Storyline · 1954–1986
In 1954 Odell H. Clayton won a Democratic runoff to succeed Sheriff S. T. Latta, and when he died in office in 1959 the commissioners appointed his deputy C. D. (Buck) Knight. Knight faced challengers in 1974 and 1978, when the Daily Tar Heel called Harriet B. Alford the first woman candidate for sheriff. In 1982 Chapel Hill detective captain Lindy Pendergrass won the runoff to succeed him, and the county honored Knight after 23 years as sheriff. Pendergrass was re-elected in 1986 over the only Republican in any county race.
On February 8, 1954 former deputy Odell H. Clayton paid the $41 filing fee and entered the Democratic primary for sheriff of Orange County. On March 6 Sheriff Samuel T. Latta Jr., sheriff for 19 years, said he would not seek re-election, and his deputy Frank C. Maddry of Chapel Hill entered the race with Latta's backing. In the June 26 runoff Clayton beat Maddry 2,618 to 1,900, on a turnout the News of Orange County thought a record for a runoff; Clayton carried Hillsboro and the north of the county, while Maddry, laid up by heart attacks since May, carried Chapel Hill and Carrboro. The nomination was tantamount to election. On May 31, 1958 Democrats renominated Clayton over Charles M. Johnston, 3,684 to 926. Clayton died on April 3, 1959, at 45, four months into his second term, and on April 6 the county commissioners unanimously named Deputy Clarence Dew (Buck) Knight, a deputy since 1950 and Hillsboro police chief in 1948-50, to serve out the term to December 1962. Before the vote an Efland contractor protested the deputy's handling of an armed man that weekend; board members called it an isolated incident and went ahead.
Knight filed for a fifth four-year term in January 1974, and former county commissioner William C. Ray of Hillsborough, who had helped organize the Orange County Rescue Squad, announced against him for the May 7 Democratic primary, saying he would modernize the department. In the May 2, 1978 primary Knight faced Eugene Mauer and Harriet B. Alford, a Carrboro resident who worked a school crossing for the Chapel Hill Police Department; the Daily Tar Heel called her the first woman candidate for Orange County sheriff. She called for women deputies; Knight's 25 deputies included five Black officers but no women.
In the June 29, 1982 Democratic primary Chapel Hill police detective captain Lindy Pendergrass led six candidates with 4,595 of 11,247 votes, ahead of Bobby McCullock, a 21-year veteran of the sheriff's department, with 3,164 and Jake Hardee with 2,083; only 34.7 percent of registered voters turned out. McCullock called a runoff, and on July 27 Pendergrass won it, 5,371 votes (59 percent) to 4,070, carrying every Chapel Hill and Carrboro precinct while McCullock, of Cedar Grove, ran strongest in northern Orange. With no Republican in the race, the nomination all but decided the November election. The county commissioners proclaimed November 29, 1982 Buck Knight Day for the retired sheriff, who had served 23 years as sheriff and led a department that grew from four employees to about 40. On November 4, 1986 Pendergrass was re-elected over Republican John Gainey, the only Republican in any county or district race, 20,330 votes to 4,533, on a county turnout of 54.4 percent.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
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 the most widely held histories of the theme it is filed under, so they may not discuss it. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Rick Jackson's true crime history of Chapel Hill, published by The History Press in 2023, in 28 short chapters. Cases include the Efland bank robbery, the execution of John Henry Breeze, the unsolved murder of Suellen Evans, the killing at the Internationalist Bookstore and the death of Eve Carson.
Albert Coates's own account of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina, which he founded, subtitled 'out of a classroom in Chapel Hill' and published in 1981. The 303 pages trace the institute's history and its role in educating North Carolina's public officials.
Kemp Plummer Battle's memoir, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1945, 296 pages with plates and portraits. Battle, a lawyer, state treasurer and president of the university from 1876 to 1891, recalls North Carolina manners, customs and public life across the nineteenth century, with Chapel Hill and the university's reopening after Reconstruction at the center.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1946), The Journal of Southern History (1946).
William J. Billingsley's history of the Speaker Ban Law, the 1963 North Carolina statute that barred known Communists from speaking on state campuses, and the fight over it at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The subtitle sets the scope: race, politics and the public university in sixties North Carolina. It treats academic freedom, anti-communist movements and free speech in the state. University of Georgia Press, 1999, 308 pages with eight pages of plates.
Reviewed in Academe (2000), The American Historical Review (2001), The Journal of Southern History (2001), Journal of American History (2001), The Journal of Politics (2001).
Francis Nash's history of Hillsborough in colonial and Revolutionary times, first published in 1903 and reprinted in 1953 by Edwards & Broughton with an index and a sketch of the author. Topics include the Regulator Insurrection of 1766 to 1771, the Revolution and local genealogy.
Howard E. Covington Jr.'s biography of Albert Coates (1896-1989), the law professor who founded the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina and led it through its early years. Topics include Coates as a law teacher and the institute's history as a center for the study of public administration in Chapel Hill. Published in 2010 by the University Library at Chapel Hill, 322 pages with 32 pages of plates.
Jean Bolduc's collection of oral history interviews with Black residents of Durham and Orange counties, published by The History Press in 2016, 125 pages with photographs and portraits. The narrators are the poet Jaki Shelton Green, civil rights lawyer Floyd McKissick, Walter Jackson, Nate Davis, Brenda Stephens, Diane Wright, Jackie Wagstaff and Michelle Johnson, and a closing chapter deals with the Ku Klux Klan. The interviews document Black life and race relations in the two counties across the twentieth century.
Abstracts of the minutes of Orange County's Inferior Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions for 1777 to 1788, the county court of justices of the peace in the Revolutionary years. The abstracts name the people who came before the court. First published in Charlotte in 1966 and later reprinted from Greenville, South Carolina, in three paginated sections with a map.
David Cook collects the grim side of the Eno River's past in Orange and Durham counties: ghost stories, crimes, train wrecks and accidents, including the hanging of rebels near the river in 1771, a sawmill accident said to have started a run of hauntings, and a dance one Valentine's Day that ended badly. Published by The History Press in 2025, 141 pages with illustrations.
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).
Deed transcripts for the town lots of Chapel Hill and adjoining land from 1790 to the 1930s, compiled by Stewart E. Dunaway. Each transcript keeps only the working facts: grantor and grantee, price, acreage and the metes and bounds of the parcel. Self-published in 2014 as Issue 1G, 702 pages with maps and facsimiles.
Nora Gaskin's short true account of a murder investigation in 1960s Chapel Hill and the judicial error that followed, centered on Frank Rinaldi (1929 to 2009). Published in 2013 by Lystra Books, 52 pages with references.
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. “Choosing Orange County's sheriff, 1954–1986.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/choosing-sheriff-storyline-1954/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
