived and closed in 1790.
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Joseph Dunn Hughes keeps a school in the Eno Church community
Pender lists a school run by Joseph Dunn Hughes near Eno Presbyterian Church in 1785, the earliest of the Hughes family schools that later produced Cedar Grove Academy.
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University of North Carolina is chartered
Meeting in Fayetteville, the General Assembly adopted William R. Davie's bill chartering the University of North Carolina. The act named some forty trustees and, instead of an appropriation, gave the school escheated property and uncollected debts; the trustees later placed it in southern Orange County, where Chapel Hill grew up around it.
- 1790s
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Richard Stanford opens an academy in the Hawfields
Richard Stanford, who had come to the Hawfields district of Orange County from Maryland in 1789, opened an academy there. Thomas Hart Benton was among his early pupils.
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Old East cornerstone is laid
William Richardson Davie and fellow trustees laid Old East’s cornerstone; October 12 is observed as University Day.
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The trustees elect David Ker presiding professor of the university
Balloting on January 10, 1794, the trustees elected David Ker, who had come from Fayetteville, the university's first professor, with the title of presiding professor. He took charge at the opening in January 1795, lived in the house meant for a future president and held the post until July 1796.
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A school begins to be kept at New Hope church
Thompson urged the congregation to take up schooling, and after his time the church generally kept a school for many years. His successor James H. Bowman is said to have taught school there while supplying the pulpit.
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Walter Alves serves as a university trustee and board treasurer
Walter Alves of Orange County was a trustee of the University of North Carolina from 1795 to 1813 and treasurer of its board from 1795 to 1799.
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UNC opens to students
The University formally opened at Chapel Hill on a cold, rainy January 15, 1795, with Governor Richard Dobbs Spaight and trustees present, but no students had yet arrived. Hinton James came on February 12, and by March two professors taught 41 students; UNC was the only public university to graduate students in the eighteenth century.
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Hinton James arrives as UNC’s first student
Hinton James became UNC’s first student on February 12, 1795.
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Charles Wilson Harris joins the new university as professor of mathematics
Harris joined the faculty in March 1795, weeks after the university opened, as professor of mathematics. On June 3, 1795 he organized the students into the debating club that became the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies.
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Harris sets up a small store of medicine for students and neighbours
Writing from the university on June 1, 1795, Harris told his uncle, a physician, that with no doctor nearer than Hillsborough he would keep a small stock of medicine for students and the neighbourhood, at cost. He enclosed a plan of the university lands and village.
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UNC’s Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies take shape
UNC students held the first recorded meeting of a Debating Society on June 3, 1795, and voted on July 2 to split in two, the new body being the Concord Society. They took the names Dialectic and Philanthropic in late August 1796 and for over a century served as debating clubs, student government and keepers of large libraries.
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Trustees vote to build a house for the university's grammar school
With Old East crowded and many students too young or unprepared for college classes, the board ordered a separate preparatory school building with lodging rooms, in the woods south of Rosemary Street. Richard Sims, an advanced student, seems to have been its first master.
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Trustees adopt William R. Davie's plan dividing the university into a preparatory school and professorships
Davie's plan put English at the center, let French stand beside the classics and set up chairs of moral and political philosophy, natural philosophy, mathematics, chemistry with agriculture and the mechanic arts, and languages. The board elected Samuel McCorkle a professor, but he declined when refused extra pay in place of the president's house.
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Charles Wilson Harris acts as presiding professor
After David Ker resigned under pressure from the trustees in the summer of 1796, Harris acted as presiding professor until his own resignation that December. He had persuaded Joseph Caldwell to join the faculty in October 1796.
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Joseph Caldwell arrives in Chapel Hill as professor of mathematics
Joseph Caldwell, a Princeton graduate and tutor, moved to Chapel Hill in October 1796 to teach mathematics at the new university. He became presiding professor the next year.
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James Smiley Gillaspie is made principal of the university
To keep Joseph Caldwell, who meant to leave rather than carry the executive duties, the trustees elected Gillaspie professor of natural philosophy with the title of principal. Caldwell stayed as professor of mathematics and taught French in the preparatory school.
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UNC holds its first commencement
UNC’s first graduating class included Hinton James and six other students.
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Archibald D. Murphey graduates from the university and joins its faculty
Archibald D. Murphey graduated with honors from the University at Chapel Hill in 1799 and was hired at once as a tutor. The next year he became professor of languages, one of three faculty members, and also served as librarian before resigning to study law in Hillsborough.
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Students rise against the faculty and beat principal Gillaspie
In the term before the 1799 commencement students beat Gillaspie, waylaid and stoned tutor William E. Webb and threatened Caldwell and Archibald Murphey, and for a week exercises stopped. Three leaders were dismissed and the faculty offered to resign, and by that November Caldwell was chosen again to head the university.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1800s
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The university builds a house for its Grammar School
Six years after the trustees ordered it, a one-story frame schoolhouse for the university's preparatory Grammar School was built in 1801. John M. Goodloe was paid about $320 for the work; until then the boys had been taught in a rented building.
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Hillsborough Academy reopens for boys and girls under Andrew Flinn
The academy's trustees announced that it had reopened on a larger plan for youth of both sexes under the Rev. Andrew Flinn, teaching Latin, Greek, English, mathematics and bookkeeping.
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Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies
Hillsborough Academy reopened under Andrew Flinn in 1801 and grew under William J. Bingham, who left in 1844 to open his own school at the Oaks. The Burwell School for girls ran from 1837 to 1857. The Nash and Kollock School and Hillsborough Military Academy opened in 1859; the military academy sent its cadets home in May 1865.
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Archibald D. Murphey marries Jane Armistead Scott and settles at the Hermitage
After leaving the University to read law in Hillsborough under William Duffy, Murphey married Jane Armistead Scott on November 5, 1801, and made his home at the Hermitage, her father's farm on Great Alamance Creek about eighteen miles west of Hillsborough, in the part of Orange County that is now Alamance. He built his law practice around the Hillsborough courthouse.
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Cameron becomes a trustee of the University of North Carolina
Cameron joined the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina in 1802, while he was practicing law at Hillsborough.
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William Norwood gives $100 toward finishing South Building
William Norwood of Hillsborough contributed $100 toward finishing South Building at the university.
