Local theme
Immigration and migration to the county: who came, why, where they lived, and what they built.
47 indexed records are connected with this theme.
Narrow the indexed records. Each link opens the search already limited to this theme. Counts are indexed records, not copies on a shelf.
Named events and episodes the index follows in detail. Each has its own page.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. The first group is the works most libraries hold on this theme, novels aside; the second is what the index added most recently. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Letters to Nancy Dunnagan from her children and grandchildren in Union and Webster counties, Kentucky, discussing family matters and farming. Included are estate papers of Timothy Dunnagan, her husband.
Apr. 22: Report on appropriations of fines and forfeitures in the Superior and Inferior courts (messages only) Apr. 26: Report to Governor Alexander Martin on his address May 11: Report on the remonstrance of Patrick Sa…
Apr. 16: Report on governor's message, resolves of Congress, etc. (messages only) Apr. 17: Report on governor's message and related letters and papers. (messages only) Apr. 17: Report on the petition from a number of in…
… El Pueblo Inc. focuses on the Latin American community of North Carolina and Latino issues broadly.
Family and business correspondence of T. W. Harriss, including letters to members of the family in Tennessee and Mississippi, and correspondence, 1870-1891, of Harriss' son, Thomas. The collection includes accounts givi…
Family correspondence with relatives in Hempstead Co., Ark., Fayette Co., Tenn., San Marcos, Tex., and elsewhere. Of interest are Civil War letters from Samuel Venable Daniel concerning coastal defenses at Hatteras Isla…
Foundational works for this theme in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection: broad histories, major interpretations, primary-source collections, and reference compilations, chosen by the Friends from the collection’s catalog.
Going to Carolina del Norte is the strongest candidate for modern community change; the remaining titles concern earlier migration or statewide context.
Dated events connected with this theme: sixteen of 70, the highlights and the earliest of the rest, in date order. See all 70 in the chronology →
After a failed cotton crop, Washington Duke began growing tobacco in 1859 on his farm, then in Orange County, following favorable publicity among Orange County farmers. The farm used the labor of an enslaved girl, Caroline, bought in 1855, and later a leased enslaved man, Jim, who worked in tobacco.
The 1860 census recorded more than 5,000 enslaved people in Orange County, whose labor sustained the county's farms. At emancipation they made up roughly a third of the county's population.
Jim, an enslaved man whose labor Washington Duke leased to grow and cure tobacco, ran away with three others in June 1863 trying to reach Union lines. After the war he took the surname Cox and became a tobacco sharecropper in the Durham area.
About 6,000 enslaved people in Orange County were freed at the end of the Civil War. Many Black families left for Durham and other towns, while some stayed on the land as tenant farmers or sharecroppers.
Orange County tenant Jessa Buttler signed a chattel mortgage pledging his horse and his entire crop of corn, wheat, oats and tobacco to landowner C. R. Miller for a debt of $88.20. By October 1890 the debt stood at $106.04 despite partial payments.
Tenants operated 643 of 1,870 Orange County farms in 1930 (34.4 percent), 718 of 1,956 in 1935 (36.7 percent) and 687 of 2,043 in 1940 (33.6 percent). Of the 1940 tenants, 514 were share tenants and croppers.
Under the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, John Parker borrowed $3,915 through the Farm Security Administration to buy a 145-acre farm, the first such loan to a Black farmer in Orange County. He paid it off in about six years on a 40-year note.
The county Farm Security Administration office awarded certificates of merit to 15 Black farm ownership borrowers, former tenants it had helped to buy farms. By March 1944 the county had 22 approved tenant-purchase loans.
As returning veterans pushed enrollment to about 6,800, the federal government put up the prefabricated metal houses of Victory Village on 65 acres of UNC's south campus in 1946. About 350 student families lived there, and the last units were torn down in the early 1970s for the expansion of UNC Hospitals.
The News of Orange County reported a Farmers Home Administration effort to raise tenant income by adding livestock to tobacco farming. Tenants on the Banks Wilson farm near Cedar Grove added hogs and other animals, and 42 county farm families had FHA operating loans.
Tenant-operated farms in Orange County fell from 513 of 1,939 farms in 1954 to 295 of 1,405 in 1959, and croppers fell from 261 to 135. In 1959, 500 of the county's farms were classed as tobacco farms.
The Student Health Action Coalition began in 1967 with a few UNC medical students seeing patients in supporters' homes. It now holds a free Wednesday evening clinic at the Carrboro Community Health Center, with student interpreting teams in Spanish and Mandarin.
Orange-Chatham Comprehensive Health Services began in 1970 as a joint venture of UNC's Division of Health Affairs and a local community action program, bringing federally funded primary care to rural residents. UNC staffed its health centers, including Prospect Hill and Haywood-Moncure, from September 1970, and the program later became Piedmont Health.
Subject: Piedmont Health Services
By July 1975 Chapel Hill residents had sponsored two Vietnamese refugee families and expected more. Four churches pledged about $1,500 for a family sponsored by UNC historian Thomas Reefe, and volunteers were directed to INFO, a referral service in the Inter-Church Council building.
All 55 refugee direct arrivals recorded in Orange County in fiscal year 2006-2007 came from Burma. A second resettlement agency, the Triangle office of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, opened.
On February 10, 2015, neighbor Craig Hicks shot and killed Deah Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Abu-Salha, 21, and her sister Razan Abu-Salha, 19, in the couple's Chapel Hill condominium. Hicks pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder in June 2019 and received three consecutive life sentences without parole.
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