Discover Orange County History
Click below on the mural images to learn more about what is depicted on the mural, or explore common themes of the murals in the navigation to learn more about the history of Orange County.
Barbara Bynum Henderson
A women’s suffrage activist before the World War I, Henderson was a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate, President of the NC Equal Suffrage League, and a poet and language translator.
Railroad
The North Carolina Railroad (NCRR) was chartered in 1849 as part of a state improvement effort.
Speaker ban law protest at UNC-Chapel Hill
“An Act to Regulate Visiting Speakers at State Supported Colleges and Universities” prohibited state-sponsored colleges from hosting speeches by known members of the communist party, people known to advocate for the overthrow of the Constitution, and people who pleaded the Fifth Amendment to decline to answer questions related to communism or subversive activity.
Albert and Gladys Coates
The Coates founded the Institute of Government in 1931 to help train government officials, originally funding the venture themselves.
Willie P. Mangum
Willie P. Mangum served as a superior court judge, represented Orange County in the North Carolina General Assembly, and represented North Carolina in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate.
Ira Ward
Orange County native Ira Ward joined the U.S. Army Air Corps in 1942, serving as an aerial radio operator in the Southwest Pacific for three years, and was highly decorated for his service.
Edwin Caldwell
The son of Wilson Caldwell, a slave of UNC President David Swain, Edwin Caldwell was a Chapel Hill civic leader after the Civil War; studied medicine at Shaw University, and pioneered in treating pellagra.
Elizabeth Cotten
Elizabeth Cotten was a folk singer and composer who grew up in Chapel Hill’s Northside community, where sounds from trains on the nearby railroad spur inspired her award-winning song “Freight Train.”
Wildlife on Morgan Creek
Morgan Creek is an approximately 17-mile-long tributary of the New Hope River running through Orange, Durham, and Chatham counties.
William B. Aycock
William Brantley Aycock was a white educator and legal scholar. Upon his graduation in 1948 from UNC-Chapel Hill, he joined the law faculty. With the exception of his tenure as Chancellor at UNC-Chapel Hill from 1957 to 1964, Aycock taught at the law school until his retirement in 1985.
Karen Lynn Parker
UNC’s first Black female student, Karen Lynn Parker participated in civil rights demonstations in Chapel Hill in the 1960s, graduating in 1967 with a journalism degree and continuing to support civil rights as a freelance writer thereafter.
ENo will
Eno (or Enoe) Will was an Eno-Shakori chief. He is known through the journals and book of English explorer and surveyor John Lawson, who he served as a guide.
Carolina Playmakers at UNc-chapel hill
The Carolina PlayMakers were founded in 1918 by Frederick H. Koch, a white professor of dramatic literature and playwriting at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Koch established the group as a means through which his students could experience their written work performed.
Frances Hargraves
A public school teacher and community leader, Frances Hargraves promoted peaceful change and harmonious racial relations during the 1960s civil rights movement and public school integration in Chapel Hill.
James Hogg
James Hogg was a primary backer and trustee of Hillsborough’s first academy in 1779 and was also very involved in the formation of UNC, serving on the university’s first board of trustees.
Dairy Farms
By the early 1950s the sale of dairy products was the second largest source of farm income in Orange County.
Hillsborough Recorder
The Hillsborough Recorder was a widely-read newspaper in Hillsborough, Orange County, and beyond that was published from 1820 to 1879.
Lisbon P. Berry
Lisbon Berry was admitted to the North Carolina Bar in 1882, becoming the first Black attorney in Orange County. In addition to being an attorney, Berry served the Hillsborough community for many years as an educator and a missionary.
John Berry
John Berry, a white architect and builder, was involved with several notable buildings in Orange County, some designed by trained architects and some of his own creation.
Roberta Jackson
In 1970 Roberta Jackson became UNC-Chapel Hill’s first Black female professor. The undergraduate admissions building was named after her and her husband Blyden in 1992, and was the first UNC building to be named after a Black citizen.
