Storyline · 1789–1818
The University was granted escheats, the property of people who died without heirs, in 1789, and unsold confiscated Loyalist lands, chiefly Henry Eustace McCulloch's claims, in 1794. Its suits over those claims angered landholders, and in 1800 the legislature repealed both grants. In 1804 the courts held that the peace treaty protected McCulloch, and the money collected was refunded. In 1805 the Assembly restored the escheats and made the governor president of the trustees. By 1809 the trustees had escheat attorneys in ten districts, and in 1818 the board counted on Tennessee land warrants to pay for a new chair of rhetoric and logic.
In December 1789, alongside the University's charter, a second act gave it the proceeds of property that fell to the state for want of heirs, its escheats. In December 1794 the Assembly added confiscated Loyalist lands still unsold, chiefly the forfeited claims of Henry Eustace McCulloch, but sent anything above $20,000 to the state, and the University's suits to collect under that act angered landholders in Mecklenburg and nearby counties. In 1798 Charles Gerrard, a Revolutionary lieutenant living in Edgecombe County, left the University his 2,560-acre service tract on the Cumberland River below Nashville, asking that it stay University property forever, with warrants for 11,364 more acres; the gift emboldened the trustees to begin the Main Building.
In 1800, amid hostility to the University as a Federalist school and anger at its suits over the McCulloch claims, the legislature repealed the 1794 grant of confiscated property and the 1789 grant of escheats; the courts later held the escheat repeal unconstitutional in University v. Foy. In 1804, in Ray's Executors v. McCulloch and Trustees v. Rice, the Court of Conference held that the 1783 peace treaty protected McCulloch's claims, and the General Assembly ordered the money collected under the 1794 act refunded to the state treasury in trust for the debtors who had paid. In 1805 a bill restoring the escheats passed the House 82 to 35 and the Senate 32 to 23, with Maurice Moore, one of the first students, among its strongest advocates; the escheats' Tennessee land warrants later became the University's endowment. The same act made the governor president of the trustees and let the General Assembly fill vacancies on joint ballot, and a trustee absent from meetings for two years could lose his seat. In 1809 the trustees named escheat attorneys in ten districts, Archibald D. Murphey among them, paid by commission on sales and collections, and the legislature gave the University estate balances unclaimed for seven years. In 1818, counting on money from Tennessee land warrants, the board created a chair of rhetoric and logic and an adjunct chair of moral philosophy; Shepard K. Kollock took the rhetoric chair in the fall of 1819.
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.
Photograph from about 1903 of South Building on the university campus in Chapel Hill. Work on the building started in 1798 under Samuel Hopkins, was later carried on by John Clare, and finished in 1814. Part of the Images of North Carolina collection.
Draft minutes of the Grand Lodge of North Carolina for 14 April 1798, recording the Masonic ceremony for laying the cornerstone of the University of North Carolina's Old South Building in Chapel Hill.
South Building at UNC on 22 April 1987, showing its columns with flowers in bloom, in a Hugh Morton color photograph. Mounted 35 mm slide.
South Building on the UNC-Chapel Hill campus, probably shot on infrared film by Hugh Morton in late 1946 or early 1947. Morton gave six photographs to the Alumni Office that autumn, and this one ran on page 216 of the April 1947 Alumni Review. Black-and-white sheet film negative.
Resolutions adopted by a meeting of Hillsborough citizens on Friday 30 January 1835, on the death of Joseph Caldwell, president of the University of North Carolina, who died that year. Signed at the end by W. J. Bingham as secretary and dated 31 January 1835. Printed at Hillsborough, it is a single sheet of civic mourning from Orange County.
Exhibit text on Joseph Caldwell, founder of the Caldwell Observatory at UNC and the university's first president, photographed at the Morehead Planetarium on 30 May 2002 for the North Carolina ECHO project.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Kemp P. Battle's 1902 account of the two monuments to Joseph Caldwell, the university's first president, on the Chapel Hill campus. Battle lived from 1831 to 1919. Detached from the December 1902 University of North Carolina Magazine and signed by Battle, it was published by the Dialectic and Philanthropic Literary Societies.
Walker Anderson's oration on Joseph Caldwell, the University of North Carolina's first president, given in Person Hall on 24 June 1835 before the trustees, faculty and students at the executive committee's request. J. Gales and Son printed it in Raleigh the same year.
Adam Lucas marks one hundred years of basketball at the University of North Carolina in this illustrated history, published by UNC Press in 2010 in association with the athletics department. Chapters follow the program from the game's arrival on campus and the 'White Phantoms' of the Southern Conference through the founding of the ACC, the 1957 season, Dean Smith's changes to the game and the title seasons of 1982, 1993, 2005 and 2009, closing with a century of statistics. 289 pages.
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.
The Duke and North Carolina basketball rivalry written together by Johnny Moore and Art Chansky, the latter a sports reporter who has followed it since his student days at UNC. The book opens with the 2014 season and moves through recruiting battles old and new, 'Black and Blue Sunday', 'Blood and Roses', and chapters on the rivalry's heroes, leaders and teachers, with a foreword by Jay Bilas and a photo gallery. Published by Triumph Books in 2014, 289 pages.
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.
Steven J. Tepper's chronicle of how the University of North Carolina marked its bicentennial in 1993 and 1994. An appendix reprints the University Day speeches of October 12, 1993, given by Paul Hardin, James B. Hunt Jr., C.D. Spangler, William C. Friday, Charles Kuralt and President Bill Clinton, plus bicentennial addresses by Li Lu, Francis S. Collins and Richard J. Richardson. Published by the university in Chapel Hill, 1998; 284 pages.
Art Chansky's 2016 account of Dean Smith, Charlie Scott and the years that changed Chapel Hill as a Southern college town. Scott was the first Black scholarship player in the Carolina basketball program. Topics include civil rights, racism in sports and the university's twentieth-century history.
Biography of William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system, by historian William A. Link, published by UNC Press in 1995 with the subtitle power, purpose, and American higher education. It covers Friday's career and the history of the university at Chapel Hill and statewide. Part of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection.
William D. Snider's history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1992. It runs 370 pages with illustrations, a bibliography and an index.
Reviewed in History of Education Quarterly (1993), The Journal of Southern History (1993).
Twelve essays by novelist Daphne Athas (1923-2020) on the Chapel Hill she knew across the twentieth century. Subjects include Carrboro as 'the Paris of the Piedmont', philosopher Horace Williams, Betty Smith writing in Chapel Hill, Junius Scales, Ab Abernethy and the Intimate Bookshop, Richard Wright's visit, and a set of Chapel Hill murders. Published 2010, 243 pages with illustrations.
Scott Fowler gathers recollections from Carolina basketball players, decade by decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, organized around Roy Williams and the question in the title. Contributors include Lennie Rosenbluth, Larry Brown, Billy Cunningham, Charlie Scott, Phil Ford, James Worthy, Brad Daugherty, Eric Montross, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Raymond Felton and Sean May, each entry giving position and playing years. Published 2010 by Triumph Books of Chicago, 270 pages, here as an e-book.
Archibald Henderson's history of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, its buildings and grounds from the founding in the 1790s onward. Henderson, a professor of mathematics and a prolific historian of the university, wrote it in the years around the university's sesquicentennial. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 412 pages with illustrations and bibliographical footnotes.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1949), South Atlantic Quarterly (1950).
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
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 University's escheats and confiscated lands in the legislature, 1789–1818.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/unc-escheats-storyline-1789/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
