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Early twentieth century, every dated entry: 193 dated entries from the full dataset. Back to the highlights →
- Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
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The Texas community builds Jeffries Cross Church and Martin's Chapel Baptist Church
Around the turn of the twentieth century the community built two churches on land given by Joe and Levi Jeffries and by Sam Martin, in place of the circuit riding preachers who had served the settlement before. Social life in the community turned on its churches and its school.
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Thomas Wolfe, who came to Chapel Hill as a student in 1916, was born
Thomas Wolfe was born in Asheville and entered UNC in 1916.
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Josephus Daniels serves on the University of North Carolina board of trustees
Daniels became a member of the university board of trustees in 1901 and remained an active trustee until his death in 1948. During the 1920s he pressed for consolidating the state colleges at Chapel Hill, Raleigh and Greensboro into one university, and in 1930 he championed Frank P. Graham to succeed Harry Woodburn Chase as president.
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Lincoln Hospital opens in Durham for Black patients
Dr. Aaron Moore and John Merrick won Duke family funding for a separate hospital where Black physicians and nurses treated Black patients, after Watts Hospital had excluded them. It opened in 1901 as a 50-bed frame building.
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The university opens Davie Hall for botany and zoology
In 1901 the university opened a new building for botany and zoology on its Chapel Hill campus and named it William R. Davie Hall. The building was renovated and expanded in 1967.
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Josiah Turner Jr. dies at his Hillsborough home
Josiah Turner Jr., former Confederate congressman and editor of the Raleigh Sentinel, died at his home in Hillsborough and was buried in the churchyard of St. Matthew's Church.
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Baptists organize Union Chapel in West End
On land Thomas Lloyd deeded for churches, Baptists and Methodists shared a small Weaver Street building on alternate Sundays, and the Baptists organized as Union Chapel with seventeen charter members; the congregation became Venable Baptist in 1911 and Carrboro Baptist in 1914.
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Elizabeth Cotten composes Freight Train
At about age eleven, growing up near the railroad tracks in the settlement that became Carrboro, Elizabeth Cotten wrote "Freight Train." She played a right-handed guitar upside down, and the song became a folk standard after Folkways released her recording in 1958.
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Eno Mill adds cloth weaving
New looms extended operations beyond spinning yarn.
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Phillips Russell graduates from the university and helps found the Golden Fleece
Russell edited the student paper the Tar Heel and was one of the founders of the honorary society Golden Fleece before graduating in 1904.
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The old Joseph Caldwell obelisk is moved to the cemetery and rededicated to four college servants
When a new monument to President Joseph Caldwell went up on campus, the Class of 1891 moved his original 1837 obelisk to the Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery and rededicated it to Wilson Caldwell, November Caldwell, David Barham and Henry Smith, who had served the university.
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Herbert and Alice Blackwood purchase and revitalize the farm
Herbert and Alice Blackwood purchased the farm and renewed its house and agricultural buildings.
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UNC's Carnegie Library opens
UNC's new library, built with a gift from Andrew Carnegie first offered in 1905 as $50,000 and later raised to $55,000, was finished in the summer of 1907 and opened to students that fall once its furniture arrived. It served as the main library until Wilson Library opened in 1929 and was renamed for John Sprunt Hill in 1931.
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Julian Carr's Durham Hosiery Mills buys the Alberta Mill
In 1909 the Alberta Cotton Mill that Thomas F. Lloyd had built at West End was sold to Durham Hosiery Mills, the company of Julian S. Carr of Durham, which ran it as Mill No. 4. On March 9, 1909 the company also bought the Blanche Hosiery Mill, a local knitting mill, and folded it into the same operation.
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The legislature creates the Chapel Hill Graded School District
An act ratified February 26, 1909 created the Chapel Hill Graded School District, with a special school tax and six trustees, among them Charles H. Herty and N. W. Walker, who ran its schools free of the Orange County board. Voters had to approve it in May; the city school system dates its founding to 1909.
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Hillsboro Public Library is counted among North Carolina's early free public libraries
A 1954 history of North Carolina public libraries names the Hillsboro Public Library among the free public libraries established in North Carolina by 1910, fifteen in all. A later survey dates Hillsboro's library to 1910 in its list of the twenty-eight public, society and Y.M.C.A. libraries in the state's first library report.
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Mill houses go up for the Lloyd Manufacturing Company's workers
One-story frame houses with front porches were built between 1910 and 1915 as worker housing for the Thomas F. Lloyd Manufacturing Company; 25 of them form the Thomas F. Lloyd Historic District on the National Register.
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Lloyd organizes a second mill company and builds a yarn mill
Thomas F. Lloyd organized the Thomas F. Lloyd Manufacturing Company in February 1910 and built a second mill across Main Street from the Alberta mill in 1910 and 1911 to spin cotton yarn.
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UNC plays its first varsity basketball game
UNC defeated Virginia Christian 42–21 in Bynum Gymnasium in its first varsity basketball game.
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Venable is incorporated
The General Assembly incorporated the mill settlement west of Chapel Hill as the Town of Venable in an act ratified March 3, 1911, naming William H. Parker mayor and T. N. Mann, J. F. Ragan, T. A. Ray and J. F. Partin commissioners until the first election. The town, named for UNC president Francis P. Venable, became Carrboro in 1913.
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A new wood-frame railroad station is built in Carrboro
The depot that still stands beside Carr Mill was built around 1913, replacing the earlier West End stop that had drawn settlement to the end of the line.
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Carl Durham begins work at Eubanks Drug Store in Chapel Hill
Carl Durham, born in 1892 in the White Cross community of Orange County, went to work at Eubanks Drugstore in Chapel Hill in the summer of 1913. He qualified as a pharmacy apprentice by 1916, studied pharmacy at UNC, served in the Navy Hospital Corps in 1918 and came back to Eubanks as a pharmacist.
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Edward Kidder Graham serves as acting president while Venable is in Europe
Graham, head of the English department and dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Chapel Hill, acted as president in 1913 during President Francis P. Venable's absence in Europe.
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Hack's High School opens
Louis H. Hackney and Lara Edwards Hackney purchased property and started Hackney’s Educational and Industrial School.
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Swain Hall is built as the university dining hall
The university built Swain Hall in 1913 and 1914 as a dining hall on the site of the first president's house and named it for David L. Swain. It served as the dining hall until 1940 and later became the first home of the communications department.
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Venable is renamed Carrboro
A 1913 act of the General Assembly changed the name of the Town of Venable to Carrboro. Julian S. Carr, owner of the local mill since 1909, had asked UNC president Francis Venable's consent in January 1913, and the town's own history says Carr agreed to supply the community with electricity.
