Storyline · 1800–1805
In 1800 a great camp-meeting revival was held at New Hope: people came from long distances and camped on the church grounds for days, and the revival spread into other neighborhoods. In 1801 William D. Paisley took charge of the Hawfields and Cross Roads Presbyterian churches near present Mebane. At a general communion at Cross Roads in March 1801, before a large crowd, the congregation broke into the outcries and physical frenzy of the western camp meetings just as an ordinary service was ending, and the ministers present let the demonstration run its course. A 1966 article in the North Carolina Historical Review dates the start of the Great Revival in North Carolina from this meeting. The revival reached Hawfields, where people from long distances camped on the church grounds in their wagons for several days. The Hawfields church historian credits Paisley with organizing that meeting, and Foote and the 1966 article call it the first camp meeting in North Carolina, though the accounts differ on its date. At New Hope, D. I. Craig thought the revival did much to prompt the building of a third church. It went up in 1805 with a high pulpit at the west end and a gallery at the east end for Black worshippers, and it stood until fire destroyed it in 1862.
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 2 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.
Rev. D. I. Craig's history of New Hope Church, a Presbyterian congregation in Chapel Hill Township, Orange County, printed at Reidsville in 1891. A closing family history section covers the Strayhorn, Craig, Blackwood and Kirkland families.
A congregational history of New Hope Presbyterian Church in Orange County, written by Barbara A. Murphy and published in 2006 by Chapel Hill Press. Chapters take up the five successive church buildings, the land itself, the ministers who served, the cemeteries, members who went to war, the church's organization, its music, gifts and memorials, and its outreach to the surrounding community. It also covers Presbyterian experience of the Civil War. 126 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Bicentennial folder for New Hope Presbyterian Church in Orange County, issued by the church in 1956 as a single folded sheet of four pages with illustrations. It includes Presbyterian experience of the Civil War. The title's two hundred years put the congregation's beginnings in the mid 1750s.
Wilmer Harding Clay's 1948 study of the part rural churches played in community life, with New Hope Church in Orange County among the congregations examined. Five preliminary and 104 leaves with a map and a long bibliography. Topics include rural churches and church work in North Carolina together with social conditions in Orange County.
Herbert Snipes Turner's history of Hawfields Presbyterian Church and its community from 1738 to 1960. Hawfields lies in what is now Alamance County, land that was part of Orange County until 1849, and the book gives a place to Henry Pattillo, the congregation's eighteenth-century minister. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1962, 297 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1963).
Elizabeth Chalmers's 74-page history of Hawfields Presbyterian Church, the old congregation in the Haw River country of what is now Alamance County, published in 1940 with illustrations. It includes Presbyterian experience of the Civil War. Hawfields lay within Orange County until Alamance was formed in 1849, linking the church to the county.
Ralph Lydron Biggerstaff's 1975 alphabetical listing of the identifiable graves in the second burying ground at Hawfields Presbyterian Church in Alamance County. Alamance County was formed from Orange County in 1849.
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.
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).
A history of Orange United Methodist Church in Chapel Hill since 1832, prepared by the congregation's History Committee and edited by Margaret A. Blanchard with Julia Blackwood, Mildred Stout, Wiley Williams, Kay Creech, Andrea Stark and Shirley Mallard. Published by Taylor Publishing of Dallas in 1992, 161 pages with illustrations, some in color, a facsimile, maps and portraits.
Andrew Gardner's history of Binkley Memorial Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, named for Olin T. Binkley, covering the years between the late 1950s and the 2010s and tracing how a congregation with Southern Baptist roots came to be known for liberal Christianity. Published by the University of Tennessee Press in 2023, 213 pages with illustrations.
Samuel Tilden Habel's centennial monograph on the Baptist Church at Chapel Hill, covering its first hundred years from 1854 to 1954. It pairs a narrative of the congregation with membership lists. Published by the church in Chapel Hill in 1954, 58 pages plus sixteen pages of plates with illustrations, portraits and facsimiles.
A. C. Howell's history of the Baptist church in Chapel Hill from 1854 to 1924, published in 1945. Thirty-two pages with one plate; the story touches the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina as well as the congregation itself.
Archibald Henderson's history of the Episcopal congregation in Chapel Hill, the Church of the Atonement and the Chapel of the Cross, as the title names them. A short work of Chapel Hill church history and of the Episcopal Church in North Carolina, published in Hartford, Connecticut, by the Church Missions Publishing Company in 1938, 57 pages with illustrations and portraits. One copy carries the author's presentation inscription to the North Carolina State Library.
Address by Bishop Joseph Blount Cheshire at St. Matthew's Church in Hillsborough on 24 August 1924, marking the parish's hundredth anniversary. Printed in Durham in 1925 at the vestry's order, with a foreword by the rector. Cheshire discusses George Micklejohn, William Mercer Green and Moses Ashley Curtis.
Transcription of the first register kept by Chapel of the Cross, the Episcopal parish on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill, with its entries from 1842 to 1881. Published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 2024 with an introduction and a bibliography, 142 pages with illustrations 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. “The Great Revival in Orange County, 1800–1805.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/great-revival-storyline-1800/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
