Storyline · 1784–1818
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.
Under the bastardy law a single woman could be examined and asked to name her child's father, and the man she named, the reputed father, gave a bond to keep the child from becoming a charge on the county. Some women gave the bond themselves. On February 16, 1784 Mary Albird would not name the father and signed it herself, and in August 1795 Jane Atwood declined to name the father of her daughter Anne and offered Thomas Atwood as her security in £150. In 1788 the court accepted James Taylor as security for William Strudwick's bond for a child, the mother's name left blank, and discharged Richard Stanford from his recognizance on Margaret Crofford's charge.
Support orders set what the father owed. In August 1787 the court ordered John Breeze to pay Thomas Curtis and his wife Mary £18 for her child, and in May 1789, on the motion of her attorney Jesse Benton, it ordered William McCabe to pay Jean Latta £48 over six years. When it ordered Levi Whitted to pay Mary Jackson in February 1796, it called £27, £5 a year for five years and £2 for the birth, the usual allowance. William Nash gave bond for a child of Alsey Murphey in 1795. In 1798 the court ordered Samuel Benton, as reputed father of another of her children, to pay her £27, and in June 1799 Benton deeded her Hillsborough lot 86. In August 1802 it ordered Nash to pay her the whole £27 at once, though most orders of these years spread it over five or more years.
Some men had to be brought in. George Horner Jr., named by Mary Hunt in 1790 and 1792, signed bonds for both children on May 30, 1793, two days after his arrest. Felty Farmer, named by Barbara Holt in August 1801, resisted the constables who came to serve the papers, and the grand jury charged him. In August 1807, on Duncan Cameron's motion, the court sent a capias to Caswell County for Benjamin Ponds, named by Mary King. Short Vaughan, jailed after Nancy Baxter named him in 1810, took the insolvent debtor's oath and was discharged. Juries found Joseph Dickey the father of Mary Elliott's child in 1816, and John Robinson Jr. the father of Polly Bradley's child in 1817 after he denied it.
Mothers also went to law to collect. In February 1801 Nancy Carrigan won execution against Christopher Stubbins for £9 10s in arrears, and a jury awarded Elizabeth Waggoner £37 10s against Nathaniel Harris. Priscilla Woods won two suits against Mark Harris in 1807, and Patsy Crowder attached Joseph Brittain's property and won £27 10s in 1808. The court sometimes sent the money elsewhere: Bolling Jolley's award to Polly Dixon and her husband Timothy Weaver in 1801, Henry Berry's to those who had kept Elizabeth Pinkerton's son and then to Captain Robert Morrow, to whom the court bound the boy in 1808, and John Freeman's to James Mebane as trustee for Sally Liner's child in 1817. In 1806 it bound William McCaddam, seven, to Edward Faucett, the man his mother had named, and in 1810 it ordered the late Willie Mangum's administrators to pay Nancy Dunnagan £54 for two children.
The papers show other outcomes. William Roark married Ann McMullen eleven days after she named him in 1800, and Hugh Cain married Sally Allen a week after his bond in 1809. The court released John Justice in 1798 when Ann Ayscue's child was proved to be of color. Catherine Lytle named the lawyer William Norwood in 1797, and the compilation lists no bond or order after it; in 1806 Norwood moved a support order for Sarah Ray. The Cane Creek women's meeting of Friends disowned Elizabeth Wells in 1799 for having a child while unmarried. On April 5, 1810 four women were summoned on one day to name fathers, and in February 1818 a jury convicted Polly McDade on an indictment, apparently for bastardy, a verdict the court set aside.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 1 with a known location.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Account from 1768 for the cost of guarding one prisoner in the jail, a document from the Regulator troubles in Orange County, when backcountry settlers rose against royal officials they accused of extortionate fees and false records. Two images.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
House bills of 13 December 1796, among them a rejected bill for a district jail in the town of Hillsborough and a bill for separate elections and general musters in Orange County. Others concern inspectors, clearing the Yadkin River, and sheriffs. Thirty images.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
A bill of December 7, 1771 proposing a public jail and a jailer's house at Hillsborough for the Hillsborough District, four images among the bills of the colonial assembly session of November and December 1771 in the State Archives of North Carolina.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Seven items from the Hogg and Norwood families of Hillsborough, dated 1815 to 1841 and preserved as typed transcriptions whose originals have not been located, in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 2258-z. Subjects include William Norwood and Robina Hogg Norwood, Scottish American family life in the town, and opinion abroad on the Napoleonic Wars.
