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News, Journalism & Broadcasting: 38 dated entries from the full dataset. Back to the highlights →
- Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
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Provincial Congress at Hillsborough orders its journal printed by James Davis
The congress meeting at Hillsborough directed that its proceedings be delivered to James Davis, the province's printer and a delegate for the town of New Bern, who was desired to print them and send a copy to each member. It also named a committee to state and settle his account for services done as printer to the province.
- Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
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William Woods Holden is born near Hillsborough
William Woods Holden, later editor of the North Carolina Standard and governor, was born near Hillsborough to Thomas Holden and Priscilla Woods. His grandfather had moved to Orange County to farm, and from age six he was raised by his stepmother, Sally Nichols Holden.
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The Hillsborough Recorder begins publication
Dennis Heartt began publishing the weekly Hillsborough Recorder in February 1820, at three dollars a year. The paper ran until 1879, and its surviving issues are a main record of nineteenth-century Hillsborough and Orange County.
Part of The Hillsborough Recorder begins publication, 1820
People: Dennis Heartt
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Josiah Turner Jr. is born in Hillsborough
Josiah Turner Jr. was born in Hillsborough, the eldest son of Josiah and Eliza Evans Turner. His father was a longtime sheriff and large landowner in Orange County.
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William W. Holden serves as an apprentice printer at the Hillsborough Recorder
At about age ten Holden was apprenticed as a printer's devil to Dennis Heartt, editor of the Hillsborough Recorder, who was responsible for his early education and political views. He struck out on his own at about sixteen, working first for the Milton Chronicle.
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Josiah Turner Jr. is admitted to the bar after studying law in Hillsborough
After schooling at the Caldwell Institute in Greensboro and a year at the University of North Carolina, Josiah Turner Jr. studied law for two years in Hillsborough and was admitted to the bar in about 1845. He soon built a large practice.
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Frederick Strudwick graduates and begins practising law in Hillsborough
Frederick Nash Strudwick, born in Hillsborough on 27 June 1833 and schooled there, graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1851 and then began a law practice in Hillsborough.
- Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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Frederick Strudwick takes an unexpired Orange County seat in the House
In February 1870 Strudwick, a Democrat, was chosen to fill the unexpired term of J. J. Allison in the North Carolina House of Representatives. He was elected to a full two-year term that August.
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Kirk's militia arrests Josiah Turner Jr. at Hillsborough
On August 5, 1870, a detachment of Kirk's state militia seized Raleigh Sentinel editor Josiah Turner Jr. at or near Hillsborough, took him by rail to Company Shops and then held him with Kirk's other prisoners in the Caswell County courthouse at Yanceyville. U.S. District Judge George W. Brooks ordered him discharged on August 19, 1870, on his habeas corpus petition.
Part of Kirk-Holden War connections, 1870
People: William W. Holden · Josiah Turner Jr.
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Strudwick is kept off the impeachment managers because of his Klan reputation
After guiding the impeachment resolution through the house judiciary committee and the full house, Strudwick was not chosen as a manager for the senate trial. It was feared that his widely known association with the Ku Klux Klan would make the proceedings look like a Klan prosecution.
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Frederick Strudwick co-owns and edits the Hillsborough Recorder
On 11 August 1887 Strudwick and C. E. Parish became co-owners and editors of the Hillsborough Recorder. Their first issue promised a firm and conservative stand on matters of public welfare and a thoroughly Democratic line in politics. Strudwick left the paper after the issue of 8 March 1888.
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Frederick Strudwick dies and Hillsborough holds a meeting in his honor
Strudwick died on 29 July 1890 after an illness of several months and was buried in the Hillsborough Cemetery. A special town meeting led by C. E. Parish was convened in his honor. Between the legislature and his death he had served as solicitor for the Fifth District for eight years.
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The Tar Heel publishes its first issue
The first issue of The Tar Heel, volume 1, number 1, appeared on Thursday, February 23, 1893, as a weekly published under the auspices of the University Athletic Association, with Charles Baskerville as editor in chief. The student paper took the name The Daily Tar Heel in 1929.
Subject: The Daily Tar Heel
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The Chapel Hill News, forerunner of The News of Orange County, begins publication
The weekly that became The News of Orange County began in Chapel Hill in October 1893 as The Chapel Hill News. Renamed The News, it moved to Hillsboro between 1936 and 1941 and took the title The News of Orange County in 1944. The paper still dates its founding to 1893.
Subject: The News of Orange County
- Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
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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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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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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 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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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.
Subject: The Intimate Bookshop
- Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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WCHL begins broadcasting
WCHL, Chapel Hill's new commercial radio station, went on the air in January 1953 at 1360 on the dial with 1,000 watts, broadcasting from sunrise to sunset from a site on the Durham highway. General manager Sandy McClamroch ran it with partners Roy E. Fullen and Lonnie Dark; its first broadcast was set for January 18.
