Local figure
James Bennitt was a farmer who settled in 1846 with his wife Nancy and their three children on a 325-acre place on the Hillsborough Road, then in Orange County. He also worked as a tailor and cobbler and sold feed, plug tobacco and liquor. In April 1865 generals William T. Sherman and Joseph E. Johnston met three times in his farmhouse and signed the surrender there. He died in 1878.
Source: NCpedia: Bennett Place
Orange County Indexed has not yet linked an indexed work directly to James Bennitt. The biography and the dated events on this page provide sources about James Bennitt’s life and work.
Dated events connected with this person, in date order. See these 3 dated events in the chronology →
People named in the same dated entries as James Bennitt, those sharing the most entries first. Each line links one of the shared entries in the chronology, where its source is cited. A shared entry shows these people in the same event, not how well they knew each other.
Background reading on Orange County during the Civil War, 1861–1865. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss James Bennitt. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Letters of the Sparrow family, including Thomas Sparrow and George Attmore Sparrow, gathered and published in 2011. The correspondence includes material associated with the Hillsboro' Military Academy, which opened in Hillsborough in 1859, and combines family and military history.
Suzy Barile's account of Eleanor Hope Swain, daughter of the University of North Carolina's president, and Smith D. Atkins, the Union general whose troops occupied Chapel Hill in April 1865; the two married later that year. Published by Eno in Hillsborough in 2009, 237 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Civil War letters of Colonel Frank Schaller of the 22nd Mississippi Infantry, combining personal narrative with regimental history. Schaller was associated with the Hillsboro Military Academy in Hillsborough. Published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2007. 185 pages with six pages of plates and illustrations.
Stephen A. Ross's study of the Hillsborough Military Academy and military education in North Carolina before the Civil War, dated 2002. An article-length piece of 27 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Two Confederate tax notices of 1864 addressed to Orange County, one on the tax in kind and one on the Confederate tax, reproduced in an electronic edition by the university library at Chapel Hill in 2000 within the Documenting the American South collection The Southern Homefront, 1861-1865. The titles come from the captions, since the originals had no title page. Topics include property tax, tax assessment and tax collection in Orange County during the Civil War.
Folded leaflet issued at Hillsborough in 1940, printing excerpts from General Joseph E. Johnston's 'Narrative of military operations' on the final fifteen days of the Civil War in North Carolina, the period of his surrender negotiations with Sherman in April 1865. Its first page announces the opening of the restored house near Hillsborough that served as Johnston's headquarters that year. One sheet of four pages with illustrations.
Augustus White Long's memoir of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina from 1865 to 1900, including higher education in the decades after the Civil War. Published by Duke University Press in 1939 in the series A segment of the American scene. 280 pages.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1940), The William and Mary Quarterly (1940), Journal of American History (1940).
Stephen Beauregard Weeks's address on the University of North Carolina in the Civil War, delivered at the centennial celebration of the institution's opening on June 5, 1895, and reprinted from volume 24 of the Southern Historical Society Papers. Printed in Richmond by Wm. Ellis Jones in 1896, 38 pages. It treats the university and the state in the war of 1861 to 1865 and the campus in the nineteenth century.
Cornelia Phillips Spencer's account of the closing weeks of the Civil War in North Carolina, reissued in 2005 as an electronic edition by the University Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Topics include the 1865 campaigns, Sherman's march through the Carolinas, Stoneman's raid, and the history of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century, where Spencer, 1825 to 1908, spent her working life.
A campaign address printed in 1864 by Jas. S. Leathers, appealing to the voters of Orange County during the Civil War. The Confederate imprint belongs to the wartime politics of the county and the state. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill produced this electronic edition in 2000 for its Documenting the American South collection on the Southern homefront.
Letters of the Kimberly family of Chapel Hill, written during the Civil War and issued in 2000 as an electronic edition in the Documenting the American South project of the university library, within its Southern Homefront collection. The sections cover the Union invasion, disease and death, the homefront and morale, with page images of the originals. Kristofer Ray transcribed and annotated the letters.
Documenting the American South, the digital library begun in 1996 by the UNC Chapel Hill Academic Affairs Library, gathers primary sources on the history, literature and culture of the South from colonial times into the early 1900s. Its collections include the first century of the University of North Carolina, antebellum student writings, oral histories, first-person narratives, Southern literature, 'North American Slave Narratives', the Civil War home front, the Black church in the South, the North Carolina experience and North Carolinians in the First World War.
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