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Hillsborough Academy trustees engage Thomas Baron after George Johnston fails to arrive
The academy trustees, Walter Alves among them, announced that George Johnston had not taken charge as promised and that they had engaged Thomas Baron, a Harvard graduate, to teach languages, arithmetic, geography and mathematics.
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Joseph Caldwell is elected the first president of the university
When the trustees created the office of president in 1804 they elected Caldwell to it unanimously. He resigned the presidency in 1812 to teach and returned to it a few years later, holding it until his death in 1835.
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Richard Henderson becomes head of Hillsborough Academy
In 1804 Hillsborough Academy announced Richard Henderson, formerly a professor at the university, as its head.
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Pleasant Henderson writes to trustee Walter Alves about a student secession at the university
Pleasant Henderson wrote to Walter Alves that about 45 students had left the university in protest over the trustees' rule requiring student monitors to take an oath, and urged Alves and the board to act.
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Frederick Nash is elected a trustee of the University of North Carolina
Nash was elected a trustee of the University of North Carolina in 1807 and remained an active supporter of the university. It awarded him an LL.D. in 1853.
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Saddler James Phillips builds a brick kitchen on the school-house lot on East Tryon Street
James Phillips, a Hillsborough saddler, buys the old school-house lot at the east edge of town and builds a two-room brick kitchen beside the house, where he lives until 1847. The kitchen, with his name scratched in a window pane, still stands beside BelleVue.
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Grammar school under William Paisley opens west of Hillsborough
A grammar school under the Rev. William Paisley was announced to open in January 1809 about ten miles west of Hillsborough, teaching Latin, Greek, geography and philosophy for sixteen dollars a year.
- 1810s
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William R. Davie receives the university's first honorary Doctor of Laws
The University of North Carolina awarded William R. Davie an honorary LL.D. in 1811, the first Doctor of Laws it conferred; honorary master's degrees had gone to Joseph Caldwell and others in 1799. Davie had sat on the board of trustees from 1789 to 1807.
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Archibald D. Murphey serves Orange County in the state senate
Archibald D. Murphey was elected to the legislature from Orange County in 1812 and sat in the state senate until 1818. There he proposed a publicly financed system of schools in a report he finished on November 29, 1817, and in 1819 he followed it with his memoir on internal improvements.
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John H. Pickard is principal of Hawfield Academy
Hawfield Academy, about ten miles west of Hillsborough, had John H. Pickard as principal from 1812 to 1814. The school had earlier been led by William Paisley.
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Rev. William Bingham takes charge of Hillsborough Academy
The trustees announced that the Rev. William Bingham had taken charge of Hillsborough Academy, with exercises to begin on February 3 and Elizabeth Russell in charge of a female department.
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Hillsborough Academy is rechartered
Hillsborough Academy received a new charter from the General Assembly in 1814.
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A Mr. Graham and Miss Farley take charge of Hillsborough Academy
After William Bingham left in 1815, Hillsborough Academy was run for a time by a teacher named Graham, with Miss Farley presumably over the female department.
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William Bingham runs his school at Mount Repose northwest of Hillsborough
After leaving Hillsborough Academy, the Rev. William Bingham kept his own academy at Mount Repose, in a house on Back Creek about ten miles northwest of Hillsborough. His son William James Bingham closed it in 1826 when he took over Hillsborough Academy.
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Senator Archibald D. Murphey of Orange moves for a legislative committee on public schools
Following Governor Miller's 1816 message, Orange County senator Archibald D. Murphey won a joint committee to study public education. Its report led to a second committee, also under Murphey, whose plan Pender credits as the groundwork of the later state school system.
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William Norwood becomes a trustee of Hillsborough Academy
William Norwood was a trustee of Hillsborough Academy by 1816 and chaired its board in 1826.
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Witherspoon takes charge of the Hillsborough Academy
Returning to Hillsborough at twenty-five, Witherspoon took a double charge: the pastorate of the newly built Presbyterian church and the principalship of the closely allied Hillsborough Academy. He gave up the academy sometime after 1819.
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Archibald D. Murphey submits his Report on Education to the General Assembly
While state senator for Orange, Murphey laid before the Assembly a plan for primary schools, academies and more state support for the university. The book calls it the first definite plan for public education offered in North Carolina.
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Dr. James Webb deeds land for Polly Burke's log schoolhouse
On November 6, 1817, Dr. James Webb deeded to his neighbor Mary W. Burke a strip of his lot on East Queen Street, where a log schoolhouse was built for her to teach the Webb children. Known as Miss Polly Burke's School, it took neighborhood children from about 1818 to 1834 and is cited as a forerunner of the Burwell School.
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Mary Mendenhall keeps Union School near Woody's Ferry on the Haw
In 1818 Union School, about a mile south of Woody's Ferry on the Haw River in Orange County, was in the charge of Mary Mendenhall.
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Hillsborough Academy publishes its rules for students
Under principal John Witherspoon, Hillsborough Academy printed its rules of conduct in the Raleigh Register. Students had to attend daily worship, stay out of stores and taverns, avoid liquor, and keep the Sabbath.
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Denison Olmsted begins teaching chemistry at Chapel Hill
Appointed in November 1817 to the university's new professorship of chemistry, Olmsted spent a year studying with Benjamin Silliman at Yale and began teaching at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1819. He stayed until the end of 1825, when Elisha Mitchell succeeded him.
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Elijah Graves announces Mrs. Graves' Female School at Long Meadows
In 1819 the Rev. Elijah Graves announced Mrs. Graves' Female School at Long Meadows, six miles northwest of Hillsborough.
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The university closes its grammar school and makes Hillsborough Academy its preparatory school
When Abner W. Clopton gave up the grammar school the university dropped it. Caldwell arranged for Hillsborough Academy, under John Witherspoon with John Rogers teaching, to prepare boys for the university, whose faculty could attend its examinations and admit its top pupils on certificate.
- 1820s
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Eagle Lodge votes money toward a male academy in Hillsborough
A year after its revival, Eagle Lodge voted to put money toward building a male academy in Hillsborough.
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Chapel Hill Academy prepares boys for the university under James A. Craig
James A. Craig announced that the Chapel Hill Academy would begin its session on June 20, 1820, with a course arranged as preparation for the University of North Carolina and sessions matching the university's.
