Hillsborough

StorylineThe Few family on the Eno, 1758–17711758–1771 · 11 events · The Few family's years on the Eno show how the Regulation undid a family of mill owners near Hillsborough. William Few came from Maryland in 1758 with four enslaved people, built a mill with his brother and later kept a tavern a mile from town. In 1768 he went on the bond of the Regulator William Butler. In 1771 his son James was captured at Alamance and hanged the next day, Tryon's army turned its horses onto the family's crops, and the Fews, pressed by lawsuits after going surety for several people, left for Georgia that winter. StorylineThe Regulator crisis, 1766–17711766–1771 · 137 events · Orange County farmers organized in 1766 against high fees, taxes and dishonest county officers, calling a meeting at Maddock's Mill that October. Protest turned violent at the Hillsborough court in September 1770 and ended with the Regulators' defeat at Alamance on May 16, 1771 and the hanging of six at Hillsborough on June 19. StorylineThe Hillsborough district superior court, 1767–18061767–1806 · 18 events · The district superior court made Hillsborough a court town, and in the Regulator years it became the place where the Regulators' quarrel with the county officers was fought out. Set at Hillsborough by an act of 1767, it first sat in March 1768. Its September 1768 term tried William Butler and Herman Husband and found Edmund Fanning guilty; later terms threw out the Regulators' bills, and in September 1770 about 150 Regulators broke up the court. Shut by the court-law quarrel after 1772, it sat again on March 24, 1778, and Hillsborough kept its hold on the circuit until the act of 1806. StorylineBattle of Alamance, May 1771 (site now in Alamance County)April–May 1771 · 17 events · In the spring of 1771 Governor William Tryon marched militia against the Regulators, raising Orange County companies, buying supplies at Hillsborough and camping across the Eno from the town. After the Presbyterian minister David Caldwell went between the camps, Tryon's army defeated the Regulators at Alamance Creek on May 16, 1771. StorylineThomas Burke of Hillsborough, 1772–17891772–1789 · 15 events · Thomas Burke went from a Hillsborough law practice to the Continental Congress and the governor's office, and Orange County sent him to each stage of the Revolution. Douglass credits him with drafting Orange's 1776 instructions to the Halifax Congress, and he sat on the committee whose report empowered the delegates to join in declaring independence. The Assembly at Hillsborough cleared him in 1778 in his quarrel with Congress. Elected governor in 1781, he was captured in David Fanning's raid, broke his parole to return, and died near Hillsborough in 1783. In 1789 the court let his executor sell four people the estate held in slavery. StorylineGuns, powder and paper at Hillsborough, 1775–17781775–1778 · 6 events · During the Revolution the Hillsborough merchant William Johnston apparently produced gunpowder, lead and rifle flints at his Snow Hill plantation northeast of the town. In 1776 Nathaniel Rochester was named to a commission to set up a gun factory near Hillsborough and led a wagon train to Philadelphia to get iron for it. On April 24, 1776 the Provincial Congress told three commissioners in each district to set up a public works for muskets and bayonets, gather gunsmiths and pay no more than 5 pounds a gun, and for Hillsborough District it named Johnston, Thomas Burke and Ambrose Ramsey, with up to 1,000 pounds to spend. On November 14, 1777 a notice in the North Carolina Gazette announced a newly built paper mill near Hillsborough and asked households to save linen rags for it. John Hogan owned the mill, a mile and a half northeast of town. In 1778 the Continental officer Absalom Tatom took charge of the state's arsenal at Hillsborough as assistant quartermaster. That summer the gun factory shut down: its shop sat beside a creek on Burke's land about two miles northeast of town, and a dry summer left the creek too low to drive its wheel. The drought slowed the paper mill as well, and the Assembly gave Hogan more time to earn the state's premium for paper. StorylineOrange County's militia in the Revolution, 1775–17791775–1779 · 17 events · Orange County had to field a Revolutionary militia in a district the Council of Safety thought full of disaffected persons. The Provincial Congress named the county's officers in 1775, and in February 1776 Orange men held Cross Creek while Nathaniel Rochester took about 500 retreating Loyalists prisoner. In April 1776 the congress split the militia into Northern and Southern regiments under John Butler and James Saunders. Asked for 500 men against the Cherokee, Orange met a quota of 300. By 1778 the county owed the state's troops 73 hats and 146 pairs of shoes, and in 1779 Hillsborough became an army depot as Orange militia fought at Stono Ferry. StorylineThe test of allegiance in Orange County, 1775–17821775–1782 · 9 events · During the Revolution, Orange County's new authorities sorted friends from enemies by an oath of allegiance. In 1775 the Provincial Congress at Hillsborough tried persuasion with former Regulators and people of scruple. By 1777 the county court was jailing a man who refused the oath and ordering merchants who had traded with Britain to swear or leave within sixty days. Magistrates tendered the oath district by district in 1778, Loyalist property was inventoried, and in 1782 the Assembly named a commissioner of confiscated estates for the Hillsborough District. StorylineThird Provincial Congress at Hillsborough, 1775August 20–September 10, 1775 · 27 events · Delegates to the Third Provincial Congress gathered at Hillsborough on August 20, 1775 but lacked a quorum. The Congress organized the next day, its members signed the test of allegiance on August 23, and it sat until September 10. StorylineOrange County’s nineteenth-century academies1779–1865 · 222 events · Meeting at Halifax on February 12, 1779, the General Assembly chartered an academy near Hillsborough named Science Hall, naming William Hooper, Thomas Burke, Nathaniel Rochester, James Hogg and others as trustees, with the same powers as those of Liberty Hall in Mecklenburg County. Jesse Benton, who supported the school, was secretary-treasurer of its trustees in 1784, and some years later he gave it the 50 pounds damages he won from Colonel William Sheppard for an assault. The school opened about 1785 as Hillsborough Academy in the old Anglican church, which an act of the 1784 Hillsborough session had ordered repaired for a school and a free meeting house, but it never thrived and closed in 1790. Pender lists a school kept by Joseph Dunn Hughes near Eno Presbyterian Church in 1785, the earliest of the Hughes family schools that later produced Cedar Grove Academy, and in September 1790 Richard Stanford, who had come to the Hawfields from Maryland in 1789, opened an academy there, with Thomas Hart Benton among his early pupils. At New Hope church William F. Thompson urged the congregation in 1795 to take up schooling, and the church generally kept a school for many years after. Hillsborough Academy opened on a larger plan under Andrew Flinn in October 1801 and grew under William J. Bingham, principal from 1827 until 1844, when he left to open his own school at the Oaks. The Burwell School for girls ran from 1837 to 1857. The Nash and Kollock School opened in 1858 and Hillsborough Military Academy in January 1859. The military academy closed for a time in 1865 at the end of the Civil War. StorylineHillsborough as the southern army’s base after Camden, 17801780 · 15 events · After the American defeat at Camden in August 1780, Hillsborough became the southern army's base, and the town and county strained to feed it. Gates regrouped his army there, the General Assembly created a Board of War that directed the war effort from the town, the courthouse became a storehouse and the church a hospital, and fugitives crowded the town. In late November the board judged that Orange could not feed the army through the winter, and Gates marched it toward Salisbury. The story runs from de Kalb's halt in June to the arrest of four Maryland soldiers in December. StorylineThe Bentons at Hartford: Jesse Benton and the young Thomas Hart Benton, 1780–17991780–1799 · 10 events · When Thomas Hart left Orange in 1780, Hartford and its mills passed to Jesse Benton, and his letters to Hart show what the war and the drought of 1782 cost the place. Benton backed the Science Hall academy and claimed 23,931 acres in the west, but he died in 1790 with his estate heavily in debt, and his will let his executors sell Hartford and its mills. His son Thomas Hart Benton, born in 1782 and later a U.S. senator from Missouri, left Hartford for the university and was expelled from the Philanthropic Society in March 1799 for taking his roommates' money. StorylineThe Hawfields, Cross Roads, Eno and Little River churches, 1780–18211780–1821 · 16 events · Between 1780 and 1821 the Presbyterian churches of western Orange split into two pastoral charges and went through the revival that began at Cross Roads. Hawfields moved west about 1780, Cross Roads was gathered from its neighbors, and about 1790 Hawfields and Cross Roads took one pastor while Eno and Little River took another. Opponents of James McGready burned his pulpit at Stony Creek in 1796. Under William D. Paisley, pastor from 1801, a Cross Roads communion in March 1801 set off what a 1966 article calls the Great Revival in the state, and crowds camped at Hawfields. Paisley also kept a grammar school before leaving in 1818. StorylineGeneral Assembly sessions at Hillsborough, 1778–17841782–1789 · 18 events · An act of the April 1782 session, held at Hillsborough, directed that future General Assemblies meet there until a proper place was fixed for the seat of government. With the war over, the April 1783 session, also at Hillsborough, repealed it. That year a post route opened between Hillsborough and Richmond, part of a push to make the town the permanent seat of government. Its backers pressed the question from session to session, and in 1785 a bill to fix the capital at Hillsborough lost 41 to 37. In November 1786, meeting at Fayetteville, the Assembly ordered the state treasurer and comptroller to take their offices and records to Hillsborough, to be convenient to most of the state's people; the comptroller was slow, and the order was repeated a year later. The treasurer's office was kept in a confiscated store known as the Blue House, though its records were carted to Tarboro and back in 1787 and 1788. On August 2, 1788 the convention meeting there fixed the seat of government at Isaac Hunter's in Wake County, and on August 4 it adjourned. On November 10, 1789 the House of Commons voted to pay John Armstrong of Orange County three pounds for taking the Treasury's books and papers from Hillsborough to Fayetteville, and five pounds each to nine men of the Orange Company of Horse who guarded the money on the road. StorylineNaming the father: bastardy bonds and support awards in the county court, 1784–18181784–1818 · 34 events · When a single woman in Orange County had a child, the bastardy law aimed to keep the child from becoming a charge on the county: the man she named as father gave a bond and could be ordered to pay support, called the usual allowance of £27 by 1796. From 1784 to 1818 the county court took these bonds, set awards, sent for men who resisted and let juries decide when a man denied it. Some women gave the bond themselves, mothers sued to collect, the court sometimes paid others to keep a child, and some named men married the mother within days. StorylineMoorefields, from Alfred Moore to the National Register1785–1972 · 8 events · Built about 1785 near Hillsborough as the summer home of Alfred Moore, whom President John Adams later appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, Moorefields stayed with Moore's descendants for more than a century. Local tradition held that Thomas Hart Benton and Mrs. Henry Clay were born there, though both were born before the house was built. On Moore's death in 1810 it passed to his son Alfred, a speaker of the House of Commons, and in 1837 to the younger Moore's son-in-law, Francis Nash Waddell. It was advertised for public sale in 1913. Edward T. Draper-Savage, related to the family by marriage, restored it from 1949, and it entered the National Register in 1972. StorylineFree children of color and the apprentice law, 1786–18641786–1864 · 102 events · Free families of color could lose their children to the county court, which bound them out as apprentices until they came of age. Some orders kept children with their families, as when the court ordered Jethro Pettiford, a free boy who had been offered for sale, returned to his mother in 1797. After an act of 1826–27 let courts bind out children of free people of color whose parents were not habitually at work, Mark Chilton counted their share of the court's apprentices rising from 12 to 44 percent. Through the 1840s and 1850s the court called in whole families, binding children as young as fifteen months, and its orders ran into 1864. StorylineBridging the Eno, 1787–18161787–1816 · 13 events · For three decades the county court kept ordering, paying for and chasing repairs on bridges across the Eno at Hillsborough. In 1787 it ordered a bridge at the ford near the town and named men to let the building, and in 1788 the superintendents it named were to hold the builder to seven years of repairs. Payments to John Walker and John Elliott followed. In 1804 the court found a bridge "highly necessary" and levied a tax for it, and in 1808 it ordered suit against the builder, Henry Goodloe, unless he repaired it. In 1814 it ordered a new bridge with another tax, and a bridge at Bennehan's and Cameron's mills was finished in 1816 for 600 dollars. StorylineThe county patrol, 1787–18291787–1829 · 14 events · From 1787 the Orange County court named patrols to watch the movements of enslaved people: patrols for Hillsborough, for the county's districts and, in 1799, for the neighborhood of the University. From at least 1807 the patrols were paid with a tax on each Black poll, and committees of justices drafted rules for them in 1809 and 1813. The court also licensed some enslaved men to carry guns on their owners' land, on the motions of men such as Richard Bennehan and Duncan Cameron, and twice ordered patrollers to give back guns they had taken. In 1829 Chapel Hill's first town ordinance set up a town patrol, and the county was still levying its patrol tax on Black polls. StorylineHillsborough ratification convention, 1788July 21–August 4, 1788 · 31 events · North Carolina's convention on the federal Constitution met at Hillsborough from July 21 to August 4, 1788, with Governor Samuel Johnston presiding. Led by Willie Jones, the majority defeated ratification 184 to 84 on August 1, adopted a declaration