Chronology

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: Thomas F. Lloyd (Carrboro mill builder)

Eno Mill adds cloth weaving

New looms extended operations beyond spinning yarn.

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.

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.

People: Wilson Swain Caldwell

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.

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.

People: Thomas F. Lloyd (Carrboro mill builder)

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.

People: Thomas F. Lloyd (Carrboro mill builder)

UNC plays its first varsity basketball game

UNC defeated Virginia Christian 42–21 in Bynum Gymnasium in its first varsity basketball game.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: Thomas F. Lloyd (Carrboro mill builder)

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.

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.

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.

People: Louis H. Hackney

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.

People: Thomas F. Lloyd (Carrboro mill builder)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: Kennon Cheek

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: Kennon Cheek

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.

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.

Carl Snavely becomes head football coach at UNC

Snavely came to Chapel Hill from Bucknell University in 1934. His first UNC team won seven games, lost one and tied one, and included George Barclay, the university's first football All-American.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: William P. Richardson

Carl Snavely leaves UNC for Cornell after the Graham Plan dispute

Snavely did not see eye to eye with university president Frank Porter Graham, whose Graham Plan would have reduced the place of big-time football at UNC and across the Southern Conference. Snavely left Chapel Hill in April 1936 to become head coach at Cornell University.

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.

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.

People: William P. Richardson

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.

Part of Libraries, Archives & Public Memory · 5 events

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: William P. Richardson

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cedar Grove Methodist Church is completed

The stone church replaced earlier facilities serving the congregation.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Orange, Chatham and Person counties share a trained librarian under the new state aid

In the first year of state aid for public libraries, Chatham, Orange and Person counties shared one trained librarian, Ernestine Grafton, while each county kept its own book collection and bookmobile service. The state's 1941–42 library statistics list her as librarian at Hillsboro, Siler City and Roxboro.

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.

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.

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.

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.

People: Rebecca Clark

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.

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.

Governor Broughton welcomes guests at the commissioning of the Navy Pre-Flight School

The dinner program for the commissioning of the Naval Aviation Pre-Flight School at Chapel Hill on May 23, 1942 has Governor J. Melville Broughton offering the welcome, and Josephus Daniels giving greetings to the Navy Department representatives and to Commander O. O. Kessing. The school trained 18,700 pre-flight cadets before it was decommissioned on October 15, 1945.

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.

Daphne Athas graduates from UNC

Athas graduated from the university in 1943 after studying writing with Betty Smith and Phillips Russell.

People: Betty Smith · Phillips Russell

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.