The Reverend Robert Burwell, his wife Anna, and their two children moved from Virginia to Hillsborough in 1835, where the Presbyterians who hired him as their minister provided a house built around 1821 at the corner of Union and Churton Streets. In 1837, after Dr. James Webb asked Anna Burwell to help educate his daughter, she opened the family home as a school for girls. Within a few years it had become a boarding school drawing students from across the South. From 1837 to 1857, as many as forty enslaved people and free blacks provided the labor needed to run the school and care for the Burwell family and their students. Students studied reading, writing, mathematics, science, history, music, and drawing. In 1848, Robert Burwell resigned from the ministry to devote more time to school affairs, purchased the property from the Presbyterian Church, and hired John Berry to renovate and enlarge the house. By 1857, the Burwells had educated more than two hundred young women. That year they closed the school and became directors of the Charlotte Female Academy in Charlotte, North Carolina, now Queens University. Anna Burwell died in Charlotte in 1871, and Robert Burwell later moved to Raleigh to run Peace Institute, now William Peace University, before dying in 1895. After the Burwells left, the Collins family, owners of Somerset Place Plantation in Washington County, bought the property to shelter their extended family and enslaved servants behind Confederate lines and called the home "The Beehive" because so many people lived there. In 1869, the Orange County sheriff sold the buildings and grounds to settle the debts of Dr. Thomas Warren, who had married into the Collins family. In 1895, Charles M. Parks sold the property to Dr. John Spurgeon, a dentist, and he and his wife Carrie raised their six children there. In the 1960s, the Historic Hillsborough Commission, under the leadership of Mary Claire Engstrom, purchased the house and turned it into a historic site. Enslaved and free people worked at the school, including Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly, who later bought her freedom, moved to Washington, D.C., and became Mary Lincoln's dressmaker; Joseph Nichols, Job Berry, and other enslaved Black craftsmen who worked for John Berry on renovations in the 1840s; free Black workers Eliza Chavious, a laundress, Patsy Freeman, a nurse, and Umstead Mayo, a maintenance man and personal servant to Robert Burwell; enslaved workers Hannah, a cook, Julia, who sewed, and Mary Ann, a housekeeper; and teachers including Antonio de Martino, an immigrant from Italy who taught music, and Sarah Kollock, a former student who taught French and drawing before helping found the Nash and Kollock School in Hillsborough.