Storyline · 1843–1862
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.
By October 1843 the Hillsborough town commissioners had ordered the constable and patrol captains to bring before the magistrate of police anyone of color passing as free who was not known to be free, and required free people of color settling in town to give a $100 bond for good behavior or leave. In February 1847 they ordered enslaved people caught without a pass after ten at night jailed and whipped unless the owner paid a fine. In 1849 they ordered the patrol to disperse gatherings of Black people in the streets and forbade Black people to loiter in the streets on Sundays.
In February 1850 they raised the bond for free Black residents to $500, and in March gave them five days instead of thirty to post it or leave. The board hired two paid patrolmen in March 1850, dropped them in August for a weekly citizen patrol and hired two again in 1851.
In 1853 it charged Black sellers of victuals a dollar a day on public days, and in June 1854 it closed the town's graveyard for Black people to new burials. In 1855 the patrol was told to break up gatherings of Black people before nine, and in 1856 the men liable for patrol duty were formed into weekly companies. An 1857 ordinance set a month in jail and a $10 fine for free Black people found drunk and disorderly, and in February 1862 the board ordered all free Black residents to renew their good-behavior bonds within ten days.
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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.
Pair of coin silver teaspoons in the fiddle back pattern with double-tipped ends, about 1840 to 1870, marked Lemuel Lynch on the back along with pseudo-hallmarks of a head, a D and a lion. Lynch, born at Back Creek in Orange County, trained under William Huntington in Hillsborough before setting up as a silversmith in Greensboro.
Copper plate seal that Lemuel Lynch, a Hillsborough jeweler and watchmaker who died in 1893, used as his mark. Dated 1840 to 1870. Part of the Images of North Carolina collection.
Teaspoon in the fiddle pattern with an angular shoulder above a pointed bowl and a slightly upturned tip, stamped L Lynch on the back. Hillsborough silversmith Lemuel Lynch made it between about 1840 and 1870.
About 600 family letters of Thomas Lynch, a Presbyterian minister in the Orange Presbytery, and his wife Mary Bingham Lynch, with dates beginning in 1794. There is material on their son W. B. Lynch, who ran an academy at High Point, and on Major Robert Bingham, head of the Bingham School in Orange County. Topics also include Lemuel Lynch and silversmith and jewelry work. At Duke's Rubenstein Library.
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).
Art Chansky's 2016 account of Dean Smith, Charlie Scott and the years that changed Chapel Hill as a Southern college town. Scott was the first Black scholarship player in the Carolina basketball program. Topics include civil rights, racism in sports and the university's twentieth-century history.
John Ehle's account of the civil rights demonstrations in Chapel Hill in 1963 and 1964 and the young people who led them, first published by Harper & Row in 1965. This reprint from Lewisville, North Carolina adds an afterword by Wayne King. Civil rights and race relations in Chapel Hill are its subjects. 340 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Geeta Kapur's history of race at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the enslaved labor that built the campus through desegregation and the Black student protests that followed. Twelve chapters, with a foreword by William Barber II, move from the founding era and the Great Depression controversies to the state's response to integration and the turmoil of later decades; North Carolina Central University also figures. Published 2021 by Blair in Durham.
Julian M. Pleasants and Augustus M. Burns III on the 1950 Democratic Senate primary in North Carolina, in which Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina, lost to Willis Smith after a campaign marked by race-baiting. Primaries, elections and race relations in the state are its subjects. Published by UNC Press in 1990, 356 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (1991), The American Historical Review (1991), Journal of American History (1991), The Journal of Southern History (1992).
Collected first-hand and second-hand stories from the Eno River valley as told from the standpoint of African Americans and Native people who have lived along the river in Orange and Durham counties, from prehistory to the present day. Issued by the Eno River Association in Durham as volume 10, number 2 of the Eno Journal, 2021, 106 pages with illustrations.
Rosetta Austin Moore's survey of Black education in Orange County from the colonial era to 1970, in a revised edition published in 2015 through Lulu in Morrisville. After chapters on slavery nationally and on schooling for enslaved people in North Carolina, the book turns to the county: its formation, the growth of its schools, the arrival of free public schooling for all, and the schools and African American educators of the twentieth century. 265 pages with maps, portraits and facsimiles.
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).
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.
Jeffrey A. Turner's study of student activism on Southern campuses between 1960 and 1970, arguing that the region's own movement has been overshadowed by attention to national groups such as SDS. Nine chapters move from the 1960 sit-ins through white students and desegregation, the rise of student power, Black Power on Black and white campuses, and the war's effect on the region. Chapel Hill is among the campuses treated. Published 2010, 366 pages, online edition.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (2011), Journal of American History (2012).
Emily Eidenier Pearce's history of Rogers Road, the historically African American neighborhood on the edge of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and of what happened to it after Orange County opened its landfill next door in 1972. Drawing on interviews with residents, the book records the neighborhood's origins, family life, churches and customs, and then the environmental and social burdens of decades beside the landfill. Privately issued in 2009, 298 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
Michael Thomas Smith's biography of Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, the University of North Carolina chemistry professor dismissed in 1856 after he declared support for the antislavery presidential candidate John C. Fremont. Published by University of Delaware Press in 2003, 216 pages with illustrations. Topics include abolitionists and dissenters in North Carolina, the antislavery movement in the state, and the university's biography before 1962.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2005).
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. “Hillsborough's town ordinances and the patrol against Black residents, 1843–1862.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/hillsborough-patrol-storyline-1843/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