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The Lloyd yarn mill becomes Durham Hosiery Mill No. 7
The Thomas F. Lloyd Manufacturing Company mill was sold to Durham Hosiery Mills, which ran it as Mill No. 7 alongside Mill No. 4, the former Alberta mill.
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Silent Sam
On June 2, 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy and UNC alumni dedicated a Confederate soldier statue in McCorkle Place, and Julian Carr's dedication speech boasted of whipping a Black woman. The monument drew decades of protest until demonstrators pulled it down on August 20, 2018.
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UNC's Confederate Monument is dedicated
On June 2, 1913, the North Carolina Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and UNC alumni dedicated a Confederate soldier statue by John Wilson in McCorkle Place, later called Silent Sam. Julian Carr's dedication address credited Confederate veterans with saving the "Anglo Saxon race" and boasted of horsewhipping a Black woman.
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Edward Kidder Graham is elected president of the university
The board of trustees elected Graham president by unanimous vote in 1914, succeeding Francis P. Venable. He had been at Chapel Hill since 1899, first as librarian and then through the English department to the deanship.
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Billy Strayhorn, who spent boyhood summers in Hillsborough, was born
Composer and pianist Billy Strayhorn was born in Dayton, Ohio. From about age five he stayed with his grandparents at Margaret Lane and Hillsborough Avenue in Hillsborough, attended his first year of school there, learned piano in their home, and spent breaks and summers in the town into his early teens.
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Chapel Hill's white graded school and high school move into a new West Franklin Street building
Paid for by a $35,000 bond, a new Chapel Hill Graded School building designed by Hook and Rogers was finished on West Franklin Street in spring 1916. It housed white elementary and high school students, and Chapel Hill High School counts 1916 as its founding year, though its classes predate the building.
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Eno Cotton Mill reports 150 women among its 500 workers
Reports from the years before the wartime changes count about 500 workers at Hillsborough's Eno Cotton Mill, 150 of them women and 50 children under 16, on a 60-hour week. The top average daily wage for women was $1.75 against $4.00 for men; at the smaller Bellevue mill nearby women's top average was $2.50.
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Segregated schooling and the rise of Lincoln and Central High schools
In 1916 the Chapel Hill school district bought Louis Hackney's school and renamed it Orange County Training School, later Lincoln High. Hillsborough's Black high school opened in 1936 and became Central High in 1948. Desegregation closed Lincoln as a high school in 1966, discarding its name and colors, and after 1968 walkouts Central's students moved to Orange High.
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The Hackney school near Merritt Mill Road became the Orange County Training School
Louis Hackney had opened Hackney's Educational and Industrial School for Black students in 1913. In 1916 he sold the property to the Chapel Hill School District trustees for $2,300, and the school was renamed Orange County Training School with a Mr. Malone as principal.
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The Lloyd grist mill burns and is rebuilt in brick
The original wood-frame grist mill buildings burned in 1916 and were replaced by the brick mill that survives on B Street; lightning gutted its interior in 1921.
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Cornelia Spencer Love works as a librarian at the University of North Carolina
Love came to Chapel Hill and worked in the university library from 1917 to 1948. She later wrote When Chapel Hill Was a Village, published in 1976.
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Orange County mobilizes for World War I
Orange County organized a Council of Defense, Red Cross chapters in Chapel Hill (May 28, 1917) and Hillsborough (June 1, 1917), Liberty Loan and War Savings drives, and food conservation committees. On October 1, 1918, 650 UNC students were inducted into the Student Army Training Corps, and volunteers nursed the sick during the influenza epidemic.
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The Carolina Playmakers are organized
Frederick H. Koch organized the Carolina Playmakers at UNC.
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Hillsborough dedicates a tablet crediting Daniel Boone with an expedition from the Old State House
During a day of patriotic meetings and a war bond drive, Hillsborough dedicated a steel tablet at the site of the Old State House stating that frontiersmen under Richard Henderson, led by Daniel Boone, set out from there for Kentucky on March 17, 1776. A Trading Path tablet was added to the monument on July 4, 1931. The inscription is disputed: the American Revolution tour AmRevNC says Boone was not with the party that left the courthouse that day.
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Chase takes charge of the college and then the faculty after two deaths
Chase was appointed acting dean of the College of Liberal Arts after President Edward Kidder Graham died in October 1918, and chairman of the faculty after Marvin H. Stacy died in January 1919.
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Influenza epidemic strikes Chapel Hill
Spanish influenza swept the University in early October 1918, putting the campus and its student soldiers under a three-week quarantine. By October 23 about 300 students had been ill and three had died, and President Edward Kidder Graham died of influenza and pneumonia on October 26.
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Frederick Koch reads A Christmas Carol in Gerrard Hall
Koch brought his annual reading of Dickens's A Christmas Carol to UNC when he arrived in 1918. The Raleigh News and Observer described a 1919 reading in Gerrard Hall, with carols by university singing groups in the two intermissions, and he gave the reading 39 times on the UNC campus.
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Luther Hodges leads the UNC student council and his senior class
Hodges worked his way through the University of North Carolina, where he was president of the student council and of his senior class. He graduated in 1919.
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Phillips Hall opens, named for three Phillips family teachers
Phillips Hall opened on the Chapel Hill campus in 1919, honoring three members of the Phillips family who taught at the university in the nineteenth century: James Phillips, his son Charles Phillips and his grandson William Battle Phillips.
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The university adds twenty-one buildings under President Chase
William M. Kendal of McKim, Mead and White was engaged as consulting architect to plan an expansion for a student body of 3,000, and the Chapel Hill campus gained twenty-one new buildings and heavy alterations to three others. The faculty grew from 78 to 115 members.
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Carolina Playmakers present their first bill
The first bill included Thomas Wolfe’s The Return of Buck Gavin, with Wolfe in the title role.
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Harry W. Chase is elected president of the university
The trustees elected Chase president of the University of North Carolina in June 1919. He had taught at Chapel Hill since September 1910 and had been chairman of the faculty since that January.
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Billy Strayhorn stays with his grandparents in Hillsborough and starts school
From about age five Strayhorn came from Ohio with his mother and siblings to his grandparents' house at the corner of Margaret Lane and Hillsborough Avenue, attended his first year of school in the town, and took to the piano his grandparents kept. He returned for breaks and summers into his early teens.
