Why Downtown Hillsborough's Newest Businesses Keep Borrowing a 255-Year-Old Name
September 10, 2026
September 10, 2026
Walk from the old courthouse down Churton Street this month and you'll pass two businesses that both call themselves the Regulator. One has been pouring beer for years out of a space it's carved into Hillsborough's identity as the town's first nanobrewery. The other is a three-story renovation project that just spent nearly two years fighting supply chain delays before finally cracking its doors open this year, corner of West King and South Churton, in what was once one of the most storied buildings downtown.
Neither business invented the name. Both are borrowing it from 1771, when a group of farmers calling themselves the Regulators rose up against corrupt colonial tax collectors and six of them were hanged for it, an event the town still marks with a historical marker on South Churton Street. That two separate business owners, years apart, independently reached for the same 255-year-old rebellion to name their bar tells you something about how this town actually grows. It doesn't invent. It inherits.
The newer arrival, simply called The Regulator, sits inside a building its owner, D.L. Brown, has watched cycle through phases for nearly half a century of living in Orange County. What started as a pandemic-era side project turned into a three-floor build: a basement brewhouse, a main-level taproom modeled on a traditional village pub, and an upstairs level with additional seating and a boardroom available for meetings and private events. Brown built much of the interior himself, including the backbar, tap systems, tables and cabinetry, in his own garage woodshop. Supply chain shortages pushed the opening back by close to two years. As of this month, the business describes itself as still in soft-open hours, welcoming residents in as it settles into a long run as what it hopes will become Hillsborough's central pub.
A few blocks away, Regulator Brewing Company has already done the work of becoming a fixture. It's the town's first nanobrewery, and last year it brewed a special Scottish ale specifically for the Outlandish Hillsborough Scottish Festival, tying its own name back to the same colonial tax revolt the festival's Outlander fans come looking for. Two businesses, same historical anchor, same street, same instinct to root a new venture in something old rather than invent something new.
The Regulator Movement isn't a footnote here. It's treated as civic infrastructure. The Alliance for Historic Hillsborough runs walking tours built around it, an annual Regulator Remembrance Day still draws descendants to lay flowers at the marker in Cameron Park each June, and the town's own historical marker sits directly on South Churton Street, a short walk from both breweries. When a new business owner in Hillsborough looks for a name that will mean something to the people already living here, this is the well everyone draws from.
That's a different growth pattern than a lot of Triangle towns are seeing right now, where new development tends to announce itself as new. Here, the newest businesses want to sound like they've always been here.
It's not limited to beer. When Radius Pizzeria closed at the end of 2024 after eleven years at 112 North Churton Street, the space didn't sit empty and it didn't get demolished for something else. Chef Josh DeCarolis, a Hillsborough resident already known locally for Mothers & Sons Trattoria in Durham, signed a ten-year lease on the same footprint with partners Phil Bey and Pietro Costanza. Radius's original owners, Mick and Kate Carroll, stayed on as landlords and sold much of the kitchen equipment to the new team. Serratore's Pasta & Pizza opened quietly around last August's Last Fridays Art Walk, and a year later it's a reviewed, established part of the Thursday-through-Tuesday dinner rotation downtown, known for handmade pastas and Neapolitan-style pizza rather than a reinvention of what the space used to be.
Vesta, the boutique Francesca Morgan opened after moving to Hillsborough from California's Monterey Bay area, works the same instinct on a smaller scale. Morgan rotates her inventory every week or two rather than committing to a fixed catalog, carrying knits from The Endery alongside basics from Crown Jewel, but the shop itself occupies existing downtown retail space rather than anything built new for the purpose.
None of this is coincidence. It's a pattern: the businesses succeeding downtown right now are the ones willing to inherit a building, a lease, a name, or a piece of local history rather than start from a blank site plan.
If you're already living here, the next few weekends make the pattern even more obvious. Every major event on the September calendar leans on something the town already had rather than importing something new.
Every one of these events is either explicitly historical, like Hog Day's decades-old car culture and Outlandish's Regulator-adjacent Scottish heritage tie-in, or built on infrastructure the town has run for years, like the recurring art walk. Nothing on the September calendar is trying to be the newest thing in the Triangle. It's all trying to be the next chapter of something already established.
If you've been in Hillsborough a while, this probably tracks with what you already sense walking down Churton Street. New ownership doesn't erase what came before it. It tends to fold in. The Regulator spent years and a stalled supply chain becoming a pub instead of tearing down a storied building for something faster to build. Serratore's kept the Radius footprint and even bought its equipment. Vesta and the boutiques around it treat downtown's existing retail shells as a feature, not a constraint.
For anyone weighing whether downtown still has room for something new, the honest answer is yes, constantly, but almost never from scratch. The town's newest businesses keep proving that the fastest way to belong here is to borrow something that already does.
If Hillsborough's next chapter has you thinking about your own, whether that means finding a home near this stretch of Churton Street or understanding what a move into this market actually looks like, the team at Bespoke Realty Group knows this town at the level of detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet. Request a Bespoke Home Valuation and let's talk about what's next.
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