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Local figure

Elias Dodson

Elias Dodson was a Baptist preacher from Virginia who traveled North Carolina as a missionary and colporteur in the mid-1840s. Around 1844 he held the first Baptist services known in Hillsborough, in the county courthouse. When the county replaced that building in 1845 he bought the old courthouse, and by 1847 it stood at the corner of Churton and Queen streets as a Baptist meeting house.

Source: NC State Historic Preservation Office: National Register file OR0077ad

Orange County Indexed has not yet linked an indexed work directly to Elias Dodson. The biography and the dated events on this page provide sources about Elias Dodson’s life and work. If you know a useful source, tell us.

Research sources

Life and Orange County connections

Dated events connected with this person, earliest first. See these 3 dated events in the chronology →

  1. Elias Dodson holds Hillsborough's first known Baptist services in the courthouse Elias Dodson, a Virginia-born graduate of William and Mary, preached in the courthouse and is the first Baptist minister the authors could find holding services in town. When the county built a new courthouse he bought the old one for the Baptists. People: Elias DodsonSearch the index · Pauline O. Lloyd and Allen A. Lloyd, History of the Churches of Hillsborough, N.C., ca. 1766-1962 (1963), scan p. 26
  2. The Old Orange County Courthouse is moved up Churton Street to Queen Street After the county built a new courthouse, its commissioners advertised the old wooden courthouse for sale at the November 1845 county court, to be removed from the court square. The Baptist missionary Elias Dodson bought it, and by about 1847 it stood at the corner of Churton and Queen streets as a church. The building later became the freedmen's school and then the home of Dickerson Chapel AME Church. People: Elias DodsonSearch the index · North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office: Hillsborough Historic District Additional Documentation (National Register documentation, about 2013)
  3. First Baptist Church of Hillsborough is organized in the old courthouse The First Baptist Church was organized in Hillsborough and met in the former 1790 courthouse building, now Dickerson Chapel, until 1862, while it raised its own church building on a lot acquired between 1854 and 1860. People: Elias DodsonSearch the index · North Carolina State Historic Preservation Office: Hillsborough Historic District Additional Documentation (National Register documentation, about 2013)

Places in this person’s story

Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows them all.

Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange and OpenStreetMap; town and community pins mark the middle of their mapped buildings.

All places and the county map →

Research sources

Resources picked for this person, each with a note on what it holds. For ready-made searches of other catalogs, see Search further.

Collections and databases

  • NC LIVE: prepared search for Elias Dodson Library card An advanced search of the state’s shared databases already scoped to Orange County’s places and this subject; edit it freely, and sign in through your North Carolina library to read
  • Ancestry Library Edition In the libraryOrange County Public Library Census, birth, death and marriage records, and more, free on the public computers at OCPL libraries

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Books about Elias Dodson

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Historical records and collections

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