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Howard W. Odum comes to Chapel Hill to lead UNC's School of Public Welfare and sociology department
Odum, a Georgia-born sociologist who had been dean of liberal arts at Emory, arrived in Chapel Hill in 1920 to direct the School of Public Welfare and the Department of Sociology. He taught at UNC for the rest of his life.
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Kennon Cheek joins the janitorial staff of Venable Hall
Cheek began working for the university as a boy, helping his father Rubin Cheek, a stonemason born in slavery in Warren County, lay the stone walls around the campus. Around 1920 he joined the janitorial staff of Venable Hall.
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Luther R. Hargraves built the tin-roofed houses that gave Tin Top its name
Luther R. Hargraves, a carpenter and Chapel Hill's first African American mortician, built a row of houses with tin roofs on Hargraves Street near the railroad tracks behind St. Paul AME, and the cluster became known as Tin Top or Tin Top Alley.
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Orange County women vote in a presidential election after the Nineteenth Amendment
Orange County women could vote for president for the first time on November 2, 1920, after registering by October 23 without paying a poll tax. In an October 15 speech at the Chapel Hill high school auditorium, Governor Thomas Bickett said women should cast their votes. Literacy tests and hostile registrars kept many Black women off the rolls.
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Carl Durham serves on the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen
While working as a pharmacist, Durham sat on the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen from 1921 to 1930 and on the Chapel Hill school board from 1924 to 1938.
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Connor returns to Chapel Hill as Kenan professor of history and government
Connor left his state archival work for the university in 1921 and taught at Chapel Hill until 1934, when he was named the first Archivist of the United States.
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Horace Williams holds the Kenan professorship of philosophy
Williams was the university's first Kenan professor of philosophy and held the chair from 1921 to 1935, teaching as professor emeritus afterwards.
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Louis Round Wilson's survey finds thin library collections in Orange County's white schools
A questionnaire of Orange County's 48 white schools for 1921–22, including the Chapel Hill and Hillsboro graded schools, found seven with no library and 3,692 volumes for 1,586 pupils, slightly more than two books per pupil. Ten of the 25 teachers who answered said the books were used "not very much"; Wilson published the results in January 1923.
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Arthur Cleveland Nash comes to Chapel Hill as the university's architect
Nash moved to Chapel Hill in 1922 to serve as architect for the University of North Carolina during its major expansion, working with the builder Thomas C. Atwood and the consulting firm McKim, Mead and White of New York.
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Howard W. Odum founds the Journal of Social Forces at UNC
Two years after coming to UNC, Odum founded and edited the Journal of Social Forces, the journal now titled Social Forces.
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Orange County Training School burns
On June 12, 1922, a kitchen fire started by boarders in the neighboring Flanner-Carr House destroyed the Orange County Training School building, the Flanner-Carr House and several outbuildings. Classes met in scattered places until a Rosenwald-funded brick school opened in Northside in 1924.
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The University of North Carolina Press is founded
On June 12, 1922, university librarian Louis Round Wilson, nine other faculty members and three trustees founded the University of North Carolina Press, the first university press in the South. Its first book, William C. Coker's study of water molds, appeared in 1923, and William T. Couch became director in 1932.
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Albert Coates joins the law faculty at Chapel Hill
Coates, a university graduate with a Harvard law degree, joined the law faculty in 1923. The schools he ran for police officers and sheriffs grew into the Institute of Government.
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Ellis Store and post office opens
Allen A. Ellis built a new crossroads store.
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The Order of Gimghouls plats its Chapel Hill subdivision with racial deed restrictions
The Junior Order of Gimghouls subdivided its land east of campus into house lots, with a plat recorded in Orange County Plat Book 1, page 51. The original deed covenants carried the racial restrictions standard for the period, along with setbacks and a requirement that the order review house plans.
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Sutton's Drug Store opens on Franklin Street
J. L. Sutton and J. L. Alderman, a UNC pharmacy graduate, opened the Sutton and Alderman drugstore with a soda fountain in the Strowd Building on Franklin Street, in space vacated by Jack Sparrow's shop. As Sutton's Drug Store it marked its centennial in 2023 as a downtown gathering place.
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Carrboro Baptist Church completes its brick church at Greensboro and Main
The mill-town congregation borrowed $50,000 to build a brick church at the corner of Greensboro and Main streets, paying off the debt in 1942; the building is now the Town's Century Center.
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Fire on East Main Street leads to brick rebuilding
A 1924 fire destroyed wooden stores on East Main Street and merchants rebuilt in brick, forming the core of what became the Carrboro Commercial Historic District.
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Kennon Cheek helps negotiate the land swap that brought Hackney's school to Northside
Cheek's daughter Marian Cheek Jackson said he was instrumental in negotiating the 1924 land swap that moved Hackney's Educational and Industrial School from South Merritt Mill Road into the Northside community.
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Nash designs Spencer Hall, the university's first dormitory for women
Spencer Hall, built in 1924 to Nash's design, was the first dormitory for women at the University of North Carolina. It was one of a series of dormitories he designed on the campus through the 1920s.
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Orange County Training School opens a Rosenwald campus
The Orange County Training School's new brick building for Black students rose on land given by Henry Strowd at the north end of Church Street in Northside, Chapel Hill. Its cornerstone was laid on Labor Day 1924 and it opened late that year; the Rosenwald Fund gave $1,500 of its $23,112 cost, Black residents $500.
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The Carolina Inn is built
John Sprunt Hill built the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill.
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UNC’s 1924 basketball team earns later Helms recognition
UNC’s unbeaten 1923–24 team was retrospectively named national champion by the Helms Athletic Foundation in 1943.
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Community Club hires a nurse to serve Chapel Hill's Black community
The health department of the Chapel Hill Community Club engaged a Black nurse, known as Nurse Compton and formerly of Lincoln Hospital, who began on January 1, 1924, visiting homes, examining children at the Black schools and organizing clean-up campaigns. By May 1926 the town had taken over part of her salary and she worked under Health Officer Nathan.
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Odum's Institute for Research in Social Science is organized at UNC
The Institute for Research in Social Science was organized at Chapel Hill on June 30, 1924, for the cooperative study of social problems arising from state and regional conditions. Odum founded it with help from the Rockefeller Fund, and it is now the Odum Institute.
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Christmas seal money pays for tuberculosis care and a free clinic in Chapel Hill
The Community Club's seal sale committee reported that seal money had sent an Orange County man to a sanatorium and paid $450 toward the nurse working among Black residents, who inoculated 68 people for typhoid and brought 36 patients to a free tuberculosis clinic.