Samuel F. Phillips
After graduating from law school at UNC-Chapel Hill, Samuel F. Phillips began his own practice in Chapel Hill in 1845 and became one of the most respected and successful lawyers in the state. Phillips went on to work as part of the legal defense that represented Homer Plessy in the landmark Plessy v. Ferguson case.
University Re-opening After Reconstruction
UNC-Chapel Hill was closed by the General Assembly in 1871 due to low enrollment, financial pressure, and political infighting. Cornelia Phillips Spencer, the daughter of a mathematics professor, wrote to politicians in defense of the school’s importance to the state’s finances and cultural heritage. When the General Assembly reopened the school in 1875, on Spencer’s 50th birthday, she rang the bell in UNC-Chapel Hill’s South Building.
Old Orange County Courthouse
The former Orange County courthouse served as Orange County’s seat of government until 1954 when the current courthouse building was completed. Though no longer the seat, the old courthouse is still used for county judicial business.
Civil War Surrender
Hearing news of a possible surrender by General Robert E. Lee, Union General William T. Sherman hastened his troops to North Carolina. Upon hearing the news, Generals Sherman and Johnston met at a nearby farmhouse, owned by the Bennett family in Orange County, to discuss their situation. The two reached a surrender agreement on April 16, 1865, 17 days after Lee in Appomattox.
Mark Morgan
Mark Morgan was one of the first white settlers in the Chapel Hill area and was one of the biggest landowners, ultimately owning many thousands of acres of land in early Orange and Chatham Counties. He is the namesake of Morgan Creek, where according to local legend he first lived in the hollow trunk of a sycamore tree, before building a cabin on the banks of the creek.
Paul Green
Paul Green was a white dramatist, writer, and professor who was born in rural Harnett County, North Carolina, in 1894. Green’s best known works are the play In Abraham’s Bosom, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927, and the symphonic drama The Lost Colony, based on the lost colony of Roanoke.
Kay Kyser
James Kern “Kay” Kyser was a white big band leader, performer, and radio and television personality who was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, in 1905. After graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill, Kyser and his band toured around the country, eventually landing a radio show on NBC called the “Kollege of Musical Knowledge,” in which Kyser was known as the “Ol’ Perfesser.” The comedic show proved very popular, led to a number of films, and eventually moved from radio to television.
Thomas Wolfe
Thomas Wolfe was a white novelist and playwright who was born in Asheville, North Carolina, in 1900. Wolfe is primarily known for his epic autobiographical novel, Look Homeward, Angel, published in 1929, which drew heavily on his childhood in Asheville.
Civil Rights in Chapel Hill
The civil rights movement in Chapel Hill included a crusade for the desegregation of public facilities like movie theaters.
James Taylor
James Taylor is a white acclaimed singer-songwriter. In 1968, he released his self-titled debut album, which included the track “Carolina in My Mind,” a song in which Taylor pays homage to his childhood in Chapel Hill and to North Carolina.
Civil War
North Carolina participated in the Civil War as a Confederate state, remaining so until April 1865.
Tobacco
While production briefly shrank after the Civil War, the 1880s saw massive expansion in the tobacco industry. Tobacco manufacturing companies were popping up all around the state, but some of the biggest were in Durham, and Orange County farmers benefited greatly from this proximity. By the early 20th century, North Carolina was regarded as the leading source of tobacco.
William Hooper
William Hooper was a white attorney, judge, politician, and one of three North Carolina signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Betty SMith
Betty Smith was a white novelist and playwright. In the 1930s, Smith took a job with the Federal Theater Project, which saw her relocate to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Once the job ended, Smith remained in Chapel Hill and began writing her most famous work, based on her childhood memories – the novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Fannie Breeze
Fannie Breeze was the midwife for almost all families, Black and white, in the mid-1800s along the Eno River.
William A. Graham
William Alexander Graham was a white attorney and politician who served as governor of North Carolina from 1845 to 1849. He was educated at a Hillsborough preparatory school and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, practiced law in Hillsborough, and began serving in public office in the 1830s.
