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Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
- 1890s
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Chemist Charles H. Herty buys Charles Baskerville's new house
Charles Baskerville, who had built a house on the southwest corner of Boundary and Franklin streets in 1897, sold it the next year to Dr. Charles H. Herty, later known for a process that made newsprint from southern pine.
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Chesley Foster Andrews builds a frame farmhouse near Union Grove
In 1898 Chesley Foster Andrews (1862-1944) built a frame farmhouse at 8306 Union Grove Church Road, beside a log house first owned by the Lloyds. It was redone as a bungalow in the 1920s; a tenant house and a frame and stone barn belong to the farm.
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Cotton Chapel CME Church, the forerunner of St. Joseph CME, was organized
Chapel Hill members of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church, who had worshipped at Hamlet Chapel in Pittsboro, formed their own congregation named for founder Henry Cotton. Its first building later burned and was rebuilt as a frame church.
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Ernest Graves plays fullback on the undefeated 1898 Carolina football team
Graves, a Chapel Hill native, played fullback for the university and was a member of its undefeated, untied team of 1898. He scored 131 points in his Carolina football career.
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Herbert Lloyd takes over his brother's cotton gin and grist mill
As Thomas F. Lloyd turned to building the Alberta Cotton Mill, his brother Herbert took charge of the steam gin and grist mill by the tracks, the frame buildings that had started the settlement in the early 1880s.
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J. T. 'Bull' Durham opens a general store at Franklin and Columbia streets
Durham opened a general store in the building on the southeast corner of Franklin and Columbia streets where S. W. Andrews had kept a Farmers' Alliance meat market. By 1912 he also ran a jitney service.
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M. C. S. Noble joins the university as professor of pedagogy
Marcus Cicero Stephens Noble, superintendent of the Wilmington schools, was invited to return to the University of North Carolina in 1898 as professor of pedagogy. He also directed the university's summer school.
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Masons lay the cornerstone of the Alumni Building
Chapel Hill's University Lodge No. 408 took part in the Masonic laying of the cornerstone for the university's Alumni Building.
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The Kirkland-Miller farmstead is built near Caldwell
The Kirkland-Miller farm on NC 57 near Caldwell dates to about 1898 and keeps a group of outbuildings the survey thought worth noting. It is on the Study List.
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Thomas F. Lloyd builds the Alberta Cotton Mill
Lloyd built the Alberta Cotton Mill beside the railroad in West End in 1898 and 1899, the brick mill that later became Durham Hosiery Mill No. 4 and then Carr Mill Mall.
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The Order of Gimghouls builds its first lodge on Rosemary Lane
The Gimghouls, a junior-class order at the university, were building their own lodge in the spring of 1898 on a lot at Rosemary Lane and Boundary Street. By late 1899 the order was holding dances in the new lodge.
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University students in the National Guard await orders as war with Spain begins
When the United States went to war with Spain, about thirty university men who belonged to the National Guard waited for active duty orders, and freshman Joseph Monroe Morris left for Durham to enlist in the Durham Light Infantry.
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Sallie Walker Stockard becomes UNC's first woman graduate
Sallie Walker Stockard, a Guilford College graduate, entered UNC's senior class in the fall of 1897, the first year the university admitted women. She became the first woman to graduate from UNC when the class of 1898 received its degrees on June 1, 1898, and she earned a master's degree there in 1900.
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Edward Kidder Graham wins the Mangum Medal
Added to the commencement orators after Horace Williams showed Alderman one of his papers, Graham won the top senior speaking prize with an address on "the economic man" that foresaw business coming to rule Southern life. He reworked the theme over the next decade into his argument for the university's service to the state.
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Wilson Caldwell dies and is buried in the Chapel Hill town cemetery
Wilson Caldwell, head of the university's campus workforce, died on July 8, 1898 and was buried the next day in the Chapel Hill town cemetery, now the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery; Kemp Battle gave the funeral address.
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Manly McCauley and Maggie Brewer leave the Brewer farm west of Chapel Hill
On a Wednesday afternoon Maggie Brewer, wife of the farmer Milton Brewer, left the family farm four miles west of Chapel Hill with Manly McCauley, an eighteen-year-old Black farmhand who had worked there about a year. A posse of eighteen men led by her husband set out after them on Friday and overtook the pair beyond Jonesboro.
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Manly McCauley is lynched near Carrboro
Manly McCauley, an 18-year-old Black farmhand, left Milton Brewer's farm west of Chapel Hill with Brewer's wife on October 26, 1898. A posse caught them beyond Jonesboro, and on the way back masked men took McCauley from the officer holding him and hanged him. His body was found on November 6, about three miles west of Chapel Hill.
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Manly McCauley's body is found hanging from a tree three miles west of Chapel Hill
A farmer, Thomas Myrick, found McCauley's body hanging from a bent dogwood beside the public road some three miles west of Chapel Hill, a week after masked men had taken him from the officer bringing him back. Coroner Jordan was telegraphed to hold an inquest.
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W. A. Guthrie urges Chapel Hill voters to the polls for the white supremacy ticket the day after McCauley's body is found
With McCauley's body found the previous afternoon, Major W. A. Guthrie spoke at Chapel Hill on election eve, appealing to white voters to cast their ballots for the party of white supremacy; A. L. Brooks, the Democratic candidate for solicitor, followed him. The state election was held the next day.