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Black clubwomen open the North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls at Efland
After years of fundraising, the North Carolina federation of Black women's clubs led by Charlotte Hawkins Brown opened a home and school for Black girls on about 140 acres of farmland on US 70 at Efland. The state gave only occasional small grants, and the home closed at Efland in 1943 before reopening under state sponsorship in Rocky Mount in 1944.
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Hillsborough women organize the Hillsborough Garden Club
Twelve Hillsborough women met in an old school building in 1925 to form a garden club, and began by cleaning lots in the business district and planting crepe myrtles along the downtown streets. The club later sponsored the founding of the Orange County Historical Museum.
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The Mayo family's quarry land near Hillsborough is sold to Duke's land agent for $500
A deed at the Orange County courthouse records that Duke land agent Murray Jones paid the Mayo family $500 in March 1925 for land with a working stone quarry, the source of the stone for Duke's new campus. According to family accounts, George Mayo refused to sell until he was jailed and signed so his family would not go hungry.
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Patrick L. Clayton sells his farm northwest of Hillsboro to James B. Duke's agents for $4,000
The Chapel Hill Weekly reported that Patrick L. Clayton, who had paid $200 for a 70-acre farm about a mile northwest of Hillsboro twenty years earlier, had sold it to representatives of James B. Duke for $4,000 for its building stone. Architects and builders had judged the stone suitable for the new Duke University.
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Playmakers Theatre opens
The Carolina Playmakers dedicated their theatre in the remodeled Smith Hall, the 1850s building later used as a library and law school, on Monday, November 23, 1925, with talks by Frederick Koch and President Harry W. Chase and three new folk plays.
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Nash builds his own house in Chapel Hill
Nash designed and built a Colonial Revival house in Chapel Hill as his personal residence, at the address now numbered 124 South Boundary Street. The state listed it on the National Register on October 26, 2017 as the property most closely associated with his career.
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Nash renovates South Building and adds its portico
Nash carried out the renovation of South Building and added the portico in 1926 and 1927, part of his remodelling of older campus buildings that also took in Old East, Old West and Gerrard Hall.
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William T. Couch joins the University of North Carolina Press as assistant director
Couch, who had moved to the Chapel Hill area in 1917, began at the press in 1926 as assistant director under Louis Round Wilson and took over as director in 1932.
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Annual benefit football games fund Chapel Hill's Black public health nurse
From 1927 a yearly football game played by Black teams on Fetzer Field, sponsored by the University YMCA, raised money for the public health nurse serving Chapel Hill's Black community, a project run by the Community Club. The 1941 game involved the Orange County Training School and raised $275 net.
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Paul Green wins the Pulitzer Prize for In Abraham’s Bosom
Paul Green received the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for In Abraham’s Bosom.
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Chapel Hill Community Club women question local legislators on the women's bills
The Community Club's legislative committee asked the state women's lobby how Orange County's legislators had voted on measures backed by women's organizations, including the Australian ballot, child labor and the Efland school for Black girls, and then voted to write each legislator for a statement of his position.
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Kenan Memorial Stadium opens
Kenan Memorial Stadium, the gift of William Rand Kenan Jr., hosted its first event on November 12, 1927, when Carolina beat Davidson 27 to 0. It was formally dedicated before the Thanksgiving Day game against Virginia on November 24, when Governor Angus McLean accepted it for the state and the University.
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Chapel Hill adopts its first zoning ordinance
The Board of Aldermen unanimously adopted an ordinance dividing the town into two residence zones and two business zones, with height limits, setbacks, yard rules and a board of adjustment. The published text makes no reference to race.
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The university names Bingham Hall for Robert Bingham
In 1929 the university named Bingham Hall on its Chapel Hill campus for Robert Bingham, class of 1857, an alumnus who often spoke at campus events and helped reopen the university in 1875.
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The Tar Heel becomes the Daily Tar Heel
The commencement issue of June 7, 1929, was the first published as The Daily Tar Heel, after a plan to turn the tri-weekly Tar Heel into a daily went to the Student Activities Committee. Regular daily publication began with the new volume on September 20, 1929.
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County welfare superintendent notes Orange has no health officer or public health nurse
In a letter to the Chapel Hill Weekly, county welfare superintendent George H. Lawrence wrote that Orange County had no county health officer, no county health department and no public health nurse, and that little preventive health work was being done. He contrasted Orange with Vance County, which had a health officer, a hospital and a tuberculosis sanatorium.
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The new University Library, later Wilson Library, is dedicated
UNC dedicated its new University Library, designed by Arthur Cleveland Nash, on October 19, 1929, weeks after students began using the building that fall. It served as the main campus library for decades, was named for librarian Louis Round Wilson in 1956, and after a 1984 to 1987 renovation became the home of UNC's special collections.
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Census counts tenants on about a third of Orange County farms
Tenants operated 643 of 1,870 Orange County farms in 1930 (34.4 percent), 718 of 1,956 in 1935 (36.7 percent) and 687 of 2,043 in 1940 (33.6 percent). Of the 1940 tenants, 514 were share tenants and croppers.
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Durham Hosiery closes Mill No. 4, the former Alberta mill
Durham Hosiery Mills stopped operations at Mill No. 4 in 1930 as the Depression cut into the hosiery business.
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Nash retires and leaves Chapel Hill, staying on as consulting architect
Nash retired in 1930 and moved to Washington, D.C., but continued as the university's consulting architect until 1953, advising on later campus work.
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The Martin School is consolidated into Pleasant Grove Union School
The Martin School, attended almost entirely by Indian children, was merged in 1930 with several other small schools to form Pleasant Grove Union School. The change was unpopular in the community because the school would no longer be exclusively Indian, though it brought better facilities and was in time accepted.
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The Southern Historical Collection is established
In 1930 Sarah Graham Kenan of Wilmington gave UNC $25,000 to buy books, letters and diaries for the Southern Historical Collection being gathered by history professor J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, who became its first director. Kept in the new library, it grew into a leading repository of manuscripts on the American South.
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Black janitors organize the UNC Janitors' Association
Facing a threatened 10 percent pay cut, janitors Kennon Cheek, Frank Hairston, Elliot Washington and Melvin Rich organized the Janitors' Association, with Cheek as its first president. Its early gains included a week's paid vacation and showers in the janitors' bathrooms.
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Chapel Hill charity circle reports taking a patient to Lincoln Hospital in Durham
The Burden Bearers' Circle of the King's Daughters and Sons of Chapel Hill reported that it had taken a man to Lincoln Hospital in Durham for an operation and driven him back weekly for two months of treatment. The circle also made gowns for the hospital.