William W. Holden
William Woods Holden was a white attorney, newspaper editor and publisher, and politician born in Orange County, North Carolina. President Andrew Johnson appointed Holden as the provisional governor of North Carolina, a position Holden held from May to December of 1865, and Holden was later elected as governor of North Carolina from 1868 to 1870.
Civil War Military Academy
The North Carolina Military Academy, also known as the Hillsborough Military Academy, was founded by Colonel Charles C. Tew of South Carolina in 1859, two years before the outbreak of the Civil War. The school served as a training ground for the state’s Confederate forces.
Mack P. Efland
Madison “Mack” P. Efland was a white entrepreneur and industrialist born in 1879. Mack was a member of the Efland family, who settled in North Carolina in the 1700s and are the namesake of the town of Efland. In 1906, the family founded one of the first excelsior, or wood wool, plants in North Carolina, which was managed by Mack.
William C. Coker and the Coker Arboretum
William C. Coker was UNC-Chapel Hill’s first professor of botany and would be the chair of the botany department for 36 years. In 1903, shortly after he arrived at UNC, Coker obtained permission from university authorities to plant a teaching collection in a five-acre area of campus that had previously been a damp pasture and transformed it into the Coker Arboretum.
frank P. Graham
Frank Porter Graham was a white educator and politician who was named president of UNC-Chapel Hill in 1930, a role he served in until 1949. During his tenure as president, which spanned the years of the Great Depression and World War II, UNC-Chapel Hill came to be known as one of the nation’s leading public universities.
Hillsborough Scene
British Revolutionary General Lord Cornwallis is said to have ordered his soldiers to pave Hillsborough’s muddy streets after capturing the village in 1871.
Occaneechi
The Occaneechi, known today as the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation (OBSN), are a Souian Indigenous people descended from those who have lived on the land now known as the North Carolina Piedmont for thousands of years.
Harriet M. Berry
The “Champion of Good Roads” was a Hillsborough native, UNC-Greensboro graduate, and Secretary of NC Good Roads Association. She co-authored the state legislation that in 1921 established the North Carolina highway system.
George Moses Horton
George Moses Horton was a Black poet born around 1797 in Northampton County, North Carolina. His first published piece was “Liberty and Slavery,” which was published in the Lancaster Gazette on April 8, 1829. This is the first known poem written by an enslaved person that protests slavery.
Clovis point
Clovis points are stone tools that were made and used by some of the earliest people to inhabit North and South America. Clovis points found in North Carolina dated Paleo-American people to living in the Piedmont area around 9500 BCE.
Wilson Caldwell
Enslaved by UNC President David Swain at the time of his birth, Caldwell went on to operate a school for Black children in Chapel Hill and later became the principal of a school near Elizabeth City after the Civil War.
Dean Smith Student Activities Center
The Dean Smith Student Activities Center, also known as the Dean Dome, was built to replace the Carmichael Auditorium as the home of basketball at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Constitutional Convention
This scene depicts the North Carolina Constitutional Convention, which met at Hillsborough in July 1788, where the majority of delegates favored states’ rights over a strong federal government, leading the assembly to vote 184-84 to neither accept nor reject the proposed Constitution.
Richard Caswell
Richard Caswell (1729-1789) was the first elected governor of North Carolina and a white enslaver of over 60 individuals.
Dr. Kenneth Brinkhous
Kenneth M. Brinkhous was a white doctor and medical researcher who served as the the chair of the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Pathology from 1946 to 1973. At UNC, Brinkhous and his team would discover a way to control hemophilia and developed tests that allowed for the diagnosis and monitoring of bleeding disorders.
UNC Law School
UNC’s first law class was taught in 1845 by William H. Battle in the little building shown in the mural. This building, located at 401 E. Franklin St., was built by Samuel Field Phillips to be his law office, the first law office in Chapel Hill.
William Churton
William Churton was a white colonial surveyor and cartographer who participated in a number of surveying and cartographical projects in colonial North Carolina, including the establishment of the towns of Salisbury and what is now Hillsborough (then called Childsburgh).