Storyline · 1895–1920
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.
In November 1895 the Farmers' State Alliance bought the old Hillsborough Military Academy barracks and about 40 acres from the Cameron heirs, with 70 acres from D. C. Parks and 20 from James Webb Jr., and in January 1896 it moved its state offices there and published its Alliance Weekly at Hillsborough, a paper that stopped in September after running at a loss. In 1896 the Alliance built a tannery at the headquarters and bought a shoe factory plant, which was stopped in August with about $12,000 invested; that month's state session there denounced the lease of the North Carolina Railroad to the Southern Railway.
In 1897 the Alliance elected John Graham of Warren County president and voted to reopen the factory under W. O. Roberts. By 1899 the factory's debt was paid and it was making about forty pairs of shoes a day, but in August 1900 the Alliance reported part of its machinery sold and the plant closed, and the same session petitioned the legislature for four-month public schools, compulsory attendance and a ban on employing young children in manufacturing. The Alliance found the old Barracks property a burden from about 1901. In 1902 it moved its business agent's office to Raleigh while keeping its headquarters at Hillsborough, and in August 1904 Governor Charles B. Aycock spoke at its picnic at the Barracks.
Meeting for its annual session at the Barracks in August 1905, the Alliance voted to offer its Hillsborough buildings, built for a military school at a cost of $22,000, and 146 acres to the A. and M. College at Raleigh for an agricultural school, on condition that the college keep up the property and pay its taxes. It re-elected T. B. Parker secretary-treasurer and state business agent, and when it met again at the Barracks in mid-August 1906 Parker kept both posts. On February 27, 1909, with enough sub-alliances, the local chapters, formed through the work of State Lecturer H. M. Cates of Alamance County, the Orange County Alliance was reorganized at the Barracks and elected R. D. Bain president, Haywood H. Thompson vice president and P. M. Cates secretary-treasurer.
The Alliance also demanded repeal of the crop lien law, under which a merchant could take a claim on a farmer's coming crop for supplies advanced, and endorsed Raleigh for a Federal Land Bank. On September 7, 1916 the News reported that the state Alliance had decided to sell its headquarters property near Hillsboro and buy a home in a North Carolina city or town. On June 21, 1920 the property was cut into lots and sold at auction, and John W. Hill got the parcel with the commandant's house.
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 3 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.
Letters of the Sparrow family, including Thomas Sparrow and George Attmore Sparrow, gathered and published in 2011. The correspondence includes material associated with the Hillsboro' Military Academy, which opened in Hillsborough in 1859, and combines family and military history.
Raleigh Edward Colston's four-page printed statement for the Hillsboro' Military Academy, issued in 1866 by Wm. E. Pell, printer to the State, and signed by Colston as superintendent. It concerns government aid to education in North Carolina, so it documents the Hillsborough school and the question of state support just after the Civil War.
Stephen A. Ross's study of the Hillsborough Military Academy and military education in North Carolina before the Civil War, dated 2002. An article-length piece of 27 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Annual catalogues of the Hillsborough Military Academy in the county seat, with registers of the faculty and statements of the curriculum. Titles and imprints vary across the volumes, which were printed at Hillsborough and Raleigh in 1876 and 1877. Illustrated, 26 to 28 centimeters tall.
Book three of an 1860 map series tracing the North Carolina Railroad through Alamance, Orange and Wake counties. The sheets show the right of way and the property it crossed, providing material for railroad and land tenure history.
Environmental assessment from May 2015 on closing three private railroad crossings on the North Carolina Railroad and Norfolk Southern line in Orange County, at Gordon Thomas Drive, Greenbriar Drive and Byrdsville Road. Prepared by the North Carolina Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration under the National Environmental Policy Act, with maps and plans.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Finding of no significant impact, October 2015, for closing three private railroad crossings on the North Carolina Railroad and Norfolk Southern line in Orange County: Gordon Thomas Drive, Greenbriar Drive and Byrdsville Road. The North Carolina Department of Transportation and the Federal Railroad Administration prepared it under the National Environmental Policy Act. 91 images.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Keri Petersen's dissertation on the hired enslaved workers who built the North Carolina Railroad through the Piedmont, Hillsborough included, from 1851 to 1856, and the hundreds more who kept it running through the Civil War.
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.
