Agenda 02-03-2026; 8-i - National Register Recommendation for Moorefields

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29 United States Department of the Interior National Park Service/National Register of Historic Places Registration Form NPS Form 10-900 OMB Control No.1024-0018 Moorefields (Additional Documentation) Orange County, N.C. Name of Property County and State formation of a new nation in 1788,when delegates arrived in Orange County's seat to vote on the United States' Constitution and to select a new, permanent home for North Carolina's capital. Although Hillsborough was considered for the honor, it was not selected; nearby Raleigh was chartered in 1792. In 1789, however, Chapel Hill, in the southeastern corner of Orange County, was chosen as the site of the first public university.39 As the state's Attorney General since 1783, Alfred Moore (1755-1810) likely recognized this regional shift in political power when he decided to establish a base near Hillsborough.40 In the first week of January 1784, Peter Mallett sold the 1,200 acres he had bought from Thomas Hart to Moore for 1,200 pounds.41 Having been at the Battle of Alamance in 1771 and through his familial connections to General Francis Nash (his brother-in-law), Moore would have been familiar with Hillsborough and its vicinity long before he purchased the Grayfields estate, which he renamed Moorefields.Furthermore,in the 1784 deed,he was described as"Alfred Moore of Orange County attorney at law," suggesting that he was already firmly ensconced and practicing his profession in Hillsborough during the years it served as the seat of the state legislature (1782-1784).42 Family lore maintains that Moorefields was intended and used as a family summer home in the Occoneechee Mountains,as Moore's homeplace was a vast rice plantationBuchoion the lower Cape Fear River, west of Wilmington.43 This is supported by the fact that Moore was only enumerated as a resident of Brunswick County in the 1790 and 1800 federal censuses. But in its earliest years,Moorefields may have functioned less as a vacation home and more as a pied-a-terre positioning Moore closer to emerging centers of political influence and the courts. Family letters,however,do illustrate that Moorefields was used as a summer home by the extended Moore family by 1805 if not sooner. The letters illustrate how the Moores took carriages from Buchoi and traveled on primitive roads to reach Moorefields, where they would stay from June until the third hard frost,typically in late October.44 This seasonal migration was customary among elite coastal planters of the South, in general, and to North Carolinians in particular: To escape the heat and malaria of the coastal towns the people of Eastern North Carolina had retired in colonial times to the edge of the piedmont where they might find cool springs out of reach of the "miasma."Thus custom was continued into the antebellum period until it came to be a means of distinguishing those who were fashionable in town life from those who were not.4s One such summer retreat, widely popular by 1802, was Lenox Castle in nearby Rockingham County.46 Similarly, Hillsborough's "healthy location...drew Wilmingtonians and other eastern Carolinians for summer stays."47 The practice of coastal planters summering in the Piedmont was common enough at the time for William Bingham to place an advertisement in two Raleigh newspapers in July 1801, which stated[italics are author's emphasis], A PLANTATION, &c. FOR SALE THE subscriber intending to remove from Chatham, proposes disposing of his plantation and crops growing thereon, and part of his stock, consisting of one good mare, four cows and calves, some heifers and young steers,and about twenty hogs. To gentlemen in the low country, Section 8 page 27