of rights and twenty-six amendments to lay before Congress, and fixed the seat of government in Wake County before adjourning. A second convention at Fayetteville ratified in November 1789. StorylineEagle Lodge and the Hillsborough Masonic Hall, 1788–18231788–1823 · 10 events · Eagle Lodge, silent since 1799, was revived at Hillsborough in 1819 and paid for its Masonic Hall with a lottery. Under a new number, 71, the lodge voted money toward a male academy in 1820, and from 1821 it ran a lottery, held over eleven years, to pay for a hall. In July 1823 commissioners advertised for proposals to build a brick hall, and the cornerstone was laid on November 23, 1823 at what is now 142 West King Street. The Greek Revival hall was designed by the state architect William Nichols and is believed built by John Berry and Samuel Hancock. The Grand Lodge restored the lodge's original number, 19, in 1932. StorylineFreedom and free people of color in the county court, 1791–18171791–1817 · 13 events · Freedom from slavery in Orange County passed through the county court, which granted it under wills and petitions and judged the claims of free Black people held as slaves or runaways. In May 1791 it let Anne Hooper, widow of William Hooper, free John for his meritorious service. Over the next two decades it decreed freedom under the wills of James Armstrong, William Freeman and Major Absalom Tatom and on Pleasant Henderson's petition, often with new names such as Samuel Freeman and Tatom. It ordered Jethro Pettiford, a free boy offered for sale, returned to his mother in 1797, and discharged Joseph Lantorn and George Simms, jailed as suspected runaways, once they satisfied the justices they were free. StorylineBridging Morgan Creek: McCauley’s and Merritt’s mills, 1793–18181793–1818 · 10 events · Where the road from Hillsborough to Fayetteville crossed Morgan Creek, the county court had to get a bridge sited, built and paid for, and the record shows how a county did public works through its court. The court fixed a site at Matthew McCauley's public mill in 1794 and named commissioners and inspectors, and after a nine to nine vote in 1797 it paid the builder, Tobias Rogers, 94 pounds in 1798. Henry Merritt later built a mill and a bridge, which the court made a toll bridge in 1811, and in 1818 it paid Merritt 195 dollars for a bridge across the creek. StorylineThe county court tries enslaved defendants, 1793–18281793–1828 · 12 events · Enslaved men accused of crimes in Orange County were tried at Hillsborough, first before a called court of justices and freeholders and later before juries in the county and Superior courts. Between 1793 and 1828 some were discharged when no one proved the charge and juries acquitted others of murder, while the court sentenced Bob to whipping, mutilation and branding, Joshua and Jim to hang, and Sam to branding under the benefit of clergy. In 1818 the court bound over Samuel Strudwick for the death of a woman he enslaved and had whipped. StorylineHillsborough Presbyterian Church, 1815–18371815–1837 · 12 events · The first pastor of Hillsborough's Presbyterian church strained relations with his congregation by advocating religious education, Sunday schools and preaching for enslaved people. The brick church on West Tryon Street was built with money from a lottery the state authorized, and in September 1816 Mary W. Burke, eight others and the Rev. John Knox Witherspoon organized the church. In 1823 the session admonished two members for trading in enslaved people without punishing them. Witherspoon ended seventeen years as pastor in 1833. In 1834 six enslaved women were baptized, and in 1835 Robert Burwell began a thirteen-year pastorate; the church bought a manse, and a Sessions House was built for the Sunday school. StorylineThe Hillsborough Recorder begins publication, 18201820–1879 · 29 events · Dennis Heartt began the Hillsborough Recorder in February 1820 and published it for nearly fifty years, a Whig paper before the Civil War whose shop also printed books, among them George Moses Horton's poems in 1845; William W. Holden learned printing there. Heartt gave up the paper in January 1869, and John D. Cameron, its editor from 1872, moved it to Durham in 1879. StorylineAgricultural societies and fairs in Orange County, 1821–18571821–1857 · 13 events · Orange County farmers organized agricultural societies repeatedly between 1821 and 1857. The Cane Creek Agricultural Society, reporting in 1821 that the county's wheat crop had largely failed, asked farmers to report their improvements and trials. A county society formed at Hillsborough in 1822, with Duncan Cameron as president, offered premiums and planned a cattle show, and in 1841 a grand jury proposed another. In 1853 the Orange County Society for the Promotion of Agriculture and the Mechanic Arts was organized under Paul C. Cameron. At its first fair, in 1854, Cameron predicted that the coming railroad would shake farmers out of their old habits. The society bought fair grounds near the depot in 1856 and held fairs through 1857. StorylinePublic libraries in Orange County1822–2026 · 150 events · Orange County’s public libraries grew from the Franklin Library Society of 1822 and the free library counted at Hillsboro in 1910 to the Confederate Memorial Library of 1934, the Hyconeechee Regional Library of 1948, the Negro Public Library’s own building in 1951 and Chapel Hill’s town library in 1958. The county system that followed opened branches at Carrboro and Cedar Grove, a Main Library on Margaret Lane in 2010 and the Drakeford Library Complex in 2025, with the Friends of the library founded in 1981 along the way. StorylineThe Orange County Bible Society, 1822–18461822–1846 · 6 events · In 1828 the Orange County Bible Society resolved to supply every household in the county that had no Bible. Hillsborough people had formed the society on January 7, 1822 as an auxiliary of the American Bible Society. Early in 1828 a committee visited every Hillsborough family and found one household without a Bible, which it supplied within the hour; that summer the managers turned to the whole county and named Dennis Heartt agent to collect gifts. In October 1829 the society reported about a thousand families in the county without a Bible and resolved to supply them through paid agents. In September 1846 citizens organized a new county Bible society at Hillsborough under Giles Mebane. StorylineOrange County and the 1835 constitutional convention, 1822–18351822–1835 · 11 events · Reforming the state constitution threatened Hillsborough's borough seat, the town's own member in the House of Commons, yet Orange pressed for reform. Toasts at Hillsborough in 1822 and 1823 said the constitution needed mending, and in 1823 a county meeting named four delegates, Thomas Ruffin among them, to a reform meeting at Raleigh; voters elected all four. In April 1835 Orange voted 1,648 to 111 for a convention, and Hillsborough itself voted 228 to 23 in favor. Candidates were pressed on the 32nd article, the religious test for office. At Raleigh, James S. Smith moved to abolish borough seats entirely and lost 61 to 67, but Hillsborough lost its member. Orange voters approved the amendments that November. StorylineSt. Matthew’s Episcopal Church, Hillsborough, 1823–18541823–1854 · 25 events · Hillsborough's Episcopalians built St. Matthew's on Thomas Ruffin's land after he argued against claiming the colonial parish's old church lot, then used by the Presbyterians. Organized on August 23, 1824 with William Mercer Green as first rector, the parish had John Berry and Samuel Hancock build its brick Gothic Revival church in 1825 and 1826 to William Nichols's design, and Bishop Ravenscroft consecrated it in 1826. Green married the parish register's first couple of color in 1831 and in 1833 baptized Job, enslaved by George W. B. Burgwyn, who as Job Berry later led Hillsborough's first Black congregation. A gallery for Black worshippers followed in 1835. Ruffin's deed formally conveyed the land in 1854. StorylineTemperance and the liquor question in Orange County, 1825–18591825–1859 · 14 events · Treating voters with liquor, and the liquor trade itself, drew organized opposition in Orange County from 1825 to 1859. In 1825 a court house meeting declared treating injurious to morality, and about 1827 the university trustees won a law against distilling or selling liquor at or near Chapel Hill. Temperance societies spread from 1829; by 1834 the Hawfields and Cross Roads society counted 437 members, and at least nine or ten distilleries had stopped. In 1841 Hillsborough men formed a Washington Temperance Society. In 1854 the county voted against the liquor 'Reform' question, but the 1855 Revised Code barred liquor sales within two miles of Chapel Hill, and in 1859 the village banned traveling liquor sellers. StorylineInternal improvements and the 1833 Hillsborough railroad convention, 1828–18371828–1837 · 16 events · From 1828 Orange County leaders pressed for river navigation and, above all, a central railroad through the state. That year James Mebane brought a flour boat down the Haw from Murphey's Mills, and a meeting with Joseph Caldwell giving the address urged a central railroad. The 1833 convention at Hillsborough chose Thomas Ruffin president, called for a Roanoke and Yadkin Rail Road and adopted Willie P. Mangum's report that the state should pay two-fifths of any work for which private citizens secured three-fifths. By August 1834 every Orange candidate for the Assembly had declared for the central railroad, and in 1837 Cadwallader Jones of Hillsborough was named to the Board of Internal Improvement. StorylineHall's Mill on the Eno, 1835–20171835–2017 · 6 events · A mill on the Eno west of Hillsborough and the brick house across the road passed through several families before a 2017 review found the site did not qualify for the National Register. The Rev. Ira Ellis bought the land in 1835, and his Federal brick house, later called Little Ayr Mount, is usually dated to that purchase. In 1878 Nelson Parrish Hall bought the house and 267 acres, and the mill took the Hall name. After Hall died, his widow Martha bought the farm from his estate and sold it to sheriff R. D. Baine. Only the mill's stone dam, a foundation and the trace of its race survived. StorylineThe Burwell School and the Burwell household1837–1857 · 46 events · Anna Burwell opened a school for girls in Hillsborough in 1837 that ran until the family moved to Charlotte in 1857. In the same household Elizabeth Hobbs, later Elizabeth Keckly, was enslaved from 1835, beaten at Anna Burwell’s urging and subjected to years of sexual coercion before being sent back to Virginia in 1842; she bought her freedom in 1855. StorylineThe Log Cabin campaign in Orange County, 1840–18411840–1841 · 11 events · In 1840 Orange County's Whigs and Democratic Republicans contested both the presidential race and the county's seats in the legislature. In August Orange elected Willie P. Mangum, William A. Graham and two other Whigs, with the Democratic Republican Cadwallader Jones Jr. taking the fourth seat, and the Recorder declared Orange a Whig county. In September Mangum and Democratic Senator Bedford Brown debated for two days at Hillsborough's Masonic Hall, and Chapel Hill held a Whig log cabin festival, though the University faculty asked the candidates not to speak there. In November the county gave Harrison a majority of 191 over Van Buren, and William A. Graham went on to the U.S. Senate. StorylineWhigs, Democrats and Know Nothings in Orange County, 1841–18591841–1859 · 16 events · Orange County's elections from 1841 to 1859 were often close, as Whigs, Democrats and for a time the Know Nothings contested the county. In 1841 Orange narrowly backed the Whig James S. Smith for Congress, though the Democrat Romulus M. Saunders won the district. In 1844 the county elected its whole Whig ticket and gave its own William A. Graham a majority for governor. A tied 1848 state Senate race, broken by the sheriff's casting vote, ended in a new election. Orange backed Graham's 1852 run for vice president, voted for the Know Nothing, or American, candidate for Congress in 1855 and went Democratic in 1856. In December 1859 a Whig and Opposition meeting denounced John Brown's raid. StorylineThe Nash and Bailey law school at Hillsborough, 1842–18591842–1859 · 6 events · Two separate plans for teaching law at Hillsborough became one school in 1850, when Frederick Nash and John L. Bailey joined forces. Nash and Hugh Waddell had announced a school in 1841 to prepare young men for the bar, and in 1845 Bailey moved to Hillsborough from Elizabeth City and announced a law school of his own. Together Nash and Bailey charged $100 for the whole course and held a moot court once a week. Nash, by then chief justice of the state supreme court, died at his Hillsborough home in 1858. In 1859 Bailey moved to Black Mountain, where he and his son proposed a new law school; it ran until the Civil War. StorylineBuilding the Orange County courthouse, 1842–18461842–1846 · 7 events · Orange County's new courthouse at Hillsborough was disputed from the start, because western voters saw it as a move to fix the county seat and block a division of Orange. In February 1844 the county court voted to build instead of repairing the old courthouse and laid a tax of $8,000. The building commissioners let the contract privately to John Berry of Hillsborough without public notice, and western critics attacked the bargain. Masons laid the cornerstone that September, and Berry's Greek Revival temple-form building was standing by May 1845. The old wooden courthouse became a church, and by mid-July 1846 the repaired town clock was striking the hours from the new cupola. StorylineDividing Orange: the fight that made Alamance County, 1842–18511842–1851 · 16 events · From 1842 to 1849 Orange County fought over division and over a tax for a new courthouse that western voters saw as a move to fix the county seat and block division. In 1842 a meeting at the High Falls of Haw River resolved to keep petitioning for a central division, and voters rejected one. After the county court laid an $8,000 courthouse tax in 1844, meetings called the tax unjust, but voters rejected division again, by 292 votes. In 1849 a bill introduced by Giles Mebane created Alamance County west of a line nine miles west of Hillsborough, Orange voters approved it on April 19, and the new county's court first met on June 4. StorylineHillsborough's town ordinances and the patrol against Black residents, 1843–18621843–1862 · 15 events · From 1843 to 1862 Hillsborough's town commissioners passed ordinances restricting the movement, gatherings and residence of Black people, enslaved and free, and kept a patrol to enforce them. By 1843 free people of color settling in town had to give a $100 bond for good behavior or leave; in 1850 the bond rose to $500, with five days instead of thirty to post it. Enslaved people