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Tavern keeper William Adams builds the house that became the Burwell School
William Adams, a Hillsborough tavern keeper and businessman, builds a two-story house with two rooms on each floor facing West Union Street in 1821. Those rooms survive as the south rooms of the Burwell School.
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The university rents the empty Grammar School house to hunter Peyton Clements
Two years after closing its preparatory school, the university let the building on the Grand Avenue ground to Peyton Clements, a hunter who supplied game to the college and the village boarding houses.
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William H. Adams buys the lots that became the Burwell School site
Hillsborough sold lots in the old North Town Commons pasture, advertising the town as a healthy place to live and to school children. In November 1821 William H. Adams took the deed for lots 152 and 153, an acre each, for $216.
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John Rogers runs Hillsborough Academy
John Rogers ran Hillsborough Academy from 1822 to 1826, when W. J. Bingham succeeded him.
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Hugh Waddell begins practising law in Hillsborough
Waddell, an 1818 graduate of the university, began to practise law in Hillsborough and Orange County in 1823 and kept his practice there until 1867, when he moved to Wilmington.
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Sarah Grove buys lots 152 and 153 for $800
Adams sold the two lots to Sarah Grove for $800, a rise that suggests he had built the first four-room house and its outbuildings. About eighteen months later she sold them to the attorney Nathaniel J. Palmer for $1,200.
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The Orange County Sunday School Union asks the Assembly to fund its schools
The Orange County Sunday School Union petitioned the General Assembly for 25 cents a year per pupil for its 22 Sunday schools, which taught 800 to 1,000 children, many from poor families, to read. John Scott of Hillsborough presented it in the House of Commons, which turned it down.
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Trustees adopt by-laws creating a resident superintendent and a student uniform
On Bartlett Yancey's motion the trustees created a superintendent of university property living at Chapel Hill, who was to receive and pay out all student money, and they prescribed a plain uniform dress and forbade boots. Chapel Hill merchant Thomas H. Taylor was appointed; in January 1829 the office passed to the faculty, who chose Elisha Mitchell.
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Hillsborough Female Seminary opens under Lavinia Brainerd
A female seminary opened in Hillsborough on August 1, 1825, taught by Lavinia Brainerd under the supervision of the Rev. William M. Green. DNCR says the Hillsborough Female Academy had been incorporated apart from the male academy in 1824.
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John Witherspoon opens a private boarding school
The Raleigh Register announced the Rev. John Witherspoon's Private Boarding School for opening in 1826. The school seems to have run until 1830 or later.
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Nicholas Marcellus Hentz becomes the university's professor of modern languages
Hentz took the chair of modern languages at the university, the first professor at Chapel Hill whose duties were to teach French and Spanish regularly. While there he also studied spiders and published on them in scientific journals.
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Rev. William Bingham dies at his Mount Repose academy
The Rev. William Bingham, who had kept an academy at Mount Repose northwest of Hillsborough for years, died after a few days' illness in his 73rd year. His son William J. Bingham carried on and in 1827 moved the school to Hillsborough.
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William James Bingham becomes principal of Hillsborough Academy
After John Rogers resigned, the trustees engaged William James Bingham as principal of Hillsborough Academy, where he taught until he moved his school to the country in 1844.
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Archibald D. Murphey gives the first commencement-eve oration in Person Hall
On June 27, 1827, the day before commencement, Murphey delivered an oration in Person Hall at Chapel Hill under the appointment of the Dialectic Society. Addressing the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, he argued that a college course only prepared the mind for later learning; the speech was printed and reissued in 1843.
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Bethlehem School on Cane Creek offers college preparation under George W. Morrow
Bethlehem School, on Cane Creek twelve miles from Hillsborough, offered studies to prepare boys for college under George W. Morrow in 1829.
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Elijah Graves opens a female school at Walnut Grove
In 1829 Elijah Graves advertised a school for girls that he would run at Walnut Grove, near the Pittsboro road and twelve miles from Hillsborough.
- 1830s
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Caldwell builds the first college observatory in the United States
Caldwell began an astronomical observatory on the campus in 1830 and finished it in 1831, paying more than 400 dollars himself, to house instruments he had bought in Europe in 1824. The DocSouth biography calls it the first American observatory built for teaching.
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Orange Methodist Church is organized at the Davis School House
Alexander Gattis and neighbors organized Orange Methodist Church in the Davis School House near the Wash Fowler home. The congregation built its first church about 1838.
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W. Anderson opens a female boarding school near Hillsborough
In 1830 W. Anderson announced Anderson's Female Boarding School within a mile of Hillsborough. It took a limited number of pupils and ran at least through 1836.
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Hentz leaves the university and Chapel Hill for Kentucky
Hentz left the university in 1831. The local Presbyterian community had frowned on his Roman Catholic upbringing and suspected his politics, and after he left French was dropped from the curriculum.
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John DeBerniere Hooper teaches at the university as tutor and professor
After graduating in 1831 Hooper stayed in Chapel Hill as a tutor in languages, became professor of modern languages in July 1836 and professor of Latin in 1838. He and his wife left Chapel Hill in 1848 to teach and farm near Littleton.
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Friends of education organize the North Carolina Institute of Education at Chapel Hill
During commencement week a meeting adopted a constitution on Benjamin M. Smith's motion, elected Simmons J. Baker president and made professors Elisha Mitchell, William Hooper and James Phillips its executive committee. The Institute met at the next few commencements and enrolled about 130 members before it lapsed.
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William Mercer Green delivers the literary societies' oration before commencement
On June 22, 1831, the day before commencement, William Mercer Green delivered an oration at Chapel Hill on the influence of Christianity upon the welfare of nations, under the annual appointment of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies. Dennis Heartt printed it in Hillsborough the same year.
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Orange County counts twenty-one academies
By 1832 Orange County had twenty-one academies, among them Hillsborough Academy, the Bingham school and Cedar Grove Academy, a pace of school founding somewhat ahead of the state as a whole.
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The university sells the old Grammar School house and grounds
Thirteen years after the Grammar School closed, the university sold its empty schoolhouse and lot. In the meantime the house had been left vacant and then lived in by a hunter's family.
