Named event or history
The draft and the county’s soldiers, the Red Cross and the Liberty Loan drives, the university in wartime, and the men who did not come home.
In briefOrange County organized for the war in 1917. A county Red Cross chapter under John W. Graham, with branches and auxiliaries in Chapel Hill, Hillsborough, rural communities and Black churches, knitted for soldiers and shipped relief clothing; women's committees sold Liberty bonds; and the university's students drilled and in 1918 came under the Students' Army Training Corps. The county's war record lists 23 Orange County servicemen who died.
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 Wars & Military Service, the wider history this event belongs to.
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 84, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 84 dated events in the chronology →
Among the auxiliaries of the Chapel Hill Red Cross chapter were groups at the Black Methodist church and the Black Baptist church of Chapel Hill, and one at Zion Church. Like the country circles they made hospital and refugee garments and comfort kits for the chapter.
Orange County organized a Council of Defense, Red Cross chapters in Chapel Hill (May 28, 1917) and Hillsborough (June 1, 1917), Liberty Loan and War Savings drives, and food conservation committees. On October 1, 1918, 650 UNC students were inducted into the Student Army Training Corps, and volunteers nursed the sick during the influenza epidemic.
In January 1917, 344 of the 1,137 students registered that fall signed a petition asking that a military training course be set up on the campus. The Tar Heel under editor William Polk backed the drive.
Abernethy gave up his medical practice in Chapel Hill in May 1917 to enter the Army medical corps as a first lieutenant. He rose to lieutenant colonel, was wounded in Belgium in July 1918, and then commanded the 78th Division sanitary train in the St. Mihiel and Meuse-Argonne campaigns.
After a week of canvassing by C. H. Robertson's membership committee, a Sunday afternoon service at the court house led by the town's ministers raised $400 for the national Hundred Million Dollar Red Cross War Fund and brought the chapter to 200 members. By July 1 the chapter reported 400 members to Atlanta.
People: Charles H. Robertson
By August 1, 1917, a Red Cross branch had been organized at Cedar Grove and was making surgical dressings. In the fall the county chapter thanked Cedar Grove for giving it the premiums from the community fair.
Answering Gov. Bickett's call, the Council of Defense chose 25 men on October 20, 1917, and they enlisted for the duration at the Hillsborough court house on October 22 and 24, electing Shepperd Strudwick first lieutenant. The county bought their uniforms, and they drilled twice a week until the influenza ban on meetings.
People: Shepperd Strudwick (1868-1961) · J. Cheshire Webb · Thomas W. Bickett
With Harriet M. Berry of Chapel Hill as county chairman, women organized in every township made $59,600 of the county's $99,150 in Third Liberty Loan sales, more than two-thirds of the allotment. Mrs. T. J. Wilson's Chapel Hill committee took 85 subscriptions for $18,500 and the Hillsborough committee raised $36,000.
People: Harriet Morehead Berry
The commissioners ordered two-thirds of an $800 salary paid for a home demonstration agent, with the school board paying the rest. The work stopped after the war and did not resume until 1935.
Subject: Home demonstration clubs
Jean Blue enlisted in Unit 65 from Watts Hospital on May 27, 1918, trained at Camp Lee and in New York, and sailed for France at the start of September. At Brest she nursed soldiers with influenza and wounded men on their way home.
A canvass of the county by the Woman's Committee in July 1918 for the U.S. Student Nurse Reserve enrolled eight young women, six white and two Black.
On the night of Registration Day, September 12, 1918, a crowd packed the court house for a War Savings rally to hear two of Pershing's soldiers. One was Jim Cheshire, the first man to volunteer from the town and the first to come home, sent back wounded to train troops. That day 1,727 county men registered for the draft.
People: J. Cheshire Webb · Samuel Mallett Gattis
In the Fourth Liberty Loan the Hillsborough Township women's committee included a committee of Black residents, among them Annie Renshaw, Fannie Benton and Christianna Ferribow, who raised $1,350 from 27 Black subscribers.