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Albert Coates establishes the Institute of Government
UNC law professor Albert Coates founded the Institute of Government in Chapel Hill in 1931 to give local and state officials practical training, working with his wife, Gladys Hall Coates. It ran as a private enterprise until it became part of the university in 1942 and is now the UNC School of Government.
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Graham Memorial is completed as the university's student union
The building named for Edward Kidder Graham was completed in 1931 and served as the student union, holding the Horace Williams Library, a barber shop, a bowling alley, a game room and offices for student publications.
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Phillips Russell returns to Chapel Hill to teach creative writing
After years as a newspaperman in New York and London, Russell came back in 1931 and taught writing at the university for twenty-five years, first in the English department and then in the School of Journalism. The Atlantic Monthly called his class, often held outdoors under the trees, one of the four best in the country.
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Contempo and the Intimate Bookshop begin in Chapel Hill
Milton Abernethy, Anthony Buttitta and three other young men distributed the first issue of Contempo, a four-page review of ideas and personalities, in Chapel Hill on April 27, 1931. They also ran the Intimate Bookshop from a dormitory room; by June it had moved above the Cavalier Cafeteria, and Contempo was later headquartered there.
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Schley Grange No. 710 is chartered
Thirty residents of the Schley farming community north of Hillsborough chartered Schley Grange No. 710, one of five Orange County Granges formed in the state Grange revival of 1929 to 1931. In November the county Board of Education sold the Grange the Schley School building, empty since the county's 1928 school consolidation, for $122.
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The Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower is dedicated at UNC
The bell tower given by John Motley Morehead III and Rufus Lenoir Patterson II was dedicated to the university on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1931, with Governor O. Max Gardner giving the dedication address. Morehead had proposed a tower to President Harry Woodburn Chase in the 1920s and been turned down on three sites.
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Carl Durham serves on the Orange County Board of Commissioners
Durham was an Orange County commissioner from 1932 to 1938 and in 1935 helped secure $22,000 in federal aid for rural electrification in the county. He was elected a UNC trustee in 1937.
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Kennon Cheek moves that the Janitors' Association give to the student loan fund
Frank Porter Graham came to an association meeting to tell the janitors that the Depression would cut their wages but that everyone would come through together. Cheek then moved that the Janitors' Association give five dollars to the fund set up to keep students in school, the first campus organization to contribute to it.
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Rebecca Clark moves to Chapel Hill and goes to work in a faculty home
Clark, born around 1915 in Chatham County, moved to Chapel Hill in 1932 to live with a relative on Church Street. She went to work in the home of professor Vernon Howell while enrolled at the Orange County Training School.
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St. Joseph CME built its first church on West Rosemary Street
Henry Baldwin, Margaret Burnette and Kennon Cheek mortgaged their homes for the down payment on the Rosemary Street lot, which Black leaders had judged too small for a new high school. A frame church went up under Rev. Joseph S. Miller and was dedicated as St. Joseph Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.
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University Lake begins supplying Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina dammed Morgan Creek west of Carrboro to form University Lake, which began supplying water to the university and to Chapel Hill. The lake and about 500 acres of surrounding land remain in university ownership, with OWASA entitled to use the lake under contract.
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Water for the towns: University Lake, the 1976–77 drought, and OWASA
The University dammed Morgan Creek in 1932 to create University Lake. Droughts in 1968 and 1976–77 forced rationing and purchases from Durham, and on February 16, 1977 the Orange Water and Sewer Authority, organized by the county and both towns, took over the university and town systems. A long fight over a Cane Creek reservoir followed.
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Hundreds take typhoid vaccine at Chapel Hill clinic after new cases
After several new typhoid cases were reported in late June 1932, about 600 people received typhoid vaccine at the Chapel Hill public clinic in a single day, and the Infirmary gave the treatment on any day. Town health authorities said the water supply was not the source.
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A community library begins at the Carrboro school
In 1933 Nellie Roberson gave the Carrboro school 145 books as the nucleus of a library for grown people as well as children. Built up by teachers, pupils and parents, it was formally dedicated in May 1937 and lent adult books to Carrboro residents.
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Free health examination clinic for children entering school in Chapel Hill
The Parent Teachers' Association arranged a free clinic at the school building to examine all children due to enter school that fall, with physicians from Duke Hospital and Chapel Hill dentists, and urged vaccination against smallpox, diphtheria and typhoid.
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Hillsborough builds the Confederate Memorial Library
Federal relief crews began a new library on Churton Street in Hillsborough in December 1933, with local money, including $7,000 from the Hillsborough United Daughters of the Confederacy, paying for materials. The cornerstone of the Confederate Memorial Public Library was laid on July 13, 1934, and the building became the Orange County Historical Museum in 1983.
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Janitors' Association president Elliot Washington asks for help joining a union
In 1934 Dean Robert House wrote to President Frank Porter Graham about a request from association president Elliot Washington for help with union membership, since the janitors could not afford local union dues.
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Jim Tatum is named an All-Southern tackle at UNC
Tatum enrolled at UNC with the persuasion and financial aid of his uncle William Donald Carmichael Jr. He played tackle under Chuck Collins and Carl Snavely, was named All-Southern in 1934, also caught for the baseball team, and graduated in 1935.
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The Texas community asks the Bureau of Indian Affairs for an Indian school
Clayton Jeffries, Charles Will Jeffries and others retained a lawyer, drew up a list of Indian families, made contact with the Indian community in Person County that already had a state sponsored school, and wrote to Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier seeking a federal school for their children. A bureau agent visited and reported the families to be Indian, and the bureau's letters called the settlement an Indian community, but no assistance was ever given.
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Dr. Charles Mangum outlines a proposed federally aided health district tied to UNC training
Dr. Charles S. Mangum described a proposed public health district of Orange, Person and Caswell counties, largely paid for by the U.S. Public Health Service. It would also train health officers, sanitary inspectors, public health nurses and secretaries, building on UNC's 1934 to 1935 public health administration courses.
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Temporary county health unit starts work in Orange during a typhoid outbreak
Because typhoid fever had appeared in the county, a temporary health organization, set up as part of the planned district unit, began operating in Orange County on July 1, 1935. Its staff were acting health officer Dr. G. A. Sumner (lent by the State Board of Health), acting health nurse Marie Strickland, secretary Ida Lloyd and sanitary inspector E. B. Caruthers.
