Town in Orange County
Laid out in 1754 on the Eno River near the Occaneechi town and the county seat ever since, called Orange, Corbin Town and Childsburgh before it took the name Hillsborough in 1766. The Regulator crisis, the state’s 1788 constitutional convention and the Confederate surrender talks of 1865 all passed through it, and its historic district keeps more than a hundred 18th and 19th century buildings.
Source: NCpedia, North Carolina Gazetteer
1,797 indexed works are connected with this place. 101 held at OCPL →
Themes here. The subjects the index files most often under Hillsborough.
Storylines set here, earliest first. Each has its own page.
Other dated events here: sixteen of 1,600, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 1,600 dated events in the chronology →
After leaving the Roanoke River valley in 1676, the Occaneechi built a town on the Eno River near present-day Hillsborough and lived there from about 1680 to 1710. It was a small stockaded village of ten or twelve houses and probably fewer than 75 people, and it was the town John Lawson visited in 1701. Archaeologists dug the whole village between 1983 and 1986 at a place they named the Fredricks site, and they call this period of Occaneechi life on the Eno the Fredricks phase.
The second session of the 1778 General Assembly met at Hillsborough, elected Whitmell Hill and Thomas Burke as additional delegates to the Continental Congress, and authorized 850,000 pounds in bills of credit to pay the state's war debts. The House adjourned to meet next at Halifax in January 1779.
People: Thomas Benbury · Allen Jones · Thomas Burke
After driving Nathanael Greene's army across the Dan River, Lord Cornwallis reached Hillsborough on February 20, 1781, raised the royal standard and issued a proclamation calling loyalists to join him. Short of food and forage, and told that Greene had recrossed the Dan, he left on February 26, crossing the Haw toward Alamance Creek.
People: Charles Cornwallis · Nathanael Greene
Fanning’s Loyalists captured Governor Thomas Burke during a surprise raid on Hillsborough.
Part of David Fanning’s raid on Hillsborough, September 1781
People: David Fanning · Thomas Burke
Meeting at St. Matthew's Church in Hillsborough, delegates defeated a motion to ratify the Constitution 184 to 84 on August 1, 1788. On August 2 they voted to neither ratify nor reject it until a declaration of rights and amendments went before Congress.
People: Samuel Johnston · Richard Dobbs Spaight · Willie Jones · James Iredell
Subject: St. Matthew’s Episcopal Church
Orange County's 1790 tax list returned 2,272 polls and 406,106 acres across its eight districts, with a separate list for Hillsborough town showing 36 white polls against 82 black polls. William Hooper was charged for 22 of them, John Taylor for 10 and Francis Childs for 5.
People: William Hooper · Walter Alves
Legal proceedings brought by William Kirkland, Catlett Campbell, Jacob Greer and Isaac Mordecai against Robert Bell placed Hannah and her children Jenny and David in the hands of the sheriff. Sheriff Samuel Turrentine sold the three at public auction at the Hillsborough Market House to Duncan Cameron for 200 pounds.
People: Duncan Cameron · William Kirkland
In September 1816 Mary W. Burke joined eight other people and the Rev. John Knox Witherspoon to organize the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church, which acquired the town's brick church built in 1810. She rented pew 13 on the first pew list and supported the church for the next eighteen years.
People: John Knox Witherspoon
Subject: Hillsborough Presbyterian Church
Dennis Heartt began publishing the weekly Hillsborough Recorder in February 1820, at three dollars a year. The paper ran until 1879, and its surviving issues are a main record of nineteenth-century Hillsborough and Orange County.
Part of The Hillsborough Recorder begins publication, 1820
People: Dennis Heartt
Subject: Hillsborough Recorder
Thomas Ruffin of Hillsborough, newly seated on the North Carolina Supreme Court, wrote the opinion in State v. Mann, overturning the conviction of John Mann of Edenton for shooting Lydia, an enslaved woman he had hired, as she fled a whipping. Ruffin held that a master's power must be absolute, and abolitionists later cited the ruling widely.
People: Thomas Ruffin · Lydia
Robert and Margaret Anna Burwell operated their Hillsborough school for girls from 1837 to 1857.
Part of The Burwell School and the Burwell household · 37 events
People: Margaret Anna Burwell · Robert Armistead Burwell · Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly
Subject: Burwell School
The General Assembly chartered the North Carolina Railroad in 1849, after Senate speaker Calvin Graves cast the deciding vote. The state built the 223-mile line from Goldsboro to Charlotte between 1851 and 1856, running it through Hillsborough, and the first train ran its full length in January 1856.
Subject: North Carolina Railroad
Elizabeth Keckly purchased freedom for herself and her son in St. Louis, after earlier enslavement in Hillsborough.
Part of Elizabeth Keckly in Hillsborough
People: George Kirkland · Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly
Early on August 7, 1869, about 100 disguised white men took Washington Morrow and his brother Nelson from the Hillsborough jail, where they were held on barn-burning charges, and shot Washington as they fled; he died of the wound. On October 14 a mob hanged their father, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, and their uncle, Daniel Morrow.
