Named event or history
The county’s public schools from the 1868 constitution through township and district school committees, separate schools for Black and white children, teachers’ institutes, and the first graded and high schools.
In briefAfter the Civil War Orange County organized its public schools by township and district, with separate schools for Black and white children under local school committees. In the 1880s and 1890s the county board formed new districts and counted its log and frame schoolhouses; after 1900 districts voted local taxes for graded schools for white children, eight rural schoolhouses went up in one school year, and a 1918–19 survey found white teachers earning a median $50 a month and Black teachers $35.
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 Schools & Education, the wider history this event belongs to.
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 192, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 192 dated events in the chronology →
When the 1839 school law put tax-supported common schools to a vote in each county, Orange approved. Approving counties raised $20 per district, matched two to one from the Literary Fund.
When Alexander Dickens resigned as school committeeman for Hillsborough Township, the county Board of Education unanimously elected John T. Hogan in his place. At the same meeting it accepted Dr. Clop's resignation for Chapel Hill Township and chose John Hutchins.
In 1884 Orange had 33 white and 31 Black public schools, with 1,369 white and 1,134 Black pupils, a term under ten weeks, and mostly log buildings. School property was valued at $3,500 for white schools and $2,500 for Black schools.
Webb's Warehouse, the Hillsborough leaf-tobacco sales house, changed hands and was to reopen under a new name with C. J. Pogue of Hillsborough and J. D. English of Danville, Virginia, as proprietors.
Unable to find anyone to serve as its committee, the board placed Harmony School under its own supervision so a school could be taught there.
The board gave Colonel George Tate, maker of a map of Orange County, leave to offer it for sale to the school committee of every district.
The county Board of Education, sitting January 3 to 5, counted 4,820 children of school age in Orange County and divided the school fund among the township districts at about $1.30 a child.
The committee bought a house on a two-acre lot, known as the Wash Bruce or Gill lot, from E. S. Cooley for $500. Pender says Hillsboro had never before owned a school building; the county board furnished it and paid for repairs.
Subject: Hillsborough High School
The Orange County Board of Education divided the year's school fund among about 4,700 children of school age and set aside more than $1,000 for new schoolhouses to be built in 1903.
People: Charles Edward Maddry
The new public school building for the Efland district was completed. The Observer called it one of the best, if not the best, public school buildings in the county.
The book's list of Chapel Hill school superintendents begins with E. M. Highsmith, 1908 to 1910. Chapel Hill ran its schools as a separate unit under a special legislative charter.
Fire destroyed the school building in the University community in the fall of 1910, and on November 3 the board asked the state for a $700 loan to rebuild it. In April 1911 the board offered a $100 reward, if the law allowed, for conviction of whoever had set the fire.
Subject: University Station
Answering a petition from Cedar Grove residents, the board offered on May 3, 1915 to buy the old Cedar Grove Academy from Annie Hughes and on May 15 paid her $1,500 for it, deeding her the lot of the one-teacher school it closed. The new Cedar Grove High School took grades one through eleven.
People: Samuel Paul Lockhart
Subject: Hughes Academy (Cedar Grove Academy) · Cedar Grove schools
The diocese gave the Orange County Board of Education two acres of the chapel tract, west of the chapel and north of St. Mary's Road, on condition that the land be used only for a public school and return to the diocese if the school closed.
Subject: St. Mary’s Chapel
Every white district had a schoolhouse, but the 28 Black districts had only 25: two used churches and one had no place at all. The survey judged every Black school building unsatisfactory, worst at Sunnyside, Merritt's, Cedar Grove and Maple Grove, and the first two were log houses.
Around 1920 pupils from the area began riding buses to the elementary school in Chapel Hill, and the two-room school John Edward Clark had built was made into a house.
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 16 with a known location.
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 Schools & Education, the wider history this event belongs to (6,685 works in all). Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
A 2026 novel set in Carrboro. Frances, thirty and grieving her mother, and her husband Ben open their marriage, and the book follows what that decision does to them and to the people closest to them. The characters include college teachers and a ghostwriter. 296 pages.
An illustrated online timeline of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, issued by the school in 2025. One page with portraits.
A 2025 history of University of North Carolina baseball from its nineteenth-century beginnings to the program's rise as an ACC power. Chapters cover the early years on campus, the building of Boshamer Stadium, and the Mike Fox era. Self-published by the author, 288 pages.
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.
The 2023 issue of Carrboro High School's literary magazine, featuring fiction and poetry written by its students.
William R. Burk's history of botany at the University of North Carolina, from its early natural scientists such as Denison Olmsted and Elisha Mitchell through later figures including George Francis Atkinson, Joseph Austin Holmes and Henry Van Peters Wilson, closing with a chapter on the Department of Botany itself. Published in Fort Worth in 2023.
Willis P. Whichard's biography of David Lowry Swain, governor of North Carolina from 1832 to 1835 and president of the University of North Carolina from 1835 until his death in 1868. The subtitle ties Swain, nineteenth-century North Carolina and the university together, and the book belongs with the lives of college presidents and governors. Published in 2022.
Jim Grimsley's coming-of-age novel about Ronny, who grew up in a trailer alongside his mother and a string of stepfathers, kept his head down, earned good grades and won a scholarship to UNC in Chapel Hill. On campus he finds his first love and begins to sort out who he is. Subjects include gay college students, first loves and mothers and sons. Published by Levine Querido in 2022, 322 pages.
Scott Madry's recollections of the student tech crew at Memorial Hall, the University of North Carolina's auditorium in Chapel Hill, presented under the banner of the Carolina Union, the campus student union. Published in Chapel Hill in 2021.
Geeta Kapur's history of race at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the enslaved labor that built the campus through desegregation and the Black student protests that followed. Twelve chapters, with a foreword by William Barber II, move from the founding era and the Great Depression controversies to the state's response to integration and the turmoil of later decades; North Carolina Central University also figures. Published 2021 by Blair in Durham.
Tracy Deonn's young adult fantasy about an African American teenager who arrives as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after her mother's death and finds a secret society bound to Arthurian legend, with demons, magic and her own family's past. Published by Margaret K. McElderry Books in 2020, 501 pages, for ages 14 and up. Winner of the 2021 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Reviewed in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books./Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (2020).
Sylvia D. Hoffert's article on Margaret Anna Burwell, 1810 to 1871, and the work of being a Presbyterian minister's wife in North Carolina from 1835 to 1857, the years of the female school she and her husband kept in Hillsborough. Pages 245 to 275 with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits, issued by the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh in 2019.
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