caught without a pass after ten at night were to be jailed and whipped unless the owner paid a fine. The patrol broke up gatherings in the streets. In 1854 the town closed its graveyard for Black people to new burials, and in 1862 it ordered free Black residents to renew their bonds. StorylineHarriet, Cornelia and the Smith household, 1844–18521844–1852 · 5 events · According to UNC Libraries' account, Harriet, whom James Strudwick Smith had bought in 1834 as a maid for his daughter Mary Ruffin Smith, was raped by his son Sidney and gave birth to Cornelia in 1844. Cornelia's granddaughter Pauli Murray told the story in Proud Shoes. In 1845, shielding his property from creditors, Smith passed most of the family's holdings to Mary Ruffin Smith, selling her Harriet and her children Julius and Cornelia, and offered property in the Hillsborough Recorder to cover his debts; NCpedia says he went bankrupt that year. The family moved to Price Creek Plantation, southwest of Chapel Hill, and Harriet and her children moved with them. Smith died on December 7, 1852. StorylineThe Caldwell Institute at Hillsborough, 1845–18511845–1851 · 9 events · Hillsborough won Orange Presbytery's Caldwell Institute in 1845 and kept it only five years. The presbytery chose the town over Yanceyville and Oxford, and a town meeting chaired by Dennis Heartt pledged the town's support. The institute opened that July under Alexander Wilson in the Hillsborough Academy building, absorbing the older school, and townspeople paid to repair and enlarge the building. Incorporated in 1847, it saw enrollment peak at 100 in 1848 and fall the next year, and the trustees voted in 1850 to discontinue it. Wilson and Ralph H. Graves then opened a classical school, and Benjamin R. Huske and Graves revived the Hillsborough Academy, which ran until 1858. StorylineElm Grove school district, 1846–19221846–1922 · 5 events · The Elm Grove school district, about five and a half miles south of Hillsborough, built a log schoolhouse with a rock chimney in 1846 and 1847, under a contract said to be for $80, and John Latta taught the first school there. In 1896 the district put up a new schoolhouse near the old one, but in 1903 its voters rejected a special tax for a graded school, 19 to 16. Twelve pupils served in the World War while the district's women sewed, knitted and canvassed for the soldiers, and two former pupils died of influenza at Camp Greenleaf in October 1918. In March 1922 influenza and grippe closed the school for a week. StorylineOrange County and the Mexican War, 1846–18481846–1848 · 8 events · Orange County raised a volunteer company for the war with Mexico, only to see it divided among other companies at the regiment's camp because it was still short of full strength. In 1846, 110 men enrolled at a Hawfields Regiment muster, and the volunteers later elected John Cameron captain. In January 1847 townspeople gave the Orange Volunteers a dinner at the Hillsborough House, and the company, accepted as Company I of the North Carolina Regiment, marched for Wilmington. At Smithville in February it was broken up, leaving Cameron without a command, though Orange men served on in the regiment in Mexico. In August 1848 about five hundred people attended a Chapel Hill dinner for the returning volunteers. StorylineRailroads through Orange, 1849–19091849–1909 · 118 events · Orange County residents put up $100,000 toward the North Carolina Railroad, a line built partly by enslaved workers that reached Hillsborough in April 1855, with through trains early in 1856. The Hillsborough depot shipped flour, tobacco and bacon, a depot on the Orange-Alamance line gave rise to Mebanesville, and state convicts built the University Railroad from University Station, which brought trains to West End in 1882. From 1901 came new bridges over the Eno, a train that killed two Caswell County farmers in 1903 and a fire that destroyed the Hillsborough depot that November. In 1905 a legislative committee killed a bill that would have let the University Railroad be abandoned. StorylineThe Orange Guards, 1855–19281855–1928 · 15 events · The Orange Guards, Hillsborough's volunteer company, went to war in 1861 and outlived it by decades. Formed in 1855 after a visit from Raleigh's Independent Guards, with sixty-two men under Dr. Pride Jones as captain, the company was incorporated by the General Assembly in 1859, which exempted members from jury duty and road work. On April 20, 1861 it left for Fort Macon, and as Company G of the 27th North Carolina it lost men at Sharpsburg and Bristoe Station. Old soldiers revived it in 1875 under Captain Halcott P. Jones, and nearly thirty men signed the roll to reorganize it in 1894. In 1928 the University of North Carolina Press published its Descriptive Book, edited by H. M. Wagstaff. StorylineThe Hillsborough Military Academy, 1858–18611858–1861 · 11 events · In 1858 Charles C. Tew, superintendent of the state military academy at Columbia, South Carolina, announced that he would open a military academy at Hillsborough, and in December he bought a tract on what is now the west end of town. The academy opened in January 1859 in the old Hillsborough Academy buildings, and that August Masons, the Orange Guards and the cadets laid the cornerstone of the barracks. In June 1860 the cadets moved into the barracks, built, the Recorder reported, for 125 cadets at a cost of $30,000. The register counted 107 cadets from eight states by September 1860 and 131 by April 1861. On April 18, 1861 Tew left Hillsborough to command Fort Macon. StorylineThe end of the Civil War in Orange County, 1865April 1865 · 31 events · In April 1865 David L. Swain and William A. Graham pressed for peace from Hillsborough as Johnston's army fell back through the county. Wheeler's cavalry fought Union pursuers at New Hope Creek on April 14, Union troops occupied Chapel Hill on April 17 under orders to protect the university, and Sherman and Johnston met at the Bennitt farm on the Hillsborough road, then in Orange County, where Johnston surrendered on April 26. StorylineThe Freedmen’s Bureau at Hillsborough, 1865–1868August 1865–December 1868 · 100 events · After emancipation the county court went on binding out Black children, apprenticing them to masters, and the Freedmen's Bureau itself apprenticed some, among them Cadmus and Erasmus Webb in October 1865. From May 1866 to the end of 1868 the Bureau kept an office at Hillsborough for the sub-district of Orange, under Lt. Isaac Porter until the fall of 1867 and Lt. Thomas H. Hay from May 1868. It heard freedpeople's complaints over wages, crops and children, approved labor contracts, gave rations to destitute people white and Black, and helped freedpeople open schools. The court kept binding children through 1867, and in 1868 it rescinded bindings, among them Calvin Godfrey's because he was working for wages paid to his mother. StorylineFreedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation1865–1889 · 168 events · After emancipation, Black residents of Orange County built their own churches, schools and societies. Chapel Hill's First Baptist Church formed in September 1865, and in June 1866 Job Berry and Philadelphia Quakers opened Hillsborough's freedmen's school in the old courthouse. Over the next two decades congregations bought land, Black Masons established Mount Olive Lodge No. 86, and supporters of Chapel Hill's Black public school pledged nearly $80 toward a schoolhouse. In 1886 Hillsborough's AME church bought the old courthouse where it had worshipped and kept school for twenty years. A normal school for Black pupils opened in Hillsborough in 1887, and in 1889 the American Missionary Association made the Methodists' 1853 Chapel Hill church a Congregational church for Black worshippers. StorylineRacial-terror lynchings in Orange County1869–1898 · 41 events · Six people are documented as lynched in Orange County: Washington Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, Daniel Morrow, Wright Malone and Cyrus Guy in 1869, and Manly McCauley in 1898. Sworn testimony before Congress in 1871 gives the same count for 1869, four men hanged and one shot (Josiah Turner Jr.), or five Black men killed (constable W. G. Turrentine), though names differ: the Senate committee's list and two Orange witnesses name a man called Wood, hanged east of Hillsborough, and two sources a William Guy, who may be Cyrus Guy. In September 2022 the county commissioners apologized for racial-terror lynchings and approved markers, citing five cases without naming the victims. StorylineKirk-Holden War connections, 1870October 1869–March 1871 · 49 events · Governor Holden named Orange County in his October 1869 warning about Klan violence, Hillsborough men were named in a Klan plot against Senator T. M. Shoffner, and Kirk's militia arrested Josiah Turner Jr. at Hillsborough in August 1870. Orange men Frederick N. Strudwick, William A. Graham and John W. Graham then helped bring, prosecute and decide Holden's impeachment. StorylineThe Grange in Orange County, 1873–19481873–1948 · 6 events · The Patrons of Husbandry, or Grange, took root in Orange County twice. James Means of Concord organized the Eno Grange at Cedar Grove in December 1873, and in October 1874 delegates of seven Granges organized a county council with John K. Hughes as master. A state Grange revival from 1929 to 1931 produced five Orange chapters, among them Schley Grange No. 710. Schley and Fairfield made their halls out of abandoned schoolhouses, and the chapters met every two weeks with women and children as members. A Grange was organized at New Hope in 1946, and in 1948 W. Kerr Scott, the Democratic nominee for governor and a former State Grange master, spoke to the county's Granges. StorylineHillsborough's tobacco market: factories and warehouses, 1877–18911877–1891 · 17 events · Hillsborough built up a tobacco market of warehouses and factories between 1877 and 1891, though the firms behind it dissolved or changed hands again and again. Pogue's warehouse held its opening sale in 1877, and in 1882 Major H. P. Jones received what the Observer called the first cablegram ever sent to Hillsborough, a Liverpool order for his Tar Heel smoking tobacco. In 1886 the Hookers' Central Warehouse gave the town a second warehouse. The Webb & Co. firm dissolved in 1887, A. A. Springs assigned his business in 1888, and Hooker & Crisp dissolved in 1889. E. A. Rosemond bought the Central Warehouse and in 1891 opened his warehouse at prices that pleased the farmers. StorylineBuilding the State University Railroad, 1879–18831879–1883 · 29 events · Chapel Hill's railroad to University Station was graded by state convicts; a guard shot one dead as he ran, and an overseer was charged with cruelly whipping another, a Black convict named Fries, who died. A coroner's jury found other causes, and Battle wrote that the solicitor found no ground to prosecute. In 1879 the legislature had rechartered a stalled iron-mine line as the State University Railroad, and in January 1880 the stockholders adopted Kemp P. Battle's resolution to run it from Chapel Hill to University Station, and the directors elected him president. The first passenger train left Chapel Hill in February 1882, and by July mail ran on the line. StorylineProhibition and the liquor question, 1879–18921879–1892 · 13 events · Between 1879 and 1892 the sale of liquor in Orange County was argued over in the legislature, at the polls, before town and county boards and in court. In 1879 the legislature widened the ban on selling liquor around the university to four miles. Before the 1881 statewide prohibition vote, supporters organized the county under Rev. N. H. Cobb, with every minister, white and Black, a vice president. In 1882 Anderson Hill ran for the House as an Independent Prohibition candidate. Hillsborough's town board refused liquor licenses in 1890 and 1891, but the county commissioners licensed John U. Smith, and the town's suit against him was compromised and dismissed in 1892. StorylineOrange County party politics and Sheriff Hughes, 1880–18881880–1888 · 13 events · In the 1880s Orange County voters kept returning Sheriff John K. Hughes, even in years they voted Democratic for president. Hughes was first elected in 1880, when independents ran against the Democratic ticket. In 1882 the Republican county convention endorsed the Liberal coalition ticket and Hughes's re-election; Zebulon B. Vance spoke nearly three hours against the coalition, but the Republican Isaac R. Strayhorn led the Senate race and the Liberal James A. Cheek won a House seat by seven votes. In 1884 Orange went for Cleveland and still returned Hughes, and in 1886 the Republican-backed Hughes won by more than 1,100 votes. In 1888 the Democrats left the sheriff's race to Hughes, who won as an independent. StorylineThe stock law and the end of open range, 1881–18871881–1887 · 10 events · From 1881 to 1888 Orange County argued over whether to keep the open range, with farmers fencing their crops against roaming livestock, or adopt a stock law, which made owners keep their animals penned. Little River Township voted for the old fence system in 1881, and two Black leaders, Alfred Holmes and Lewis Jenkins, spoke for a no-fence law in 1884. An 1885 act barred cattle from running at large in four townships and let Chapel Hill Township adopt the stock law. Its voters rejected the law 415 to 104 that November, but in 1887, on a petition of 383 freeholders, the commissioners put it in force there from 1888, without an election or a fence tax. StorylineTelephones in Hillsborough and the countryside, 1883–19641883–1964 · 31 events · Hillsborough's first telephone line ran from the railroad depot to Hooker's drug store in 1883. In 1905 the town gave John D. Morris of Roxboro a twenty-year franchise, and his exchange opened in March 1906 in the Murdock house on West King Street with Mamie Murdock, later Mamie Gordon, at the switchboard, where she stayed for 41 years. Morris switched Hillsborough to dial telephones in a new East King Street exchange in September 1947. In the countryside, Schley Grange members strung lines to 51 families in 1948, and the University's telephone service reached Calvander in 1949. Morris opened an exchange at Efland in 1951. The Mebane Telephone Company built 140 miles of rural lines in western Orange in 1955, the year Hillsboro merchants and the county commissioners asked the state to investigate Morris's service. In 1964 Morris built a larger exchange on East King Street. StorylineThe killing of student Jacob Freeze and the trials, 1886–18871886–1887 · 5 events · A University student's quarrel with a Black man, Pat Brewer, ended with a student shot dead and three men in the penitentiary. In October 1886 students besieged Jack Barbee's house in Chapel Hill, where Brewer and others had gathered, and a shot from inside killed Jacob A. Freeze, a first-year student from Rowan County. Five men were indicted, and Governor Alfred