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Local figure

William Few

William Few grew up from 1758 on his family's 640-acre farm on the Eno River near Hillsborough, where his father ran a gristmill and tavern, and from 1767 managed a second family farm. After Governor Tryon's forces destroyed the farm in 1771 the family moved to Georgia, which he later served in the Constitutional Convention and the U.S. Senate.

Source: NCpedia: Few, William, Jr.

1748–1828 as the Library of Congress records it · Library of Congress authority record ↗

1 indexed work is connected with this person.

William Few, 1787
William Few, 1787

Indexed works

Works in the index that concern this person directly, or were written by them. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it; background reading with wider context sits further down.

Hillsborough District: Trial, Reference and Appearance Docket Superior Court, Part 1, 1768-1773

United States. District Court (North Carolina: Hillsborough District) · 1768

Hillsborough District Superior Court trial, reference and appearance docket, part 1, 1768 to 1773, from the colonial court at Hillsborough. Suits over debt, contracts, slander, detinue and trover fill it, and names include Edmund Fanning, William Tryon, Martin Armstrong and William Few. 299 images.

Life and Orange County connections

Dated events connected with this person, earliest first. See these 7 dated events in the chronology →

  1. 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.Search the index · Eno River Association: The History of Few's Ford
  2. 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. People: William FewSearch the index · Orange County Historical Museum (Churton Street): 1768
  3. 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.Search the index · Nash, Hillsboro, Colonial and Revolutionary (1903), p. 92
  4. 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.Search the index · NCpedia: Few, William, Jr.
  5. William Few conveys his home place near Hillsborough to John Butler In debt and weighing a move to Georgia, Few deeded the Kirkland place east of town to his friend John Butler, sheriff that year. Butler in turn sold the tract to the Scottish merchant Ralph MacNair on July 23, 1771. People: John Butler, Ralph McNairSearch the index · Nash, Hillsboro, Colonial and Revolutionary (1903), p. 93
  6. 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. People: William TryonSearch the index · Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, vol. 8, pp. 574-600: Tryon's order book in the campaign against the Regulators
  7. Trinity's William P. Few proposes a joint medical school with UNC After the trustees' site committee split on December 16, Few met the committee at the governor's mansion and offered a four-year school with two years at Chapel Hill and two in Durham near Watts Hospital, backed by $1 million from each side and a Trinity endowment. Morrison endorsed it that night, but Baptist protest over church and state killed it within weeks. People: Harry Woodburn Chase, Isaac Hall Manning, Cameron MorrisonSearch the index · Howard E. Covington Jr., Fire and Stone: The Making of the University of North Carolina under Presidents Edward Kidder Graham and Harry Woodburn Chase (2018), pp. 251-255

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 the 2 with a known location.

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 →

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The index lists works with an Orange County connection. To find everything else about William Few, search these catalogs.

Books about William Few

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Photographs, papers, and newspapers

Searched with the Library of Congress heading Few, William, 1748-1828, so the results are about this person and not others with the same name. Each link opens that catalog’s own results in a new tab. The Friends have not reviewed what they return.

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Picture: William Few, 1787. CC0. Photograph by John Ramage; This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy; via Wikimedia Commons

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