Benjamin Smith (1756 1826) was a Revolutionary War veteran, one of the original appointees to the UNC board of trustees, and the 16th Governor of North Carolina where he focused on reforming the states criminal codes and penitentiary system. Smith donated his payment for war service, 20,000 acres in Tennessee, to the new university system, making him the first donor to the new school.
Aldolphus Williamson Mangum (1834-1890) was born in Orange Co NC to a large plantation owner. He attended Randolph-Macon College in Virginia and became a circuit rider preacher. He joined the Confederate Army in 1861. In 1875 he was elected as the chair of Mental and Moral Philosophy at UNC. He was remembered as an intense believer in the Lost Cause and Mangum Dormitory was named after him, his uncle, and his cousin in 1922.
Cornelia Phillips Spencer, born in Harlem, spent most of her life in Chapel Hill. Best known as the woman who rang the bell after UNC reopened after Reconstruction, Spencer’s legacy has raised questions as scholars and activists alike have reexamined her white supremacist views.
Mitchell, born in 1793, was a UNC professor from 1818 until he died in 1857. His main field was geology. He found that a North Carolina mountain, now called Mount Mitchell, is the highest in the eastern US. He was a minister and slaveholder and preached on the morality of slavery. Mitchell Hall is named after him.
George Moses Horton (c. 1797-c. 1883) published his first book of poetry, The Hope of Liberty, in 1829 while enslaved on a Chatham County, North Carolina, farm. He is the only person to publish a book while enslaved; he hoped that book sales would buy his freedom. Horton often went to Chapel Hill to sell produce and, while there, several UNC students paid him for poems to give to their girlfriends.