Graham: County Seat and a Dark Night in Reconstruction

Alamance County was split from Orange County in eighteen forty-nine because residents found it too far to cross the Haw River to Hillsborough for county business. Graham was incorporated in eighteen fifty-one as the new county seat, named for William Alexander Graham, a former North Carolina governor who also served as Secretary of the Navy. The town built its courthouse and settled into the rhythms of a Piedmont market community.

Then came Reconstruction. In February of eighteen seventy, Wyatt Outlaw, an African American town commissioner and Union League organizer in Graham, was kidnapped from his home by members of the Ku Klux Klan and hanged from a tree in the courthouse square. The murder helped prompt Governor William Holden to call out the state militia, triggering a political crisis that led to Holden's own impeachment.

Graham has carried that history quietly ever since.