Storyline · 1842–1859
Two separate plans for teaching law at Hillsborough became one school in 1850, when Frederick Nash and John L. Bailey joined forces. Nash and Hugh Waddell had announced a school in 1841 to prepare young men for the bar, and in 1845 Bailey moved to Hillsborough from Elizabeth City and announced a law school of his own. Together Nash and Bailey charged $100 for the whole course and held a moot court once a week. Nash, by then chief justice of the state supreme court, died at his Hillsborough home in 1858. In 1859 Bailey moved to Black Mountain, where he and his son proposed a new law school; it ran until the Civil War.
On November 1, 1841 Frederick Nash and Hugh Waddell gave notice that they would open a school at Hillsborough to prepare young men for the bar from January 1, 1842, if at least eight students enrolled. John L. Bailey, who had taught law students in his office at Elizabeth City, moved to Hillsborough and announced in the Raleigh Register of May 30, 1845 that he would open a law school there on July 1. By June 1850 Nash and Bailey had announced that they had joined to open a law school in the town. Their notice of January 1, 1851 put tuition at $100 for the whole course, and a notice of December 31, 1851 announced a session beginning January 15, 1852, with a moot court (a practice court where students argued cases) once a week and board with families in town. Nash, then chief justice of the state supreme court, fell ill returning from a synod meeting at New Bern and died at his Hillsborough home on December 4, 1858, in his seventy-eighth year. He was buried in the Hillsborough Old Town Cemetery. In 1859 Bailey moved to his farm at Black Mountain, where he and his son William H. Bailey proposed to open a law school on the north fork of the Swannanoa River on March 1; that school ran until the Civil War.
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 them all.
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.
Plaque on the wall in front of the Old Town Cemetery in Hillsborough, just behind the Hillsborough Historical Society's building, photographed for the North Carolina ECHO project on 6 March 2002.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Old Town Cemetery in Hillsborough, which lies just behind the Hillsborough Historical Society's building, in a North Carolina ECHO project photograph taken 6 March 2002.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Mary Claire Engstrom compiled this single folded typescript sheet for the Historic Hillsborough Commission in 1966, recording the Old Town Cemetery of 1757 in Hillsborough. A note places the ground on lots 98 and part of 97 at the northwest corner of Churton and West Tryon streets. Topics include epitaphs, cemetery recording and Orange County genealogy. Part of UNC's North Carolina Collection.
Samuel A. Ashe's eight volume set of North Carolina biographies, published by C.L. Van Noppen from 1905 and running from the colonial period forward. The sketches take in governors, judges and public men, among them William Tryon, Frederick Nash, Richard Henderson and Matt W. Ransom. Genealogists use the set as a name source for families across the state, Orange County included.
John Heritage Bryan's memoir of Frederick Nash, chief justice of the Supreme Court of North Carolina, who had died in 1858. Neathery and Jones, printers to the university, produced it at Chapel Hill the following year.
Personal and political papers of Willie Person Mangum, the Whig senator from Orange County, together with papers of Arthur Mangum and Charity Alston Cain Mangum. Correspondents include Daniel Webster, William A. Graham, David L. Swain, John Chavis and Abraham Lincoln, and other topics include plantations at Hillsborough, the estate called Walnut Hill, state politics, agriculture and education.
Family papers of Frederick Nash, 1757 to 1864. Nash was an Orange County legislator and judge who sat on the North Carolina Supreme Court from 1844 and served as chief justice from 1852 to 1858. The letters, many undated, deal with family matters, an 1822 case in Wilkes County Superior Court and the lack of organized religion in Hillsborough. State Archives of North Carolina, PC.72.
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. “The Nash and Bailey law school at Hillsborough, 1842–1859.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/nash-bailey-law-school-storyline-1842/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
