Restrictions to Access

Use of audio or moving image materials may require production of listening or viewing copies.

Restrictions to Use

No usage restrictions.

Copyright Notice

Copyright is retained by the authors of items in these papers, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.

Preferred Citation

[Identification of item], in the Webb Family of Hillsborough (N.C.) Papers #5532, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Acquisitions Information

Received from Kate Webb Ragsdale and Richard Beverly Raney Webb in July 2012 (Acc. 101629).

Sensitive Materials Statement

Manuscript collections and archival records may contain materials with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations, the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. § 132 1 et seq.), and Article 7 of the North Carolina State Personnel Act (Privacy of State Employee Personnel Records, N.C.G.S. § 126-22 et seq.). Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in this collection without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill assumes no responsibility.

Summary description was created in October 2017.

Encoded by: Laura Smith, October 2017

Updated: May 2019

The following terms from Library of Congress Subject Headings suggest topics, persons, geography, etc. interspersed through the entire collection; the terms do not usually represent discrete and easily identifiable portions of the collection--such as folders or items.

Clicking on a subject heading below will take you into the University Library's online catalog.

• Cone Mills Corporation--History.
• Eno Cotton Mills--History.
• Families--North Carolina--History.
• Hillsborough (N.C.)--History.
• Orange County (N.C.)--History.
• Slavery--North Carolina--Orange County--History.
• Textile industry--North Carolina.
• Webb family.

The Webb family of Hillsborough, N.C., is descended from James Webb (1774-1855), a physician from North Carolina's white planter, slave holding class, and his son James Webb, Jr., a Hillsborough merchant. The elder Webb helped to establish the North Carolina State Medical Society in 1799 and attended the University of North Carolina in its first year (1795), becoming a member of the university's debating organization, the Dialectic Society, which he purportedly named.

Correspondence between Webb family members from the early 1900s through the 1950s and early twentieth-century love letters compose the majority of papers from the affluent, white family of Hillsborough, N.C. Webb family members represented in the correspondence include James H. Webb, Annie Hudgins Webb, their son James Webb (b. 1904), who was president of the Eno Cotton Mills and later vice president of Cone Mills Corporation, and Margaret Raney Webb. Collection materials also include v-mail and letters from members of the armed services during the Second World War; genealogical and family history files; a scrapbook from the late 1940s and early 1950s pertaining to Eno Cotton Mills and Cone Mills Corporation; materials related to James Webb's political career in the North Carolina state senate in the late 1940s; subject files on Hillsborough, N.C., history; and an audio cassette tape of local historian Jean Anderson speaking in 1999. Genealogical files contain letters, newspaper clippings, family trees, family histories, copies and transcriptions of historical documents pertaining to related families including the Norwood family and Huske family, and writings by family members. Family history materials include a transcribed 1843 estate document listing people enslaved in Orange County, N.C., by William Norwood (1767-1842) and a reminiscence by an unnamed white female author, who was a child in the late antebellum and Civil War period. In the composition, she perpetuates the southern plantation myth, characterizing her "black Mammy" and other enslaved people her father owned as contented "servants."

• Audiocassette: C-5532/1
• Oversize Volume: SV-5532/1
• Rolled Items: R-5532/1-2