M. Scales posted a reward for Brewer. In 1887 a jury of nine white and three Black men convicted Brewer, Jesse Harris and Frank Kirby of manslaughter; Brewer got ten years and the others five. Their attempt to break jail failed, the state Supreme Court upheld the sentences, and in December 1887 they were taken to the penitentiary. StorylineThe Farmers' Alliance in Orange County, 1887–18951887–1895 · 16 events · Orange County farmers began organizing in 1887 and within a year had joined the Farmers' Alliance. Bingham Township farmers formed a club at Oaks that June, and in September an Orange County Club organized under Alex. McIver, though small attendance soon led it to put off a farmers' institute. After the Alliance's state organizer spoke at Hillsborough in March 1888, chapters formed quickly, and on May 18 delegates created the County Alliance under Sheriff John Knox Hughes. It opened an exchange in Hillsborough in 1890 and in 1891 endorsed the sub-treasury plan and all the Alliance demands. In 1893 a county committee called a bill to repeal the State Alliance charter a scheme to destroy the order. StorylineHillsborough’s downtown fires of 1888 and the rebuilding1888–1889 · 8 events · Two fires in 1888 destroyed buildings near the Hillsborough court house, and the owners rebuilt within months. On March 16 a fire that started on the roof of Robert Faucette's shoe shop burned a row of eight old wooden buildings; townspeople, white and Black, held it to the row. By late June new buildings stood on the burned corner and on Tryon Street. On November 27 fire burned Postmaster Harry L. Parish's brick building, which held the post office and the Recorder's printing office, and the Recorder lost its press and subscription books. Parish moved back into a new brick store on March 11, 1889, built by the Black builders who then formed Nichols, Benton & Webb. StorylineThe revenue officers' killing of Henry McMannen, 18901890 · 6 events · On February 25, 1890 federal revenue officers searching for illicit stills shot Henry McMannen, a Black man, dead at his house in Little River Township. The officers said he had fired a shotgun at agent S. Kirkpatrick; others in the county said he was killed without cause, and the Rev. Sam P. Terry swore out murder warrants. Judge Armfield let the officers go after the sheriff gave them up to the U.S. marshal, and the Orange grand jury indicted five of them for murder. Federal Judge Dick freed all five by late April; the Observer wrote that the people would not be satisfied. In August the state dropped its charges against three of them. StorylineBlack Republicans and the county party, 1890–18971890–1897 · 8 events · Black Republicans in Orange County condemned the county's white Republicans for keeping every office and appointment, and in the 1890s they ran candidates of their own. In August 1890 a mass meeting called to order by Lisbon P. Berry nominated him for the state Senate, and a later meeting backed London A. Whitted for the House. The county convention endorsed its own slate, and one man named on it called it the "white Republican" convention. In 1892 Black men who said the party's "ring" had not treated them fairly nominated John M. Whitted, and in 1894 Swain Kirkland announced for the House. In 1897 Hillsborough elected Samuel L. Whitted, by the paper's account the first Black town commissioner. StorylineJulian S. Carr's Occoneechee Farm, 1891–19231891–1923 · 15 events · By 1896 Julian S. Carr's Occoneechee Farm held nearly all of the registered cattle and hogs that put Orange first in the state's register of blooded stock. The Durham industrialist bought Poplar Hill, the house James Hogg had built about 1794 on the Eno, in 1891 and renamed it. He gave the Norwood Mineral Spring a marble basin and spring house and built a large stock barn, a gate wall and a model sheep fold. The State Dairymen's Association met there in 1896, and a Farmers' Institute in 1906 drew several hundred people. Wind, lightning and a 1918 storm destroyed barns, and Carr rebuilt. On November 22, 1923 the farm was sold at auction in small farms. StorylineHillsborough’s public school and its first schoolhouses, 1891–19111891–1911 · 10 events · By Pender's account Hillsboro had never owned a school building before 1901, though its public school had opened in the Academy building in 1891. In 1900 the town would offer only a ten-year lease on the old Hillsboro Female Academy lot, which the county board said the law did not allow, and in 1901 the school committee bought a house from E. S. Cooley for $500. Townspeople subscribed for a new schoolhouse in 1902, and in 1903 the Black contractor James Nichols began building it for the town's white children. Voters defeated a special school tax in 1908, but in 1911 the high school opened with 136 pupils, by the Observer's account its largest attendance. StorylineThe People's Party and fusion in Orange County, 1892–18981892–1898 · 13 events · The People's Party, whose platform a large Hillsborough gathering adopted in March 1892, joined with the Republicans to sweep Orange County in 1894 and with the Democrats to win it in 1896. In 1892 the Democratic county convention barred two delegates for standing on the St. Louis platform, and the Populists voted to put up a full county ticket. In November 1894 Republicans and Populists won everything but sheriff and register of deeds, which the Democrats kept by 58 and seven votes. In 1896 Orange Democrats and Populists fused on a county ticket that won in full, with the Populist Albert H. Holmes going to the House. In 1898 Orange Populists endorsed a union of the silver forces. StorylineHillsborough's roller mill, 1893–19641893–1964 · 7 events · When a contractor razed Walker Milling Co.'s three-story landmark on Court Square in 1964 to clear the lot for parking, historical groups asked the commissioners to save it, but by a split vote they agreed only to buy its old handmade bricks for resale. The story began in 1893, when Jackson Crabtree's new Hillsboro Roller Mills started turning out flour. In 1900 the Hillsboro Milling and Manufacturing Company organized under Dr. C. D. Jones, and Crabtree later sold it the old river mill. By 1917 Houston J. Walker and his brother had bought the roller mill. In 1963 Charles M. Walker Jr. said he would close the business, and the commissioners bought the mill and its lot for $25,000. StorylineThe News, Chapel Hill's weekly that became the News of Orange County, 1893–19441893–1944 · 6 events · A Chapel Hill weekly founded in 1893 became Hillsborough's countywide paper. Begun as The Chapel Hill News and later renamed The News, it had a larger office and press in Chapel Hill by 1917, and in 1935 the Chapel Hill Weekly reported that it had moved to Hillsboro. In January 1944 W. B. Thompson and his wife sold its name, mailing right and good will to J. Roy Parker, an Ahoskie publisher on the university faculty. Parker renamed it The News of Orange County, remade it as a countywide weekly with journalism students as reporters. In November 1944, after ten months of printing about 150 miles away, it came off its own press in Hillsboro. StorylineThe Farmers' Alliance headquarters at Hillsborough, 1895–19201895–1920 · 21 events · The Farmers' State Alliance made the old Hillsborough Military Academy barracks its state headquarters in 1896 and found the property a burden from about 1901. It published its Alliance Weekly there until the paper stopped at a loss, and ran a tannery and shoe factory that stopped, reopened, paid its debt by 1899 and closed in 1900. From the Barracks it denounced the railroad lease, asked for four-month public schools and compulsory attendance, and heard Governor Charles B. Aycock in 1904. In 1905 it offered the buildings and 146 acres to the A. and M. College for an agricultural school. By 1916 it had decided to sell, and in 1920 the property was cut into lots and sold at auction. StorylineEno Cotton Mill and its village1896–1984 · 54 events · Allen J. Ruffin and James Webb Jr. founded the Eno Cotton Mill at Hillsborough in 1896, and it began production in 1897 with a village of cottages for its workers. It added weaving in 1904 and gingham in 1909, rented its houses for 25 cents a week in 1915, reached about 600 workers in 1940, and became part of Cone Mills in 1952; the mill houses were moved in 1956, and the mill closed in 1984. StorylineThe 1898 white supremacy campaign in Orange County1898 · 9 events · Orange County's 1898 election came during the Democrats' white supremacy campaign, and in its last weeks masked men lynched a young Black farmhand west of Chapel Hill. Populists nominated Devereux Turner for the state Senate, and the Democrats ran Samuel M. Gattis for the House. On October 26 Manly McCauley, 18, left Milton Brewer's farm with Brewer's wife; a posse overtook them, and as the officer Jesse King brought McCauley back alone, masked men took him and lynched him. His body was found on November 6. On election eve W. A. Guthrie appealed to white voters at Chapel Hill. King was later tried for letting the mob take his prisoner and was acquitted. StorylineSmallpox and the county's first pest house, 1899–19001899–1900 · 5 events · With no pest house, a building for isolating contagious patients, Orange County had to quarantine each smallpox patient at home when the disease came in 1899 and 1900. In 1899 Hillsborough quarantined itself against an outbreak in Alamance County. In 1900 a University medical student caught smallpox and recovered, and in February Postmaster J. Clyde Cheek of Hillsborough was found to have it; his house was cut off, everyone there was vaccinated, and no other town case followed. Cases then turned up among Black workmen building a telephone line. On Dr. C. D. Jones's advice, the commissioners bought 15 acres that had belonged to William Wheaton, a Black landowner, and ordered a two-room pest house built at once. StorylineThe Anderson Chapter, UDC, and the Confederate graves at Hillsborough, 1899–19121899–1912 · 6 events · Fourteen Hillsborough women organized a chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in October 1899 and spent its first years marking and honoring the county's Confederate dead. Named for Gen. George Burgwyn Anderson, a Hillsborough native who died of a wound received at Sharpsburg, the chapter under Mrs. Robina Webb held Memorial Day in 1901 with flags and flowers on soldiers' graves. It helped feed veterans at an Efland picnic in 1902 and raised money in 1906 to mark graves. By June 1908 it had marked the graves it could identify and published the names. In July 1912 it appealed to the men of Orange for a monument to the county's Confederate soldiers. StorylineThe Occoneechee Mountain quarry, its convicts and its Italian laborers, 1900–19061900–1906 · 6 events · Convicts did much of the work at the Southern Stone Company's quarry on Occoneechee Mountain, begun in the late 1800s, whose gravel surfaced Hillsborough's sidewalks and crossings by 1902. In early 1903 more than a hundred state convicts came from Mitchell County, and another gang from Raleigh, to get out stone for ballasting the North Carolina Railroad. That April a guard shot dead a convict named Stevens, who was serving thirty years for murder, when he broke for liberty. In January 1904 the state convicts were taken back to the penitentiary at Raleigh. In August 1906 nearly thirty Italian workers came to work in the quarry, and quarrying on the mountain went on at least until about 1910. StorylineMacadam for Hillsborough: the township road tax, bonds and paved streets, 1900–19081900–1908 · 10 events · Hillsboro Township taxed itself for roads and became the only Orange township to vote road bonds, and from 1905 Hillsborough's streets were macadamized, surfaced with crushed stone. In 1900 township voters carried a special road tax. In 1905 the township road commissioners set up a rock crusher west of the court house and began a macadam road from Churton and King streets to the depot. In 1907 township voters sought an election on $40,000 in road bonds, and the money built a few miles of macadam road. In 1908 the township road commission organized a chain gang of prisoners, and Street Commissioner T. Norfleet Webb's crew, using convict labor, macadamized Churton Street south to the river bridge for $3,085.47. StorylineProhibition and the blockaders in Orange County, 1901–19301901–1930 · 22 events · Hillsborough's fight over its saloons gave way to a long struggle against illegal stills across Orange County. In 1903 the town elected a board chosen mostly on the prohibition ticket, which refused every saloon license, and the barrooms closed that June. In 1905 the county commissioners refused the licenses a new town board recommended, and the town voted against liquor dispensaries. The county voted against state prohibition in 1908, though the state carried it, and in 1919 Orange's representative voted against ratifying national prohibition. Blockading, the illegal distilling of whiskey, went on: in 1920 Louis Graves wrote in the New Republic that Orange had the largest distilling operations in the state, and officers kept capturing stills through 1930. StorylineShepperd Strudwick and Hillsborough's new enterprises, 1902–19091902–1909 · 13 events · Shepperd Strudwick, who brought his family back to Hillsborough about 1902, stood at the head of one new enterprise after another. Ralph Adams Cram designed his new house at the corner of Churton and Union. In 1904 a new Business Men's Association elected him president, and he became president of the Bellevue Manufacturing Company, a cotton mill in west Hillsborough. In 1905 voters made him a town commissioner on a ticket understood to favor licensing barrooms. In 1907 the new Hillsboro Clay Manufacturing Company chose him president and treasurer for a brick plant, and by 1909 the Observer listed him at the head of the clay company and the Bellevue mill. StorylineLocal school taxes come to Orange County, 1903–19091903–1909 · 10 events · Between 1903 and 1910 Orange County's school districts voted one by one on whether to tax themselves for better schools, and the votes went both ways. Caldwell District approved a local tax for a rural graded school in 1903, while Elm Grove rejected one that October. After a 1904 election the Mebane district followed, and in 1905 the commissioners levied special school taxes in both. In 1907 Superintendent John C. Hocutt said he meant to campaign for local taxes. In 1908 the Hillsboro district defeated a school tax while Fairfield carried one, and in 1909 the legislature created the Chapel Hill Graded School District with a special tax. By 1910 special school taxes were collected in six districts. StorylineThe Bellevue Manufacturing Company, 1904–19191904–1919 · 12 events · Organized in 1904 to build a knitting mill west of Hillsborough, the Bellevue Manufacturing Company soon enlarged its plans and by 1912 was weaving dress ginghams. It was incorporated