Key local figure
William Alexander Graham practiced law in Hillsborough from 1828 and represented Orange County in the North Carolina House of Commons in 1836, 1838 and 1840, serving as speaker in the last two sessions. He was governor from January 1845 to January 1849 and is buried at Hillsborough.
Source: NCpedia: Graham, William Alexander
Also found in catalogs as William A (William Alexander) Graham.
1804–1875 as the Library of Congress records it · Library of Congress authority record ↗
18 indexed works are connected with this person.
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.
William A. Graham's letter to A. M. Waddell, dated at Hillsborough on February 5, 1861, and printed there. Graham, the former governor and senator who lived in Hillsborough, argues against secession on the ground that Abraham Lincoln's election alone does not justify leaving the Union. A single printed letter from the winter before North Carolina seceded.
John V. Allcott's 1965 article on the building campaign at Montrose, the Hillsborough home of William A. Graham, during the 1850s. Allcott connects the work to the architect Alexander Jackson Davis, and the piece runs as pages 85 to 95 of a larger publication, with illustrations.
Facsimile, dated 1940, of George W. Tate's 1891 map of Orange County. It shows towns, roads, railroads such as the North Carolina Rail Road and the Chapel Hill line, residences, schools, churches, mills and mines, with portraits and pictures of buildings in the margins.
Personal and political papers of Willie Person Mangum, the Whig senator from Orange County, together with papers of Arthur Mangum and Charity Alston Cain Mangum. Correspondents include Daniel Webster, William A. Graham, David L. Swain, John Chavis and Abraham Lincoln, and other topics include plantations at Hillsborough, the estate called Walnut Hill, state politics, agriculture and education.
Max R. Williams on the schooling of William Alexander Graham, the North Carolina governor who lived from 1804 to 1875, with attention to his years at the University of North Carolina. Fourteen pages printed in 1963, a biographical study set in the nineteenth century history of the Chapel Hill campus.
Two filmed interviews recorded on 9 June 1962 with Frank Porter Graham, former president of the University of North Carolina. In the first he talks with Hubert Robinson, a Black man who spent years as his driver, butler and assistant; in the second chancellor William Aycock joins him. Topics include university history, Graham's United Nations work and South Asian affairs.
Photographs gathered by Mary Claire Engstrom (1906-1997), dated from the 1930s to 1979 with most falling between the 1950s and 1976, about 2,140 items in 4.4 linear feet in UNC's North Carolina Collection. Subjects include historic buildings in Hillsborough and Orange County, the Alexander Dixon House, the Nash Hooper Graham House, Bingham School, Nash and Kollock School, the Hillsboro' Military Academy, Carrboro views, and the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
George W. Tate's map of Orange County, drawn from actual surveys and published by Tate at Bingham School in 1891, here as a reduced positive photostat. It marks townships, churches including Black churches, schools, mills, post offices, mines and quarries, stores, landowners and historic sites, with names such as Cedar Grove Academy and Memorial Hall at Chapel Hill.
Statewide Civil War collection of the State Archives of North Carolina, dated 1860 to 1965. It gathers pardon petitions, bounty payrolls, quartermaster vouchers and supply papers, disabled veterans' claims and letters about artificial limbs, regimental and unit papers, muster rolls, diaries, reminiscences, clippings and sheet music. Orange County is one of the many North Carolina counties represented.
Letters and papers of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, the Chapel Hill writer and historian and daughter of professor James Phillips, 1857 to 1905. Most of the correspondence, from 1859 to 1895, concerns the university and life in the village, with letters exchanged with Swain, Kemp P. Battle and George T. Winston, successive heads of the university, and with Mrs. Swain and W. C. Kerr. State Archives of North Carolina, PC.7.
Diaries and papers of John Hill Wheeler of Hertford County, historian, legislator, state treasurer from 1843 to 1845 and minister to Nicaragua from 1854 to 1857. The diaries, a broken run from 1854 to 1882, follow his social and political life in Washington, D.C. University commencements at Chapel Hill and his work on North Carolina history also come up. State Archives of North Carolina, MfP.51.
Papers of the family of Kindle Van Hook (died 1854) of Person County and his wife Anne, widow of Hugh Dobbin, 1779 to 1922, with Holeman family material. Van Hook's business letters with John G. Williams, his stepson John M. Dobbin of Fayetteville and others concern land, debts, enslaved people and crops. Orange County and Durham appear. State Archives of North Carolina, MfP.110.
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this person. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled.
