Six people are documented as lynched in Orange County: Washington Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, Daniel Morrow, Wright Malone and Cyrus Guy in 1869, and Manly McCauley in 1898. The county’s 2022 resolution apologized and approved markers without naming them.
In briefSix people are documented as lynched in Orange County: Washington Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, Daniel Morrow, Wright Malone and Cyrus Guy in 1869, and Manly McCauley in 1898. Sworn testimony before Congress in 1871 gives the same count for 1869, four men hanged and one shot (Josiah Turner Jr.), or five Black men killed (constable W. G. Turrentine), though names differ: the Senate committee's list and two Orange witnesses name a man called Wood, hanged east of Hillsborough, and two sources a William Guy, who may be Cyrus Guy. In September 2022 the county commissioners apologized for racial-terror lynchings and approved markers, citing five cases without naming the victims.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Orange County, N.C. Road Records
Dunaway, Stewart E. · 2008
Three volumes of historic Orange County road records compiled by Stewart E. Dunaway and self-published through Lulu.com in 2008, with maps. The documents, reproduced as facsimiles and sometimes transcribed, include petitions for new roads, requests for road upkeep, bridge records and papers explaining why roads were rerouted. Road petitions name the householders along a route. The third volume also gathers records connected with Cyrus Guy's lynching in Orange County in 1869.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Lynching -- North Carolina -- Orange County.
Diaries and papers of John Hill Wheeler of Hertford County, historian, legislator, state treasurer from 1843 to 1845 and minister to Nicaragua from 1854 to 1857. The diaries, a broken run from 1854 to 1882, follow his social and political life in Washington, D.C. University commencements at Chapel Hill and his work on North Carolina history also come up. State Archives of North Carolina, MfP.51.
Why this is here: The record names this subject alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Cowles, Calvin J. (Calvin Josiah), 1821-1907 · 1817
Papers of Calvin J. Cowles, 1817 to 1885. A Wilkes County merchant, Cowles was a Unionist Whig and later a Republican, presided over the Constitutional Convention of 1868 and ran the United States Branch Mint at Charlotte from 1869 to 1884. Early letters involve his father and business partner Josiah of Surry County. Reconstruction, Governor W. W. Holden and Orange County come up. State Archives of North Carolina, PC.111.
Why this is here: The record names this subject alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
David L. Swain, 1801 to 1868, served as governor of North Carolina and then as president of the university at Chapel Hill. His papers span 1807 to 1877 with the bulk from 1833 to 1868. Subjects include Cornelia Phillips Spencer, Elisha Mitchell, W. W. Holden and Thomas Ruffin, and cover state politics, railroads, and records of enslaved people. Microfilm reels were made in 1949 and 1974.
Why this is here: The record names this subject alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
William Andrew Jeffreys (1817-1845) and Family Papers
Jeffreys family · 1786
Papers of William Andrew Jeffreys, Franklin County lawyer and state senator, and his uncle Robert N. Jeffreys of Wake County, 1786 to 1883. They include grand jury indictments and road reports from 1839 to 1842, an 1844 plan for a literary, scientific and military academy in Raleigh, and family letters on plantations, slavery, politics and travel. Chapel Hill and the Hillsborough Military Academy come up. State Archives of North Carolina, PC.66.
Why this is here: The record names this subject alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Papers of the Jones family of Crabtree in Wake County, 1771 to 1940: planter and legislator Nathaniel Jones (died 1828), his son Kimbrough Jones (died 1866), Mary Warren Jones, and Kimbrough Jones Jr. and his wife Mary Green Jones. Topics include plantations and enslaved people, cotton, politics and the Civil War. Chapel Hill also comes up. State Archives of North Carolina, PC.105.
Why this is here: The record names this subject alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Papers of John Heritage Bryan (1798 to 1870), New Bern lawyer, legislator and Whig congressman from 1825 to 1829, dating 1716 to 1907. His letters mostly follow social life in the towns and plantations of eastern North Carolina, chiefly New Bern and Raleigh, from the 1820s to the 1860s, and touch the university at Chapel Hill and the Hillsborough Academy.
