Storyline · 1757–1782
Thomas Hart held land, office, mills and trade in colonial Orange, which shows how one man's interests could run together, and why he became unpopular with the Regulators. Granted land on the Eno from 1757, he built Hartford and bought the mill that became Hart's Mill. As sheriff from 1763 he was excused from taxes by the Assembly and found short in his account, and the Regulators whipped him in the 1770 court riot. He supplied Tryon's troops, then sat for Orange in the first Provincial Convention, the Third Provincial Congress and the state Senate before moving to Maryland in 1780 and leaving Hartford to Jesse Benton.
Thomas Hart came from Hanover County, Virginia, settled at Hillsborough and in 1757 was granted 273 acres, followed by 1,058 acres in 1759 and 951 in 1779, on the Eno River and nearby creeks. At Seven Mile Creek and the Eno, about two miles northwest of town, he built his home, Hartford. In 1763 Governor Arthur Dobbs appointed him sheriff, the office his father-in-law, John Gray, had held, and he served two years. As collector of taxes he became unpopular with the Regulators, though Stokes found no charge that he abused any of them. He and Francis Nash oversaw a ten-foot stockade around the Hillsborough jail and stocks in 1764 or 1765. On November 20, 1764 the Assembly passed a bill excusing Hart and others from paying taxes, and in May 1765 it found his account short because he had not collected the poll tax; he settled with the colony. In November 1767 Hart, a friend of Governor William Tryon, bought Joseph Maddock's grist mill on the Eno and built it up with a sawmill, oil mill, fulling mill, distillery and tannery. It became known as Hart's Mill.
In 1768 Hart was made a militia captain and commissary for the Orange and Granville troops. Ordered by Edmund Fanning to raise 500 men, he and Nash wrote on April 17 that they could not, since feeling against Fanning ran high. In the court riot of September 24, 1770 the Regulators whipped him, and on September 30 he joined James Watson, Nash and other leading men in asking Tryon for protection. In April 1771 he contracted to victual the militia raised against the Regulators, nearly a thousand men from eleven counties.
Elected to the Assembly in 1773, Hart received a petition for laws to regulate taxes and the courts, and some of the legislation he introduced passed. On August 25, 1774 he alone sat for Orange at the first Provincial Convention, and that year he joined Richard Henderson's Louisa Company to buy western lands. Gray died in 1775 and left him the plantation Grayfields, which Stokes found gave him the capital for his ventures. Hart sat in the Third Provincial Congress at Hillsborough in August 1775 and in the state Senate in 1777, resigning his commission as commissary of the Sixth North Carolina Regiment. From 1778 he kept a Hillsborough store with Nathaniel Rochester and James Brown. In the fall of 1780, with Loyalists raiding his property and Cornwallis expected, he moved his family to Hagerstown, Maryland, and Hartford went to Jesse Benton, husband of his niece. In December 1782 Benton wrote him that drought had left no water to run the mills.
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 1 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.
Account from 1768 for the cost of guarding one prisoner in the jail, a document from the Regulator troubles in Orange County, when backcountry settlers rose against royal officials they accused of extortionate fees and false records. Two images.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
House bills of 13 December 1796, among them a rejected bill for a district jail in the town of Hillsborough and a bill for separate elections and general musters in Orange County. Others concern inspectors, clearing the Yadkin River, and sheriffs. Thirty images.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
A bill of December 7, 1771 proposing a public jail and a jailer's house at Hillsborough for the Hillsborough District, four images among the bills of the colonial assembly session of November and December 1771 in the State Archives of North Carolina.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Stewart E. Dunaway's transcription of letters exchanged between Jesse Benton and Thomas Hart from 1780 to 1790, concerning Hart's affairs at Hartford, his place at Hillsborough. The letters concern the economic and social conditions of Hillsborough in the eighteenth century and the Revolution in North Carolina. Self-published through lulu.com in 2009, 68 pages with illustrations and facsimiles, and part of the library's Wall Local History Collection.