Joseph Graham (1759 to 1836) fought in fifteen engagements in the Carolinas during the Revolution, rising from private to major, and after 1820 wrote accounts of the war for the historian Archibald D. Murphey. His grandson William A. Graham collected them with a biography and an appendix on the state's Revolutionary troops and the laws that raised them. Published in Raleigh in 1904, 385 pages with portraits, a folding map and an index.
Storylines this person is part of, earliest first. Each has its own page.
Dated events connected with this person: sixteen of 38, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 38 dated events in the chronology →
The house Francis Nash built in 1772 became the home of William Hooper, signer of the Declaration of Independence, in 1782. William A. Graham lived there in the 1860s.
People: Francis Nash · William A. Graham
Subject: Nash-Hooper House
Graham read law with Thomas Ruffin of Orange County and, having taken his county and superior court licences, had established a practice among the Hillsborough bar by March 1828. He kept a law practice until his death and in time owned three plantations worked by enslaved people.
People: Thomas Ruffin
At Duncan Cameron's instance the board placed management in a seven-member executive committee including the governor, with the powers of the land, appointments and building committees and the right to change studies and dismiss faculty. The first members were Cameron, George E. Badger, William McPheeters, Charles Manly, Frederick Nash, William A. Graham and Governor Swain.
People: Duncan Cameron · David L. Swain · George E. Badger · William McPheeters · Frederick Nash · William A. Graham
On buying the property in 1842, William A. Graham built a one-and-a-half-story frame law office there. It survives on the Montrose grounds; his son John W. Graham added a two-room rear ell around 1893.
People: John W. Graham
Subject: Montrose
Graduates meeting at commencement organized the Alumni Association with former governor Morehead in the chair. At the 1844 meeting they adopted a constitution and chose Morehead as the association's first president.
People: William A. Graham · Charles Phillips · William Horn Battle
With no orator found from the class of thirty years before, the association's president, former governor Morehead, delivered the address at the meeting of 36 alumni in Gerrard Hall.
People: William A. Graham
Subject: Gerrard Hall
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.
People: Paul C. Cameron · Josiah Turner Jr. · William A. Graham
Seven years after organizing in the old courthouse, the First Baptist Church of Hillsborough began its brick church about 1860, to a design by William Percival. The congregation met in the courthouse until 1862 and the war stalled the work; John Berry took over from the first builder, D. Kistler, and finished it. The Baptist State Convention met in the newly completed church in the fall of 1868, when Rev. Thomas H. Pritchard of Raleigh preached the dedication sermon.
People: William A. Graham
The house the Grahams had enlarged at Montrose burned in 1862, and the family moved to a house on West Tryon Street. Only the law office and outbuildings were left on the land.
Subject: Montrose
Orange would have elected Graham to the postwar convention, but his pardon was held up, so he withdrew and voters chose Berry and Phillips.
People: Samuel (Samuel Field) Phillips · William A. Graham · William W. Holden
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.
People: William A. Graham · Kemp Plummer Battle
The House managers announced to the impeachment court that former governor William A. Graham of Hillsborough, with Thomas Bragg and Augustus S. Merrimon, would act as their counsel. Graham argued points of evidence for the prosecution through the trial.
People: William A. Graham · Thomas Bragg · Thomas Sparrow
In 1874 William A. Graham gave the vacant Montrose land to his son Maj. John W. Graham, who built a twelve-room house on the foundation of the first house. It burned in 1893.
People: John W. Graham
Subject: Montrose
Orange elected Graham over Duke, 1,908 to 1,528, and Josiah Turner Jr. over John T. Hogan. Graham died before the convention met, and William N. Patterson beat Duke again in a special election, 2,000 to 1,297.
People: Josiah Turner Jr.
Graham died unexpectedly at Saratoga Springs, New York, on 11 August 1875, where he had gone for a meeting of the Virginia and Maryland arbitration commission. He was buried in the cemetery adjacent to the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church. He had been elected a delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1875 but died before it assembled.
Subject: Hillsborough Presbyterian Church · Old Town Cemetery, Hillsborough
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 10 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.
The index lists works with an Orange County connection. To find everything else about William A. Graham, search these catalogs.
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Picture: William A. Graham, 1870. Public domain. Photograph by Mathew Benjamin Brady / Levin Corbin Handy; Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Brady-Handy Photograph Collection. hdl.loc.gov CALL NUMBER: LC-BH826- 3350 <P&P>P&P; via Wikimedia Commons
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