Why this is here: The record names this subject alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Lynchings (Chapel Hill Historical Society vertical file)
Undated newspaper clippings and photocopied articles on lynchings, gathered in the Chapel Hill History series of the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Vertical File Collection.
Earliest first. Scroll sideways, or use the arrows.
16 dated events
The White Brotherhood, a Ku Klux order, appears in Orange County
Violence or armed conflict · Hillsborough
The first Klan-type order to reach North Carolina, the White Brotherhood, set up camps including one at Hillsborough. Its Orange County chief was Colonel Joseph C. Webb, followed by Frederick N. Strudwick.
Violence or armed conflict · southwestern Orange County, near the Chatham and Alamance lines
After William M. Jones had a Black tenant family turned out by a writ of possession, served by officer James F. Minor with Jesse W. Morrow helping, the barns of all three men, newly filled with wheat, burned within the same ten minutes one night after harvest, according to George Laws, clerk of the superior court, testifying before the Senate committee on February 15, 1871. Laws said evidence in his court showed Jeff Morrow, a Black man, had meant to have satisfaction after harvest, and that the disguised men who took two prisoners from the Hillsborough jail and hanged others acted over these burnings; constable W. G. Turrentine counted two barns, and said the one prisoner tried on the charge was acquitted. Two Alamance men who admitted White Brotherhood membership, W. S. Bradshaw and George S. Rogers, also described barns burned in one night in that neighborhood near the Alamance line, Rogers placing it in 1868, and Josiah Turner Jr. testified that the fires came just after harvest.
Early on August 7, 1869, about 100 disguised white men took Washington Morrow and his brother Nelson from the Hillsborough jail, where they were held on barn-burning charges, and shot Washington as they fled; he died of the wound. On October 14 a mob hanged their father, Thomas Jefferson Morrow, and their uncle, Daniel Morrow.
Law, policy or court · Hillsborough and the roads southwest toward Alamance and Chatham counties
On the morning after disguised men broke open the Orange County jail and shot two Black prisoners, the sheriff summoned Hillsborough men to follow the raiders' horse tracks from the bridge where the prisoners were shot. About three miles out, where the road forked, the tracks split toward Chatham and toward the Oaks in Alamance; Empson Moore counted forty or fifty tracks and picked up a stuffed cloth horn with blood on it, and Haywood Beverley followed twelve or fifteen riders about ten miles, to within two miles of Webb's store in Alamance. Both men described the pursuit at Governor Holden's impeachment trial on March 8, 1871.
Holden's proclamation of October 20, 1869, named Lenoir, Jones, Orange and Chatham counties and said that in Orange the jail had been forced, two Black prisoners taken out and shot, and three other Black men hanged. He warned that he would declare those counties in a state of insurrection and use the whole power of the state if the violence continued.
Orange County Klansmen agree to disband after Pride Jones carries the governor's offer
Closing or ending · Orange County
Starting on March 8, 1870, when he rode eight miles into the country, Captain Pride Jones went to men he suspected of leading the Klan in Orange and told them, on Governor Holden's word passed through John W. Norwood, that past offenses would be overlooked if they disbanded. By his sworn account in June 1871, several said they were tired of it, the klans disbanded within about four weeks, and after four to six weeks he wrote Holden that the county was quiet.
Violence or armed conflict · about three miles from Hillsborough, Orange County
Disguised men who called themselves Red Birds and dressed in red whipped two women and two young men of about twenty at a house about three miles from Hillsborough, tore off its roof, knocked down the chimney and set it on fire, according to the testimony of Hillsborough constable W. G. Turrentine before the Senate committee on January 31, 1871. Turrentine, who saw the wrecked house when he went to make arrests, said it was thought to have been aimed at a disorderly house. George Laws, testifying on February 15, described what seems to be the same affair five or six miles from town as neighborhood fathers breaking up a disorderly house, with the boys paddled and the roof torn off, and said it was not the Ku Klux. The one man arrested on Turrentine's warrant was discharged by a magistrate after his sister-in-law and a Dr. William Strudwick swore he had been too drunk that evening to sit his horse.