Jean Bradley Anderson's history of the Bennehan and Cameron families and their plantations, Stagville and Fairntosh, on lands that lay in Orange County until Durham County was formed from it in 1881. Published by the Historic Preservation Society of Durham in 1985, the book follows plantation life and ownership across several generations, with genealogical tables, a map, portraits, a bibliography and an index; 227 pages plus plates.
Reviewed in South Atlantic Quarterly (1987).
Sydney Nathans's history of a Black community in Hale County, Alabama, whose founders were enslaved people sent there before the Civil War from the Cameron family's plantations in Orange County, North Carolina. Instead of following the Great Migration out of the South, this group stayed, moved from bondage to owning the land they had worked, and held onto it across generations. Published 2017, 342 pages with plates and maps; this is the e-book edition.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (2017), Journal of Social History (2017), London review of books (2017), The Journal of the Civil War Era (2018), The Journal of Southern History (2018), Environmental History (2018), The Alabama review (2019), The Oral History Review (2019), The Register - Kentucky Historical Society/The register of the Kentucky Historical Society (2020).
Herbert G. Gutman's 1976 history of African American families from 1750 to 1925, published by Pantheon Books in New York, 664 pages with 38 leaves of plates. Its Orange County connection is the Bennehan and Cameron family plantations, Stagville and Fairntosh: the book discusses the people enslaved by Richard Bennehan (1743-1825) and the Camerons, and follows family ties among them under slavery and after emancipation. Subjects include African American families and enslaved persons in Orange County.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1977), The William and Mary Quarterly (1977), The American Historical Review (1977), Journal of American History (1977), The History Teacher (1977), Political Science Quarterly (1977), Journal of Black Psychology (1978), Journal of Social History (1978), Civil War history (1978), Signs (1978).
Rachel Frankel's Duke University honors paper of 1984 on the Couch tract in the Durham Division of Duke Forest, a history of agricultural land use from 1750 to 1950. The Couch family, family farms and rural land use in Orange County are its subjects. A photocopied typescript, 97 leaves with maps and a bibliography.
Evan P. Bennett returns to the photographs Marion Post Wolcott made in 1939 in Cedar Grove, a Black farming neighborhood in northern Orange County that she documented for the federal resettlement program. Published in 2025 by the Historical Research Office in Raleigh, pages 384 to 406, with illustrations and portraits. Topics include rural African Americans in the Cedar Grove township and photographers in the state.
A tour guidebook prepared for the 2016 Vernacular Architecture Forum conference in Durham, leading visitors through buildings in Orange and Caswell counties. It takes in the architecture of the bright leaf tobacco economy and the work of Thomas Day, the free Black cabinetmaker of Caswell County who worked in the middle of the nineteenth century.
Joe Liles's interviews with longtime residents of Fish Dam Road, an old rural road in Durham County, recorded in 2004, with subjects tied to both Durham and Orange counties. The interviewees are Charles Scott Harkey, Mary Scarlett Jones, Boyce Link and John Scarlett, all born between 1912 and 1920, and the topics include country life, the road's history and the Duke Power Company.
Richard L. Bushman looks at the county court of Orange County and the farmers who came before it between 1750 and 1776, a period that in this county included the Regulator insurrection of 1766 to 1771. Published in 2001 as pages 388 to 413 of a larger volume. Topics include courts, farmers and eighteenth century law in the county.
AlexSandra Lett's family history and memoir of country life around a Lee County store, subtitled Lett's set a spell at the country store. Published in 2000, it includes anecdotes of the Lett family and of Sanford and Lee County, North Carolina.
Megan Elizabeth Greene's 1998 study of smoking pipes recovered from three Native American communities in the North Carolina Piedmont dating between about 1400 and 1700. The evidence includes material excavated at Hillsborough in Orange County. The study also concerns tobacco use among Indigenous peoples of North America. Bibliography on leaves 35 to 36.
Bradley J. Lambert's study of the fiddler Joe Thompson and the Black communities of the rural Piedmont, covering music and daily life in Orange County in the early twentieth century. Seventy-seven leaves with a bibliography, completed in 1998. Topics include African American musicians in the county and African American history there.
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. “The Farmers' Alliance headquarters at Hillsborough, 1895–1920.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/farmers-alliance-hq-storyline-1905/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
