Storyline · 1740–1840
When Orange Presbytery called in 1820 for long-vacant churches to be reorganized, New Hope Presbyterian Church had no roll of members, and it reorganized with four elders and ten members. Elijah Graves, then teaching at Hillsborough, had preached there from 1818 as stated supply, a minister serving without being installed as pastor, and he returned from 1825 to 1831 after Shepherd K. Kollock ended his connection. A revival in 1831 and 1832 added at least seventy communicants. George W. Ferrill was pastor from 1833 until 1836, and that August James Phillips, a university mathematics professor, began preaching at New Hope, which he served until 1865, longer than any other minister. Four more elders were ordained in 1840.
Gilbert Strayhorn, a Pennsylvania-born tailor of Scottish parentage, came to the Hawfields about 1740, and in 1741 a party of related Scotch-Irish families from Pennsylvania, among them William Craige, William Blackwood and Joseph Kirkland, settled there; D. I. Craig wrote that they left Pennsylvania because of hostile Indians and would not stop in Virginia because of its established church. About 1750, when word spread through the Hawfields that the land titles got through Earl Granville's agents were not genuine, Craige, Strayhorn and other families took up land on the waters of New Hope, a stream family tradition said they named for the "new hopes" they found there. About the time he got the deeds for his New Hope lands, in 1754 or 1755, Gilbert Strean took the name Strayhorn; his nephews, who came south later, kept the name Strain.
New Hope Presbyterian Church counts 1756 as its founding year, when the Hawfields and Eno Presbyterians, with whom the New Hope families then worshiped, first asked Hanover Presbytery for preachers. About 1760 settlers still attached to the Hawfields congregation built a rough first meetinghouse about five miles south of Hillsborough, later replaced by an octagonal log church that the church dates to 1775. Henry Pattillo served the Hawfields and Eno churches from 1765 to 1774, and Craig believed he had organized New Hope. John DeBow, who succeeded him about 1775, preached at New Hope as he could until his death on September 8, 1783, and Jacob Lake served it in the same way until about 1790.
On February 25, 1792 Gilbert Strayhorn gave two hundred acres "to the subscribers of the church and their successors," and every New Hope church stood on this land. On November 18, 1795 Orange Presbytery met at New Hope and ordained William F. Thompson, said to be a native of Connecticut, who was apparently installed as the church's first pastor; earlier ministers had served it as supplies alongside the Hawfields and Eno. About that year James Strayhorn, John Strain and John Freeland were ordained elders, joining James Hart, and at Thompson's urging the congregation built a parsonage, laid off much of Strayhorn's gift as a farm, and took up schooling. As he was leaving in September 1799, Thompson sold about a hundred acres of the church tract to Gilbert's son John Strayhorn, stating that Gilbert had conveyed the land to him; no such conveyance was ever seen or recorded, Craig judged the deed a forgery, and the land left the church's hands. Thompson gave up the charge on November 12, 1799.
A camp-meeting revival in 1800 drew people from long distances, and Craig thought it did much to prompt the building of a third church, which went up about 1805 with a gallery at the east end for Black worshippers. James H. Bowman preached and taught school there as stated supply, a minister serving without being installed as pastor, from about 1802 until 1815, and Robert H. Chapman supplied the pulpit about 1815. Gilbert Strayhorn died on February 6, 1803 at 88, and John Craig, eldest son of William Craige, died in February 1816 at about 90; D. I. Craig names the two as the church's original founders and first elders. On May 17, 1817 the elders and subscribers sold seventeen acres of the church tract to Samuel Strayhorn to pay for church repairs, leaving seventy acres of Gilbert Strayhorn's gift.
Elijah Graves, then teaching at Hillsborough, preached at New Hope as stated supply from November 1818 to April 1820 and persuaded many hearers to sign a temperance pledge. On April 22, 1820 Shepherd K. Kollock laid before the session Orange Presbytery's call to reorganize long-vacant churches. Finding no roll of members, the session reorganized the next day, when four elders and ten members assented to the articles of faith and covenant. Alexander Gattis, Samuel Faucett and Gilbert Strayhorn were ordained elders that October. Kollock, who preached at New Hope with the Hillsborough church, ended his connection in May 1825, and Graves returned as stated supply from that November until May 1831. A revival from November 1831 to November 1832 under Daniel L. Russell, John S. McCutcheon and Philip Pearson added at least seventy communicants, and five elders were ordained in February 1832. The congregation elected George W. Ferrill pastor on March 23, 1833; the relation was dissolved in July 1836. That August James Phillips, a university mathematics professor licensed to preach by Orange Presbytery in 1833, began preaching at New Hope, which he served until December 1865, longer than any other minister. On May 9, 1840 four more elders were ordained: George A. Faucett, David Craig, William C. Blackwood and Joseph Kirkland.
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.
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.
A 1980 edition, issued by the church, of A. A. Ellis's history of Eno Presbyterian Church at Cedar Grove, Orange County. Twenty unnumbered pages with illustrations and portraits. Ellis's original history of the congregation appeared in 1955.
A. A. Ellis's short history of Eno Presbyterian Church at Cedar Grove in northern Orange County, published by the church in 1955, 22 pages with illustrations and portraits. Subjects include the religious aspects of the Civil War among Presbyterians, along with Presbyterian and church history for Orange County.
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. “New Hope Presbyterian Church, 1740–1840.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/new-hope-presbyterian-1818-1840-storyline-1818/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
