Storyline · 1752–1824
From 1752 St. Matthew's Parish was Orange County's established Anglican church, with chapels at New Hope and St. Mary's and, from about 1768, a church in Hillsborough. Its rector, George Micklejohn, preached to Tryon's troops in 1768 and stayed loyal to the Crown in 1776. Its church served as an army hospital, an academy and the meeting place of the 1788 convention, and in 1797 the Assembly ordered the ruinous building sold. Episcopal worship came back through St. Jude's and St. Mary's in 1818 and 1819, and in 1824 the reorganized parish left the old lot to the Presbyterians.
The act of the spring 1752 General Assembly that created Orange County also made it the Anglican Parish of St. Matthew, with its own vestry, and named John Patterson among the twelve vestrymen who were to serve until the first vestry election. In October 1754 the county court directed the vestry to divide the parish into districts so that each person's land lines could be walked and recorded between October and April; no report back appears in the minutes, but later records name parish districts, among them St. Mary's in the east. The 1752 act appears to have been voided by royal proclamation, so in 1756 the Assembly passed a fresh act setting up the county and the parish again. In 1757 a one-acre lot was bought in Hillsborough for the parish church. About 1759 Anglicans built chapels for worshipers far from town: New Hope Chapel in southern Orange, at the site of present Chapel Hill, and St. Mary's, on land given by Thomas Holden about seven miles northeast of Hillsborough.
By April 1767 Governor William Tryon had sent the Rev. George Micklejohn, a Society for the Propagation of the Gospel missionary, to the parish, and about 1768 or 1769 its members put up what the Lloyds' history of Hillsborough's churches calls the town's first church, at the corner of Churton and Tryon streets. During the unrest of 1768 Micklejohn carried messages several times between the Regulators and the authorities, seeking a peaceful settlement, and the Regulators called him "our Rector." On September 25, 1768 he preached to Tryon's troops at Hillsborough on the duty of subjection to the civil powers. Tryon had the sermon printed and distributed, the Assembly voted that November to repay Micklejohn for the printing, and Bassett, citing Foote, reports that the sermon said at least twenty Regulators ought to have been hanged; it cost Micklejohn favour with opponents of royal authority. On August 21, 1775, at the congress's request, he opened the Provincial Congress by reading prayers in the church. He stayed loyal to the Crown, was held among the Loyalist prisoners and paroled to Perquimans County on May 3, 1776, and on November 24 took the oath of allegiance to the state before the Halifax Congress and was discharged.
In the fall of 1780 the Board of War ordered the church repaired for use as a hospital. An act of the 1784 session ordered it repaired for a school and a free meeting house, and Hillsborough Academy, chartered as Science Hall, opened in it in 1785 and closed in 1790. Meeting at St. Matthew's Church from July 21 to August 4, 1788, the Hillsborough Convention declined to ratify the Constitution. In November 1792 the University's site commissioners wrote down the name of the rise where New Hope Chapel had stood, New Hope Chapel Hill, and the village laid out in 1793 kept the short form, Chapel Hill. In 1797 an act authorised the sheriff to sell the old church on Lot 98, ruinous and not used for worship for years; it went soon afterwards, and around 1800 the town had no church at all. In 1815 and 1816 a brick Presbyterian church went up near its site with money from a lottery the state authorized. In 1818 St. Jude's, meeting near Stony Creek, joined the new Diocese of North Carolina, and St. Mary's followed in 1819; Murphy counts St. Jude's as an old colonial mission revived. In the convention year 1819-20 G. T. Bedell, one of the first clergy Murphy found recorded as officiating in Hillsborough, preached in the Presbyterian church lent by its pastor John Witherspoon. A notice dated June 8, 1823 announced Bishop Ravenscroft at St. Mary's Chapel for June 22. In 1824, when St. Matthew's was reorganized under William Mercer Green, some vestrymen proposed claiming the old church lot, then used by the Presbyterians; Thomas Ruffin argued against it and offered his own land for a new church.
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.
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.
Joseph W. Murphy's sermon on the history of St. Matthew's Episcopal parish in Hillsborough, preached at the church on 21 September and 5 October 1890 and printed in Washington, D.C., in 1900. Forty pages.
A booklet from a three-day celebration, September 19 to 21, 2003, marking 250 years of Anglican and Episcopal presence in Orange County, North Carolina. A note summarizes its contents as the history of four congregations: St. Matthew's Church and St. Mary's Chapel in Hillsborough, and the Chapel of the Cross and the Church of the Holy Family in Chapel Hill. Sixteen unnumbered pages.
A three-page printed program for the ordination services conducted at St. Matthew's Episcopal Church in Hillsborough on Wednesday, August 7, 1872, set in two columns. An ordination sermon and an 1872 Hillsborough imprint, it is a small record of the Episcopal parish in the town in the years after the Civil War.
Compiled in 2009 by Ben Franklin from the records of Saint Mary's Episcopal Chapel in Orange County, this genealogy came out of a service project by the young women of three Latter-day Saint wards in Chapel Hill and Durham. Topics include church registers, cemeteries, registers of births and wills for the county, so the volume gathers burial and family data on Episcopal families there.
Hugh Conway Browning's notes on the history of St. Mary's Chapel, the Episcopal chapel near Hillsborough, gathered into 31 unnumbered leaves with plans and issued in Orange County in 1996, after Browning's death in 1983, apparently by Polly Cabe Roberts, who added a biographical sketch of him. Topics include Episcopal church history in Orange County.
Deborah Joy's archaeological assessment of St. Mary's Chapel Cemetery outside Hillsborough, prepared for the Committee on St. Mary's Chapel in April 1995. The report documents what survives at the burial ground. One volume in various pagings with illustrations, of use to anyone researching graves and families locally.
Deborah Joy's archaeological assessment of St. Mary's Chapel Cemetery, a field report from 1995 on a burial ground in the Hillsborough vicinity of Orange County. It belongs with the cemetery and archaeological studies of the county and would interest anyone tracing burials at St. Mary's or the condition of the site.
Anniversary history of Hillsborough Presbyterian Church marking its hundred and fiftieth year, from the congregation's founding in 1816 to 1966, published by the church in Hillsborough. 28 pages with illustrations, portraits and a facsimile. It includes Presbyterian experience of the Civil War.
Pipe organ and bench by Derrick and Felgemaker of Erie, Pennsylvania, dated 1831, with the makers' name imprinted above the keys. The pewter pipes stand in three rows, and those on view are decorated with gold leaf and flowers. The organ served the Presbyterian church in Hillsborough.
Historic American Buildings Survey documentation, compiled after 1933, of the brick Hillsborough Presbyterian Church at Churton and West Tryon Streets: three photographs, four data pages and a caption page. Names tied to the church's story include William Hooper, Archibald Murphy, William A. Graham, Frederick Nash, William J. Bingham and Edmund Strudwick, and its history touches on the Revolutionary War and slavery.
About 1810, the date in this card's title, belongs to the Hillsborough Presbyterian church building; the postcard carries no date of its own. The Paul C. Koeber Company of New York published it.
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.
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. “St. Matthew's Parish and Hillsborough's old church, 1752–1824.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/st-matthews-parish-storyline-1752/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
