Theme
One-room academies, Rosenwald schools, desegregation, and the teachers and students who filled the county's classrooms.
In briefFrom the academies of the early 1800s and the Burwell School for young women to Rosenwald schools, Lincoln and Central high schools and the desegregation fights of the 1950s and 1960s, schooling in Orange County has been a story of who was taught, and where. The storylines follow the academies, the segregated systems and the campaigns that ended them.
6,685 indexed works are connected with this theme. 39 held at OCPL →
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 most widely held first, novels aside. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Narrow these works. Each link opens the search already limited to this theme. Counts are indexed works, not copies on a shelf; a work can carry more than one period or place.
Biography of William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system, by historian William A. Link, published by UNC Press in 1995 with the subtitle power, purpose, and American higher education. It covers Friday's career and the history of the university at Chapel Hill and statewide. Part of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection.
Why this is here: The record names this subject alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Durham record: Spencer, Cornelia Phillips, 1825-1908.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
Daniel W. Barefoot arranges first-hand recollections of the University of North Carolina by decade, from the 'infant university' of the 1790s through the Civil War years when promise turned to despair, the rebuilding of the 1870s, the 'frosh' life of the 1880s, wartime fame in the 1940s, the controversies of the 1960s and the bicentennial of the 1990s. Thomas Wolfe's student years appear among the voices. Published by John F. Blair of Winston-Salem in 2008, 257 pages.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Students.
Albert Coates's own account of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina, which he founded, subtitled 'out of a classroom in Chapel Hill' and published in 1981. The 303 pages trace the institute's history and its role in educating North Carolina's public officials.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Coates, Albert, 1896-1989.
Sarah Watson Emery's 1963 book on the University of North Carolina, concerned with communism on the Chapel Hill campus and with academic freedom in 1960 and 1961. Published by Prospect House in Dallas, 240 pages with illustrations.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Communism in education.
Robert Watson Winston's biography of Henry Horace Williams (1858-1940), who taught philosophy at the University of North Carolina for half a century, subtitled gadfly of Chapel Hill. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1942, 309 pages with frontispiece and portraits; this copy is autographed. Topics include educators in Chapel Hill and the university's history.
Why this is here: The record names this subject alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Reviewed in Social Forces (1943).
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.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Minority college students.
William J. Billingsley's history of the Speaker Ban Law, the 1963 North Carolina statute that barred known Communists from speaking on state campuses, and the fight over it at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The subtitle sets the scope: race, politics and the public university in sixties North Carolina. It treats academic freedom, anti-communist movements and free speech in the state. University of Georgia Press, 1999, 308 pages with eight pages of plates.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the NCCU record: Education -- Political aspects.
Reviewed in Academe (2000), The American Historical Review (2001), The Journal of Southern History (2001), Journal of American History (2001), The Journal of Politics (2001).
Recently indexed: The "value-added" effects of two-year college transfer programs (1976) · 100 years of Epsilon of Phi Gamma Delta, 1851-1951 : centennial celebration, March 31, 1951 (1951) · 25th anniversary (1975) · 'Varsity banking (1959) · 50 years of change and challenge, 1940-1990 (1989) · A A U W asks how well do you know our schools? (1954)
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this theme. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled. Books marked Wider context cover the broader subject rather than this theme itself.
Mary Claire Engstrom's biographical register of the young women who attended the Burwell School in Hillsborough, subtitled lives of educated women in the antebellum South. The school was kept by Margaret Anna Burwell and her husband, and the book bears on women's education in nineteenth-century North Carolina. Published by the Historic Hillsborough Commission, 1979, 256 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Irene Oliver Pender's history of the public schools of Orange County from 1752 to 1983, covering more than two centuries of schooling in Hillsborough, Efland, Cedar Grove and the rural districts of the county. Published in 1983, 186 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.
Donna Ruffin-Villines documents the school that served African American students in Hillsborough from 1936 until 1968, described as the first state supported school of its kind in Orange County. Published in 1998 concerning African American public schools and their history in the county. A starting point for anyone tracing segregated education in Hillsborough.
Microfilm of minutes kept by the Orange County Board of Education, dated 1872, documenting the organization and staffing of the county's public schools after the Civil War.
Ann Strudwick Nash's history of the Nash and Kollock School, the select boarding and day school the Misses Nash and Miss Kollock ran in Hillsborough from 1859 to 1890, mostly for girls with a few boys. Published in Hillsborough in 1964 with plans and portraits. Part of the Wall Local History Collection.
Charles L. Coon's documentary history of North Carolina academies and schools from 1790 to 1840, published by the North Carolina Historical Commission in 1915. Its 846 pages reprint academy notices, legislative acts and items from the Raleigh Register and other papers, with a section on the colleges' beginnings. Hillsborough Academy trustees' notices are among them, and Coon's introduction notes how many academy principals came from the University in Chapel Hill.
James B. Hunt Jr., governor of North Carolina from 1977 to 1985 and again from 1993 to 2001, lays out his views on public schools, education reform and early childhood programs, Smart Start among them, and challenges the state to build the best schools in the nation. Issued by the First in America Foundation in Raleigh in 2001, 93 pages.
The Historic Hillsborough Commission's account of slavery in antebellum Hillsborough and of the enslaved and free people of color who worked at the Burwell School, the female school the Burwells kept in town, between 1837 and 1857. African American history in Hillsborough and the school's own history are its two threads. Published in 2019.
Other storylines that include this theme, earliest first. Each has its own page.
Dated events connected with this theme: sixteen of 988, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 988 dated events in the chronology →
A schoolteacher came to the Few family's neighborhood on the Eno in 1760 to teach local children, and William Few Jr. attended. He later recalled the school with pleasure.