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James Phillips is licensed to preach and later serves New Hope Presbyterian Church
Mathematics professor James Phillips joined the Presbyterian church in 1832 and was licensed to preach by Orange Presbytery in 1833. He was later ordained and installed as minister of New Hope Presbyterian Church, about seven miles outside Chapel Hill, and shared the university chapel work with Elisha Mitchell.
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Witherspoon ends seventeen years as pastor at Hillsborough
Witherspoon severed his connection with the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church and moved to Camden, South Carolina. His advocacy of religious education, Sunday schools and preaching for enslaved people had strained relations with his congregation.
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Polly Burke leaves Hillsborough for Alabama
In August 1834 Mary W. Burke sold most of her household goods and moved to Greensboro, Alabama, with her niece's family, part of a wider migration of Hillsborough people to Alabama. After her nephew-in-law died there she settled in Marion, where she taught again for many years.
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Robert Burwell becomes pastor of the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church
Burwell began a thirteen-year pastorate, and he and his wife opened a school for young women whose income let him serve the church on a small salary. He returned for a second term in the 1850s.
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James Phillips opens a female school in Chapel Hill
In 1836 mathematics professor James Phillips announced Phillips' Female School in Chapel Hill. Mrs. Phillips and a teacher from Emma Willard's seminary at Troy, New York, did most of the teaching.
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David L. Swain moves to Chapel Hill as university president
Chosen to succeed the late Joseph Caldwell, former governor David L. Swain moved to Chapel Hill in January 1836 to become president and professor of national and constitutional law. He stayed at the university for the rest of his life, the longest term of any of its presidents.
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Hillsborough Presbyterian Church buys the house as its manse
The church's trustees bought lots 152 and 153 in January 1836, renovated the house, and gave it to their minister, Robert Armistead Burwell, and his family, who had arrived from Virginia late the year before.
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Burwell School for young women operates
Robert and Margaret Anna Burwell operated their Hillsborough school for girls from 1837 to 1857.
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Dr. James Webb builds a house around Polly Burke's log schoolhouse
About twenty years after the one-room log schoolhouse went up on his East Queen Street land, Dr. James Webb built a house around it, with the log room as its living room.
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The Burwell School and the Burwell household
Anna Burwell opened a school for girls in Hillsborough in 1837 that ran until the family moved to Charlotte in 1857. In the same household Elizabeth Hobbs, later Elizabeth Keckly, was enslaved from 1835, beaten at Anna Burwell’s urging and subjected to years of sexual coercion before being sent back to Virginia in 1842; she bought her freedom in 1855.
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William Mercer Green leaves St. Matthew's to become university chaplain and professor
William Mercer Green accepted a post at the University of North Carolina as chaplain and professor of belles lettres and resigned from St. Matthew's in Hillsborough the following year. The Hillsborough congregation had grown from seventeen communicants in his first year to sixty-seven when he left.
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Anna Burwell opens a school for girls in Hillsborough
Anna Burwell advertised that she would open a female school in Hillsborough on July 17, 1837, teaching the usual English branches, with music available. She and her husband, the Rev. Robert Burwell, ran it in their home until 1857.
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Mount Pleasant Academy, later Junto Academy, operates under Daniel W. Kerr
Daniel W. Kerr ran an academy in northern Orange County, advertised as Mount Pleasant Academy in 1837 and by 1838 as Junto Academy, twelve miles northwest of Hillsborough and six miles south of Mason Hall.
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James P. Clark opens Fairfield School northwest of Hillsborough
In 1838 James P. Clark gave public notice of Fairfield School, which lay six miles northwest of Hillsborough.
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Thomas W. Holden opens Holden's English School
In 1838 Thomas W. Holden gave public notice of Holden's English School, kept at his home in Orange County.
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John R. Holt opens Union Academy in western Orange
In 1839 John R. Holt gave public notice of Union Academy, a school in western Orange County.
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Maria L. Spear becomes principal of Hillsborough Female Seminary
After William M. Green's last announcement in 1838, the seminary's trustees named Maria L. Spear principal in 1839.
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Orange County voters approve the new state public school plan
When the 1839 school law put tax-supported common schools to a vote in each county, Orange approved. Approving counties raised $20 per district, matched two to one from the Literary Fund.
- 1840s
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A Female School House is built for the Burwells' school
As the school grew, subscribers in town paid for a 36-by-20-foot schoolhouse north of the Burwell home, built by the carpenter George A. Faucette.
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A one-room log school is built beside St. Mary's Chapel
In the 1840s a one-room log schoolhouse went up next to St. Mary's Chapel. The brick St. Mary's School of 1931 was later built on the same site.
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Orange County receives its first state Literary Fund money for public schools
The earliest record of a Literary Fund allotment to Orange is $670.14 in September 1841, the year the county first had school officials. By 1853 the allotment was $2,543.
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Hugh Waddell opens a school for law students in Hillsborough
In 1842 Waddell opened a school in Hillsborough to prepare young men for the bar.
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William Horn Battle moves his family to Chapel Hill and buys a house beside the campus
Judge William H. Battle moved his family from Raleigh to Chapel Hill in 1843 so his sons could attend the university. He bought a house near the campus and enlarged it, adding quarters for the people the family enslaved.
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The Union Church is moved off Franklin Street and becomes a school
When the university sold the Grand Avenue ground to Andrew Mickle and Richard James Ashe and the Presbyterians, the little Union Church was moved away from Franklin Street and later used as the village school.
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The county counts 57 common schools for white children in the 1844-45 term
In the 1844-45 term, 60 teachers at 57 Orange County common schools taught 1,347 boys and 945 girls, all of them white. The schools had been set up after the county board of superintendents divided the county into districts.
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David L. Swain organizes the Historical Society of the University of North Carolina
In January 1844 President David L. Swain announced the Historical Society of the University of North Carolina, with himself as president and the whole faculty as its executive committee. It set out to copy colonial records in British repositories and to collect North Carolina books, newspapers and papers at the university.
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Charles Phillips returns to Chapel Hill as a tutor of mathematics
Phillips accepted a call from President David L. Swain in July 1844 to return to the University of North Carolina as his father's assistant. He held the post of tutor of mathematics until 1853.
