University Libraries, UNC-Chapel Hill

Battle Family Papers

The Battle Family Papers document the life of William Horn Battle (1802–1879) of Louisburg, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill, a white lawyer, legislator, judge, and trustee and professor of law at the University of North Carolina; Kemp Plummer Battle (1831–1919) of Chapel Hill and Raleigh, a white...

Cameron Family Papers - Records of Enslavement

• Legal Documents
• Letters and Correspondence
• Lists of Enslaved People

Cameron Family Papers - Series 1.1

Cameron family of Orange and Durham counties and Raleigh, N.C. Among antebellum North Carolina's largest landholders and slave holders, the Camerons also owned substantial plantations in Alabama and Mississippi. Prominent family members included Richard Bennehan (1743–1825), merchant; Duncan...

Cherokee Lands Salesbooks

The collection contains records of sales of former Cherokee lands in Macon County, N.C., made by Samuel Finley Patterson and Charles L. Hinton, state commissioners. Records include amount of land sold, price, name of surveyor, purchaser, and other data

Elizabeth Frances Perry Diary

The collection consists of the diary of Perry, containing scattered entries, some reflecting on her earlier life, including details of family and social life in Greenville, S.C. The diary includes a four-page "Preface" by Perry's husband, Benjamin Franklin Perry (1805–1886).

Federal Writers' Project Papers

CONTENT WARNING: Some of these texts contain offensive and racist language used by the creators of these documents. W. T. Couch (1901), a white publisher and editor, was also a part-time official of the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration, as assistant and...

Francis Taylor Diary

Francis Taylor (1747-1799) was an officer in the American Revolution and later a planter in Orange County, Va. Taylor lived at Midland Plantation with his father, Colonel George Taylor (died 1794). The collection includes a typed transcription of a diary, 1786-1799, of the daily activities,...

Francis Terry Leak Papers

Francis Terry Leak was a cotton planter and businessman of Tippah (now Benton) County, Miss. The collection includes manuscript volumes containing entries of various types, most of which are presumed to have been written by Francis Terry Leak. With the exception of one volume consisting chiefly...

Fred Dudley Swindell Diary

Fred Dudley Swindell was born 2 March 1882 in Kingston, N.C., to Frederick Dallas (b. 1846) and Sue Decater Swindell. His brother, Charles LeRoy Swindell, was born on 1 December 1884, in Wadesboro, N.C. Charles attended the University of North Carolina in the early 1900s and became a physician...

George Wesley Johnson Farm Journal

Farm journal, 1853–1866, kept by George Wesley Johnson, a white merchant, postmaster, farmer, landowner, and enslaver in Davie County, North Carolina. The journal primarily documents daily farm operations, including what he planted, the methods he used, and the crops he yielded, as well as...

Hawkins Family Papers

The Hawkins Family Papers chiefly document white male family members, including Philemon Hawkins (1752-1833), John Davis Hawkins (1781-1858), and William J. Hawkins (1819-1894), and others of Warren, Franklin, and Wake counties, N.C., who owned and managed plantations; enslaved people; served as...

Hayes Collection

Johnston and Wood family members owned and operated Hayes Plantation on the Albemarle Sound near Edenton, N.C. Members of the Johnston family include Gabriel Johnston (1699–1752), royal governor of the colony of North Carolina and planter; his brother Samuel Johnston (1702–1757),...

Haywood Family Papers

The Haywood family was a politically and socially influential white family in Raleigh, N.C., with plantations dependent on enslaved labor in Edgecombe County, N.C., and in Greene County and Marengo County, Alabama. The collection includes correspondence, business papers, legal documents, medical...

Hentz Family Papers

Prominent members of the Hentz family included French revolutionary Nicholas Arnould Hentz (1756-1832); his sons Nicholas Richard Hentz (1786-1850), an officer in the French Imperial Army; and Nicholas Marcellus Hentz (1797-1856), a prominent entomologist; the latter's wife, the writer Caroline...

John Bramblett Beall Letters

John Bramblett Beall (1833-1917) was born in Carroll County, Ga. At the outbreak of the Civil War, he served in the 19th Georgia Infantry Regiment in the Virginia campaigns in 1861 and was wounded in the hip at Mechanicsville in 1862. During his recovery, he served as conscription officer at...

