Named event or history
The federal office for the sub-district of Orange: its officers, the freedmen’s court, labor contracts and complaints, relief, and the freedmen’s schools it supported.
In briefFrom May 1866 to the end of 1868 the Freedmen's Bureau kept an office at Hillsborough for the sub-district of Orange, under Lt. Isaac Porter until the fall of 1867 and, after a run of agents, Lt. Thomas H. Hay from May 1868. It heard freedpeople's complaints over wages, crops and children, approved labor contracts and sent cases to the courts, gave rations to destitute people white and Black, and helped freedpeople open and keep schools across the county.
The dated events and research sources on this page document this event. Explore the dated events, or browse the research sources.
Orange County Indexed has not yet linked any indexed works directly to this event. The background reading below is about Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation, the wider history this event belongs to.
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 84, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 84 dated events in the chronology →
Answering a letter from Orange County's county attorney that Governor Jonathan Worth had passed on, General Ruger's headquarters ruled that the civil courts could try offenses where the law punished Black and white offenders alike. Freedmen's Bureau agents kept only petty cases punishable by up to a month in jail or a $100 fine.
People: Jonathan Worth
Job Berry, who had advertised a fair in September 1865 to raise money for a school, worked with the Friends of Philadelphia to buy the former Orange County courthouse on Queen Street for twelve hundred dollars and open a freedmen's school in it on June 5, 1866. More than three hundred children and adults learned to read and cipher there. The Freedmen's Bureau's state superintendent of education wrote on June 2, 1866 that a freedmen's school had then been running in Hillsborough for more than four months, with 107 pupils in April, and would reopen under its former principal.
People: Job Berry
On the night of November 2, 1866, Bill Fuller, a Black youth, was fatally wounded in the leg when C. C. Tinnen fired a gun out a window to break up a freedmen's corn shucking at his place, and a coroner's jury the next day found he meant no harm. Lieutenant Isaac Porter reported on November 9 that only two of the fifteen or twenty people present had been examined and that justice had not been sought, and on November 23 the acting assistant commissioner ruled the verdict unjustified by the evidence and ordered a complaint made to the civil authorities to bring the case to trial.
George T. Cook, a Black editor from Baltimore, spent a day in Hillsborough about December 1, 1866, taking subscriptions for his paper among Black residents, and on December 3 wrote from Hillsborough to the Bureau that Guilford County's courts dealt unjustly with Black people. The assistant commissioner's office, which thought him a sensationalist, asked Lt. Isaac Porter about him; Porter replied on December 18 that he had not met Cook and knew of the visit only from Black residents.
On March 26, 1867, Milly Johnson, a freedwoman living in Chapel Hill, asked the Bureau at Hillsborough to help her find five children sold or kept by former owners in Virginia and North Carolina, among them a daughter her former owner Albert Elliott had carried off after the surrender, claiming her until she was 21. Lieutenant Isaac Porter vouched for her account and sent it up on April 2; Virginia agents could not find the children sold there, and on July 31 the assistant commissioner ordered Elliott to return the daughter at his own expense, which he promised to do before October 1. On June 14 Porter wrote her that one daughter had left her owner in 1865 and was thought to be in Washington, that a son sold in 1859 through a Richmond firm could not be traced because its books had burned, and that her former husband was living in Essex County, Virginia.
Porter wrote to the governor on May 13, 1867, that he knew Messrs. Laws and Blackwood, applicants to be registrars for Orange County, and thought them qualified and acceptable to citizens of both races. On May 15 he sent the Bureau's state headquarters the names of persons to act as registrars and inspectors of elections in each of Orange's election districts.
Special Orders No. 120 relieved Porter from Bureau duty in North Carolina and added Orange and Person counties to the sub-division of Wake and Chatham under Dr. H. C. Vogell at Raleigh, to whom Porter was to turn over the Bureau's property. The Hillsboro letter book then has no entries until late February 1868.
The Hillsborough office's school report for February 1868 listed day schools at Hillsborough, taught by Misses Harris and Allen, Cedar Grove (Frank Whitted), Pleasant Green (William Douglass), the Ridge (London Moore) and Durham's (George Bradshaw). It counted 50 school districts without schools and about 6,000 children of both races who might attend, though it advised organizing schools in no more than half of them; agent James Carle had written to men in Orange and Person for the figures.
On April 24, 1868, Whittemore settled Jordan White's complaint against Addison E. Wilson, on whose land near the North Carolina Railroad White had cleared ground and cut wood, by ordering Wilson to pay him for 22 cords and a dollar a cord on 27 more and to let him stay and work his part of the place until November 1. Wilson asked for a new hearing on April 27, and Benjamin F. Mebane, William Bingham and Robert Bingham signed a statement that the custom of giving the wood to whoever cleared the land did not hold along the railroad, where wood had a cash value. White wrote to Gen. Nelson A. Miles on June 10 that the ruling had been turned against him at a hearing he was not called to; the case went to Lt. Thomas H. Hay and was closed on October 30 with a $7.50 judgment from a justice of the peace.
People: Benjamin Franklin Mebane · William Bingham (1835-1873) · Robert Bingham
Hay attended the term that sat from May 25 to May 30, 1868 under chairman James C. Turrentine with John W. Graham as county solicitor. The court made indentures binding Black children and cancelled the indentures of five. In state cases against Black defendants, petit larceny brought four convictions, three acquittals and one continuance, bastardy two convictions and two continuances, and keeping a disorderly house one conviction.
People: James C. Turrentine · John W. Graham
Hay investigated and settled twenty cases in June 1868, eighteen brought by freedmen and two by white men, and judged the freedmen to be working better than a year before. Some schools had closed for the summer, with children in the fields and some Northern teachers recalled for three months; he expected all to reopen in the fall and at least four new ones to start. Orange County needed some rations, nearly as many for whites as for Black residents.