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William James Bingham opens his school at the Oaks
William James Bingham gave up Hillsborough Academy after its spring 1844 session and in May announced a select classical and mathematical school twelve miles southwest of Hillsborough, to open that November on the Oaks tract he bought the same year. It became known as the Bingham School and stayed at the Oaks until December 1864.
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Hillsborough citizens pay to refit the academy building for the Caldwell Institute
Townspeople paid for the repair and enlargement of the Hillsborough Academy building so that the Caldwell Institute could move in from Greensboro. The older school was absorbed into the institute under Alexander Wilson.
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Richard Mayo, a free cabinetmaker of color, buys three town lots
Richard Mayo paid $200 for three lots on Occoneechee Street between West Tryon and West Queen streets, and in 1849 gave them to Levi McCollum to settle a debt. His brother William later waited tables at the Burwell School.
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William Horn Battle becomes the university's professor of law
After teaching law from his office in Chapel Hill, Battle was professor of law at the university by 1845, and the university began offering the bachelor of law degree.
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Samuel Wellwood Hughes opens a classical school for boys near Cedar Grove
Samuel Wellwood Hughes opened his own academy in northern Orange County in January 1845. First called Cedar Grove Academy and later Hughes' Academy, it offered classical and mathematical courses modeled on the Bingham School and ran until his death in 1884.
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Caldwell Institute reopens in Hillsborough after leaving Greensboro
The Orange Presbytery's Caldwell Institute, founded at Greensboro, moved to Hillsborough and began its first session there on July 9, 1845, with Alexander Wilson as president. It used the Hillsborough Academy building and absorbed that school.
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Andrew Mickle turns the log schoolhouse at Highlands into a house
The log school built south of the Eno around 1844 was converted to a residence, and Andrew Mickle added a three-bay, two-story side-hall section in 1846. Paul C. Cameron enlarged it again in 1857.
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James Phillips buys the Village Chapel lot for the Presbyterian church
Professor James Phillips, as trustee, bought for $200 the lot where the Union or Village Chapel stood, as a site for the Presbyterian church, on condition that no burials be made there. The old chapel was moved a few hundred yards north, enlarged, and long served as the village public school.
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Mitchell asks the Burwells to sell his wife Mary Ann with him
Mitchell, an enslaved man who had run from his owner, came to Robert Burwell asking that he and his wife Mary Ann, enslaved in the Burwell household, be sold together. He worked at the house for a week; then Burwell told him to go back to his master, and he left on February 17.
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Smallpox at the Turner house sends students out of town
Anna Burwell wrote that William Turner had caught smallpox from the clothes of a brother back from medical lectures in Philadelphia. Twenty or thirty students of the Institute left town, and both Burwell boarders went home, though no second case followed.
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A boys' preparatory school meets in Samuel Phillips's law office
Samuel Phillips's small stuccoed law office on East Franklin Street reportedly housed a preparatory school for boys in 1847. Later in the century William Horn Battle taught law classes in the same building.
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Caldwell Institute enrollment peaks at 100 in Hillsborough
Under Alexander Wilson the school reached a peak enrollment of 100 students in 1848. Attendance fell back to 68 the next year, and in 1850 the trustees voted to discontinue it.
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Robert Burwell buys the house and has John Berry enlarge it
Burwell resigned his pulpit and bought the two lots from the church for $800 and back pay. The builder John Berry added a central hall and two rooms and turned the house to face Churton Street. A deed of trust of July 16, 1850 shows Burwell still owing Berry $2,500 and the church trustees $800, secured on the lots and on enslaved members of the household.
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Sarah Kollock becomes the Burwell School's teacher of French and drawing
Sarah Kollock, one of the Burwell School's first pupils, had helped teach the younger children and in 1848 became its full-time teacher of French and drawing. By September 1851 Molly Burwell had taken her place and she was in Oxford.
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Solomon Pool studies at the university in Chapel Hill
Solomon Pool entered the University of North Carolina in 1849 at the age of seventeen and graduated in 1853 as the second honor student in a class of fifty-nine. He was a member of the Philanthropic Society while in Chapel Hill.
- 1850s
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Caldwell Institute closes in Hillsborough
The Caldwell Institute ended in 1850 after five years in Hillsborough.
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Orange County has 15 academies with 470 pupils
The count for 1850 found fifteen private academies in the county, teaching 470 students.
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The old Burwell schoolroom is said to be moved to West Orange Street during John Berry's work on the Burwell School
The west wing of the bungalow at 114 West Orange Street is reputed to be the old Burwell schoolroom, moved there in 1850 while John Berry was renovating the Burwell School. The house around it dates from 1922.
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Samuel W. Hughes is named to Orange County's first board for examining teachers
On March 12, 1850, Samuel Wellwood Hughes was appointed to the first Orange County board to examine teachers for the common schools. In February 1852 he was also appointed to the county Board of Superintendents of Common Schools.
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Robert Burwell pledges Mary Ann and her children against his building debts
A deed of trust set out Burwell's debts of $2,500 to the builder John Berry and $800 to the Presbyterian trustees, and offered as security the enslaved seamstress Mary Ann, her four children and any children born to her, and a girl named Ann.
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Hillsborough Academy is revived under Benjamin Huske and Ralph Graves
After the Caldwell Institute closed, Benjamin R. Huske and Ralph Henry Graves revived the Hillsborough Academy, which ran until 1858.
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Legislature transfers the university's escheats to the common schools
The General Assembly took the right to escheats from the university and gave it to the public schools. Friends of the university soon won repeal, and the Supreme Court later held that the university, as a part of the state, was subject to such legislation.
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Orange County seats a Board of Superintendents for its common schools under William H. Brown
A nine-man county Board of Superintendents, chaired by William H. Brown, oversaw the common schools in 1852. That year a new state law obliged such boards to name committees to examine would-be teachers rather than merely allowing it.
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Orange County's first recorded public school report counts 51 districts
The first written record of Orange's public schools, for 1853, shows 51 districts with schools in all but one. Of 4,447 children, 2,507 attended, and 36 men and one woman were licensed to teach.
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Solomon Pool becomes tutor of mathematics at the university
Pool was appointed tutor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina in December 1853, months after his own graduation. He received an honorary alumni master of arts degree in 1856.