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Orange-Person District Health Department organized with Dr. Malcolm Rourk as health officer
A district health department for Orange and Person counties was organized in summer 1935 as a model unit linked to UNC's public health teaching. Dr. Malcolm Henderson Rourk was appointed district health officer, with sanitary inspector E. B. Caruthers and a public health nurse and clerk in each county. The district officer also took over Chapel Hill's municipal health authority.
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Betty Smith comes to Chapel Hill with the Federal Theatre Project
The Federal Theater sent Smith to Chapel Hill in 1936 to work with Frederick H. Koch of the Carolina Playmakers. She stayed when the federal project expired, helped Koch compile American Folk Plays and took his classes for him in his absence.
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Passenger trains stop running on the University Railroad
Mixed passenger service on the ten-mile line between University Station and Carrboro ended as car ownership spread and roads improved, leaving the line to freight.
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UNC Press publishes Odum's Southern Regions of the United States
The University of North Carolina Press in Chapel Hill published Odum's Southern Regions of the United States, a 664-page study of social conditions across the South prepared for the Social Science Research Council's Southern Regional Committee.
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Grace Beatty appointed supervising nurse of the district health unit
Acting district health officer Dr. William P. Richardson appointed Grace Beatty, who held a master's degree in public health nursing from Columbia, as supervising nurse under an enlarged program funded by Social Security money. By July 1936 the Orange-Person staff of 11 included staff nurses Agnes Tolbert in Chapel Hill and Ruth O'Briant and Lieotta Hall in Roxboro.
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Health officer reports on the preschool clinics in Chapel Hill and Carrboro
The health department finished its round of preschool clinics, with 25 children at the Chapel Hill clinic and 34 at Carrboro. Health officer W. P. Richardson credited a committee of women with much of the success and reported that 56 correctible defects were found among 38 of the 59 children examined.
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First field training course for North Carolina public health workers held in the Orange-Person District
A month-long field training course for 29 new public health workers (14 nurses, 6 sanitary officers, 4 sanitary engineers and 5 health officers), described as the first in North Carolina, ended in Chapel Hill in early July 1936 under Dr. William P. Richardson. The Orange-Person and Durham health departments then ran as a joint field training center, and by July 1937 it had trained 109 workers.
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The school library at Hillsborough High School for Negroes also served as the public library for Black residents
The twelve-room school building was put up in July 1936 on land bought from Louis Wilson and George Mayo, and its library served the local Black community as a public library. Albert L. Stanback became principal in 1942 and had the school renamed Central High School in 1943.
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District health department holds midwife classes across Orange County
Classes for midwives were held at Efland and Hillsboro and began for those in and near Chapel Hill at the health department offices, with attendance required before a permit to practice would be issued. Health officer W. P. Richardson said 17 percent of births in the county were attended by midwives, against 31 percent statewide.
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A new Chapel Hill High School opens on Columbia Street
Chapel Hill's new high school for white students, beside the Pittsboro road on what is now South Columbia Street, opened to classes on October 5, 1936, three weeks late. Built for $106,000 with Public Works Administration aid to plans by Atwood and Weeks, it came in the same federal program that built an addition at the Orange County Training School.
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Betty Smith edits a collection of plays with Frederick Koch and Robert Finch
Smith coedited Plays for Schools and Little Theatres with Koch and Finch in 1937 and wrote a catalog of one-act plays.
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Ben Johnson, born enslaved near Hillsborough, recalls the Klan lynching of Cyrus Guy for a WPA interviewer
Interviewed at 85 in Hecktown, Durham, by Federal Writers' Project worker Mary A. Hicks, Johnson said the Ku Klux came for Cy Guy a hundred strong, tried him in the woods and hanged him over the road. He said nobody would touch the body for four days, until the sheriff took it down.
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The Lost Colony premieres
Paul Green's pageant-drama The Lost Colony opened on Roanoke Island on Sunday evening, July 4, 1937, and the Chapel Hill Weekly reported that it scored a hit. The production had Chapel Hill roots: Frederick Koch's Carolina Playmakers were involved, and at least one actor came to Chapel Hill in June to rehearse.
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Racial violence erupts in western Chapel Hill and Carrboro
Late on Saturday, August 21, 1937, a white filling-station attendant struck Tom Atwater, a Black man, with a bottle near West Franklin Street. An angry crowd gathered, some throwing stones and firing guns, and armed white men from Carrboro fired on them from a barricaded truck. Four men were shot before Durham police with tear gas restored calm.
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Farm women open the Orange County curb market in Carrboro
A curb market run by Orange County farm women opened in the former McCauley store in Carrboro, selling vegetables, fruit, chickens, eggs, sausage, preserves and canned goods. It was organized with the county home demonstration agent, with thirteen women signed on as sellers before opening.
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Chatham County joins the Orange-Person Health District
District health officer Dr. William P. Richardson announced that Chatham County had joined the Orange-Person Health District, which would provide a physician, a nurse and a sanitary officer for the new county. The State Board of Health had kept a nurse in Chatham for the past year with U.S. Children's Bureau funds.
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Louis H. Hackney dies in Chapel Hill
Louis H. Hackney, pastor, principal of the Quaker school from 1898 to 1912 and founder of Hackney's Educational and Industrial School, died in Chapel Hill on December 19, 1937. He was buried in the segregated Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Archaeologists excavate the wall site believing it to be Occaneechi Town
Joffre Coe began digging a village site on a bend of the Eno at Hillsborough in 1938 in the belief that it was the town John Lawson visited in 1701, and Robert Wauchope carried the work on in 1940 and 1941 with federal funding. A state highway marker for the Occaneechi village was erected at Hillsborough in 1941. The village Coe had found was in fact an earlier settlement of about 1400 to 1600.
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Daphne Athas's family moves to Chapel Hill
Athas came to Chapel Hill as a teenager in 1938 with her Greek family, who during the Depression traded a large Massachusetts home for a small house on Merritt Mill Road. She spent most of the rest of her life in Orange County.
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Piedmont Electric Membership Corporation is incorporated and energizes its first lines
Piedmont Electric, a rural electric cooperative formed under the federal Rural Electrification Administration loan program, received its North Carolina incorporation papers in 1938. In 1939 its first substation, in Hillsborough, energized lines to members' homes for the first time.
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The Chapel Hill post office opens on Franklin Street
A new federal post office was built in two stages on the site of the old one at Franklin and Henderson streets. Postal workers moved into its rear section early in 1938 while the old building was torn down and the front half built, and the finished post office began full operation on July 1, 1938.