on October 13, 1904, with Shepperd Strudwick as president. Early in 1905 the stockholders decided to raise the subscribed stock to add a spinning plant, and Charlotte mill designer Richard C. Biberstein planned the machinery. The engine was first fired on July 7, 1905, but a tank failure the next week delayed the start. The 2014 Hillsborough survey dates the mill to 1909, perhaps an enlargement or rebuilding. By 1912 it ran 5,000 spindles and 200 looms, and by 1919 it ran partly on electricity. StorylineHazing at the University and the death of Isaac Rand, 1906–19131906–1913 · 8 events · The death of freshman Isaac William Rand in a sophomore hazing in September 1912 led to criminal trials and a state law against hazing. In 1906 a freshman set upon by three sophomores had shot one of them, and in March 1912 sophomores threw rocks at a freshman room and fired a shot into it. Near midnight on September 13 sophomores took Rand and stood him on a barrel; he fell onto broken glass and died. Four students were arrested for manslaughter, and the faculty dismissed four more and suspended twelve. The 1913 legislature made hazing a crime. That March a jury found three defendants guilty, and their families paid the fees and took them home the same day. StorylineThe county road bonds of 1911–19121911–1912 · 6 events · Orange County's first bonds, $250,000 to build roads, passed narrowly in 1912 and left a debt not cleared until 1953. Support built through 1911, with delegates to a state good roads convention and a talk to farmers by State Geologist Joseph Hyde Pratt, but the commissioners put off a bond election until spring. In February 1912 a Chapel Hill meeting named a citizens' committee to work for the bonds, and on March 19 the county voted 919 to 831 to borrow the money, with a good roads commission to pick the roads. Work waited while Frank Nash made up a case on the county road law for the state Supreme Court. The bonds sold about a year after the vote. StorylineHighways through Orange County, 1911–19241911–1924 · 17 events · Hillsboro fought to be on the Central Highway, and between 1911 and 1924 hard roads were built across Orange County. In 1911 Hillsboro, joined by delegations from Durham and Mebane, pressed its claim, and the trustees chose the route by way of Hillsboro and Mebane. In 1919 the commissioners let the national highway across the county. The 1921 Highway Act, championed by Harriet Morehead Berry of Hillsborough, paid for a state network whose Central Highway ran through the town. The state bridged the Eno at Hillsboro in 1922, and the Durham-Hillsboro highway opened in 1924, after paving had sent traffic through Chapel Hill and onto a private detour whose owner charged drivers. StorylineSouthern Power and electric service, 1911–19191911–1919 · 4 events · By June 1911 Duke's Southern Power Company had carried its line of towers across Orange County, and within a few years it had a generating plant in the county and was bringing electric power to its mills. In 1915 the company built a coal-fired steam plant beside the Eno near University Station as a backup for its hydroelectric stations, and by July 1916, with flooding shutting the river stations, it was sending current as far as Charlotte. That October the company surveyed a line to Carrboro to power the mills and light the town. In West Hillsborough the steam-driven Bellevue mill ran partly on electricity by 1919 and completely by the mid-1920s. StorylineThe 1915 sanitary survey of Orange County1915 · 6 events · At the county's request, U.S. Public Health Service doctors began a house-to-house sanitary survey of Orange County in early May 1915, and in seven weeks they visited 1,650 homes and held public health meetings. Hillsboro required a sanitary privy at every home in town, and women formed the Orange County Sanitation League. Organizers found the Black churches the only real way to reach Black families, and Black congregations took lantern-slide talks on unsafe privies as a fit church concern, while some white churches thought them out of place. In November the county commissioners praised the doctors' work, and the Board of Education urged every school committee to build two sanitary privies. StorylineThe 1915 road law and the county road supervisor, 1915–19171915–1917 · 10 events · In 1915 Senator Frank Nash's act directed the Orange County commissioners to spend the road tax on the roads of the county at large rather than township by township, and to elect a county supervisor of roads. A. W. Clarke became superintendent of roads that March. In 1916 the county placed the Chapel Hill to Durham road and the road from Carrboro to the Alamance line under the federal engineer and authorized the superintendent to buy equipment to work convicts on the roads. By 1917 inspectors counted 37 miles of central highways and many more miles of Class A and Class B roads, and the commissioners were ordering straightening, bridge work and a sand-clay road. StorylineLiberty Loans in Orange County, 1917–19191917–1919 · 9 events · Orange County passed its allotments in the later Liberty Loan drives of 1917 to 1919, and women's committees raised much of the money. Hillsborough banker Paul C. Collins chaired the county men's committee for all four loans. For the second, a women's committee under Mrs. James H. Webb raised $79,800. In the third, with Harriet M. Berry as county chairman, women organized in every township made $59,600 of the county's $99,150 in sales. Influenza called off a Liberty Day meeting in 1918, but Orange passed its fourth-loan allotment, and a committee of Black residents in Hillsborough Township raised $1,350 from 27 Black subscribers. In May 1919 the county passed its Victory Liberty Loan allotment too. StorylineOrange County in the First World War, 1917–19191917–1919 · 117 events · Orange County organized for the war in 1917. A county Red Cross chapter under John W. Graham, with branches and auxiliaries in Chapel Hill, Hillsborough, rural communities and Black churches, knitted for soldiers and shipped relief clothing; women's committees sold Liberty bonds; and the university's students drilled and in 1918 came under the Students' Army Training Corps. The county's war record lists 23 Orange County servicemen who died. StorylineOrange County’s first draft, 19171917 · 8 events · Orange County's part in the first draft of 1917 ran from a festive registration day to the departure of seven picked men in September. On June 5, 1917, 1,503 Orange County men registered, and Chapel Hill led its registrants in a parade. The county's share of the first draft was 141 men. At a benefit for the Damascus school an entertainer billed as Uncle Josh said the government could not force anyone to leave the country to fight. The county exemption board summoned the first 400 men drawn, then picked seven to leave for Camp Jackson, South Carolina. On Labor Day the county gave its drafted men a dinner for white men and a separate dinner for Black men. StorylineBattery C, Orange County’s National Guard artillerymen, 19171917 · 4 events · Men from Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsboro helped fill Battery C, a Durham-based field artillery battery of the North Carolina National Guard, by its July 1917 deadline. Chapel Hill and Carrboro furnished 34 men and Hillsboro 4, and Samuel M. Gattis Jr. of Hillsboro was made one of its lieutenants. On July 23 the Order of Red Men entertained the Chapel Hill and Carrboro men at their hall in Carrboro. Two days later between 30 and 35 young men left for camp at Trinity College in Durham before training in South Carolina. In late August the Chapel Hill Red Cross sent the battery's Orange County men comfort bags, and a committee of the battery wrote to thank the women. StorylineHillsboro’s memorial high school, 1919–19411919–1941 · 5 events · In 1919 the county board offered Hillsboro money for a new school plant and asked that the building honor the men of the county killed in the First World War. After first offering $5,000 if the town raised $2,500, the board settled on $20,000. In March 1921 Hillsboro town and township carried a school bond election for a new fireproof high school. The brick school on West Tryon Street was nearly ready in September 1922, though a shortage of desks held up the opening, and by early 1923 it housed grades one through eleven under principal J. A. Abernethy. In December 1941 the county commissioners burned the retired 1921 bonds on a coal fire. StorylineBig farms sold in small tracts, 1919–19231919–1923 · 3 events · Between 1919 and 1923 three big Orange County farms were broken up and sold at auction in smaller tracts. On July 12, 1919 the 508-acre Williams-Snipes farm near Carrboro sold in tracts laid off by a Greensboro realty company, and Professor H. H. Williams of the University bought most of it. That October the New Hope Valley tobacco farm east of Chapel Hill, owned by Maynard Mangum of Durham, was auctioned as sixteen farms and brought $98,260.70. On November 22, 1923 Julian Carr's Occoneechee Farm near Hillsboro was sold at auction in small farms along the Durham-Greensboro highway, with its personal property; Carr had already sold his Holstein herd to Chapel Hill dairyman C. H. Weaver. StorylineSchool dental clinics in Orange County, 1920–19401920–1940 · 7 events · From 1920 to 1940 Orange County schoolchildren received free or reduced-fee dental care through clinics backed by the State Board of Health, civic clubs and the Red Cross. In January 1920 state school dentist A. M. Schultz treated 75 children free at Chapel Hill High School, then set up a county clinic at Hillsboro. From about 1928 Dr. J. P. Jones ran a clinic for Chapel Hill school children for the Kiwanis Club. By May 1935 a clinic at the Chapel Hill school for Black children had treated 340 children, with Black residents raising $100 of its cost. From 1936 Dr. I. A. Daves of the State Board of Health toured the county's Black schools, reaching every one by 1940. StorylineThe Central Highway route fight, 1921–19221921–1922 · 8 events · The route of the Central Highway, the trunk road of the state network paid for by the 1921 Highway Act that Harriet Morehead Berry of Hillsborough championed, set off a fight in Orange County. In August 1921 the county commissioners weighed eastern and western 'Frog Pond' routes, and eastern Chapel Hill township residents demanded County Attorney A. H. Graham's discharge. In November a Hillsborough mass meeting resolved to fight the State Highway Commission's plan to carry the highway north of the courthouse. A Hillsborough group protested in Raleigh on March 1, 1922, Commissioner John Sprunt Hill was burned in effigy the next day, and the town board vowed to keep fighting in the state courts. StorylineHillsboro's improvements, 1922–19231922–1923 · 5 events · In 1922 and 1923 Hillsboro gained a new bridge, a new school and paved streets. On February 8, 1922 the State Highway Commission let a reinforced concrete bridge over the Eno to contractor George W. Kane for $30,651.20; it was the main way into town from the south until 1964. That September the town's new $100,000 brick school on West Tryon Street was nearly ready, and by early 1923 it housed grades one through eleven of the consolidated Hillsboro schools. Paving the streets with bond money cost Main Street some of its old elms and maples, to the regret of some citizens, and in April the Carolina Playmakers performed in the school's new auditorium. StorylineWalker's Funeral Home, 1922–19631922–1963 · 4 events · A Hillsborough family business opened in 1922 by Houston J. Walker and his son Allen H. Walker Sr. grew over four decades into a funeral firm with branches in Chapel Hill and Mebane. The Walkers began with a Model T Ford and a Reo hearse. In 1936 the firm bought and remodeled a building at 120 West Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, and in January 1937 the Weekly reported the branch finished and open, with I. M. Walker as manager and day-and-night ambulance service. A Mebane branch followed in 1945. On its 41st anniversary in 1963 the firm dedicated the chapel in its brick building on North Churton Street in Hillsborough, honoring Houston J. Walker and his late wife. StorylineCounty school finance and the special tax districts, 1923–19241923–1924 · 5 events · In 1923 Orange County began its first round of school consolidation and, for the first time by Lefler and Wager's account, funded its school deficits with bonds. Robert Hume Claytor folded one- and two-teacher schools into larger ones and sought local tax elections. In August the commissioners voted six percent bonds to pay debts the Board of Education had run up to keep a six-month term, and called school tax elections in the Carrboro district and part of Cedar Grove Township. In April 1924 the county board moved building money to Efland, which had a local tax, an eight-month term and a paved road for school trucks, and put it first in the building order. StorylineBreeding and testing the county's dairy cattle and poultry, 1923–19271923–1927 · 10 events · In 1923 the Bank of Chapel Hill backed the Chapel Hill high school's purebred Jersey program, and that fall Jersey owners in the southern half of the county formed a breeders' club. Federal inspectors found no tuberculosis in the town's dairy herds that summer, a result the Weekly credited to the town's testing rule. In 1924 the first county poultry show formed a poultry breeders' association, and in 1925 the Lloyds' large incubator at Sunnyside began hatching farmers' eggs. That year the county joined the federal and state campaign to rid its cattle of tuberculosis and Chapel Hill began grading its dairies under the state milk ordinance, and in 1927 a federal inspector tested more than 400 cows in the town's dairies. StorylineOrange County’s 1925 jail, 1923–19961923–1996 · 10 events · In July 1923 six prisoners walked out of the old Hillsboro jail through cell doors found unlocked. In August 1924 the grand jury asked that Orange County's jail be made secure or replaced. By September 1925 work had begun on a new jail just east of the courthouse: a brick Colonial building with the jailer's quarters in front and cells behind, keeping white and Black prisoners, men and women, and juveniles apart. Its cost of about $65,000 was met by bonds, and the Weekly took their sale price as proof of the county's good credit. Built in 1926, the jail also served as a base for convicts on road work. Five years later the state took over most sentenced prisoners, and the jail was often nearly empty. A fuel truck exploded at the jail in 1974. After a 1981 state inspection found it short of safety standards, the county built an addition in 1981 and 1982 so it could hold women and juveniles, and in 1996 the jail was greatly enlarged. StorylineSelling the county’s farm produce, 1923–19261923–1926 · 9 events · Cream routes run by the Chapel Hill school's agriculture department grew from about 20 pounds of sour cream a week in 1922 to more than 500 in the spring of 1924, all of it sold to the Burlington creamery, and in March 1924 the agriculture teacher R. P. Harris shipped pure-bred eggs out of the county, the first such sale, the Weekly said. That fall the county commissioners paid a driver and the school board lent a revolving fund for a farmers' marketing truck, which sold $2,402 of poultry, eggs, butter and other produce in October. In 1926 the county's sweet cream and poultry producers reported a net profit of $5,151 for six months, and farms around Chapel Hill were supplying much of the cream for Durham's ice cream companies. StorylineThe county home for the aged and infirm, 1924–19411924–1941 · 8 events · Grand juries urged Orange County to replace its county home for the aged and infirm, far from the county seat, and the home closed in 1941 once most of its residents qualified for old age assistance. In 1924 a grand jury asked for a modern home on the highway nearer Hillsboro, and in August 1928 another condemned the buildings as unfit for human habitation. That October George Lawrence described them in the Chapel Hill Weekly: two narrow brick buildings north of Efland, heated by fireplaces and lit by kerosene, with no plumbing. At the closing the last residents were boarded with relatives and friends at county expense, and on October 4, 1941 the county auctioned the home and its farm. StorylineBuses between Chapel Hill, Durham and Hillsboro, 1924–19251924–1925 · 6 events · Within a year of the death of C. S. 