1768
Population of Hillsborough Approximately 40
Historical Context
North Carolina is one of the 13 Colonies
The colonies are governed by King George III
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1754 -- Surveyor William Churton receives a grant of 663 acres on the north side of the Eno River and lays out a town called
Corbin Town or Corbinton. It consists of 92 one-acre lots.
1759 -- Town is incorporated as Childsburg
1764 -- William Tryon becomes Governor of North Carolina
1766 -- Town name is officially changed to Hillsborough;
Building requirements enacted mandated that the purchaser of a town lot had 2 years to build a brick, stone or frame
house “at least twenty feet long, sixteen feet wide, and nine feet pitch in the clear, with brick or stone chimney, or
proportional to such dimensions;”
Ordinance enacted making all taxable males liable for street service under penalty of 2 shillings 8 pence for each
day’s neglect
1767 -- With 21,500 residents, Orange County has the largest population of any county in North Carolina. By 1779, it only
has a population of 7,560 after several new counties are carved out, including Wake, Guilford, and Chatham.
1768 -- First time "Regulator" is used to describe the movement in the Piedmont against unfair taxes, fees, and other
government practices
1770 -- Hillsborough becomes a borough, which entitles it to its own representative in the House of Commons
1771 -- Battle of Alamance
1775 -- Third Provincial Congress held in Hillsborough
Based on a Map by CJ Sauthier
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Born in Strasbourg, Alsace, Claude Joseph Sauthier (1736-1802) was a surveyor and mapmaker. In 1767, Governor William Tryon brought Sauthier to North Carolina and appointed him and architect John Hawks to make the fortifications for Tryon Palace in New Bern. Whether Sauthier did more work on the palace is unknown.
From October 1768 to March 1770 Sauthier drew renderings of nine towns in North Carolina including Hillsborough. On his maps, he delineated the location of public and private buildings, gardens, farms, as well as roads, dams, canals, and even racetracks. He also identified geographic features such as rivers, creeks, mountains, and marshes.
Two interesting features of this map are: the absence of a church and the existence of a racetrack. The church would be built by the following year. The racetrack would be used until the mid-1800s.
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In May 1771, Sauthier accompanied Tryon to Alamance, where the Regulators were defeated. Sauthier drew a map of the battle. Later that year, when Tryon became governor of New York, he took Sauthier with him.
The 1768 map of Hillsborough by Claude Sauthier.
Another map of the Hillsborough area was produced in 1770 by John Collet (c.1735-1818). Entitled "A Compleat Map of North-Carolina from an Actual Survey by Captain Collet, Governor of Fort Johnston," only a portion of the work depicted Orange County.
Originally from Switzerland, Collet was appointed, to a post at Fort Johnston, NC in 1767. There, he made the acquaintance of Governor Tryon and served as his aide de-camps on Tryon's expedition to Hillsborough to put down the Regulator insurrection. Tryon asked Collet to complete a map of the state begun by William Churton.
The section of the 1770 map of North Carolina by John Collet that depicts Hillsborough
and Orange County.
Contemporary Descriptions
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In 1764, resident William Few (whose family mill can be seen on the above map) described the town as “The metropolis of the county, where courts were held and all the public business was done. It was a small village, which contained about thirty or forty inhabitants, with two or three small stores and two or three ordinary taverns, but it was an improving village. Several Scotch merchants were soon after induced to establish stores that contained a good assortment of European merchandise, which changed the state of things for the better. A church, courthouse and jail were built, but there was no parson or physician. Two or three attorneys opened their offices and found employment.”
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Two years later, in 1766, Wooddason, a Church of England clergyman who traveled through Orange County was not as impressed. He reported, “Marriages, through want of the clergy, are performed by every magistrate. Polygamy is very common, celibacy much more, bastardy is no disrepute, concubinage general. When will this Augean stable be cleansed?”
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NC Royal Governor Josiah Martin visited Hillsborough in 1772 and wrote to his colleague Wills Hill, Lord Hillsborough, "This little village, honoured by your lordship's title, is situated in a high and apparently heathful and fertile country but from the extreme badness of the roads difficult of access and discouraging to exercise to which indeed there is no invitation at present after fulfilling the calls of duty and satisfying that common curiosity to see new places; the settlements in its invirons although numerous beyond belief, being yet in infantine rudeness afford but little delight to the observer."
In 1906, local historian Francis Nash wrote of this period in Hillsboro Colonial and Revolutionary, “In Hillsboro, however, particularly at the quarterly County Courts, there were drinking, gambling, horse racing, cock fighting, man fighting, and gouging.” He further described the populace as “ignorant, violent, headstrong, lawless.”