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WUNC-TV begins broadcasting
WUNC-TV began broadcasting from Chapel Hill on January 8, 1955.
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Sandy McClamroch is elected to the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen
McClamroch, one of five candidates for three seats, was elected on May 5, 1959 with F. E. Strowd and Roland Giduz, and was sworn in with Mayor Oliver K. Cornwell the following Monday night. Campaigning, he had called for coordinating town and university planning and for bringing the university's payments for town services above the table.
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Sandy McClamroch is elected mayor of Chapel Hill without opposition
McClamroch ran unopposed for mayor in the May 1961 town election. Before the vote he took questions from residents at a public meeting at the Negro Community Center sponsored by the Chapel Hill Fellowship for School Integration and the Civic Club, and on a WUNC radio panel, saying he wanted to improve the town's public relations and would discuss merging Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
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McClamroch is sworn in as mayor and Joe Page is named to his aldermen seat
McClamroch and three re-elected aldermen, Adelaide Walters, Paul Wager and Hubert Robinson, were sworn in at the Monday night meeting of the Board of Aldermen by Recorder's Court Judge William Stewart. The board named businessman Joe Page to the unexpired two year aldermen's term McClamroch left on becoming mayor, and elected Mrs. Walters mayor pro tem.
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John E. Greenbacker Jr. leads the Dialectic and Philanthropic literary society
The federal court's findings in Dickson v. Sitterson list Greenbacker as president of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Literary Society, one of the recognized student organizations whose officers brought the Speaker Ban suit. The Daily Tar Heel likewise named him as Di-Phi president among the ten student leaders who wrote to Chancellor Sitterson on March 1, 1966.
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John E. Greenbacker Jr. serves as associate editor of the Daily Tar Heel
The masthead of the December 7, 1966 Daily Tar Heel lists Greenbacker as associate editor under editor Fred Thomas. He wrote signed opinion pieces, and a letter in the same issue takes issue with his Sunday column profiling the SDS leader Gary Waller.
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UNC names its new bookstore building for Josephus Daniels
In 1968 the university named its newly completed bookstore, which housed the Book Exchange and other student services, for Josephus Daniels, class of 1885 and a long-time trustee.
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Phillips Russell publishes These Old Stone Walls
Russell's last book, a collection of stories and historical anecdotes about Chapel Hill, appeared in 1972, two years before he died.
- Recent decades · 1976–2026
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WUNC-FM returns to the air as an NPR affiliate
UNC's radio station WUNC, which had begun FM broadcasting in 1952 and had been silenced by equipment problems in the early 1970s, returned to the air from Chapel Hill on April 3, 1976, as a National Public Radio affiliate.
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Sandy McClamroch helps found the Carol Woods retirement community
McClamroch, by then a former mayor and the founder of WCHL, was instrumental in founding the Carol Woods retirement community in Chapel Hill in 1979.
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Shanklin's Press prints Irene Oliver Pender's History of Orange County Schools
Shanklin's Press of Hillsborough, the Black-owned print shop run by the family of Thomas Shanklin, published Irene Oliver Pender's A History of Orange County Schools: 1752-1983. The shop began in the family home in the 1960s and later moved to Cornelius Street.
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Charles Kuralt gives the UNC spring commencement address
Kuralt, who had edited the Daily Tar Heel as a student, returned to Chapel Hill to deliver the University's spring commencement address in 1985. He told the graduates that the influence of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill moves outward to the farthest corners of the state.
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WXYC makes the first internet radio simulcast
WXYC streamed its radio broadcast over the internet on November 7, 1994.
People: Paul Jones
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Charles Kuralt is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Kuralt died on July 4, 1997 and was buried on the UNC campus in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. About 1,600 people attended a memorial service in Memorial Hall, where Hugh Morton and William C. Friday spoke.
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WCOM community radio begins broadcasting
WCOM, a 100-watt low-power FM community station run by the nonprofit Public Gallery of Carrboro, first went on the air at 103.5 FM from Carrboro at 11:27 p.m. on September 29, 2004. Its founders included Jacques Menache and Ruffin Slater, and it first broadcast from a building at Weaver and Greensboro streets.
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UNC trustees vote to remove Josephus Daniels’s name from the student stores building
On July 29, 2020 the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted 11 to 2 to remove four names from campus buildings, among them Josephus Daniels. The Daniels Building became UNC Student Stores, and the names of Charles Brantley Aycock, Julian Shakespeare Carr and Thomas Ruffin Sr. were removed at the same meeting.
People: Thomas Ruffin
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The News of Orange merges with the Mebane Enterprise
Womack Publishing announced on January 3, 2024, that its weeklies The News of Orange County and the Mebane Enterprise would merge at the end of January. The combined paper, with a section for Mebane, covers Mebane, Hillsborough and Efland from the News of Orange office in Hillsborough, and the Mebane office closed.
Subject: The News of Orange County
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.