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State offers the three-county district $5,900 for venereal disease control
At a meeting of county commissioners in Chapel Hill, State Board of Health executive officer Dr. Carl V. Reynolds offered the Chatham-Orange-Person district $5,900 from the Smith Reynolds Foundation fund for venereal disease control, if the district matched it. The program called for examinations and clinics to bring every infected person in the district under treatment.
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Durham Hosiery closes its last Carrboro mill
Durham Hosiery Mills dissolved its business at Mill No. 7 in June 1938 and laid off the workers, ending the company's operations in Carrboro.
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John Parker becomes the first Black Orange County farmer to get a Farm Security Administration purchase loan
Under the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, John Parker borrowed $3,915 through the Farm Security Administration to buy a 145-acre farm, the first such loan to a Black farmer in Orange County. He paid it off in about six years on a 40-year note.
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Chapel Hill pharmacist Carl T. Durham is elected to Congress from the Sixth District
Durham, who had been named the Sixth District nominee, won the general election over write-in candidate Oscar G. Barker, and Chapel Hill voters gave him 703 votes to Barker's 57. He went on to serve 22 years in the House and retired in 1961.
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UNC rejects Pauli Murray's graduate application
Pauli Murray, who grew up in Durham and lived in New York, applied to UNC's graduate school in 1938 to study with Howard Odum and Guy B. Johnson. On December 14, two days after the Supreme Court's Gaines ruling, Dean W. W. Pierson rejected her because of her race, and her appeals to President Frank Porter Graham became national news.
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Cedar Grove Methodist Church is completed
The stone church replaced earlier facilities serving the congregation.
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Jim Tatum returns to UNC as director of freshman athletics
After following Carl Snavely to Cornell as an assistant football coach and head baseball coach, Tatum came back to Chapel Hill in 1939 as UNC's director of freshman athletics.
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The university completes a Chapel Hill building for the Institute of Government
The university finished a building for Albert Coates's Institute of Government in 1939. It later carried the Coates name.
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UNC Press publishes These Are Our Lives
The University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill published These Are Our Lives in 1939, life histories gathered by Federal Writers' Project workers in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, with a preface by W. T. Couch.
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A lent library truck carries books to schools and crossroads stores across Orange County
For May, June and July 1939 a bookmobile with a revolving shelved turret was lent to the county, run by Lucile McDade and her assistant Louise Carroll, who stopped at schools and crossroads stores. The county board of education and the Confederate Memorial Library in Hillsboro paid its operating costs, and the WPA and the Hillsboro library lent the books.
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Citizens buy land for a Negro Community Center
Ten Chapel Hill men, among them Louis Graves, R. B. House and Paul Wager, signed a $1,500 note at the Bank of Chapel Hill to buy about five acres of the old Craig place at the west end of Rosemary Lane for a Black community center. The project grew out of concerns raised by the Negro Civic Club.
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A memorial tablet for Robert Bingham is installed in Memorial Hall
A memorial tablet in Robert Bingham's name was installed in the university's Memorial Hall in Chapel Hill on October 12, 1939.
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Census finds nearly half of Orange County's Black-owned farms in Cedar Grove Township
The 1940 census counted 1,753 Black and 1,671 white residents in Cedar Grove Township, the county's only township with a near-even racial balance, and about three-fourths of the township lived on farms. Nearly half of Orange County's 503 Black-owned farms were in the township, which also had the county's highest share of Black tenant farmers.
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Kennon Cheek dies at his home in Northside
Cheek, born in Chapel Hill about 1890, lived out his life in the house he built on land in Northside bought from the university's holdings, and died there in 1940 after diabetes and overwork wore him down in the late 1930s.
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UNC School of Public Health runs a Rockefeller-funded syphilis study in Orange and neighboring counties
The School of Public Health's first research project, a field epidemiological study of syphilis funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, ran from 1940 to 1950 with the state venereal disease control program in Orange, Chatham, Person and Durham counties. Project staff held clinics, lectured and traced contacts in the health departments.
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UNC establishes a School of Public Health
UNC's Division of Public Health, created within the School of Medicine in 1936 under Dr. Milton Rosenau, separated from the medical school in 1940 and became the School of Public Health, with Rosenau as its first dean. The school is now the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.
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UNC purchases Chapel Hill's airfield
In 1940 the university bought the Chapel Hill airport that Charlie Martindale had opened in 1928 on land bought from Professor Horace Williams. By August the trustees had set aside $15,000 for land, the university had agreed terms with Martindale and neighbor Fred Sparrow, Williams had given over 200 acres, and the field was to bear his name.
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UNC receives the Horace Williams tract by bequest
The core of what became the Carolina North tract, north of Estes Drive and west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, came to the university as a bequest from Professor Horace Williams. The university later bought adjoining land, and parts of the site were used as an airport, landfill, town operations center and animal shelter.
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William D. Carmichael Jr. returns to Chapel Hill as the university's finance officer
Carmichael left a New York Stock Exchange partnership and came back in 1940 to serve the consolidated University of North Carolina as finance officer. As finance officer, comptroller and then vice-president he raised money from the legislature, foundations, corporations and individuals.
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District health officer reports one of the district's best years for diphtheria
Although diphtheria was widespread in North Carolina in 1939, the Orange-Person-Chatham district recorded only 18 cases. Health officer W. P. Richardson credited immunization of children under six, warned that immunizations had fallen off over the past twelve months, and urged parents to have young children immunized.
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Community Center land is deeded to Chapel Hill
The trustees holding the five-acre community-center site deeded it to the Town of Chapel Hill, whose aldermen had voted in May to accept the title and sponsor the project, since the WPA required government ownership. The deed limited the land to a community center and recreation for Black residents.
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Horace Williams dies and is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Williams died at eighty-two and was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. He left all of his property to the university in trust, the income to pay for fellowships in philosophy.
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Connor returns to the UNC faculty as Craige professor
After resigning as Archivist of the United States in 1941, Connor came back to Chapel Hill to hold the newly established Craige Professorship of Jurisprudence and History until he retired in 1949.
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W. Reece Berryhill becomes dean of the UNC School of Medicine
Berryhill, who had been physician-in-chief at the University infirmary and director of the student health service in Chapel Hill since 1933, became professor of medicine and dean of the School of Medicine in 1941. He led the school's expansion from a two-year to a four-year program.
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Construction begins on the Negro Community Center
Work on the Negro Community Center began on January 9, 1941, with Clarence Webb directing a crew of 20 and Charles Craig, the Black architect and contractor who drew the plans, helping supervise. A WPA grant paid most of the cost, and Black masons, carpenters and other workers donated their labor.
