Pittsboro: Named for the Earl Who Defended America

Pittsboro is the seat of Chatham County, occupying a crossroads in the North Carolina Piedmont where several old trading routes converged. Chatham County itself was formed in seventeen seventy-one from Orange County, in part because of unrest stemming from the War of the Regulation, the farmers' revolt against colonial tax collectors that ended violently at the Battle of Alamance. The county was named for William Pitt, the Earl of Chatham, who had argued in the British Parliament against taxing the American colonies without representation, a position that made him a hero in North Carolina.

The town that became the county seat went through two names: first chartered in seventeen seventy-eight as Chatham on land that belonged to Ambrose Edwards, then renamed and relocated in seventeen eighty-five as Pittsboro, honoring Pitt's son William Pitt the Younger. Its circular courthouse square, where the county courthouse anchors the center of town, is a well-preserved example of the courthouse-square plan common to county seats across the upper South.