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In 1882 one-legged Sharpsburg veteran Willie Thomas Patterson was appointed Bursar of the University of North Carolina, and served in that post for most of the rest of his life, to 1909.

He was raised the 5th of 7 children by wealthy parents James Newton (1806-1865) and Lucy Hawkins Couch Patterson (1808-1848) on their large plantation at Durhamville in Orange County (now Durham, Durham County), North Carolina.

He was of the 5th generation on the place, all born in North Carolina. His great-great-grandfather John B Patterson (1717-1787) first owned and farmed there before 1770, followed by John Tapley Patterson (c. 1743-1781), who had slaves working the land by 1781, then Mann Patterson (1772-1835), his grandfather.

John B Patterson

In 1850 Willie’s father James owned 63 slaves, the second largest number in the county, and by 1860 had 112, 6 of them in trust for his children. The US Census that year reported the value of those people at $77,000 (equivalent to about $3 million in 2024). His real estate holdings were worth $26,500, by way of comparison.

Soon after the start of the war in 1861, 20 year old Willie and his orphaned cousin James Newton Faucette, who lived with the Pattersons, enlisted in the Orange Guards, who became Company G of the 27th North Carolina Infantry. They first saw combat together at Newberne, NC in March 1862. Willie was seriously wounded in the leg at Sharpsburg, captured there, and lost his leg to amputation. He returned home in 1864.

His life was very different after the war: in 1870 he was an unemployed “cripple” living with his brother John, a physician in Chapel Hill, though by 1880 he was a bookkeeper in Durham making his own way. He never married.

His picture here from University President Kemp P. Battle’s History of the University of North Carolina (Vol. II, 1907), online from the Internet Archive.

Family details from genealogies and the Population and Slave Schedules of the 1850 and 1860 US Census.

The 1968 photo of the Patterson Plantation house, now called Holly Rock Farm, is online from Open Orange; original by the Durham Herald Sun.

The portrait of John B Patterson is of unknown provenance, shared to the FamilySearch database by Glen Robert Cary.

John Tapley Patterson’s 1781 will is also in that database.