This website creates a visual and textual interpretation of the Orange County Courthouse mural. This mural, located in the main courtroom of the courthouse in Hillsborough, North Carolina, is comprised of six panels and depicts representations of notable figures, places, and events in Orange County history. The effort to create the mural was spearheaded by Judge Joe Buckner, and the mural was painted by Chapel Hill artist Michael Brown. It was completed and installed in the courtroom in 2004 in commemoration of the 250th anniversary of Orange County.
In 2024, a committee formed within the local Judicial District 18 Bar, which covers Orange and Chatham counties, spearheaded efforts to add to the mural a depiction of Lisbon Payne Berry (1850-1935), the first Black attorney in Orange County, who was born as an enslaved person. In addition to being an attorney, Berry served his community for decades as an educator and a missionary. This addition of Berry to the mural prompted an upgrade to an existing paper brochure, which had been used in walking tours of Hillsborough, that had very brief information about each of the 54 mural subjects. This provided an opportunity to create a new digital resource that would represent the mural content and make it accessible to a wider audience.
During the 2024-2025 academic year, four master’s students — Zane Allison, Emma Eubank, Sarah Kirkgard, and Caroline Pate — in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill developed and created this website, a digitized reinterpretation of the courthouse mural. The site features high-quality interactive images of the mural, graciously taken by local photographer Mike Benson, and descriptive content of its subjects. Each mural item, including Lisbon Berry, has been grouped into one or multiple overarching themes, demonstrating how the items relate to each other within the context of Orange County history, and described through individual interpretations and collective thematic essays. This website is accessible via a QR code that has been placed in the courtroom, allowing viewers to creatively engage with Orange County history as it is represented in the mural, as well as linked to other local websites.