After the armistice of November 11, 1918, the chapter left the Zeta Psi fraternity hall for roomy quarters in the University Inn that the University provided.
Subject: Eagle Hotel (Chapel Hill)
The chapter's report of woman's work to April 12, 1919 counted 66 cases shipped from its workroom and auxiliaries: 200 comfort kits, 306 oakum pads, 8,155 dressings, 1,004 hospital garments, 20 cases of refugee clothing weighing 2,500 pounds, 235 Christmas packages and about 725 knitted articles.
On July 16, 1919, about 15,000 people came to Hillsborough to welcome home Orange County's soldiers and sailors, with a parade, Gov. Bickett's address at the court house and a dinner for about a thousand guests in Cameron Park. J. Cheshire Webb chaired the celebration, and the county Red Cross voted $300 toward its cost, money the celebration fund turned out not to need.
People: Frank Nash · Julian S. Carr · John W. Graham · J. Cheshire Webb · Samuel Mallett Gattis · Thomas W. Bickett
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 4 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 Wars & Military Service, the wider history this event belongs to (1,497 works in all). Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
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.
Anne R. Keene's history of the Cloudbusters, the baseball team of the Navy Pre-Flight School at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill during the Second World War, on which Ted Williams played in 1943. The chapters move from a batboy's trunk of keepsakes through the pre-flight training program to the players' lives after the war, and Keene's own family is part of the story. Published by Sports Publishing in New York in 2018, 340 pages with sixteen pages of plates.
Alex Albright's history of the B-1 band, the group of Black musicians drawn largely from students and graduates of North Carolina A&T who became the first Black sailors of the modern Navy to serve above the rank of messman, and the first of more than a hundred Black Navy bands in wartime. The band was posted to the Navy Pre-Flight School at Chapel Hill, the book's Orange County link. Published by R.A. Fountain in 2013, 194 pages with illustrations and portraits.
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.
Letters of the Sparrow family, including Thomas Sparrow and George Attmore Sparrow, gathered and published in 2011. The correspondence includes material associated with the Hillsboro' Military Academy, which opened in Hillsborough in 1859, and combines family and military history.
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.
Suzy Barile's account of Eleanor Hope Swain, daughter of the University of North Carolina's president, and Smith D. Atkins, the Union general whose troops occupied Chapel Hill in April 1865; the two married later that year. Published by Eno in Hillsborough in 2009, 237 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Civil War letters of Colonel Frank Schaller of the 22nd Mississippi Infantry, combining personal narrative with regimental history. Schaller was associated with the Hillsboro Military Academy in Hillsborough. Published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2007. 185 pages with six pages of plates and illustrations.
A congregational history of New Hope Presbyterian Church in Orange County, written by Barbara A. Murphy and published in 2006 by Chapel Hill Press. Chapters take up the five successive church buildings, the land itself, the ministers who served, the cemeteries, members who went to war, the church's organization, its music, gifts and memorials, and its outreach to the surrounding community. It also covers Presbyterian experience of the Civil War. 126 pages with illustrations and portraits.
The Rev. Charles M. Jones (1906-1993), minister of Chapel Hill's Presbyterian church in the late 1940s, and his wife Dorcas talk with John Egerton in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded July 21, 1990. Jones spends most of the hour on the disputes his stand on race provoked, when the regional presbytery objected to his conduct of the church, and his dealings with university president Frank Porter Graham. Published online in 2006 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Guion Griffis Johnson (1900-1989), a historian of the antebellum South, talked with Jacquelyn Hall and Mary Frederickson in August 1974 for the Southern Oral History Program. She recalls her training, her years at the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina, the standing of women historians in higher education, and the research behind her study of antebellum North Carolina society. Running about an hour; electronic edition issued by the UNC library in 2006 through Documenting the American South.
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