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James Phillips keeps weather records at Chapel Hill
From 1854 to 1862 Professor James Phillips kept weather records at Chapel Hill. They survive in the Southern Historical Collection alongside Chapel Hill records kept from December 1879 to 1882 by Professors W. B. Phillips and Francis Preston Venable.
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School for the Application of Science to the Arts opens
Under a trustee resolution of 1852 the university opened a scientific school with departments of civil engineering, under Charles Phillips, and of chemistry applied to agriculture and the arts, under Benjamin S. Hedrick, with a laboratory in the basement of Smith Hall. Its students could earn a Bachelor of Science in about two and a half years.
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Mary Burwell marries Frederick Nash Strudwick
Mary Susan Burwell, one of her mother's first pupils and later a teacher at the school, married the neighbor Frederick Nash Strudwick in Hillsborough, with the Rev. F. K. Nash officiating, joining two families who lived a town lot apart.
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Aunt Fariby saves Jane from burning
Jane, a young enslaved servant at the Burwell School, caught fire. Anna Burwell wrote that she would have burned to death but for Aunt Fariby, who saved her life.
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The university dismisses Benjamin S. Hedrick over his Free Soil views
In 1856 faculty member Benjamin S. Hedrick admitted and defended in the newspapers his preference for the Free Soil party. President David L. Swain disapproved of his speaking out, and the trustees' executive committee dismissed Hedrick; Swain objected only that the committee had taken authority belonging to the full board.
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The first through trains run on the finished North Carolina Railroad, with mail trains at Hillsborough
The North Carolina Railroad was finished on January 29, 1856, when the last rail was laid about four and a half miles west of Greensboro. Two days later the regular mail and passenger trains made their first through run from Charlotte to Goldsboro, with a westbound train due at Hillsborough each morning and an eastbound one before dawn, replacing the coach connection that had carried the Burwells' letters to their daughter Fanny in New York.
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The Burwells resolve to sell their cook Hannah
Hannah, who had come from Virginia with the family and cooked for the school, had been drinking heavily through 1855. Anna Burwell wrote to her daughter Fanny that she had made up her mind: Hannah would be sent to Richmond to be sold.
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Fanny Burwell dies aboard the steamer Jamestown as her parents bring her home to Hillsborough
Fanny Burwell had gone to New York to complete her music education, but fell ill with erysipelas in early March. Her mother went north to nurse her, and she died at dawn on the steamer Jamestown between New York and Norfolk with both parents beside her, in her eighteenth year; her body was brought home to Hillsborough for burial.
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Anne Call Cameron, piano teacher to Burwell School students, dies
A widow known as Nancy, she gave piano lessons at the Burwell School to help pay for the care of her daughter Anna McKenzie Kirkland, whose illness followed her husband's death in 1843. She died in Hillsborough in June 1856.
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A Black child and then a student die of illness at the Burwell School
Writing to her mother, the student Lizzie Glass mentioned a small Black boy who had died at the school the previous day, at a time when Nannie Burwell and three of the Burwell children lay sick. Within a few weeks Lizzie Glass herself died at the school.
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Burwell School closes as the Burwells move to Charlotte
The Burwells closed their Hillsborough school in 1857, the same year they took charge of a girls' school in Charlotte.
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Charles Phillips serves as stated supply for the Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church
Phillips was licensed to preach by the Presbytery of Orange in December 1857 and served as stated supply for the Chapel Hill Presbyterian Church from 1857 to 1868. He taught and superintended the church Sunday school and with his wife started a Sunday school for Black residents.
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Paul C. Cameron enlarges Highlands, the former log schoolhouse south of the Eno
Paul C. Cameron added two bays to Highlands, giving it the center-hall plan it keeps. The house had begun about 1844 as a log school and was made a dwelling by Andrew Mickle in 1846.
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The Baptists build a schoolhouse, and the lane beside it becomes Church Street
A schoolhouse went up next to the new Baptist church on West Franklin Street, and the dirt road just east of the two buildings took the name Church Street.
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Robert Bingham becomes a partner in his father's school at the Oaks
After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1857, Robert Bingham was admitted in July as junior partner in his father's school at the Oaks, which took the firm name W. J. Bingham and Sons. His brother William was also a partner.
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A marble monument to Joseph Caldwell is dedicated in McCorkle Place
A marble obelisk to Caldwell was dedicated north of the Davie Poplar. Its inscription names the President of the United States, the Governor and other alumni as donors and praises his advocacy of common schools and internal improvements. Caldwell and his wife still lay by the old sandstone shaft near New West; their remains, with her son's, were moved to the monument's east base in July 1904.
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Charles Tew chooses a site west of Hillsborough for a military academy
In late July 1858 Charles C. Tew, with Moses A. Curtis and A. S. Galliard, searched Hillsborough for a school site and settled on a 40-acre tract about a mile and a half west of town near the new North Carolina Railroad. They engaged the Columbia architect John A. Kay, and local builders John Berry and Henry Richards built the barracks and commandant's house.
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Masons lay a cornerstone at the Hillsborough Military Academy
A delegation from Eagle Lodge took part in a Masonic cornerstone ceremony at the Hillsborough Military Academy in 1859.
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The Nash and Kollock School turns the old Nash law office into a music room
After Chief Justice Frederick Nash died, his daughters Sally and Maria Nash and their cousin Sarah Kollock began holding their school's music lessons in his former law office on Margaret Lane.
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Hillsborough Military Academy opens
Charles C. Tew, then superintendent of the South Carolina military academy at Columbia, opened the Hillsborough Military Academy on January 12, 1859, holding its first classes in the Hillsborough Academy building. Its neo-Gothic barracks west of town, built to house 125 cadets, was finished in September 1860.
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Samuel Wellwood Hughes opens his own school near Cedar Grove
After fourteen years as founder and principal of Cedar Grove Academy, Samuel Wellwood Hughes opened his own classical school five miles northwest of Hillsborough, its first session beginning on the second Monday of January 1859. He taught there until his death in 1884; the surviving schoolhouse, dated about 1862, was later moved to Hillsborough and restored.
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The Hillsborough Military Academy commandant's house is ready to live in
The academy's neo-Gothic commandant's house, with turrets and crenellations along the roofline, was far enough along to be occupied by March 1859, though interior work may have continued for years.