'Kern' Pendergraft, whom the News called the pioneer bus man of Chapel Hill, the town's buses to Durham passed to a single franchised company. Pendergraft, who died on November 22, 1924, had run a line from Chapel Hill to Durham for 13 years, since 1911 by his advertisements. By June 1925 the Pendergraft Bus Line was running Studebaker cars between Chapel Hill and Hillsboro. By August 7 the Safety Coach Line had bought out the Pendergrafts and the other operators, becoming the only company running between Chapel Hill and Durham. It ran a car every hour under a three-year state franchise and no longer called at homes for passengers. StorylineThe Orange County Civic Association, 19281928 · 3 events · On February 10, 1928 citizens from around Orange County formed the Orange County Civic Association, a nonpartisan group to gather and publish facts about county government, with E. C. Branson as chairman and Paul W. Wager as secretary. In March the association looked into the cost of school buses, hearing that the county had paid $37,828 for buses since 1922; members split between cutting bus service and improving the roads that wrecked the buses. In April it took up the roads themselves, agreeing that they were in poor shape and that the year's $42,000 for maintenance was spread too thin over about 800 miles. Commissioners proposed classing the roads by traffic. StorylineAmateur theatre outside the Playmakers, 1929–19331929–1933 · 4 events · Alongside the Carolina Playmakers, faculty families, Hillsboro residents and Chapel Hill children formed their own theatre groups between 1929 and 1933. About 1929 drama professor Preston Farrar built a house on Laurel Hill Road with indoor and outdoor stages, and in November 1931 a community dramatic club, mostly faculty members and their wives, formed there, planning to read a modern play each month. In January 1932 a play-producing group for Hillsboro was launched in Clem Strudwick's studio, with Frederick H. Koch and Irene Fussler advising. That April Harry E. Davis, the Playmakers' technical director, staged his own Cinderella with about 35 children, and the cast organized as the Junior Playmakers, who gave plays for child audiences into 1933. StorylineSoil conservation in Orange County, 1929–19391929–1939 · 4 events · In July 1935 the federal Soil Erosion Service estimated that erosion had cost Orange County the value of 26,300 acres. Work against it had begun in January 1929, when the new farm agent, Don S. Matheson, held a terracing school for 25 farmers (terraces are low ridges run level across a slope to slow runoff). The county commissioners then bought a Diesel-powered terracing outfit and rented it to farmers, and by the end of October it had terraced 836 acres on 54 farms. In February 1939 county voters approved joining the Neuse River Soil Conservation District, and federal farm planning began that year. By June 1953 plans covered 1,265 farms and about 142,000 acres. StorylineRelief in Orange County as the Depression deepens, 1929–19331929–1933 · 47 events · When the Depression began, Orange County had no health department, no public health nurse and no hospital of its own, and welfare superintendent George H. Lawrence's list of families in dire need grew from 30 to about 60 by December 1929. The commissioners matched private gifts for an emergency health fund, and the Kiwanis Club, the King's Daughters and the Daily Tar Heel took up relief. In 1930 the county said its funds could not meet emergency relief, and Chapel Hill set up an unemployment committee under Howard W. Odum. In September 1932 the commissioners, short of money, cut off county relief to every family with an able-bodied man, and federal relief allotments began that October. StorylineAdult literacy classes in Orange County, 1931–19391931–1939 · 5 events · In 1939 the county's adult education council counted 530 white and 1,106 Black adults in Orange who could not read and write, and night classes had been working to reach them since 1931. They grew from a two-week course in Chapel Hill in July 1931, taught by Eva Edgerton of the High Point night schools, whose students started the Carrboro Night School for Adults. In the year to December 1939 the council held classes for 637 adult students in Carrboro, the McFarland community and around Hillsborough. By November 1939 Black adults met weekly at Rock Hill Baptist Church, taught by volunteers from the Orange County Training School, though the congregation had no money to heat the building. StorylineRural electrification and Piedmont Electric, 1933–19641933–1964 · 40 events · Rural power in Orange County began in 1933 with a three-mile federally funded line from Chapel Hill to Calvander, carried on to Orange Grove with farmers' donations. The Piedmont Electric Membership Corporation, a cooperative formed under the Rural Electrification Administration, was incorporated in 1938 and energized its first lines from a Hillsborough substation in 1939. It took bids for 150 miles of new lines in 1945, had 1,271 members in 1947, when its manager reckoned that 65 percent of Orange farms had electricity, and built its Hillsborough headquarters in 1949 with an REA loan; by 1953 it ran about 1,100 miles of line. At its silver anniversary meeting in June 1964 Piedmont Electric reported 6,300 members in six counties, against 356 in three counties in 1939. StorylineBeer, repeal and the 1933 liquor vote1933 · 5 events · In 1933 Chapel Hill and Orange County split over alcohol. Restaurants in Chapel Hill, where a law had barred alcohol within four miles of the University since the early 1800s, began selling legal beer on May 1, and the county issued 18 retail beer licenses, 10 of them in Chapel Hill. That fall advocates of repealing the 18th Amendment nominated Collier Cobb Jr. for Orange's one seat in the state convention, and the dry forces named J. J. Ward. On November 7 Orange voted 1,169 to 807 against a convention. Chapel Hill was the only precinct for repeal, while Carrboro voted heavily against. The state went dry by a wide margin, so the convention was never held. StorylineThe New Deal in Orange County, 1933–19361933–1936 · 25 events · Families asking relief in Orange County peaked at 900 in March 1933; from that summer federal programs reached the county, which had to share their cost. George H. Lawrence ran Civil Works projects that by December 1 employed more than 200 men, and 851 Orange farmers were under federal AAA contracts. Cuts in relief money halted work projects in 1934 and 1935, and Orange was merged into a five-county relief district run from Durham. The Works Progress Administration then gave jobs to all but 24 of the families on the old relief list. By December 1936 Lawrence said any able-bodied man who tried could get work, and the need that remained was among widows, orphans, the old and the sick. StorylineThe Civil Works Administration in Orange County, 1933–19341933–1934 · 12 events · In November 1933 the county relief director, George H. Lawrence, took charge of the new Civil Works Administration in Orange County, and by December 1 more than 200 men were at work on University and other projects. Crews rebuilt Hillsborough's courthouse square with stone from the old jail, began the Confederate Memorial Library, worked on Chapel Hill's streets and sidewalks, straightened Bolin's Creek and painted county schools. In February 1934 orders from Raleigh cut the county's force from 766 to 375 in nine days, dropping county road and school projects. On March 31 the Civil Works Administration went out of existence, leaving Lawrence only a few relief men to keep Chapel Hill's streets and the University's rebuilt tennis courts going. StorylineOrange County’s PWA school building program, 1935–19361935–1936 · 29 events · In 1935 Orange County sought Public Works Administration money for school buildings, with the government to grant 45 per cent, and the size of the county's own share decided how much got built. A $471,000 application was approved, but the commissioners limited the county's share to $150,000, cutting the program to $272,000. When bids ran above estimates they raised the share to $190,000 and cut the new Hillsboro school for Black children and the Training School addition. The school board kept the Training School on its site despite a petition from some of Chapel Hill's Black residents. By May 1936 ten projects were under way, and the new Chapel Hill high school opened in October 1936. StorylineHome demonstration and 4-H clubs in Orange County, 1935–19391935–1939 · 7 events · Home demonstration work, the teaching of homemaking to farm women and girls by a county agent, began in Orange in September 1935, when no county school but Hillsboro's taught home economics. Grace Holcombe, hired jointly by Orange and Chatham counties, led it. That month women of New Hope and Blackwood Station organized what the Weekly called the county's first club, and Fairfield women the second. Holcombe organized girls' 4-H clubs that fall, and by May 1936 there were seven clubs with 106 members and ten girls' 4-H clubs with 231. The boys' 4-H clubs were reorganized in 1938, Woodward Byars succeeded Holcombe by 1939, and by 1941 the county had 17 home demonstration clubs. StorylineOrange County’s elections of 1936, 1938 and 19401936–1940 · 10 events · In the 1936 Democratic primary for governor Orange County stood by its native son, A. H. (Sandy) Graham, giving him 2,754 votes to 817 for Ralph McDonald and 230 for Clyde Hoey. In the July runoff the county went for Hoey, and B. J. Howard of Chapel Hill won the runoff for the state House. In 1938 Carl T. Durham became the Democratic nominee for Congress, the county executive committee voted 7 to 6 for Collier Cobb Jr. to take Durham's place on the commissioners ticket, and every Democrat on the county ticket won by a wide margin. In 1940 three Chapel Hill candidates entered the Democratic primary for the House, and the election board chose to re-list voters. StorylineSocial Security comes to Orange County, 1937–19381937–1938 · 12 events · The new state social security law brought Orange County its first old-age assistance checks in 1937, and a higher county tax rate to pay for them. The law required a full-time welfare superintendent in every county, and W. T. Mattox succeeded George H. Lawrence, who would not leave the University faculty. The new Board of Public Welfare, with C. A. McDade as a Black member, announced that old-age assistance would go only to those in need. The county budget added a welfare fund that included federal and state money, and in August the county delivered its first checks, to 29 people, and raised its tax rate 7 cents for the new payments, the Weekly reported. StorylineCurb markets and community canneries, 1937–19611937–1961 · 17 events · Orange County farm women opened a curb market in Carrboro in September 1937 with the county home demonstration agent and moved it to Chapel Hill the next January. Government-sponsored community canneries, where families came to can meats and vegetables, opened at White Cross in 1943 and at the Hillsborough school in 1944. The women's market's sellers took in $30,280 in its seventh year and $40,004 in its eighth, and in May 1945 Black farm families opened the Orange County Negro Curb Market on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. Another cannery was being finished at Aycock School in 1947. The Chapel Hill women's market, in the old church building on North Columbia Street by 1954, marked its twentieth anniversary in October 1957. In August 1961 the market's 16 sellers from the county home demonstration clubs moved into a new block building beside Brady McLennan's Durham Road restaurant. StorylineABC stores and liquor by the drink in Orange County, 1938–19781938–1978 · 35 events · After Orange County voters turned down ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) liquor stores in 1938, efforts to bring the question back failed for years; in 1955 the commissioners refused the Chapel Hill PTA's request for a countywide vote. In September 1958, on petitions with 1,049 names, the board set the county's first liquor vote since 1938. Despite a dry campaign through the churches, the county voted for the stores on February 3, 1959, carried by the Chapel Hill precincts and by Hillsboro. Stores opened in 1959 and 1961, and in 1964 the ABC board voted for a second Chapel Hill-area store over opposition from university officials, ministers and the Carrboro town board. The state board turned down the West Rosemary Street site chosen for it in January 1965. Orange County voted for liquor by the drink in a 1973 statewide referendum that failed, and when a 1978 state law allowed a local vote, the county approved mixed drinks; Chapel Hill restaurants began serving them that November. StorylineOrange County’s home front in the Second World War1940–1946 · 151 events · From 1940 to 1945 Orange County was drawn into the Second World War. Red Cross women sewed garments for Britain and later made surgical dressings, a record 2,507 of them in Hillsborough on D-Day. The draft board sent men into the Army from 1940, and by late October 1945 it counted 3,110 drafted. Farm families, schools and civic clubs pledged or sold war bonds and gathered scrap, and the county more than doubled its quota in the Seventh War Loan. Carrboro's munitions plant loaded shells for the Navy, and German prisoners of war worked