Orange County NC Website
28 <br /> United States Department of the Interior <br /> National Park Service/National Register of Historic Places Registration Form <br /> NPS Form 10-900 OMB Control No.1024-0018 <br /> Moorefields (Additional Documentation) Orange County, N.C. <br /> Name of Property County and State <br /> an elite class comprised of merchants,professionals, and public officials centered in Hillsborough, <br /> which"ranked among the region's principal towns along with Salisbury and Salem to the west."32 <br /> It was these elite planters(with the use of enslaved laborers)who furnished the cotton and tobacco <br /> crops grown for export. However, because the vast majority (80%) of Orange County property <br /> owners were small (under 500 acres) landholders, backcountry politics leaned democratic and <br /> egalitarian.Yeoman farmers chaffed at the policies and taxes levied on them by an elite and remote <br /> class whose interests did not align with their own. From 1764 to 1771, Orange County (and <br /> Hillsborough, in particular) became the center of the Regulator Movement, which protested <br /> colonial governance's (and especially Royal Governor William Tryon's) corruption, abuses, and <br /> arbitrary taxation. The movement began in 1766 with a quiet protest by farmers seeking redress, <br /> but the movement quickly turned into militant revolt. A series of confrontations in Hillsborough <br /> in 1768 culminated in the Regulators' seizure of the Orange County courthouse in September 1770. <br /> This, in turn, prompted Governor Tryon to dispatch the colonial militia. The Regulators were <br /> ultimately defeated in the Battle of Alamance on May 16, 1771. Among Tryon's forces present at <br /> the battle was a young lieutenant, Alfred Moore (1755-1810) from Brunswick County, North <br /> Carolina. His father, Judge Maurice Moore (1735-1777), was tasked with dispensing justice to 12 <br /> Regulators that had been captured at the Battle of Alamance and were tried for insurrection and <br /> treason. Six of the men were found guilty and sentenced to hang; the execution took place in <br /> Hillsborough on June 9, 1771.33 <br /> Orange County figured prominently in the American Revolutionary War (1775-1783). As the <br /> revolution took shape, the Third Provincial Congress met in Hillsborough to prepare for the <br /> outbreak of war on August 23, 1775. In 1778 and 1782-1784,Hillsborough was home to the state's <br /> legislature.34 But Orange County and its residents did not just peaceably bear witness to the <br /> conflict. During this war as with the preceding conflict with the Regulators, Tories and Whigs <br /> lived as uncomfortable neighbors, and violence often erupted. The violence threatened to touch <br /> Thomas Hart, who had inherited Grayfields through his marriage to Gray's daughter.35 By the <br /> autumn of 1780, Colonel Hart's large family was under threat by their Tory neighbors, and Hart <br /> was advised to leave the region. In his rush to leave Orange County in late 1780, Hart sold <br /> Grayfields to Peter Mallett and moved to Hagerstown,Maryland. In February 1781,British forces <br /> under General Charles Cornwallis occupied Hillsborough for six days.As British soldiers marched <br /> out to Hartford, Patriots intercepted them and a skirmish ensued, known as the Battle of Hart's <br /> Mill. Several other skirmishes occurred in Orange County before the Revolutionary War came to <br /> an end on September 3, 1783, with the signing of the Treaty of Paris.36 <br /> Moorefields, the Seasonal Seat of Alfred Moore, Sr. (1784-1810) <br /> With the conclusion of the Revolutionary War in 1783,relative calm returned to the North Carolina <br /> Piedmont and quotidian business transactions that had been stymied by conflict resumed. <br /> Hillsborough's location made it a convenient meeting ground for eastern and western North <br /> Carolinians, and so the town proved a nexus in the newly-formed state's economy.37 Furthermore, <br /> after the Revolutionary War ended, the Piedmont's population grew rapidly with an influx of <br /> European and European-American settlers and soon surpassed the white population on the coast.38 <br /> The balance of political power was visibly shifting from the entrenched eastern elite to new leaders <br /> anchored in the center of the state. This was evidenced by Hillsborough's centrality in the <br /> Section 8 page 26 <br />