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Nash and Kollock School for young ladies opens in Hillsborough
After Chief Justice Frederick Nash died in 1858, his daughters Sarah and Maria Nash and their cousin Sarah Kollock opened a select boarding and day school for girls in the Nash home.
- 1860s
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Orange County teaches 57 district schools
In 1860 Orange County taught fifty-seven district schools with forty-five licensed teachers, on about $7,400 in state school money and $1,800 in county taxes, in terms of about four months, two decades after the state's first public school law. The 1860 census, counting differently, listed 25 public schools with 2,163 pupils.
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William H. S. Burgwyn enters the University of North Carolina
Burgwyn entered the University of North Carolina as a freshman in 1860, after schooling near Baltimore and at Horner's School in Oxford. He left in 1861 because of illness.
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Walter Clark enters Colonel Tew's military academy in Hillsborough
Walter Clark, then fourteen, enrolled at Colonel C. C. Tew's Military Academy in Hillsborough. He left for Confederate service after the war began.
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George Attmore Sparrow is a cadet at the Hillsborough Military Academy
Sparrow, the teenage son of the Washington lawyer Thomas Sparrow, was enrolled as a cadet at the Hillsborough Military Academy in 1861 and 1862. He wrote home to his father from the academy through that period.
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Solomon Pool is promoted to adjunct professor of mathematics
Pool was promoted to adjunct professor of mathematics in 1861 and held the position for six years. In 1866 he took leave to become a United States deputy appraiser in North Carolina on the understanding that the university need not reemploy him until it had need of him.
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UNC remains open during the Civil War
President David Lowry Swain kept the university in session as students left Chapel Hill at eight to ten a day to enlist in late April 1861. Enrollment fell to 91 by September 1861, Swain won a Confederate draft exemption for some students in 1863, and only four students graduated in 1865.
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William H. S. Burgwyn enrolls as a cadet at the Hillsborough Military Academy
Later in 1861 Burgwyn entered the Hillsborough Military Academy as a cadet. By the autumn he had been appointed drill master of the camp of instruction near Raleigh, and he was then elected a lieutenant in the Thirty-fifth North Carolina Regiment.
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George Attmore Sparrow leaves the Hillsborough academy to join the Confederate army
Writing from the academy on 21 July 1862, Sparrow told his father he had approval for his discharge and would leave with other cadets when the session ended on 31 July. He was in camp with the Army of the Pamlico by 1863.
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The Collins family buys the former Burwell School and calls it the Beehive
Members of the Collins family of Somerset Place, who had left Union-held eastern North Carolina, paid Robert Burwell $3,500 for the house and four lots. By 1863 about forty family members and enslaved servants lived there, and the family named it the Beehive.
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Two rooms are added to the Nash law office for music practice and Sarah Kollock's lodging
Two rooms were built onto the west side of the old Nash law office to give the Nash and Kollock School more practice rooms and to house Sarah Kollock.
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Walter Clark resigns his Confederate commission and graduates first in his class at the university
When his regiment came back to North Carolina in February 1863, Walter Clark resigned his commission as a Confederate officer and went to the university, where he studied under David L. Swain and William H. Battle. He graduated first in his class in June 1864.
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The county school board names committeemen for all 53 districts in wartime
The Board of Superintendents appointed school committeemen for each of Orange County's 53 districts, a sign the public schools stayed open during the war. That month W. H. Brown's examining committee also called would-be teachers to the courthouse in May.
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Northside, Pine Knolls, and Tin Top
Chapel Hill’s historic Black neighborhoods took shape after emancipation around the West End church and school, the Orange County Training School and its Rosenwald campus of 1924, St. Joseph CME and First Baptist, and the tin-roofed houses that named Tin Top. Lincoln High opened on Merritt Mill Road in 1951, residents resisted urban renewal in the 1970s, and as the Black population fell by about 40 percent the conservation districts, the Jackson Center and the 2015 Northside initiative worked to keep the neighborhoods in place.
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William Bingham takes over the family school at the Oaks and incorporates it
With his brother Robert in the army and his father in declining health, William Bingham was running the school at the Oaks by 1864. That year he incorporated it as the Bingham School, a military and classical academy, and in December moved it to Mebaneville.
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Freedpeople build a church and school at Chapel Hill's West End
After emancipation, Black families kept homes and small farms on Chapel Hill's west end. St. Paul's congregation, first gathered under an arbor in December 1864, built a log church on Merritt Mill Road and bought land in 1878, and in 1866 Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal bought an acre nearby for a freedmen's school.
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Bingham School moves from the Oaks to Mebaneville
William Bingham and Robert Bingham, sons of William James Bingham, moved the school that December to a site east of Mebane's Station on the North Carolina Railroad, after the legislature incorporated it in 1864 as a military and classical academy. The highway marker's 1865 may be when classes began at the new site.
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Wilson Caldwell walks out with President Swain under a white flag to meet approaching Union troops
When Union troops approached Chapel Hill in 1865, Wilson Caldwell walked out under a white flag with President David L. Swain, Judge W. H. Battle and others to meet the incoming cavalry and seek protection for the town and the university.
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Hillsborough Military Academy sends its cadets home at the end of the Civil War
The academy, reopened in 1862 under Maj. William Gordon after Tew left for the war, dismissed its students in May 1865 after the surrender at Bennett Place. Raleigh Edward Colston reopened the campus in 1866 as the North Carolina Polytechnic and Military Institute.
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Job Berry calls a fair to buy a building for a Black school
The Hillsborough Recorder printed Job Berry's notice that the colored citizens of Hillsborough would hold a fair on September 23 to raise money for a school building. The school later met in the old courthouse at Queen and Churton streets.
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Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation
After emancipation, Black residents of Orange County built their own institutions. Chapel Hill's First Baptist Church formed in September 1865; Job Berry and Philadelphia Quakers opened Hillsborough's freedmen's school in the old courthouse on June 5, 1866; Black residents bought land for a Chapel Hill school in 1866; and St. Paul AME bought its church lot in 1878.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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General Colston takes charge of the reopened Hillsborough Military Academy
After closing at the end of the war, the academy reopened with General R. C. Colston as superintendent. In 1868 he signed a lease with Col. Tew's widow to live in the superintendent's house, but his family later moved to Wilmington.