On July 28, 1868, four residents of St. Mark's district wrote to Hay asking Bureau provisions for a very old woman who had been a charge on the county for many years, saying her efforts to get relief from the county had now failed. They wrote that the neighborhood would have fed her as before but that hardly anyone had surplus grain or meat, and Samuel Lynch, a former warden of the poor, vouched for them.
In his August 1868 report Hay wrote that threats to dismiss freedmen from plantations were sometimes made on account of their political opinions but few had been carried out. In September he knew of one dismissal for politics, in which the employer would pay; in October he found politics taking much of the freedmen's time but expected no serious trouble on election day; and on November 30 he reported the election excitement over and few such threats carried out.
Trustees led by Samuel Ellison wrote on October 3, 1868 that they had rented a building and engaged a teacher and would open with 35 scholars, soon 45, and asked the Bureau for $8 a month. Lt. Thomas H. Hay, who called the neighborhood very poor, recommended the aid and named Empson Moore the teacher, but on November 12 reported the school suspended because Moore had resigned.
Hay's October 1868 report counted 13 day schools in Orange and Person, adding schools at Banocks Chapel near Chapel Hill (John Weaver), Cotton Run and New Hope (London Moore) to those at Hillsborough, Chapel Hill, Durham's, Bains and Cedar Grove. All 11 teachers were Black, among them R. G. Fitzgerald and E. E. Anderson at Hillsborough, James Whitted at Bains and Georgianna Rumbley at Cedar Grove, and the freedpeople owned the schoolhouses at Banocks Chapel, Bains and Cedar Grove.
People: Robert G. Fitzgerald
Army Special Orders No. 305 of December 22, 1868 relieved Hay from Bureau duty to rejoin the 42nd Infantry from December 31, and the assistant commissioner told him to send all the office's books, papers and property to the chief quartermaster at Raleigh. Hay transferred the property by the North Carolina Railroad on December 26 and left Hillsborough on December 31.
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 and OpenStreetMap; town and community pins mark the middle of their mapped buildings.
These works give background on Freedom, schools, and Black community-building after emancipation, the wider history this event belongs to (56 works in all). Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Collected first-hand and second-hand stories from the Eno River valley as told from the standpoint of African Americans and Native people who have lived along the river in Orange and Durham counties, from prehistory to the present day. Issued by the Eno River Association in Durham as volume 10, number 2 of the Eno Journal, 2021, 106 pages with illustrations.
Jean Bolduc's 2016 collection of interviews with African American residents of Durham and Orange counties, presented as short biographies. The subjects are Floyd McKissick (1922-1991), the first African American admitted to UNC's law school, Walter Jackson, Brenda Stephens, Nate Davis, poet Jaki Shelton Green, Jackie Wagstaff, Diane Wright and Michelle Johnson, with a closing chapter on the Ku Klux Klan. 125 pages with illustrations.
Rosetta Austin Moore's survey of Black education in Orange County from the colonial era to 1970, in a revised edition published in 2015 through Lulu in Morrisville. After chapters on slavery nationally and on schooling for enslaved people in North Carolina, the book turns to the county: its formation, the growth of its schools, the arrival of free public schooling for all, and the schools and African American educators of the twentieth century. 265 pages with maps, portraits and facsimiles.
Pictorial history of Carrboro in Arcadia's Images of America series by David A. Otto and Richard Ellington, published in 2011. Its 127 pages of photographs, maps, facsimiles and portraits cover the town's history, social life and African American community, with a bibliography and index.
Folded map guide from the Chapel Hill Historical Society, published in 2009, plotting sites of Black history in Chapel Hill and Carrboro. Two maps mark places of interest with descriptions beside them, on a sheet that folds to pocket size, with illustrations, some in color.
Emily Eidenier Pearce's history of Rogers Road, the historically African American neighborhood on the edge of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and of what happened to it after Orange County opened its landfill next door in 1972. Drawing on interviews with residents, the book records the neighborhood's origins, family life, churches and customs, and then the environmental and social burdens of decades beside the landfill. Privately issued in 2009, 298 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
Charlene Regester (born 1956) recalls being one of the first Black children to attend Chapel Hill's white elementary schools, in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded February 23, 2001, by Susan Upton. Her parents, convinced that integrated schools would give Black children better resources, petitioned for her transfer to Estes Hills Elementary, then all white, and Regester describes what those years were like for her. About 45 minutes. Published online in 2007 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
John K. Chapman's 2006 study of race at UNC from 1793 to 1960, issued by the author. Chapman argues that standard university histories play down the institution's role in upholding white supremacy through slavery, Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era, and that they leave out what African Americans contributed to the campus. It also covers segregation in education and the social conditions of Black residents of Chapel Hill across two centuries. 215 pages with maps.
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.
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.
Interview recorded June 21, 2000 with Rebecca Clark (1915-2009), a Black Chapel Hill resident, for the Southern Oral History Program at UNC. Clark, educated in Chapel Hill's segregated schools, describes working life under segregation and the economic discrimination she met in it. Topics also include Lincoln High School, school integration, and Howard Lee, elected mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969. Interview K-0536 in collection #4007.
Sheila Florence (born 1947) was one of the first African American students to enter Chapel Hill High School when it desegregated. In this January 2001 interview with Bob Gilgor she describes growing up in segregated Chapel Hill, the poor state of the town's Black schools, including Lincoln High School, the harassment she faced at the formerly white school, and the civil rights demonstrations of the era. About an hour and forty minutes; electronic edition from the UNC library, 2006, through Documenting the American South.
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