Robert and Margaret Anna Burwell operated their Hillsborough school for girls from 1837 to 1857.
Part of The Burwell School and the Burwell household · 37 events
People: Margaret Anna Burwell · Robert Armistead Burwell · Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly
Subject: Burwell School
Under President Solomon Pool and the Reconstruction board of trustees, the university shut down on February 1, 1871, after years of few students, little money and public opposition. It reopened on Monday, September 6, 1875.
People: Solomon Pool
The university resumed classes on Monday, September 6, 1875, after more than four years closed, with Charles Phillips as chairman of the faculty, and held a public celebration on September 15. Kemp P. Battle, then secretary of the trustees, was elected president in 1876.
People: Kemp Plummer Battle
After the trustees opened UNC's post-graduate courses to women early in 1897, four women registered in September for the 1897–98 session, which The Tar Heel called the start of coeducation: Dixie Lee Bryant, Sallie Walker Stockard, Cecye Dodd and Mary MacRae. President Edwin Alderman let women enter junior and senior classes as well.
People: Dixie Lee Bryant
Sallie Walker Stockard, a Guilford College graduate, entered UNC's senior class in the fall of 1897, the first year the university admitted women. She became the first woman to graduate from UNC when the class of 1898 received its degrees on June 1, 1898, and she earned a master's degree there in 1900.
Spanish influenza swept the University in early October 1918, putting the campus and its student soldiers under a three-week quarantine. By October 23 about 300 students had been ill and three had died, and President Edward Kidder Graham died of influenza and pneumonia on October 26.
The board let the Orange Grove contract to A. R. Davis for $13,600 and set the school about half a mile from the old one on the road to Hillsboro. It inspected and accepted the building in March 1925.
Clayton Jeffries, Charles Will Jeffries and others retained a lawyer, drew up a list of Indian families, made contact with the Indian community in Person County that already had a state sponsored school, and wrote to Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier seeking a federal school for their children. A bureau agent visited and reported the families to be Indian, and the bureau's letters called the settlement an Indian community, but no assistance was ever given.
Morehead Planetarium was dedicated at UNC on May 10, 1949.
People: John Motley Morehead III
Subject: Morehead Planetarium
About 150 people attended an open house on May 27, 1951 dedicating the Orange County Negro Public Library's own building in Hillsborough, a structure bought from Camp Butner and put up with volunteer labor. Begun in 1942 by Marinda McPherson, the library had opened to the public in 1949 and now held more than 3,000 books.
Part of The Orange County Negro Public Library and the struggle for equal library service, 1936–1960s
Subject: Orange County Public Library
North Carolina Memorial Hospital opened to patients on Tuesday, September 2, 1952, without a formal ceremony, as the core of the new University Medical Center. Its opening allowed the UNC School of Medicine to grow from a two-year program into a four-year school.
Part of North Carolina Memorial Hospital and the medical center, from 1952 · 24 events
Subject: UNC Medical Center (N.C. Memorial Hospital) · UNC School of Medicine
WUNC-TV began broadcasting from Chapel Hill on January 8, 1955.
Subject: WUNC radio and television
Orange County, Chapel Hill and Carrboro declared states of emergency on March 13, 2020, and the county and its three towns ordered residents to stay home from March 27. UNC moved undergraduate classes online in August 2020 after campus clusters. The county emergency, extended more than a dozen times, expired on May 1, 2022.
Part of COVID-19 in Orange County, 2020–2022 · 31 events
Orange County's Southern Branch Library opened in February 2025 in the $42 million Drakeford Library Complex at 203 South Greensboro Street in Carrboro, replacing the Carrboro Cybrary, which had closed on January 31, 2025. The building, named for Robert Drakeford, Carrboro's first Black mayor, also houses town recreation offices and WCOM Radio.
Subject: Orange County Public Library
The Burwell School Historic Site in Hillsborough took the name the Elizabeth Keckly Center at the Burwell School in late August 2026, honoring the woman the Burwells held in slavery in the house from 1835. Site director Elizabeth Hays said the aim was to hold the site's histories together.
Subject: Burwell School
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 86 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.
Background from selected state and local sources
Newspapers, photographs, and records of the time
Other catalogs, databases, and guides worth searching
Other catalogs to search and local organizations that can help.
Held in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection. Selected because their titles or catalog subjects provide wider historical context for this theme; they may not discuss the Orange County theme directly.
M. C. S. Noble, dean of the School of Education at the University of North Carolina, traces the state's public schools from colonial apprenticeship of orphans and chartered academies through the Literary Fund of 1825, the common school law of 1839, Calvin H. Wiley's superintendency, Reconstruction, and the graded schools and the white and Black normal schools of the late 1800s. Published at Chapel Hill in 1930; 463 pages with portraits and an index.
Subjects in the Library of Congress catalog record: Education -- North Carolina -- History; Public schools -- North Carolina OCPL call number: NC 352 NOBVanessa Siddle Walker's case study of the Caswell County Training School, a school for Black students in segregated Caswell County, and of the community around it. Caswell was formed from Orange County in 1777, with Yanceyville as its seat. UNC Press, 1996; 259 pages with illustrations, a map, a bibliography and an index.
Subjects in the Library of Congress catalog record: African Americans -- Education -- North Carolina -- Caswell County -- Case studies; Community and school -- North Carolina -- Caswell County -- Case studies; Caswell County Training School (Caswell County, N.C.) OCPL call number: NC 371.979 WALPicture: Library of Congress photograph, late 1930s; public domain. Image credits →
More to discover
The Friends connect people with new library materials, local writers and publishers, and resources documenting Orange County.