Orange farms in 1945. The county marked V-E Day quietly, while Chapel Hill celebrated the end of the war with Japan on Franklin Street. StorylineSelective service in Orange County, 1940–19461940–1946 · 17 events · Orange County's draft board, named by Governor Clyde Hoey in October 1940, had drafted 3,110 men by the fall of 1945. On October 16, 1940 more than 3,800 men registered across the county, 368 of them at Chapel Hill's Black Elks Lodge. Nine volunteers more than filled the county's 1940 call, and in December three of them went to Fort Bragg, the men the Weekly called the county's first soldiers in the new draft. In April 1944, after new rules ended many farm deferments, the board sent 302 men for preinduction examinations, its largest group yet. In January 1946 Governor R. Gregg Cherry honored Garland O. Reitzel, A. C. Pickard and S. W. Hughes for their service. StorylineRed Cross war fund drives in Orange County, 1941–19451941–1945 · 6 events · Orange County's Red Cross war fund drives started slowly after Pearl Harbor and ended above their goals. In December 1941 Chapel Hill chapter leaders pledged to raise the community's $3,000 share of the national war fund, but gifts came slowly, and in March the paper warned the town might fall short. The separate Orange County chapter met its quota early. In Hillsborough, John B. Midgett led drives that passed their quotas in 1943 and 1944, his canvass reaching the Black residential and rural sections and the mills. In 1945 both chapters passed their quotas, Chapel Hill's reaching $15,413.59 against a $13,300 goal, with gifts from the Navy Pre-Flight School and from the Carrboro munitions plant and its workers. StorylineRationing and price control in Chapel Hill and Hillsborough, 1942–19451942–1945 · 9 events · From 1942 to 1945 local boards and volunteers ran wartime rationing and price control in Chapel Hill and Hillsborough. Early in 1942 the Chapel Hill board could allot only a handful of tires, and a run on sugar led grocers to limit each customer. The board's Community Service Committee, chaired by Guion Griffis Johnson, ran a program the Office of Price Administration called a model for the Southeast, and in October 1943 some 1,225 volunteers issued 9,947 copies of War Ration Book No. 4. The OPA penalized a market for selling above ceiling prices, thieves robbed the Hillsboro ration board office of coupons in 1945, and the Hillsborough board closed its office after November 30, 1945. StorylineVeterans’ organizations in Orange County, 1943–19581943–1958 · 29 events · Between 1943 and 1958 Orange County's veterans organized posts in each town, and Black veterans formed their own, in Chapel Hill in 1944 and in Hillsboro in 1947. Chapel Hill's American Legion post drew many protests in 1943 for a traveling carnival with a strip act and gambling games, and editor Louis Graves, a Legion member, criticized the post. Hillsborough veterans organized Post No. 85 in 1944. After the war came a Carrboro Legion post, the county's first two Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, a Marine Corps League post and a county veterans' service office. In 1955 Chapel Hill's Paul Robertson became the Legion's state commander, and in 1958 fire gutted Hillsboro's Legion hut, which reopened in 1959. StorylineBlack community health clubs, 1944–19471944–1947 · 11 events · In August 1944 a health club formed in Chapel Hill's Black community under Mrs. E. T. Sellars, started by a health education trainee of the county health department. That December it reported a survey of 116 families that found unvaccinated children and homes without any means of sewage disposal, and it ran neighborhood clean-up campaigns in the springs of 1945 and 1946. In May 1945 Black parents and teachers in Hillsboro organized a health committee under Roosevelt Warner, whose Health Club went on to restore the old Odd Fellows Hall as a community center. StorylineOrange County’s dairy cooperatives, 1944–19551944–1955 · 9 events · Dairyman H. F. Latta and others formed the Latta Co-operative Dairy in November 1944, began collecting milk from fourteen farmers near Hillsboro that December, and opened their own small milk plant in Hillsborough on June 5, 1945. About fifty dairy farmers of Orange, Durham and Chatham counties bought a Chapel Hill lot for a cooperative plant early in 1945, and the Farmers Cooperative Dairy began building it on West Franklin Street that July and opened it in 1946. On September 1, 1949 the Latta cooperative merged into the Farmers Dairy Cooperative, and by 1955 the old Latta dairy building on East King Street held a shoe repair shop. StorylineThe Hillsboro Health Club and its community center, 1945–19471945–1947 · 6 events · Meeting with county health department leaders in May 1945, Black parents and teachers in Hillsboro organized to improve health conditions, with Roosevelt Warner as chairman. University of Virginia researchers came that July to study the Health Club for a book, and by November it was restoring the old Odd Fellows Hall as a community center, where it gave a banquet for returning Black veterans in March 1946. The county library for Black readers moved into the center that April, and in 1947 Agnes Johnson Whitted taught a kindergarten there. StorylineRestoring the Colonial Inn, 1946–19471946–1949 · 6 events · Col. Paul Henderson bought the worn Colonial Inn at auction in April 1946 for $11,800, and that May more than 100 Hillsboro citizens and firms petitioned the Federal Housing Administration for the permits and materials to restore it. Work began in July, and the inn reopened on May 1, 1947 as Hillsboro's first hotel in several years, managed by Martin Henderson. Henderson's daughter Josephine Humphries painted murals of four town landmarks in its private dining room in 1948, and in 1949 the commissioners cut the inn's tax value after Martin Henderson reported that it had lost $12,000 the year before. StorylineThe county superintendency passes from Claytor to Proffit, 1946–19471946–1949 · 6 events · In August 1946 Glenn T. Proffit became assistant to R. H. Claytor, Orange County's school superintendent since 1917. On May 5, 1947 the Board of Education elected Proffit superintendent and kept Claytor as his assistant; after teachers petitioned for Claytor's reinstatement, the board met until midnight on May 12 and stood by its choice. Proffit took over that July and served until 1951, and Claytor, superintendent emeritus, died in February 1949. StorylineSchools and a new courthouse: the county bonds, 1947–19541947–1954 · 65 events · In 1947 Orange County's commissioners and school board put a $1,045,000 bond issue for school buildings, a county office building and a remodeled courthouse before the voters, who turned down all three questions on June 10. In October 1948 the two boards named a fifteen-member citizens' committee to study the county's needs. Its February 1949 report, hearings on every school's needs, and grand juries that condemned the courthouse led to a vote on November 22, 1949 that approved $1.25 million in bonds for new and enlarged schools and a new courthouse. Masons laid the new courthouse's cornerstone in October 1953, and it opened on October 4, 1954. StorylineOcconeechee Speedway, Hillsborough1947–1968 · 53 events · Bill France and four partners chartered a company in September 1947 to build a one-mile dirt oval by the old Occoneechee Farm, and it opened in June 1948. The track held a race in NASCAR's first Strictly Stock season in 1949, was renamed Orange Speedway in 1954, and closed after Richard Petty won its last race on September 15, 1968. StorylineHillsboro’s new post office, 1948–19591948–1959 · 13 events · In 1949 Hillsboro was chosen for the Sixth District's new federal post office building, and the post office moved into a new building in July 1958, after a dispute over the site. Tom Bivins, a World War II veteran appointed postmaster in 1948, opened seven offers of sites in 1950 and resigned for his health in 1956. Maude Brown then became acting postmaster, the first Republican appointee in the post since before the Roosevelt years. In 1957 the town board protested Fred Cates Jr.'s plan to build a post office beside the Eno River bridge and lease it to the government, but the Post Office Department accepted his offer. President Eisenhower nominated Brown postmaster in 1958 and 1959. StorylinePaving the rural roads, 1949June–December 1949 · 17 events · On June 4, 1949 Orange County voters approved Governor Kerr Scott's $200 million secondary road bonds, 2,450 to 1,743, though the Hillsboro precinct voted them down. In September a mass meeting called by the Pomona Grange set up a countywide steering committee and township committees to choose the roads to be paved. The Highway Commission let the first two Orange paving contracts in October, and in December highway commissioner James A. Barnwell chose 42.9 miles for the first phase and the county commissioners endorsed ten projects totaling 39.7 miles. StorylineThe Osbunn Theater, Hillsborough’s movie house, 1949–19631949–1963 · 4 events · The Osbunn Theater on West King Street, Hillsboro's only movie house, passed through several operators after its owner's death before closing in 1963, which left the town without a commercial theater, the News noted. In June 1949 owner W. M. Chance built a steel marquee lit by 300 feet of neon tubing across its front. After Chance died the theater closed for several months, reopening in August 1958 under Sam R. Owens, who leased it from the family. Closed again in 1959, it reopened on August 1 under Kay Winecoff and Clarence Rosemond. On November 16, 1963 operator Wayne McDade closed it after the Chance family said the building would be remodeled and leased to a discount store. StorylineHillsborough’s water and the new Eno dam, 1949–19561949–1956 · 21 events · In September 1954 drought left Hillsboro with eight to ten days of water behind the old Eno mill dam, and the town declared an emergency, set penalties for wasting water and ordered a survey for a new dam. It had already enlarged its water system: voters approved $30,000 in bonds in 1950, and new filtration units doubled the plant's capacity in 1951. In May 1955 voters approved $50,000 in water bonds, 293 to 13, the town bought 41 acres, and the last section of the new concrete dam was poured that October. In 1956 the town named the dam for Mayor Ben Johnston and bought land to keep house lots away from its water source. StorylineFire protection for the countryside, 1951–19641951–1964 · 17 events · When Chapel Hill's fire department stopped answering most calls outside town in January 1951, people in the countryside began arranging fire protection of their own. Rural residents around Hillsboro, whose truck already stayed near town, formed the Orange Fire Protective Association, raised money by memberships and had a truck by March 1951, crewed by the town's volunteer firemen. Carrboro offered contracts to property owners around town in 1954. Around Chapel Hill, voters approved a tax-supported fire district 188 to 9 in 1955, and in 1956 Chapel Hill agreed to protect the district in return for its fire tax. In 1964 the county set up an Orange Fire Commission to regulate the departments receiving county aid. StorylineFluoridating Chapel Hill’s and Hillsboro’s water, 1951–19641951–1964 · 13 events · Chapel Hill's aldermen voted in 1951 to add fluorine to the town water, which the University ran, but a lawsuit held fluoridation up until 1964. In Hillsboro, after the State Board of Health cited a survey finding twice as much tooth decay among Hillsboro and Chapel Hill children as in Dunn, which had fluoridated, the water works began adding fluoride in September 1960. In Chapel Hill a University poll in 1960 favored it about three to one, but a resident sued to stop it and the University held off. The aldermen pressed the trustees, the suit was dismissed in 1963, and Chapel Hill's filter plant began adding fluoride on February 28, 1964. StorylineCameron Park School, 1952–19591952–1959 · 17 events · In January 1952 the county boards offered to buy part of Cameron Park, Rebecca Wall's land between St. Matthew's Church and her home, Burnside, for a new Hillsboro elementary school. She turned the offer down, and on September 15, 1952, the deadline the board had set before condemnation, she signed a deed for the land for $18,000. At the Garden Club's request the board named committees to fit the school to the town and protect the site's trees. Architect Archie Royal Davis drew a 16-classroom plan, and the school opened in 1956, taking the lower grades out of the crowded Hillsboro High School building. A second wing with an auditorium and a library went up in 1959. StorylineOrange County’s bicentennial, 1952–19531952–1953 · 7 events · In August 1952 the county commissioners named a committee under L. J. Phipps to plan the county's 200th anniversary, and in September they named 55 people to committees for programs, finance, publicity, exhibits and a pageant. Lefler and Wager's county history came off the press on October 1, 1953. The bicentennial week of October 7 through 13 opened with the laying of the new courthouse's cornerstone and brought parades in Hillsborough and Chapel Hill, Garden Club tours of old homes, and six showings of the pageant The Road to Orange. In January 1954 the commissioners paid about $9,000 in unpaid bicentennial bills. StorylineThe Hillsboro Exchange Club’s community park, 1954–19581954–1958 · 6 events · Hillsboro's Exchange Club built a community park and paid for it partly with yearly minstrel shows, blackface stage comedy built on demeaning caricatures of Black people. In 1954 the town leased the club twelve acres north of the town cemetery, and in 1955 the club approved buying about seven acres a mile south of town on the Chapel Hill road, a site recommended by design students from State College. The 1955 minstrel show raised about $600 for the park, and the 1958 show drew 900 to 1,000 people. Work on a $5,000 miniature golf course began in April 1956, and on May 15 the club dedicated the park to the youth and recreation of the town and county. StorylineBen Johnston's Hillsboro mayoralty and its end, 1955–19611955–1961 · 6 events · Ben G. Johnston, Hillsboro's mayor since 1933, saw the town's new Eno River dam named for him before voters turned him out in 1961. In 1955 he won a twelfth term, and in 1956 the town commissioners named the dam for the mayor who had pushed for a town water system and led the bond drive for it. He won a fourteenth term in 1959 over Fred S. Cates Jr., who had campaigned for a city manager form of government. In 1961 Fred T. Claytor, a commissioner, teacher and coach, defeated him 279 to 159. The new board raised the property tax rate from 75 cents to $1 per $100, and Claytor cited a General Fund under $1,000. StorylineThe Reverie Lingerie plant, strike and lawsuits, 1955–19621955–1962 · 17 events · Hillsboro business