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Quakers open a freedmen's school in Chapel Hill
In 1866 Philadelphia Friends opened a school for Black children in Chapel Hill; by early 1867 it had been running more than half a year with 248 pupils, in a rented house while the freedpeople built a school and house of worship on a fifty-dollar lot the Friends had bought. The school, which came to stand on the land near West Franklin Street and Merritt Mill Road that Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal bought in 1866, merged into Orange County Training School in 1917.
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The Collins women sell their shares of the Beehive to Dr. Thomas D. Warren
After the war the Collins relatives who had lived at the Beehive left Hillsborough, and the women sold their shares of the house to Dr. Thomas D. Warren, who had married Elizabeth Alethea Collins.
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Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal secure land for a Black school
At an estate auction in January 1866 Benjamin Craig, a local farmer, and Green Cordal, a formerly enslaved minister, bought one acre opposite the northwest end of Franklin Street for fifty dollars, and by August 1867 had conveyed it to three Philadelphia Friends for the relief of colored freedmen. The Friends sent George Dixon and his family to run the school, which stood at what is now 100 Merritt Mill Road on the edge of Northside.
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Rev. Job Berry and the Philadelphia Friends open Hillsborough's first school for Black children and adults
Job Berry, who had advertised a fair in September 1865 to raise money for a school, worked with the Friends of Philadelphia to buy the former Orange County courthouse on Queen Street for twelve hundred dollars and open a freedmen's school in it on June 5, 1866. More than three hundred children and adults learned to read and cipher there.
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Sarah J. Woodson teaches at the freedmen's school in Hillsborough
Sarah J. Woodson, an Oberlin graduate from Ohio, was principal of the school for Black children in Hillsborough, which she taught with V. S. Williams. The Freedmen's Bureau's report of January 1868 named it among the large, well-run schools in North Carolina.
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James Phillips dies in the college chapel
On the morning of March 14, 1867, James Phillips went early to the college chapel to lead morning prayers and was found dead on the rostrum as the bell rang. He had taught at the university since 1826 and was buried in the Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Trustees adopt an elective system of ten schools
Over William A. Graham's dissent, the trustees voted 18 to 3 for Kemp P. Battle's committee plan to replace the fixed four-year course with ten independent schools, from political science to modern languages, beginning in fall 1868. After the new state constitution put the university under a new board, the old trustees on June 4, 1868 reappointed Swain and the faculty and rescinded the plan.
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Charles Phillips is dismissed from the university faculty
When the state's Reconstruction government reorganized the University of North Carolina in 1868, Phillips was dismissed from the faculty. He took a professorship at Davidson College in February 1869.
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Six freedmen's schools are running in Orange County
By 1868 six schools for freed people had been set up in the county, paid for mostly by the Freedmen's Bureau and Quaker missions, with Black families giving what they could.
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Robert G. Fitzgerald comes to Hillsborough to teach a freedmen's school
Fitzgerald, a Union Navy and cavalry veteran who had taught freedpeople in Amelia County, Virginia, came to Hillsborough through the Friends' Freedmen's Association of Philadelphia to teach at a new school for Black students.
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William H. S. Burgwyn graduates from the university with first honors
After the Civil War Burgwyn re-entered the University of North Carolina as a sophomore and graduated in June 1868 with first honors, delivering the Latin salutatory address. He was a member of the Philanthropic Society.
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Reconstruction Republicans reshape UNC governance
The 1868 constitution gave the choice of university trustees to the state Board of Education, controlled by Governor William W. Holden. In July 1868 the new trustees removed President David L. Swain and his faculty, and a Republican faculty under Solomon Pool reopened classes in March 1869 amid strong partisan opposition.
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David L. Swain dies after a buggy accident
Weeks after the Reconstruction board of trustees accepted his resignation, David L. Swain was thrown on August 11, 1868, from a buggy pulled by the horse General Sherman had given him. He seemed to be recovering but died on August 27 and was buried on August 29 in the garden of his Chapel Hill home; Charles Phillips preached his funeral sermon.
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The new county commissioners name school committees for all 53 districts
Working from Silas Link's report, which listed the school districts in each new township, the board named three committeemen for every one of the county's 53 districts. Presumably they were meant to hold office until the townships could elect their own.
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A school report finds 43 schoolhouses for nearly 6,000 children
A. Hooker, late chairman of the common schools board, counted 3,667 white and 2,235 Black children in the county and only 43 schoolhouses, most run down, to serve both races. He put the need at 63 new buildings of about $100 each.
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Alexander McIver joins the reorganized faculty as professor of mathematics
McIver, a Moore County native who had graduated first in the class of 1853 and taught briefly as a tutor, came from Davidson College to teach mathematics on the Republican faculty that reopened the university under Solomon Pool.
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Solomon Pool accepts the presidency of the university
Pool accepted the presidency of the University of North Carolina in 1869 at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars and was permitted to keep his federal appraiser post at the same time. Governor William W. Holden had taken charge of the board of trustees to secure a president with Republican affiliations.
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The sheriff auctions the former Burwell School to David C. Parks
Dr. Thomas D. Warren was deep in local debt, and the Orange County sheriff sold the house at auction to David C. Parks for $600. Parks and his brother Charles traded the property between them for the next quarter century.
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Wilson Caldwell resigns from the university and founds a school for Black children
In 1869 Wilson Caldwell, who had worked at the university as an enslaved servant and janitor, resigned and started a school for children of color in Chapel Hill.
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Thomas Fitzgerald buys Woodside, where his son Robert builds a freedmen's school
Thomas Fitzgerald, whose son Robert had persuaded the family to move from Pennsylvania, bought Woodside, a 158-acre plantation six miles east of Hillsborough, from Robert J. Jeffreys for $1,200 in April 1869, with Robert writing the deed. Robert built a freedmen's school on the property, and the family also farmed and ran a tannery and brick making there.
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Robert G. Fitzgerald marries Cornelia Smith of Chapel Hill
Fitzgerald married Cornelia Smith, a niece of Mary Ruffin Smith, the Chapel Hill benefactor of the university. Their granddaughter Pauli Murray later told the family's story in Proud Shoes.
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