Hillsborough: Where Backcountry Farmers Stormed the Courts

Surveyor William Churton laid out this town in seventeen fifty-four on the site of a Native American village belonging to the Occaneechi people. It passed through several names, including Corbin Town and Childsburgh, before being named Hillsborough in seventeen sixty-six for the Earl of Hillsborough, Britain's secretary of state for the colonies.

The town's most dramatic moment came in September seventeen seventy, when backcountry farmers known as the Regulators had reached their limit. They accused local sheriffs, especially Edmund Fanning of Hillsborough, of charging illegal fees and corrupting the court system. The Regulators stormed the courthouse, disrupted proceedings, and dragged officials they considered corrupt through the streets. Governor William Tryon crushed the movement at the Battle of Alamance the following year and executed Regulator leaders, but the uprising is now understood as an early colonial rebellion against corrupt governance, a dress rehearsal for the Revolution that would follow.