John Fletcher Comer Journal

John Fletcher Comer was a cotton planter of Barbour County, Ala., where he also ran a sawmill and corn mill. J.F. Comer was the father of Braxton Bragg Comer, who, in 1906, became governor of Alabama. The collection is a journal kept by John Fletcher Comer containing various kinds of records...

Karen L. Parker Collection

The first African-American woman undergraduate to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Karen L. Parker was born in Salisbury, N.C., and grew up in Winston-Salem, N.C. Parker majored in journalism and after graduating in 1965, Parker began a career in newspapers that took her...

Manigault Family Papers

The collection contains information about the people enslaved by the white Manigault family on their rice plantations, Silk Hope in Berkeley District, S.C., and Gowrie and East Hermitage on Argyle Island on the Savannah River in Georgia. Plantation journals kept between 1833 and 1897 by Charles...

Manuel Fetter Account Book

Manual Fetter was a professor of Greek at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, N.C. The collection is an account book containing a record of personal and household expenses, 1841-1844, kept by Manuel Fetter while he was a professor of Greek at the University of North Carolina, Chapel...

Neal Family Papers

The Neal Family Papers document white farmers and plantation owners, enslaved and free people of color, and freed people in Franklin County, N.C.; Fayette and Henderson counties, Tenn.; Tuscaloosa, Ala.; Hinds County, Miss.; Waxahachie, Tex.; and other areas of the old Southwest in the 19th and...

Nimrod Porter Papers

Farmer and sheriff in Maury County, Tenn. Diary and other records of Nimrod Porter. The diary, 1861–1871, records daily life during the Civil War and Reconstruction; weather; farm and business activities; operations of Union and Confederate armies and guerillas in Maury County and vicinity; news...

Penn School Papers

The Penn School on Saint Helena Island, S.C., was founded during the Civil War by northern philanthropists and white missionaries for former enslaved individuals in an area occupied by the United States Army. Over the years, with continuing philanthropic support, it served as school, health...

Rice C. Ballard Papers

CONTENT WARNING: the contents of these papers include depictions of brutal violence and human trafficking by enslavers. Rice Carter Ballard (c. 1800–1860) was a slave trader based in Richmond, Va., who worked in partnership with the large slave trading firm of Isaac Franklin and John...

Test

Test Collection

Thomas Brevard Notebook

Thomas Brevard was a teacher of North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky. His notebook contains a diary, 1804 and 1830, accounts, poems, and other writings of Brevard; and minutes of the Union Library Society, Lebanon, Tenn., 1817-1824, and of the Philalethian Debating Society,...

Thomas Ruffin Papers

CONTENT WARNING: the contents of these papers include depictions of brutal violence and human trafficking by enslavers. Thomas Ruffin, chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, planter, and politician, served in the North Carolina House of Commons, 1813-1816; as judge of the...

UNC Papers

The University of North Carolina was chartered by the state's General Assembly in 1789. Its first student was admitted in 1795. The governing body of the University, from its founding until 1932, was a forty-member Board of Trustees elected by the General Assembly. The Board met twice a year; at...

UNC System Board of Trustees

With the creation in 1932 of the Consolidated University of North Carolina, which included the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, North Carolina State College in Raleigh, and Woman's College in Greensboro, the North Carolina General Assembly appointed a new hundred-member Board of...

William Audley Couper papers

William Audley Couper, son of John Couper (1759–1850) and younger brother of James Hamilton Couper (1794–1866), married Hannah Page King (d. 1896), daughter of Thomas Butler King (1800–1864) and Anna Matilda (Page) King (d. 1859). Couper managed Hamilton, a plantation on St. Simon's Island,...

William D. Valentine Diary

William D. Valentine was born in Hertford County, N.C. in 1806. He contracted a debilitating disease at the age of 13 that left him permanently disabled. After a brief stint as a grammar-school teacher in 1837, he became a lawyer, practicing in the courts of Hertford, Bertie, Gates, and...

William McKendree Robbins Papers

William McKendree Robbins was professor at Normal College (later Trinity College), Randolph County, N.C., 1851-1853; lawyer in Alabama, and Salisbury and Statesville, N.C.; and North Carolina congressman, 1873-1878. Papers consist of love letters, 1849-1854, between Robbins and his future wife,...