Named event or history
Enslaved people in the county’s households, farms, courts and university from the first settlements to emancipation in 1865, and the recovery of their graves and names since.
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Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 28, the highlights and the earliest of the rest, in date order. See all 28 in the chronology →
William Few brought his family from Maryland in the fall of 1758 to 640 acres bought from James Taylor, lying on both sides of the Eno about seven miles east of the county town. Four enslaved people came with them, and Few and his brother James built a saw and grist mill on the river.
Orange County's 1790 tax list returned 2,272 polls and 406,106 acres across its eight districts, with a separate list for Hillsborough town showing 36 white polls against 82 black polls. William Hooper was charged for 22 of them, John Taylor for 10 and Francis Childs for 5.
James Patterson, the slaveholding contractor who built Old East between 1793 and 1795, reported in a 1795 letter that several of his own enslaved workers had painted the building's roof. Their names were not recorded.
Africa Parker, a free Black man, was running a distillery on East King Street near William Courtney's house in Hillsborough in 1799. The census the next year counted 3,327 enslaved people and 100 free Black people in Orange County alongside 12,222 white residents.
A year after his 1803 marriage to Rebecca Bennehan, Cameron built the Fairntosh house about a mile east of Stagville, with dependencies that included his law office, a chapel and a family burying ground. He went on to hold more than a thousand people in slavery.
Legal proceedings brought by William Kirkland, Catlett Campbell, Jacob Greer and Isaac Mordecai against Robert Bell placed Hannah and her children Jenny and David in the hands of the sheriff. Sheriff Samuel Turrentine sold the three at public auction at the Hillsborough Market House to Duncan Cameron for 200 pounds.
People: Duncan Cameron · William Kirkland
By about age twenty, George Moses Horton, enslaved on a Chatham County farm, was carrying fruit to the UNC campus on Sundays, and students began paying him to compose love poems and acrostics. His first printed poem appeared in April 1829, the year The Hope of Liberty was published.
Bills from William Nichols's 1822 to 1824 enlargement of Old East list enslaved carpenters, bricklayers and laborers including Bob, Henry, Nelson, Allman, Tony, Luke, Isaac and Ned Peek, with their pay due to their owners. One bill from John C. White came to about $395.
Thomas Ruffin of Hillsborough, newly seated on the North Carolina Supreme Court, wrote the opinion in State v. Mann, overturning the conviction of John Mann of Edenton for shooting Lydia, an enslaved woman he had hired, as she fled a whipping. Ruffin held that a master's power must be absolute, and abolitionists later cited the ruling widely.
People: Thomas Ruffin · Lydia
Samuel M. Stewart advertised a $20 reward in the Hillsborough Recorder for James, who had worked four years as a college servant at the university. Stewart thought he was headed for Norfolk or Richmond to reach the free states or Africa through the Colonization Society.
In 1830 Professor James Phillips hired David Barham from William Barham to work as a college servant. A university account book page from the same year shows students paying a two-dollar fee to compensate the slaveholders whose people were hired as servants.
People: James Phillips
When the Reverend Robert Burwell became minister of the Presbyterian church in Hillsborough, he moved his household from Virginia, bringing the enslaved Elizabeth Hobbs, later Keckly. By her own account she was nearly eighteen.
In 1835, during William Mercer Green's rectorship, a gallery was added to St. Matthew's Church in Hillsborough to seat Black worshippers. Green also held monthly services at Duncan Cameron's Salem Chapel, where he gave instruction to enslaved people.
People: Duncan Cameron
Thomas Waitt's bill for 1837 work on South Building, including its tin roof, lists wages for enslaved plasterers and masons Stewart, Chester, Peter, Calvin and Evans and laborers including Lewis, Tom, Redin, Abraham and Jordan.
The 1844 to 1845 extension of Old East, designed by Alexander J. Davis and costing $9,454, used the labor of Albert and Osborne, brothers enslaved by Dabney Cosby. Albert's plastering was praised as first-rate work.
People: Albert · Osborne · Dabney Cosby
After 1845 the trustees prohibited students from bringing enslaved people of their own to Chapel Hill. The university went on hiring enslaved college servants by the year from local slaveholders.
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