Storyline · 1877–1953
Louis H. Hackney became pastor of Rock Hill Baptist Church on Franklin Street in January 1877, when he was barely twenty-two, and held the pastorate for sixty years. The congregation celebrated the end of his fiftieth year in 1927 and honored him again in 1934. In the spring of 1937 a rift divided the church, partly over salary owed to Hackney: he retired, and a group following the assistant pastor, Rev. John Jones, bought a lot for a church of its own. Hackney died that December. Under the Rev. J. R. Manley the congregation began a brick church on North Roberson Street in 1952, held its first services there in 1953 and took the name First Baptist Church.
In January 1877 Louis H. Hackney, who had spent six years at Shaw University and then taught school, became pastor of Rock Hill Baptist Church on Franklin Street, when he was barely twenty-two. By early August 1926 the church had thoroughly renovated its building, putting in new settees and replacing its old organ with a piano, ahead of a two-week revival beginning August 29. In January 1927 the congregation celebrated the end of his fiftieth year as its pastor; the Weekly noted that he also served four other churches, in West Durham, Chatham County and rural Durham County. On May 16, 1927 a clinic at the church, sponsored by the Community Club and run by Nurse Compton, examined 26 Black babies a year old or younger, with Dr. B. U. Brooks of Durham giving his services, and it was held four more times by August 8.
On January 7, 1934 the congregation honored Hackney on 58 years as its pastor with an anniversary program that packed the church, with speakers including the University's M. C. S. Noble, the president of Shaw University and the pastors of the town's Black churches. Hackney held the pastorate for sixty years, until the spring of 1937, when a rift divided the church: by May 14 he had retired and a student from Shaw University was conducting the services, and a group following Rev. John Jones, who had come from Durham as assistant pastor, had bought a lot on Graham Avenue near Franklin Street for about $400 and planned a church costing $1,000 to $2,000, in a dispute that turned partly on salary owed to Hackney. The Weekly reported that the new church was not recognized by the New Hope Association.
In October 1937 Second Baptist Church, a second Black Baptist congregation, was organized in Chapel Hill, and it put up its building in April 1938. Hackney died at his home in Chapel Hill on December 19, 1937, at 83, and was buried in a Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. In April 1946, under Rev. J. R. Stanford, the church held three weeks of anniversary services, dedicated to 45-year member Mrs. Kate Tinnie, that raised more than $700. Under the Rev. J. R. Manley the congregation raised $10,001 in the first months of 1952 and began a colonial-style brick church on North Roberson Street between Franklin and Rosemary streets. The first services in the $100,000 building were held on September 27, 1953, and with the move the congregation took the name First Baptist Church. By early 1954 the old lot on the south side of West Franklin Street stood vacant.
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.
Laura Hearne Marcus compares two Orange County Baptist congregations in this 1951 study: Carrboro Baptist Church and Rock Hill Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, one white and one African American. Structure, membership and the function of each church are her subjects, with attention to the buildings themselves. One hundred thirty-nine leaves closing with a bibliography.
Class of students posed outside the Rock Hill Baptist Church building in 1890, in a print and its negative. Part of the churches series in the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
Head and shoulders portrait of the Rev. Lewis H. Hackney of Rock Hill Baptist Church. Undated. From the churches series of the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
Directory and inventory of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery compiled by the Chapel Hill Historical Society and issued by the Town of Chapel Hill in October 1990, in one looseleaf volume; one copy carries a 1987 map. The inventory lists graves in the historic cemetery on the university campus.
One volume of newspaper and magazine clippings about the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, dated 2003, in various pagings with illustrations and portraits. Sources include the Chapel Hill Herald, the Daily Tar Heel, the Herald-Sun, the Chapel Hill News, Endeavors, Preservation Notes and the University Gazette. Subjects include cemeteries and historic sites in Chapel Hill.
Bland Simpson writes about the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery and the people buried in it, an eleven page illustrated magazine essay from 1999. The long subtitle describes a study of Chapel Hill through its characters.
A folding guide sheet to the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, issued by the Chapel Hill Preservation Society in 1995, with illustrations and a map across six unnumbered pages. A note on the sheet gives 1798 as the date of establishment.
Burnis Hackney entered Chapel Hill High School, newly integrated, in 1966, one of the first Black students there after Lincoln High School closed. In this Southern Oral History Program interview, recorded February 5, 2001, by Bob Gilgor, Hackney weighs his conviction that integration was right against what was lost when Lincoln's traditions were set aside, and how the merger played out for students. About an hour and a half. Published online in 2006 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Fred Battle grew up in Chapel Hill under segregation and describes that world in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded January 3, 2001, by Bob Gilgor. He portrays the Black community of his youth as centered on the church and on Lincoln High School, recalls his schooling there, and tells of his college years in Greensboro and the civil rights demonstrations he joined there. Published online in 2006 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Gloria Register Jeter (born 1952) attended both segregated and integrated public schools of Chapel Hill and offers a critical view of how desegregation was carried out, in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded December 23, 2000, by Bob Gilgor. Jeter argues that the merger of Lincoln High School into Chapel Hill High School cost the Black community its school traditions and institutions, and describes the student protests that followed. Published online in 2006 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
James Atwater, born in 1932 into a family that had lived in Chapel Hill for generations, talked with Jennifer Nardone in February 2001. He describes the town's Black community between the 1930s and the 1950s: how neighbors dealt with one another in church, at school and in social life, and what schooling under segregation meant at Orange County Training School and Lincoln High School. About an hour and eighteen minutes; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2006, through Documenting the American South.
A history and genealogy of two Black families of Chatham and Orange counties, tracing the households of Charles H. Hackney and Antoinette Stone Hackney and of Louis Henry Hackney and Laura Edwards Hackney. Published in 1987 by The Associates, it sets out the family lines from the nineteenth century forward.
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.
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).
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.
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 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.
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. “Rock Hill Baptist Church, 1877–1953.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/rock-hill-baptist-storyline-1877/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
