Hillsborough: Where the Trading Path Crossed the Eno

Hillsborough sits where the Great Indian Trading Path crossed the Eno River, a crossroads so strategically obvious that the Occaneechi people had a village here long before European settlers arrived. Orange County was established in seventeen fifty-two and the town was surveyed and platted in seventeen fifty-four on that same Occaneechi site.

It went through three names in its first decade. It was first planned as Orange, then called Corbin Town, then Childsburgh, before finally being renamed Hillsborough in seventeen sixty-six to honor Wills Hill, the Earl of Hillsborough who served as Britain's Secretary of State for the Colonies. The town became one of colonial North Carolina's most important political centers, hosting the Regulator uprising of the seventeen sixties the Provincial Congress in seventeen seventy-five, and later sessions of the state legislature. Few towns its size carry so much early American history in so concentrated a place.