History of Maddock's Mill at Hillsborough and of its owners Thomas Hart, Rev. James Frazier, Jesse Benton and Catlett Campbell. Stewart E. Dunaway published it in 2022 through Lulu, 174 pages with illustrations, maps and facsimiles, appending Benton and Hart family histories.
Letters written between 1780 and 1790 by Jesse Benton, a lawyer at Hillsborough, to Thomas Hart, the owner of the Hartford mill complex, edited by Stewart Dunaway and published in 2009. Sixty eight pages with illustrations, facsimiles and a plan. The correspondence falls in the Revolutionary and early federal years.
Stewart E. Dunaway's earlier compilation of the Jesse Benton papers from Hartford at Hillsborough, covering 1780 to 1790, self-published in 1991, 68 pages with illustrations. Alongside the correspondence of Benton and Thomas Hart, it covers the Revolutionary War campaigns in North Carolina, including the battles of Hart's Mill and Lindley's Mill in 1781, both fought in what was then Orange County. Dunaway reissued the letters in 2009.
Reports and papers of the House Committee of Privileges and Elections for the 1783 session at Hillsborough, including depositions on disputed elections in Washington, Bladen, Rutherford and Beaufort counties. John Gray Blount, William Blount and Landon Carter appear. 62 images.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Letters sent to the governor in 1768 concerning rebellious and civil disturbances in Orange County and other provinces. Edmund Fanning, Francis Nash, William Butler, Peter Craven and James Hasell are named, with Hillsborough, Brunswick, Halifax and Wilmington as places and riot, militia, warrants and troop movements as topics. Cited to Colonial Office volume CO 5/312, North Carolina correspondence of the Secretary of State, 1768 to 1769.
Senate bills of 14 December 1793, 15 images: one to divide Beaufort County, another to repeal the relief act for militiamen disabled by wounds and for widows and orphans of those who died in service. Courthouses, marriage law and prisons also appear, and Hillsborough is among the places tied to the session.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Gray family papers, roughly 650 items in a linear foot and a half running from 1722 to 1879 and heaviest after 1846, in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC. Account books sit among the correspondence. Topics include lawyers in eighteenth and nineteenth century North Carolina, fisheries, family social life, and students at the Bingham School in Orange County and at Wesleyan Female College in Murfreesboro.
Stewart E. Dunaway's life of Edmund Fanning (1739-1818), the colonial officeholder in Hillsborough whom the Regulators singled out and who left North Carolina as a loyalist, together with the Fanning family's genealogy. Self-published through Lulu in 2011, 223 pages with illustrations, facsimiles, genealogical tables and maps. Topics include American loyalists and Hillsborough and Orange County biography and genealogy.
Richard Henderson's account of the mob violence he witnessed in court, written in 1770 and sent on to London. Edmund Fanning, James Hunter and Governor William Tryon all appear, and subjects include weaponry, rebellion, attack, property and civil disturbance. The violence occurred in Hillsborough, the Orange County town at the center of the Regulator quarrel. Reference CO 5/314.
Papers gathered around the Regulator troubles: printed advertisements, financial statements and the address the insurgents delivered to the governor's council on 20 June 1768. William Butler, James Hunter, Edmund Fanning and Isaac Edwards are among the men named, and the papers turn on taxes, grievances, oaths and petitions. Orange County was the center of the rising. Reference CO 5/312.
First issue of the Hillsborough Historical Society Journal, July 1998, drawing on Mary Claire Engstrom's research on the town. Pieces cover William Churton, the surveyor who laid out Hillsborough; Edmund Fanning and the town in the Regulator troubles and the Revolution; the Third Provincial Congress, which met at Hillsborough in 1775; and figures and places of the old town: Mary Burke, known as Polly, the Presbyterian minister John Knox Witherspoon, Dr. Thomas Webb and Faddis Tavern.
