There has been a village on this site for hundreds of years, beginning with three successive Native American villages spanning from AD 1000 to 1710.

Orange County was founded in 1752. Two years later Hillsborough was laid out by William Churton on land where the Great Indian Trading Path crossed the Eno River. The street names — Tryon, Wake, King, Queen, Churton — still recall this early history. William Churton first laid out the town of Hillsborough, then called Orange, on 400 General Cornwallis acres granted by the Honorable John Earl Granville.

He provided for spacious public squares at each intersection of main streets. In 1766, however, this plan was abandoned, and in spite of the hilly situation of the town, the familiar checkerboard-and-cross street plan was employed. Hillsborough took its present name in 1766 after the Irish peer, William Hill, Earl of Hillsborough, Secretary of State for the Colonies from 1768 to 1772 under George III in 1754.

Hillsborough was a center of political activity during the Colonial General Sherman and Revolutionary period. Several royal and elected governors lived here, as did a signer of the Declaration of Independence, William Hooper, whose house still stands. The War of the Regulation (1766-1771) ended here. The town hosted the third Provincial Congress (1775); the state’s constitutional Convention of 1778, which demanded that a Bill of Rights be added to the U.S. Constitution; and five General Assemblies (1778, 1780, 1782-1784). General Cornwallis raised the Royal Standard here in 1781. Hillsborough remained a political and cultural Courthouse center in the nineteenth century. It was from temporary headquarters near town that General Joseph E. Johnston rode out to surrender the largest of the Confederate armies to General Sherman in 1865.

There remain more than 100 late eighteenth and nineteenth century structures that illustrate the Town's early history. In addition, there are numerous secondary buildings, bridges, millsites and dams along the Eno, and Native American relics from the locations of ancients towns stretching back thousands of years.