Charles Pettigrew (1744-1807), a prominent North Carolina educator, planter, and clergyman, was born on the Pennsylvania frontier into a family of Presbyterian immigrants from Northern Ireland. After the family moved to North Carolina, Pettigrew was appointed as a schoolmaster at Edenton. In 1774 he was ordained a deacon and priest in the Anglican church, and subsequently he sought to organize the former Anglican church into the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina. Though he was elected bishop of the proposed diocese, "he failed to attend the next two triennial conventions at either one of which he would have been consecrated bishop, and at the time of his death there was neither bishop nor diocese in the state" (Dictionary of North Carolina Biography 5:76). Pettigrew served on the University's board of trustees from 1790 to 1793. At his death he owned "two plantations in North Carolina, eight hundred acres of land in Tennessee, thirty-four slaves, a chapel, and a good house" (Dictionary of North Carolina Biography 5:76).