Storyline
How Samuel Strudwick tried to hold the Haw Old Fields against the people living on them: Burrington’s mortgage of 1754, the 1766 meeting with the settlers, the tenants’ association of 1768, the state patents taken on his land, his appeals of 1780 and the lawsuits that ended in 1788.
In briefSamuel Strudwick held a mortgage claim to 30,000 acres of the Haw Old Fields, but the land was already held by settlers, and from 1754 to 1788 he struggled to make his title good against them. Those he met in 1766 agreed to recognize it; by 1768 his tenants had formed an association to hold the land against him, and after the Revolution settlers took state patents on nearly all of the tract, even his own house. Strudwick appealed to the Assembly and to Thomas Burke in 1780, and when the lawsuits ended in 1788 he had lost about a third of the property.
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No works in the index are currently linked directly to this storyline. The works below provide background on Colonial Orange County.
On April 10, 1754, to secure a debt then grown to about 2,000 pounds, former governor George Burrington conveyed 40,000 acres to Samuel Strudwick by lease and release with a mortgage clause, 30,000 of them in the Haw Old Fields. General John Guise, who acquired Burrington's right of redemption, the right to pay the debt and take the land back, passed it to Strudwick on September 28, 1761. Strudwick came over with Governor Tryon in 1764 to take up the tract and found it held by people claiming under Burrington and by squatters. Near the end of 1766 he met a large number of them, and those present agreed to recognize his title. By April 16, 1768, Francis Nash reported to Edmund Fanning, Strudwick's tenants had formed an association to hold his lands against him and had met in the Haw Fields. The next day Nash and Captain Thomas Hart, whom Fanning had ordered to raise 500 men for the defense of the county, wrote that they could not raise them, that feeling against Fanning ran high and that the tenants were meeting in revolt; Fanning passed the report to Governor Tryon.
Lawsuits between Strudwick and the settlers began a few years after the 1766 meeting. In 1780 he asked the Assembly for relief from taxes on the whole tract, saying the settlers had blocked his court-ordered survey and, since the Revolution, had taken state patents, new grants of land from the state, on nearly all of the 30,000 acres, even his own house and plantation. On September 1, 1780 he wrote Thomas Burke that a man named Bowles, who held a new patent for a small plantation in sight of his house, meant to take the peaches from his orchard to distill and said he could raise a posse to do it, and that another settler who had patented Strudwick's own house might drive the family into the woods. He asked Burke what he should do. The lawsuits ended in 1788 with Strudwick having lost about a third of the property.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 7 dated events in the chronology →
Background reading on Colonial Orange County. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
A picture book set in the Eno River valley of Orange County in 1776. Four red wolf pups are born in a woodland den and spend their first summer and fall learning to hunt and howl with their family, while nearby a young widow, Sally Few, keeps her household going as the Revolution unsettles the countryside. Eileen Heyes wrote the story, published in 2025 by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History with color illustrations and maps, 42 pages.
Stewart E. Dunaway's life of Edmund Fanning (1739-1818), the colonial officeholder in Hillsborough whom the Regulators singled out and who left North Carolina as a loyalist, together with the Fanning family's genealogy. Self-published through Lulu in 2011, 223 pages with illustrations, facsimiles, genealogical tables and maps. Topics include American loyalists and Hillsborough and Orange County biography and genealogy.
Suzanne Adair's 2011 mystery, one of her Michael Stoddard novels, set in Hillsborough during the Southern campaign of the American Revolution and written as a historical thriller. Adair is a North Carolina author.
Stewart E. Dunaway's account of the Battle of Lindley's Mill, fought in September 1781 after the Loyalist David Fanning raided Hillsborough and carried off Governor Thomas Burke. Burke, Fanning and the Lindley family, whose mill gave the fight its name, are the people at its center, with the Revolutionary campaigns in North Carolina as the frame. Published in 2009.
Stewart E. Dunaway's transcription of letters exchanged between Jesse Benton and Thomas Hart from 1780 to 1790, concerning Hart's affairs at Hartford, his place at Hillsborough. The letters concern the economic and social conditions of Hillsborough in the eighteenth century and the Revolution in North Carolina. Self-published through lulu.com in 2009, 68 pages with illustrations and facsimiles, and part of the library's Wall Local History Collection.
David Lindsay Neville's genealogy of the descendants of Matthew McCauley (1750-1821), one of the landowners who gave land for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Lloyd and Neville families come into it as well, and Orange County genealogy is its field. Compiled in 2001.
Cleo Greer Hogan and Charles Edward Hogan's genealogy of the descendants of Colonel John Hogan (about 1745-1792) and Mary Lloyd Hogan of Orange County, North Carolina, and Montgomery County, Tennessee. Self-published in 1998 in one illustrated volume with various pagings, it follows the family from the Orange County Piedmont to Tennessee.
Marshall L. Smith's brief life of William Churton, 1710 to 1767, the surveyor who laid out Hillsborough in the 1750s, with notes on the Churton family. Self-published in Hillsborough in 1998, 22 unnumbered pages with illustrations and maps.
Stewart E. Dunaway's earlier compilation of the Jesse Benton papers from Hartford at Hillsborough, covering 1780 to 1790, self-published in 1991, 68 pages with illustrations. Alongside the correspondence of Benton and Thomas Hart, it covers the Revolutionary War campaigns in North Carolina, including the battles of Hart's Mill and Lindley's Mill in 1781, both fought in what was then Orange County. Dunaway reissued the letters in 2009.
Seventh volume of William D. Bennett's Orange County records, gathering miscellaneous papers of the Granville Proprietary land office, including an Anson County petition of about 1754 to 1759. Self-published in 1991. Like the rest of the series it abstracts colonial land records for researchers of early Orange County families and tracts.
Nancy Wallace Henderson's play, staged and filmed as a dramatic reenactment for the bicentennial of the 1788 convention at Hillsborough, where North Carolina's delegates met from July 21 to August 4 to consider the new federal Constitution and declined to ratify it without a bill of rights. The 1990 recording is a filmed performance on constitutional history and Hillsborough's part in it.
Volume V of William D. Bennett's Orange County records, abstracting the deeds and surveys of the Granville Proprietary land office from 1752, the year the county was formed, through 1760. Self-published in 1989, 164 pages with maps. Each survey describes a tract and its neighbors; volume VI carries the deeds and surveys on to 1763.
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