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UNC junior Joe Felmet is elected executive secretary of the campus American Student Union
The Daily Tar Heel reported that Felmet, a junior from Asheville who had been active in the American Student Union for two years, was elected unanimously as executive secretary of the Carolina chapter after representing it at the group's national convention in New York. He took his A.B. at UNC in 1942.
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Chapel Hill organizes civilian defense after Pearl Harbor
Within days of Pearl Harbor, Mayor John Foushee called for hundreds of civilian-defense volunteers, and armed sentries guarded the airport, the University Lake dam and the power plant. A control center opened at the Carolina Inn, with a branch volunteer office for Black residents at Perry's barber shop, and UNC students formed a volunteer training corps.
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Jim Tatum coaches UNC football for a single season
Tatum was UNC's head football coach for one year in 1942. He then joined the navy and learned the split-T formation as an assistant to its founder, Don Faurot, at Iowa Pre-Flight.
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The Janitors' Association reorganizes as a CIO union local
The Janitors' Association became Local 403-P of the State, County and Municipal Workers of America, a CIO union. Minutes of July 2, 1942 name pay as the most important matter, and laundry worker Rebecca Clark became a shop steward.
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Eleanor Roosevelt speaks at Memorial Hall to close a post-war planning conference
Eleanor Roosevelt spoke in Memorial Hall at UNC to a capacity audience of about 2,000 people, closing a two-day conference on post-war planning sponsored by the Carolina Political Union and the International Student Service. She warned the audience that there was no going back to normalcy.
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The Orange County Public Library bookmobile makes stops in Chapel Hill
In late February 1942 the Chapel Hill Weekly announced that the county bookmobile, with librarian Ernestine Grafton in charge, would park in front of the Texaco station from noon to 2 p.m. for browsers and borrowers. That spring the bookmobile offered a $5 prize to the school collecting the most waste paper, with the proceeds buying children's books, and a state aid increase let the library order books on readers' requests.
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A wartime munitions plant opens in the former Mill No. 7
National Munitions Corporation converted the empty Mill No. 7 on Roberson Street into a shell-loading plant that pressed tetryl pellets for Navy anti-aircraft ammunition, growing from about 126 workers to more than 500; an explosion hit its pellet houses on September 6, 1942.
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Chapel Hill High School burns
Fire destroyed the Chapel Hill high school building on South Columbia Street, then the Pittsboro highway, early on Saturday, August 8, 1942. The school board arranged to hold grades 10 to 12 in rooms at the Baptist church and the ninth grade at the elementary school, and wartime material shortages delayed a new building for years.
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Daphne Athas graduates from UNC
Athas graduated from the university in 1943 after studying writing with Betty Smith and Phillips Russell.
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Governor Broughton speaks at a Pre-Flight School graduation in Kenan Stadium
Broughton and UNC president Frank Porter Graham both spoke at Navy Pre-Flight School graduation exercises in Kenan Stadium on June 2, 1943.
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, written in Chapel Hill, is published
Smith wrote the novel in a one-room house on North Street in Chapel Hill, rising about half past five and working against the chimney wall to keep warm. Harper published it on 17 August 1943 and it sold more than 150,000 copies within two weeks.
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Orange County FSA honors 15 Black farm ownership borrowers
The county Farm Security Administration office awarded certificates of merit to 15 Black farm ownership borrowers, former tenants it had helped to buy farms. By March 1944 the county had 22 approved tenant-purchase loans.
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Hillsborough well-baby clinics are held separately for Black and white babies
The Junior Service League and the district health department held two well-baby clinics each month in Hillsborough, one for Black babies and one for white babies, focused on preventive care.
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Wartime day nursery opens for the children of Black working mothers in Chapel Hill and Carrboro
A federally funded day nursery for Black children opened at the Orange County Training School, caring for thirty children aged two to six from 7:15 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. while their mothers worked. Parents paid for food, and by October 1944 two nursery schools were running, one in the Masonic building on the edge of Carrboro and one on Brooks Street.
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District health officer reports the season's typhoid cases
Dr. William P. Richardson, district health officer, reported two confirmed cases of typhoid fever in the district in the past two months, one in Chatham County and one in Person County, with a suspected case in Person County and indirect reports of two cases in Orange County that health officials had not been able to confirm.
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Orange County schools stay closed until after September 18 during the polio epidemic
On the recommendation of the State Health Officer and Governor Broughton, the State Board of Education kept all North Carolina public schools closed until after September 18 because of the infantile paralysis epidemic. Orange County schools, which Superintendent R. H. Claytor had planned to open September 14, were held back with the rest, though teachers still reported on September 14.
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Frederick Koch dies and is buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Koch, who taught dramatic literature and playwriting at UNC for twenty-six years and organized the Carolina Playmakers, died on August 16, 1944 and was buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery. Samuel Selden succeeded him as chair of the Department of Dramatic Art and director of the Playmakers.
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Orange County's Black home demonstration clubs hold their first dress contest in Hillsboro
Women from every Black home demonstration club in the county modeled thirty-six dresses, suits and accessories they had made at the Hillsboro high school auditorium. By 1946 the clubs met monthly in rural communities including White Oak Grove, Jordan Grove, Cool Springs, Cedar Grove, Harmony, Ridge Road, St. Mary's, Sartin and Carr.
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O. David Garvin becomes health officer of the district covering Orange County
Garvin came to the district in 1944 on assignment from the North Carolina State Board of Health and the Public Health Service during the war emergency, after a year and a half in Scotland and Richmond counties. A later account of his resignation gave his starting date as September 4, 1944.
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Home demonstration clubs report the year's work at Achievement Day in Hillsboro
At the county home demonstration clubs' Achievement Day at the courthouse, the home agent reported that women had canned an average of 350 quarts and that 94 percent made their own clothes, and that the women's curb market in Chapel Hill had taken in $30,280.68 over the past year. Clubs from Caldwell, Carr, Cedar Grove, Efland, New Hope, Orange Grove, St. Mary's, Schley and Murphy had made 699 garments and 744 other articles for the Red Cross.
The other dated entries wait behind a subject, a place, an era, a month, or the All dated entries switch, and each storyline’s page carries its own component entries. Dates come from the sources named on the cards and from the index’s event pages; where sources disagree, the card follows the county records. Entries marked approximate or needing research say so on the card; the rest were checked against the source named on it. Each card’s “Correct this” link opens the contact form with the entry already named. Suggest an event →
Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated September 14, 2026.
