Storyline
The county’s public buildings at Hillsborough in the court minutes: repairs and a stockade for the jail, the pillory and stocks, the taxes and treasurers for public buildings, a public clock, and the courtroom refitted.
In briefFrom 1752 to 1837 the county and the Assembly built, lost and rebuilt Hillsborough's courthouse and jail. Until a frame courthouse was ready in December 1756 the court met in private homes, and in 1757 the sheriff was ordered to provide stocks, a pillory and a whipping post. The second county jail burned, a fire in March 1790 took the courthouse, and that year the Assembly ordered a new one where the burned one had stood. Henry Harris, a Black man jailed as a runaway because he could not prove his freedom, was charged with setting fire to the county jail. John Berry completed a two-story stone jail, set at no more than $4,000, in 1837.
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In September 1752 the county justices chose a site north of the Haw River, within two miles of Piney Ford, and gave Marmaduke Kimbrough the contract for a frame courthouse and a log prison; they met there that December, but the buildings were probably never finished. In 1754 the Assembly, judging that site too far west, directed that the courthouse, prison and stocks stand where the Western path crossed the Eno, on land where James Watson lived, the start of Hillsborough. In 1755 Alexander Mebane, Josiah Dixon and William Churton laid out the town's first prison, and Lot No. 1 was set aside for the market house, courthouse, prison, pillory and stocks. A frame courthouse went up in 1755 and was ready for use in December 1756; until then the court had met in private homes, including James Watson's. In 1757 Joseph Maddock built the log prison, pinned to the ground to make it more secure, and the sheriff was ordered to provide stocks, a pillory and a whipping post. In 1764 a second jail went up, and a ten-foot stockade was built around it and the stocks for twenty-four pounds, with Thomas Hart and Francis Nash overseeing the work.
By Herman Husband's account, during the superior court of September 1768 he was committed to a newly built, higher prison fortified all round and crowded with nine or ten prisoners, most of them Regulators; he and William Butler were bailed that night. A district jail built in 1771 replaced the second county jail, which had burned. In April 1778 the Assembly ordered a new courthouse, with Nathaniel Rochester and William Courtney overseeing the work. In the fall of 1780 the Board of War made the courthouse a storehouse for the army, and in December 1781 the Assembly taxed the district and the town to repair the courthouse, the stocks and the town's streets. In March 1790 a fire destroyed the greater part of Hillsborough, the district and county courthouse among the buildings lost, and the courts moved into a private house.
The county court's minutes follow the public buildings at Hillsborough. In 1788 the court repaid John Walker for repairs to the courthouse and jail of the Hillsborough District, and in 1790 the Assembly ordered a new courthouse raised where the burned one had stood. The court paid Sheriff John Sloss for a stockade around the jail in 1791 and had a pillory and stocks (wooden frames that held an offender by the neck and wrists, or by the ankles, for public punishment) built on the public lot in 1791 and 1792; in 1793 the county paid for rooms where its court had sat. Sheriff Joseph Hodge reported the jail too weak to hold prisoners in 1794. In 1797 the court levied a tax to build a county jail, and in 1798 the Assembly provided for a new district jail.
Treasurers of public buildings, James Baldridge from 1796, Sterling Harris from 1799 and James Webb from 1807, kept the money from the taxes the court laid for repairs and debts. The court ordered a public clock for the courthouse in 1805, let the treasurer hire a keeper for it in 1809, had the street opposite paved in 1814, and in 1817 named a committee, Thomas Ruffin among them, to alter the bar and jury boxes. When the market house was torn down in 1826, the town clock, which had hung in its tower after leaving the old Episcopal church steeple, was put in storage until the new courthouse was finished.
In February 1836 James S. Smith, Cadwallader Jones and James Webb, acting as commissioners, asked builders for bids on a two-story stone jail 45 feet long. Henry Harris, a Black man who had been jailed as a runaway because he could not prove his freedom and escaped soon after, was charged with setting fire to the county jail, and at the spring term of Superior Court in 1836 his case was moved to Caswell County for trial. John Berry won the contract for the jail, planned at forty-five by twenty-four feet and no more than $4,000, and completed it in 1837.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 43 dated events in the chronology →
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.
Background reading on Law, Courts & Justice. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
An Alex Cross thriller by James Patterson with Chapel Hill among its settings alongside Washington, D.C. Bombings, a kidnapping, a missing-persons investigation, terrorism and fathers and sons are its subjects; the Sampson of the title is Cross's longtime partner John Sampson. Published by Little, Brown in 2026.
David Cook collects the grim side of the Eno River's past in Orange and Durham counties: ghost stories, crimes, train wrecks and accidents, including the hanging of rebels near the river in 1771, a sawmill accident said to have started a run of hauntings, and a dance one Valentine's Day that ended badly. Published by The History Press in 2025, 141 pages with illustrations.
Joanna Pearson's novel of a cold case at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Karlie Richards was a nineteen-year-old student when she was murdered; decades later her onetime roommate, divorced and in middle age, finds herself drawn back to the crime as online conspiracy theories about it multiply. A psychological thriller with a Chapel Hill setting, published by Bloomsbury in 2024, 275 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.
John Bare's mystery set in Chapel Hill. Lassie James is drinking at the Pig Farm Tavern one October night when Holly Pike, the woman who left him years earlier when they were about to marry and never explained, walks in; before he can settle his feelings she draws him into trouble involving fraud, corruption and a murder that he ends up investigating as an amateur. Published by Wisdom House Books of Chapel Hill in a first edition of 2021, 287 pages.
Patricia S. Parker draws on civil rights organizer Ella Baker (1903-1986) to set out a method of community engagement and communication for social justice work, illustrated by case studies from the Ella Baker Women's Center for Leadership and Community Activism in Chapel Hill. Chapters cover entering into community partnerships, creating participative spaces for organizing, storytelling as leadership, and self-care for activists, with a case study timeline and curriculum overview appended. Published by the University of California Press in 2020, 177 pages.
Charlotte Fryar's 2019 doctoral dissertation on racial justice movements at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1951, the year the university admitted its first Black students, through 2018. Topics include African American students and employees, school desegregation, racial discrimination and activism, and the work belongs to the history of race relations on the Chapel Hill campus.
J. G. Hetherton's mystery novel set in Hillsborough, in which a woman journalist returning home investigates murder and missing children. Published in New York by Crooked Lane in 2018, 312 pages.
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).
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.
Stewart E. Dunaway's 2015 addendum to his history of Hillsborough's town lots, adding deed records arranged by lot number and further town history, with the expansion of the 1890s covered for the first time. Self-published in North Carolina as version 1.0, 446 pages with illustrations, facsimiles and maps. Topics include deeds, court records, land titles and real property in Hillsborough.
Deed transcripts for the town lots of Chapel Hill and adjoining land from 1790 to the 1930s, compiled by Stewart E. Dunaway. Each transcript keeps only the working facts: grantor and grantee, price, acreage and the metes and bounds of the parcel. Self-published in 2014 as Issue 1G, 702 pages with maps and facsimiles.
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