Ned Strowd of Orange testifies that disguised men whipped him in Alamance
Law, policy or court · North Carolina Senate chamber, Raleigh
Ned Strowd, a Black man then living in Orange County with a Mr. Mebane, testified for Holden's defense that about three weeks before Christmas 1869 sixteen to eighteen disguised men called him out of his house on William Thompson's place in Alamance, broke his gun across a tree and made his family carry their goods out into the yard. They whipped him twenty to thirty licks while he hugged a tree and threatened to come back and kill him if he told.
Dr. Pride Jones of Hillsborough testifies before Congress on the Orange County Klan
Law, policy or court · Washington, D.C. (testimony on Orange County)
Dr. Pride Jones of Hillsborough, the militia captain Governor Holden had sent against the Klan in Orange, testified before the Joint Select Committee in Washington on June 5, 1871. He said four or five Black men had been hanged and several people whipped by disguised men in the county before his commission, that no one had been tried for it, and that the Klansmen were mostly Democrats who had disbanded in the spring of 1870.
The congressional Ku Klux committee reports F. N. Strudwick for failing to appear
Law, policy or court · Capitol, Washington, D.C.
F. N. Strudwick of Hillsborough was summoned in June 1871 to appear in Washington before the congressional committee investigating the Ku Klux. The joint congressional committee on the Ku Klux, meeting in Washington, reported F. N. Strudwick of Hillsborough and others who had been summoned but did not appear, asking the Senate to issue warrants for them as in contempt of Congress.
Daniel Latta of Orange swears he did not write the letter accusing F. N. Strudwick
Law, policy or court · Raleigh
Daniel Latta, a Black man of Orange County, swore before Commissioner Best in Raleigh that he never wrote or caused to be written the letter read in the House saying F. N. Strudwick, in disguise, had whipped him, and that no one had struck him since the surrender.
Manly McCauley, an 18-year-old Black farmhand, left Milton Brewer's farm west of Chapel Hill with Brewer's wife on October 26, 1898. A posse caught them beyond Jonesboro, and on the way back masked men took McCauley from the officer holding him and hanged him. His body was found on November 6, about three miles west of Chapel Hill.
A farmer, Thomas Myrick, found McCauley's body hanging from a bent dogwood beside the public road some three miles west of Chapel Hill, a week after masked men had taken him from the officer bringing him back. Coroner Jordan was telegraphed to hold an inquest.
King, returning alone to Chapel Hill with his prisoner, was met by masked men who overpowered him and hanged McCauley from a dogwood. Tried at Hillsboro for permitting the prisoner to be taken from him by the mob, he was acquitted; the News and Observer used the trial to confirm that the lynching had in fact happened.
A House committee names the Sportsman's Lakeside Lodge as the Klan unit in Orange County
Protest or organizing · Sportsman's Lakeside Lodge, NC Highway 57 north of Hillsborough
The House Un-American Activities Committee, investigating the Ku Klux Klan, named the Sportsman's Lakeside Lodge as the Klan organization in Orange County. Sheriff C. B. Knight told the Daily Tar Heel that three Klan meetings had been held in the county recently.
On February 18, 2024, the Town of Carrboro, the Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition and the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a historical marker beside Carrboro Town Hall for Manly McCauley. McCauley, an 18-year-old Black farmhand, was lynched by a white mob in 1898 near Hatch Road and Old Greensboro Road, west of Carrboro.
NCpedia: Ku Klux Klan Encyclopedia article on the three Klan movements in North Carolina, starting with its Reconstruction-era rise and the violence that followed.
NCpedia: Kirk-Holden War Encyclopedia article on the 1870 Kirk-Holden War, set off by Klan killings such as Wyatt Outlaw's lynching in neighboring Graham.
Local History Help Hours and request formOCPL Local History Liaison The library’s Local History Liaison helps in person most Mondays, 12 to 3, at the Main Library, or by the online request form