Part of Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County · 17 events
People: Washington Morrow · Daniel Morrow · Jefferson Morrow
Subject: Orange County jail, Hillsborough
The Hillsboro Tobacco Warehouse, run by E. H. Pogue & Co., held its opening sale on Tuesday, January 5, 1886, and the Observer reported a heavy break with good prices. Three days earlier Pogue and fourteen other men had incorporated the Orange County Tobacco Association to buy and sell leaf tobacco.
Federal relief crews began a new library on Churton Street in Hillsborough in December 1933, with local money, including $7,000 from the Hillsborough United Daughters of the Confederacy, paying for materials. The cornerstone of the Confederate Memorial Public Library was laid on July 13, 1934, and the building became the Orange County Historical Museum in 1983.
Subject: Orange County Public Library · Orange County Historical Museum
Dated maps that show this place, oldest first: town plans, county, road and soil maps, fire insurance sheets and the U.S. Geological Survey’s topographic maps, each linked to the library or archive that holds it. The USGS maps are free to download.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina, the most widely held first, novels aside. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Narrow these works. Each link opens the search already limited to this place. Counts are indexed works, not copies on a shelf; a work can carry more than one period or place.
Lucile Noell Dula's guidebook to Hillsborough and its historic buildings, published by Pelican in 1989. It pairs a tour of the town with notes on its history, in 128 illustrated pages with a bibliography. Part of the Wall Local History Collection.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Durham record: Hillsborough (N.C.) -- Tours.
Jean Bradley Anderson's history of the Bennehan and Cameron families and their plantations, Stagville and Fairntosh, on lands that lay in Orange County until Durham County was formed from it in 1881. Published by the Historic Preservation Society of Durham in 1985, the book follows plantation life and ownership across several generations, with genealogical tables, a map, portraits, a bibliography and an index; 227 pages plus plates.
Reviewed in South Atlantic Quarterly (1987).
Marjoleine Kars's history of the Regulator Rebellion of 1766 to 1771, the backcountry uprising against corrupt county officials that ended at the Battle of Alamance. Hillsborough, the Orange County seat, was a center of the Regulators' protests and the scene of their 1770 court riot. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2002, 286 pages with illustrations and maps.
Reviewed in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2003).
Francis Nash's history of Hillsborough in colonial and Revolutionary times, first published in 1903 and reprinted in 1953 by Edwards & Broughton with an index and a sketch of the author. Topics include the Regulator Insurrection of 1766 to 1771, the Revolution and local genealogy.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the DPLA record: Hillsborough (N.C.).
Elizabeth Shreve Ryan's combined histories and tour guides for Hillsborough, Chapel Hill and Carrboro, the three towns of Orange County, with the University of North Carolina treated alongside Chapel Hill. Each town gets a narrative history and a tour of its streets and buildings. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2004, 369 pages with illustrations and maps.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Library of Congress record: Hillsborough (N.C.) -- Tours.
Annie Sutton Cameron's short account of Hillsborough during the Regulator uprising of 1766 to 1771, when backcountry farmers protested colonial officials and courts and Hillsborough, as the seat of Orange County, stood at the center of the conflict. Published by the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough in 1964, 36 pages with illustrations.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Hillsborough (N.C.) -- History.
Sydney Nathans's history of a Black community in Hale County, Alabama, whose founders were enslaved people sent there before the Civil War from the Cameron family's plantations in Orange County, North Carolina. Instead of following the Great Migration out of the South, this group stayed, moved from bondage to owning the land they had worked, and held onto it across generations. Published 2017, 342 pages with plates and maps; this is the e-book edition.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (2017), Journal of Social History (2017), London review of books (2017), The Journal of the Civil War Era (2018), The Journal of Southern History (2018), Environmental History (2018), The Alabama review (2019), The Oral History Review (2019), The Register - Kentucky Historical Society/The register of the Kentucky Historical Society (2020).
Carole Watterson Troxler's history of the Regulator movement in Piedmont North Carolina, from land speculation and backcountry resentment through Herman Husband and the Sandy Creek network to the petitions, court proceedings and rioting in Hillsborough and Salisbury, the Battle of Alamance in 1771 and the movement's afterlife in the Revolution. An appendix compiles names in a Regulator context. Published by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources in 2011, 221 pages with illustrations, maps and an index.
Recently indexed: The life and times of Richard Caswell : the first governor of North Carolina (1857) · 18th century newspapers - Edenton, Fayetteville, Hillsborough : 1785-1801 · Address delivered before the Adelphian Society of the Caldwell Institute, February 6, 1850, on occasion of their fourteenth anniversary (1850) · An alchemical lion ruminates on seventy years making and unmaking the cosmic stuff under our comic feet (1999) · An appetite for Paris : a Parisian bistro dinner (2002) · The author's apology for protesting against the Methodist Episcopal government (1829)
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this place. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled.