About 125 items from William Lytle, 1755 to 1829, dated 1773 to 1841 with the bulk before 1805, in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 445-z. Topics include the North Carolina militia in the Revolution, land tenure in Tennessee, migration out of the southern states, and Cherokee relations with government in the eighteenth century. Hillsborough history is the Orange County link.
Sydney Nathans's biography of Mary Walker, an enslaved woman from Orange County who escaped to the North in the mid nineteenth century and spent the following decades in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working to free the family she had left behind. Chapter titles trace her flight, her years among Northern friends, a rescue plot, a long silence, and the reunion that gives the book its close. Published 2012 by Harvard University Press, 330 pages with 20 pages of plates, illustrations and maps.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (2012), Civil War Book Review (2012).
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
Hope Summerell Chamberlain's life and letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825 to 1908), published in 1926, which doubles as a picture of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century. It runs 325 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Selected writings of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825 to 1908), the Chapel Hill writer who campaigned for the university's reopening after Reconstruction, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1953. The 753 pages touch on Chapel Hill life, education and the university in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1954).
Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest, raised in Durham. Its six parts follow a Southern childhood, the move to New York, the 1938 application to the University of North Carolina that was refused because Murray was Black (the chapter is titled 'Members of your race are not admitted'), law school and the coining of the phrase Jane Crow, the Cold War years, the push toward 'an NAACP for women', and a late-life ordination. 494 pages with portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2018).
Sarah Brandes Madry's history of the Old Well at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, treating both its architecture and the ideas attached to it. It takes in drinking fountains and water use in Chapel Hill and the university's history, with a chapter on Edwin Anderson Alderman, the president under whom the well took its present form in 1897, and one on water at the university. Published by iUniverse in 2003, 399 pages with illustrations.
Jennifer Fleischner's double biography of Mary Todd Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckley, the dressmaker who had been enslaved, including years in Hillsborough, before buying her freedom and becoming the First Lady's confidante. Published by Broadway Books in New York in 2003, 372 pages with illustrations and a map. Topics include enslaved women in Hillsborough and the United States, dressmakers and women's friendships in the nineteenth century.
Mary Claire Engstrom's biographical register of the young women who attended the Burwell School in Hillsborough, subtitled lives of educated women in the antebellum South. The school was kept by Margaret Anna Burwell and her husband, and the book bears on women's education in nineteenth-century North Carolina. Published by the Historic Hillsborough Commission, 1979, 256 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Cornelia Phillips Spencer's account of the closing weeks of the Civil War in North Carolina, reissued in 2005 as an electronic edition by the University Library at UNC-Chapel Hill. Topics include the 1865 campaigns, Sherman's march through the Carolinas, Stoneman's raid, and the history of Chapel Hill and the university in the nineteenth century, where Spencer, 1825 to 1908, spent her working life.
Scotti Cohn's short biographies of notable North Carolina women, including Harriet Jacobs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, Annie Lowrie Alexander and Cornelia Phillips Spencer of Chapel Hill. Published by Twodot in 2000, 198 pages with illustrations.
A Women's History Month project of 1993 and 1994 from the Orange County Women's History Month Committee, profiling women who were firsts in the county. Published in Chapel Hill in 1994, 13 pages plus unnumbered leaves with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “Naming the father: bastardy bonds and support awards in the county court, 1784–1818.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/bastardy-bonds-storyline-1784/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