Marjoleine Kars's history of the Regulator Rebellion of 1766 to 1771, the backcountry uprising against corrupt county officials that ended at the Battle of Alamance. Hillsborough, the Orange County seat, was a center of the Regulators' protests and the scene of their 1770 court riot. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2002, 286 pages with illustrations and maps.
Reviewed in The Journal of Interdisciplinary History (2003).
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.
Annie Sutton Cameron's short account of Hillsborough during the Regulator uprising of 1766 to 1771, when backcountry farmers protested colonial officials and courts and Hillsborough, as the seat of Orange County, stood at the center of the conflict. Published by the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough in 1964, 36 pages with illustrations.
Carole Watterson Troxler's history of the Regulator movement in Piedmont North Carolina, from land speculation and backcountry resentment through Herman Husband and the Sandy Creek network to the petitions, court proceedings and rioting in Hillsborough and Salisbury, the Battle of Alamance in 1771 and the movement's afterlife in the Revolution. An appendix compiles names in a Regulator context. Published by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources in 2011, 221 pages with illustrations, maps and an index.
Documentary history of the Regulator movement of 1766 to 1771, the backcountry protest against corrupt county officials that centered on Hillsborough and ended at the Battle of Alamance, compiled by William S. Powell, James K. Huhta and Thomas J. Farnham. The volume prints primary sources from 1759 to 1776. Published by the State Department of Archives and History in 1971, xxxix and 626 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in The American Historical Review (1972), The Journal of Southern History (1972).
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).
William Edward Fitch's account of the Regulator movement and the Battle of Alamance of 1771, which his subtitle calls the first battle of the American Revolution, published by Neale in 1905 in a second edition. Hillsborough, the Orange County seat, was the scene of the Regulators' 1770 courthouse riot and of the hangings that followed Alamance. 307 pages with nine leaves of plates, folding maps and a portrait.
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.
Numbered dispatches 59 through 67 from Governor William Tryon to the Earl of Hillsborough, with enclosures about the Regulators, whose protests broke into riot at Hillsborough in 1770. Reproduced by Adam Matthew Digital in 2019 from Colonial Office CO 5/302. The papers touch on the council and assembly, naval stores and trade, oaths, militia and provincial troops, judges, sheriffs and juries, voting, currency, Cherokee affairs, clergy, quitrents and land, and name officials such as Richard Caswell, Richard Henderson, Maurice Moore and Hugh Waddell.
Dispatches from Josiah Martin, the last royal governor of North Carolina, to Wills Hill, Earl of Hillsborough, the secretary of state for the colonies for whom the Orange County seat is named, and to the Lords Commissioners in London. Adam Matthew Digital reproduced the file, Colonial Office CO 5/303 part 1, in 2019. Topics include women, medicine and health, land grants, the courts and litigation, German and Protestant migration to the frontier, the Regulators, riot and treason, salt and alcohol imports, Spanish shipping and crime.
Governor William Tryon's correspondence with the Earl of Hillsborough for the months from October 1768 to May 1769, just after Tryon marched militia to Hillsborough to protect the court from the Regulators. Adam Matthew Digital reproduced the file, Colonial Office CO 5/301, in 2019. Topics include legislation, Anglican clergy, soldiers' wages, sheriffs, land and quitrents, trade and currency, taxes and education, the Catawba and the boundary line, roads, a murder case, punishment and prison, and people such as Richard Caswell, James Hasell and John Rutherford.
Letters from Governor William Tryon to the Lords Commissioners in London, with enclosed legislation and the accounts of the ship Brigantine Fox, reproduced by Adam Matthew Digital in 2019 from Colonial Office file CO 5/300. They show the range of a governor's business: council appointments, judges and courts, assembly acts, cotton manufacturing, poverty, naval stores, rice, tobacco and indigo, currency, the Tuscarora, education, marriage, debt and customs. Hillsborough is among the places named, and people include William Johnston, Richard Henderson, Cornelius Harnett and Samuel Strudwick.
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. “Thomas Hart of Hartford, 1757–1782.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/thomas-hart-hartford-storyline-1757/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