Shirley Jones Mallard's abstracts of the death and marriage notices printed in the Hillsborough Recorder from 1820 to 1879 and in the Hillsboro Recorder of 1887 and 1888. Published by the compiler in Chapel Hill in 1997, 445 pages.
Peter H. Wood's short history of Black Hillsborough, self-published in the town in 2005, 40 pages with illustrations and a map. It covers African Americans in Hillsborough, their history and their social life and customs, and is a brief starting point for the subject.
A 1982 revision of Allen Alexander Lloyd's history of Hillsborough, now written with Pauline O. Lloyd and carried forward from the town's founding in 1754 to 1982. Published in Hillsborough by A. A. Lloyd, 310 pages with illustrations and a bibliography.
Hillsborough seen by twenty-seven writers in essays, fiction and poems collected by Eno Publishers in 2010. Allan Gurganus writes on renovating old houses, David Payne and Beverly A. Scarlett on the Eno, Brooks Graebner on the courthouse and the churches, Nancy Goodwin keeps a gardener's journal, and Lee Smith offers scenes from 'On Agate Hill'; Randall Kenan, Michael Malone, Hal Crowther, Jill McCorkle, Craig Nova and Jaki Shelton Green also appear. 210 pages.
Amanda Boyd's stories of the Colonial Inn in Hillsborough, gathered as anecdotes of the inn and of the town's social life. The inn on West King Street is one of Hillsborough's landmarks. Published in Durham in 2021, 120 pages with illustrations, facsimiles, maps and portraits, many in color.
The Historic Hillsborough Commission's account of slavery in antebellum Hillsborough and of the enslaved and free people of color who worked at the Burwell School, the female school the Burwells kept in town, between 1837 and 1857. African American history in Hillsborough and the school's own history are its two threads. Published in 2019.
Elizabeth Shreve Ryan's combined histories and tour guides for Hillsborough, Chapel Hill and Carrboro, the three towns of Orange County, with the University of North Carolina treated alongside Chapel Hill. Each town gets a narrative history and a tour of its streets and buildings. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2004, 369 pages with illustrations and maps.
Bryant Kenneth Davis's folklore study of West Hillsborough from 1986, including local legends and games according to the full title. Twentieth-century folklore of Hillsborough and the town's history are its ground, and it records a neighborhood's own lore at a single point in time.
Annie Sutton Cameron's short account of Hillsborough during the Regulator uprising of 1766 to 1771, when backcountry farmers protested colonial officials and courts and Hillsborough, as the seat of Orange County, stood at the center of the conflict. Published by the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough in 1964, 36 pages with illustrations.
Background from selected state and local sources
Maps, surveys, and the ground itself
Newspapers, photographs, and records of the time
Local organizations that preserve the story and can help you go further
Other catalogs to search and local organizations that can help.
Held in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection. Selected because their titles or catalog subjects provide wider historical context for this place; they may not discuss the Orange County place directly.
William Churton, surveyor for Earl Granville, came to the colonies around 1749 and in 1754 laid out the town that became Hillsborough, the Orange County seat. Stewart E. Dunaway's life history of him follows his surveying career and his family, illustrated with maps and facsimiles and closing with a bibliography and an index. Published by the author in Hillsborough in 2017 through Lulu; 166 pages.
Subjects in the OCPL catalog record: Churton, William, 1710-1767; Churton family; Surveyors -- North Carolina -- Biography OCPL call number: NC 929.2 DUNAWAYDavid Fanning's own account of his years as a Loyalist partisan in North Carolina, 1775 to 1783, including his 1781 raid on Hillsborough, where he captured Governor Thomas Burke. Edited by Thomas H. Wynne and first printed privately at Richmond in 1861, it was reissued in 1865 by Joseph Sabin of New York with an introduction by John H. Wheeler and notes partly by former governor David L. Swain; 86 pages.
Subjects in the Library of Congress catalog record: United States -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783 -- Personal narratives, British; North Carolina -- History -- Revolution, 1775-1783 OCPL call number: NC 973.3 FANIn October 1849 the Presbyterian Synod of North Carolina met at Hillsboro, the Orange County seat, for its thirty-sixth session; these are its printed minutes. The 28-page pamphlet was printed in Raleigh in 1850 at the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb.
Subjects in the OCPL catalog record: Presbyterian Church Synod of North Carolina -- Congresses; Presbyterians -- North Carolina -- Congresses OCPL call number: NC 285 PRENorth Carolina's part in the Constitutional Convention of 1787, told by Burton Craige (1875 to 1945) with biographical sketches of the state's delegates: William Blount, William R. Davie, Alexander Martin, Richard Dobbs Spaight and Hugh Williamson. Archibald Craige published it in 1987, the Convention's bicentennial; 200 pages with portraits, a bibliography and a folded color facsimile map in a back pocket.
Subjects in the Library of Congress catalog record: United States Constitutional Convention (1787); Constitutional history -- United States; Constitutional history -- North Carolina OCPL call number: NC 342.73 CRAMore to discover
The Friends connect people with new library materials, local writers and publishers, and resources documenting Orange County.