and professional men set out to give a New York lingerie firm a permanent plant, and within two years it faced a union strike, the wrecking of the plant by explosion and fire, and years of litigation. Reverie Lingerie opened a pilot sewing plant near Hillsboro in 1955. In April 1957 workers struck for recognition of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union, and the company hired replacements. In September an explosion and fire wrecked the plant; the strike ended in November. In 1958 a labor board examiner found the company had refused to bargain in good faith, and in 1960 a jury convicted four men, among them an ILGWU representative, of burning the plant; all appealed. StorylineThe 1956 school bonds and what they built, 1955–19581955–1958 · 14 events · In 1955 commissioners' chairman R. J. M. Hobbs asked the county and Chapel Hill school boards to plan for a large bond election, and the board called a vote on $2 million in school bonds, divided among the county schools, Carrboro and the Chapel Hill unit. At the February 1956 hearing two Hillsboro men objected, citing the uncertainty left by the Supreme Court's school decision; Remus J. Smith Sr. answered that the classrooms would be needed even if segregation ended. Voters approved the bonds on March 27, 1956. The county board put a new Carrboro school first and that fall adopted a $1.17 million building program, and contracts for work from Carrboro to Efland followed through 1958. StorylineInterstate 85 comes to northern Orange County, 1955–19621955–1962 · 22 events · Rebuilding US 70 to interstate standards through northern Orange County meant a road that would bypass Efland, Hillsboro and University Station, and at a 1957 hearing landowners on the new route and businesses on old Highway 70 protested. In 1956 the Highway Commission had decided to rebuild the road as a limited-access highway, with the new federal road act paying 90 percent, and federal officials approved a route south of Hillsboro. Contracts for the stretch south of Hillsboro were let in November 1957. Near the new Interstate 85 James Freeland built a motel, the General Sherman Restaurant and the county's fourth ABC store, a government liquor store, in 1960 and 1961, and in 1962 the Dixie Motor Inn. StorylineThe fight over Sunday racing, 1956–19581956–1958 · 9 events · When new race tracks in Orange County held races on Sundays, ministers led a fight to stop them that ended in the state Supreme Court. In April 1956 the Rev. W. I. Conway asked the county commissioners to stop the races at a jalopy track near his church, and about 100 people formed the Orange County Anti-Racing Association, but the county attorney said a ban needed special legislation. In 1957 the legislature passed Senator Edwin S. Lanier's bill barring races on Sundays and after 6 p.m. After Orange Speedway, Inc. sued, the state Supreme Court struck the act down on January 10, 1958, and Sunday racing returned with a 100-mile Grand National race won by Buck Baker. StorylineWhite Furniture union drives, 1956–19641956–1964 · 3 events · Workers at the White Furniture Company, described as the oldest furniture maker in North Carolina, rejected a union in 1956 and voted for one in 1964. In an April 1956 National Labor Relations Board election at the Hillsboro and Mebane plants, employees voted 254 to 123 against the United Furniture Workers of America (AFL-CIO) as their bargaining agent. A new drive began in 1964. When the Orange High school committee refused it the school auditorium, ruling that partisan meetings meant to sway the community on a controversial issue should be denied, the Orange County Board of Education upheld the refusal. On October 20, 1964, after a 17-week campaign, employees at the two plants voted 240 to 139 for the union. StorylineThe Pearsall Plan in Orange County, 1956–19611956–1961 · 6 events · In 1956 Chapel Hill's five precincts voted down the Pearsall Plan, apparently the only small community in the state to do so, while Orange County as a whole approved it 3,359 to 1,784. The amendment allowed local votes to close schools and tuition grants for private schools to avoid integration. Former state senator Irving Carlyle attacked it at a University forum, and school board member Clarence D. Jones called the tuition grants unfair, while Representative John W. Umstead backed it, saying it kept the question away from extremists on both sides. In 1961 the Chapel Hill school board recommended a tuition grant for a Carrboro parent's two daughters, which the News called the state's first formal application. StorylineCentral High School’s crowding, fire and rebuilding, 1956–19601956–1960 · 19 events · In the fall of 1956 Central School, Hillsborough's twelve-grade school for Black pupils, had 937 pupils, many of them children who had gone to Durham schools until Durham began charging out-of-county tuition. The county board adopted a plan for a classroom addition and a gymtorium, a combined gymnasium and auditorium, and until it was built put Central classes in an old lodge building on Wake Street, which a delegation of Black parents protested in 1957. On February 14, 1958 fire destroyed Central's main building. Within three weeks students were in the new classroom building, and the board accepted a new main building in June 1959. A vocational building and an elementary wing followed from 1960. StorylineThe Orange County Historical Museum, 1956–19631956–1963 · 8 events · A Hillsboro Garden Club committee founded the Orange County Historical Museum in the upstairs courtroom of the 1845 courthouse. The committee, chaired by Mrs. Clarence D. Jones, began work in November 1956. In April 1957 the county commissioners let the club use the courtroom, which Christopher Crittenden of the State Department of Archives and History had advised keeping intact, and voted $250 for display cases. A Webb descendant gave the bookcase of Governor Thomas Burke's secretary, which the paper called the museum's first contribution. The museum opened in November 1957. The commissioners gave it register of deeds John Laws's desk in 1959, and in 1963 Hillsboro women who had spent months refurbishing the museum reopened it. StorylineThe Belle Vue mill after Belle-Vue Manufacturing, 1957–19621957–1962 · 5 events · After 1957 the Belle Vue mill in West Hillsboro, which employed about 300 people, passed through a series of New York owners and operators, closed, and in 1962 drew a new occupant. In October 1957 the William L. Barrell Company acquired Hesslein and Company, which had owned Belle Vue Manufacturing since 1945. In 1958 a Barrell vice president said the county's valuation of the mill machinery was out of line with what Barrell had paid. On March 24, 1959 Belle-Vue Manufacturing filed articles of dissolution, and in April Barrell leased the operations to a New York firm. In May 1962 Hillsboro Mills, a subsidiary of a Massachusetts textile firm, announced it would occupy the closed plant. StorylineHillsboro’s sewage treatment plant, 1958–19641958–1964 · 7 events · In 1958 engineer Thomas D. Rose found that dye wastes from the Belle Vue mill gave the sewage in the Eno River its main character, and he proposed a treatment plant east of Hillsboro for the town and the Belle Vue and Eno mills. In 1960, under a state order to submit treatment plans, the town met with the mills, but no one committed to a plan. In 1962 Hillsboro voters approved $190,000 in sewer bonds, 293 to 7, and a federal grant was approved. On May 19, 1964 the new $240,000 plant on the Eno just east of town went into operation, able to treat 400,000 gallons a day. StorylineBuilding Orange High School, 1960–19641960–1964 · 13 events · Orange High School was planned in 1960 as one senior high school for all white students in northern Orange, and building it meant consolidating the Hillsboro and Aycock high schools over protests from Aycock. The board bought 100 acres from S. T. Latta that August, and in March 1961 an Aycock petition with 476 names asked to keep an accredited high school there, while voters approved school bonds that included the new school. The board voted the consolidation in March 1963 after about 150 people protested at a hearing. Orange High opened on September 9, 1963 with 460 pupils, and that fall Tonya and Narviar Cathcart entered it after their family's transfer petition was approved, beginning its desegregation. StorylineOrange County’s first county-wide zoning plan, 1960–19671960–1967 · 5 events · A plan to zone Orange County's rural areas, begun in 1960 when Granges and other groups petitioned the commissioners, drew protests at eight community meetings, loudest in Eno Township, where residents gave commissioners chairman Donald Stanford rough treatment. In February 1962 opponents met at Palmer's Grove to hear Durham attorney Blackwell Brogden, whom they had engaged, speak against zoning outside Hillsboro. That March the county Planning Board agreed to review and simplify the whole ordinance, and the Orange County Farm Bureau's directors opposed it 'in its present form', with president Oscar Compton objecting to its sign limits for farm produce and its lot sizes. In 1967 the county adopted a zoning ordinance for Chapel Hill Township. StorylineHillsborough’s preservation bodies: the Historical Society and the Historic Hillsborough Commission, 1962–19641962–1964 · 7 events · In 1962 and 1963 Hillsborough gained two preservation bodies: the Hillsborough Historical Society and a state commission to restore and preserve the old town as a living historical exhibit. Mary Claire Engstrom was instrumental in founding the society, which held its first public meeting in April 1962. By August it had bought the remains of the William Read House, said to date from 1768, planning to restore part of it as its headquarters, and by early 1963 it had 234 members. In March 1963 the state House passed Rep. L. J. Phipps's bill for a commission appointed by Governor Terry Sanford, and that October the Historic Hillsborough Commission met for the first time. StorylineThe I-85 access road into Hillsborough, 1962–19641962–1964 · 5 events · Whether to bring a new road from Interstate 85 into Hillsborough set opponents against merchants in 1962 and 1963. At a 1962 hearing on the $338,000 federal project, artist Edmund Strudwick said he did not want more cars coming up Churton Street, though the News called the opposition thin. In May 1963 the State Highway Department put the road off and an eastern bypass was proposed; the News's Hillsborough columnist credited pressure on the governor organized by Mrs. Alfred Engstrom and the Historical Society board, while merchants protested. Bids were opened that August, and the access road and a new Eno bridge opened in the summer of 1964, taking traffic off the 1922 bridge. StorylineOrange County’s House seat changes hands, 19631963 · 6 events · Orange County lost its member of the General Assembly twice in 1963. John W. Umstead Jr. was ill from the first day of the session and stepped down by mid-March, and the county Democratic Executive Committee unanimously chose Recorder's Court judge L. J. Phipps to succeed him. Phipps took the oath on March 18. On June 22 the state American Legion elected him department commander, and because the Legion barred its commander from elective office he gave up the House seat, leaving Orange without a representative. On September 3 the county executive committee nominated Edwin J. Hamlin, publisher of the News of Orange County, by 28 to 27, and Governor Terry Sanford appointed him on September 10. StorylineThe Walker Milling building on Court Square, 1963–19641963–1964 · 4 events · Hillsborough's historical groups pressed the county to halt the demolition of the Walker Milling building, a three-story landmark on Court Square, but in December 1964 it was razed to clear the lot for parking. Charles M. Walker Jr., who had bought the business his father and uncle ran for decades, closed it in 1963, pointing to changes in the farm economy. That August the county commissioners bought the mill and its lot for $25,000 to protect the county's future land needs around the courthouse. They declined to halt the demolition but, on Chairman Harvey Bennett's tie-breaking vote, agreed to buy the building's estimated 180,000 handmade bricks for resale. StorylineThe Klan in Orange County, 1964–19881964–1988 · 10 events · Between 1964 and 1968 the Ku Klux Klan held rallies with cross burnings east of Chapel Hill and near Hillsborough, called a night rally beside Interstate 85 and gathered off Highway 54 west of Carrboro. In 1965 a House committee named the Sportsman's Lakeside Lodge as the Klan organization in Orange County, and the sheriff reported three recent Klan meetings in the county. That December Congressman Charles Weltner urged an audience of about 1,700 in Memorial Hall to stop supporting the Klan. In 1987 Klan members marched on Franklin Street beside numerous protesters, and in 1988 about 50 marched through Hillsborough and rallied at the courthouse before a crowd of hecklers. StorylineOrange County’s antipoverty program and JOCCA, 1964–19821964–1982 · 9 events · Orange County's antipoverty program began in 1964 with a slow start for Community Action, Inc., a proposed privately financed biracial corporation meant to work on Chapel Hill's racial and economic problems. In April the county commissioners, while saying they favored its aims, put off endorsing it over objections to the makeup of its 18-member board. By mid-May the commissioners and the Chapel Hill aldermen had named members, and in June Carrboro's commissioners voted 3 to 2 to take part. In September the county commissioners unanimously created an Economic Opportunity Act advisory committee to plan a county program and seek federal funds, and in October they named its fifteen members. Joint Orange-Chatham Community Action (JOCCA), created in 1966, set up a rural health service that began in 1970, and Gloria Williams directed JOCCA in the 1980s and 1990s. StorylineDaniel Boone Village, Hillsborough, 1966–19781966–1978 · 8 events · James J. Freeland's Daniel Boone Village grew from an inn and restaurant at the South Churton Street exit of I-85 in 1966 into an amusement park with a railroad, rides, rinks, an amphitheater and a wax museum by the early 1970s. The rides were gone by the end of the decade and a shopping center replaced the park's north end, while Freeland moved old buildings to the village and the Big Barn hosted campus parties. StorylineFiber Industries and New Hope Creek, 19691969 · 4 events · In the summer of 1969 Fiber Industries asked Orange County to rezone 450 acres near New Hope Creek for a $100 million plant. Chapel Hill's aldermen called the site unfortunate, and UNC and Duke scientists warned of pollution, but the county planning board recommended the rezoning. The company withdrew its request in August, and commissioners chairman Carl Smith blamed its opponents, among them Mayor Howard Lee.