The Nash-Hooper House: A Declaration Signer's Last Home

The white frame house on West Tryon Street in Hillsborough started as the home of Francis Nash, a Revolutionary War general who built it in seventeen seventy-two on land tied to a colonial governor. Nash was killed at the Battle of Germantown in Pennsylvania five years later, and the house passed through a land sale.

In seventeen eighty-two it was purchased by William Hooper, one of the three North Carolinians who signed the Declaration of Independence. Hooper had been a Patriot leader through the war, a delegate to the Continental Congress, and a man who paid a real price for his politics. He died in this house in seventeen ninety and was buried in the Presbyterian churchyard in Hillsborough.

The property stayed in the Hooper family until eighteen fifty-three. By eighteen seventy a future governor and Confederate senator named William A. Graham had acquired it. He too was buried in the adjacent cemetery. The house was declared a National Historic Landmark in nineteen seventy-one. Of all the homes William Hooper ever occupied, it is the only one that survived.