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Jesse King, the officer who held McCauley, is tried and acquitted at Hillsborough
King, returning alone to Chapel Hill with his prisoner, was met by masked men who overpowered him and hanged McCauley from a dogwood. Tried at Hillsboro for permitting the prisoner to be taken from him by the mob, he was acquitted; the News and Observer used the trial to confirm that the lynching had in fact happened.
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Edward Kidder Graham returns to Chapel Hill to manage the library
After a year teaching at a Charlotte private school, Graham came back at Alderman's request to run the university library, and before the year was out Alderman made him an instructor in English at $700 a year.
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James Sprunt endows a fund for historical monographs at UNC
By the fall of 1899 James Sprunt had set up a fund at the university for publishing yearly historical monographs, known after 1910 as the James Sprunt Historical Publications. The first monograph appeared in June 1900.
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Julian S. Carr gives money to finish the Carr Building dormitory
Carr, born in Chapel Hill, gave $3,000 in 1899 to finish the dormitory named for him. In 1900 Winston praised it as a gift from a son of the village whose family name had once hung over a small store there.
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R. D. W. Connor graduates from the university and edits its student publications
Connor took his Ph.B. at Chapel Hill in 1899, the year he served as editor-in-chief of all three student publications.
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Robert Worth Bingham endows a debate prize at the university
Robert Worth Bingham, a UNC alumnus practicing law in Louisville, endowed the university's Robert Worth Bingham prize in debate.
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The 1899 school report shows two and a half times as much spent on white schools as Black
Supervisor John Thompson's report for 1899 counted 50 white and 25 Black schools and $4,391.51 spent on white schools against $1,688.09 on Black schools. Almost half the schoolhouses of each race were still log.
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The Bank of Chapel Hill is established
Founded in 1899 with $10,000 authorized and $2,500 paid in, it was the county's first bank after the Civil War. Julian S. Carr was its first president, and by 1953 it held $8,500,000 in assets.
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The legislature funds university waterworks on Bowlin's Creek
The General Assembly of 1899 gave $7,500 for university waterworks, with steam pumps on Bowlin's Creek about a mile and a half from the campus filling a tall tank that fed the buildings by gravity. The supply still fell short.
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The university lays off a new athletic field with a grandstand
President Venable's report of February 1902 lists a new athletic field with a stand among the improvements of the previous three years.
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The university starts a course in dyeing and bleaching
A course in dyeing and bleaching was added to chemistry, with Thomas Clarke, who had studied the subject for two years in Germany, running the laboratory and Francis P. Venable giving the lectures.
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Thomas F. Lloyd builds twelve houses for Alberta Cotton Mill workers
On the mill tract east and northeast of the new Alberta Cotton Mill, Lloyd put up a dozen one-story frame houses for his hands. A house of the same period built for Alberta workers still stands at 105 Short Street.
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The General Assembly incorporates the Caldwell Institute in Orange County
Among the private schools chartered by the 1899 legislature was the Caldwell Institute at Caldwell. A bill to incorporate it had been introduced in 1891.
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A legislature-appointed Board of School Directors takes over the Orange County schools
An 1899 act abolished the county Board of Education, which met for the last time on March 7, and put in its place a Board of School Directors named by the legislature. The Orange directors organized in April.
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Orange County adopts an American Book Company contract for school textbooks
The county commissioners, with the directors' consent, accepted the American Book Company's offer to supply textbooks and take old books in exchange, adopting a list headed by McGuffey's Eclectic Primer at ten cents.
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The class of 1899 gives a bronze bust of Zebulon Vance and plants ivy from Lee's tomb
On Class Day the seniors, led by Julian S. Carr Jr., presented a bronze bust of Vance, and that afternoon planted on the South Building a sprig of ivy from Robert E. Lee's mausoleum.
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Charles E. Maddry begins teaching Strains School near his boyhood home
Maddry, who had been a pupil there, took charge of the one-room Strains School below Nunn's Mountain northwest of Chapel Hill with sixty pupils aged five to twenty-one. Two years later he became county superintendent.
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The school board names committees for every district school, township by township
The July 1899 appointments list about 55 district schools in five townships, among them schools marked as Black at Payne's Chapel, North Side and Hillsboro, and white schools at Breeze, Efland, Rail Road and Flat Rock.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
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A Black congregation builds Neville's Chapel outside Chapel Hill
An African American congregation outside Chapel Hill built the small frame sanctuary now called Neville's Chapel (United Church of Christ) in the early twentieth century. A cornerstone on the site names an earlier Strowd Grace Church and its pastor, H. B. Baldwin.
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A frame depot replaces the box car that had served West End as a station
From 1882 a box car had been the passenger depot at West End. In 1900 a one-story frame depot was built a few yards north of the later station; after the 1913 station opened it became a freight shed, and a new freight house had replaced it by 1925.
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A log house near Caldwell is enlarged into the Annie Parrish House
Around 1900 a one-room log house near Caldwell, built some fifty years earlier, was wrapped into a new story-and-a-half frame house with a center gable. The form uses the Annie Parrish House to show how early log houses survive inside later ones.
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A one-room school for Black children is built at Hickory Grove
Hickory Grove, near White Cross, gets a one-room front-gable schoolhouse for African American children early in the twentieth century.
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Adam A. Kluttz buys the lot west of his store and moves its houses back to Rosemary Street
Kluttz bought the property just west of his East Franklin Street store and had its two old houses moved to the rear of the lot, turned to face Rosemary Street, where they stood until 1963. He is said to have built a second store beside the first, run as a haberdashery.
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Arch Cates's I-house goes up on what became Arthur Minnis Road
The two-story frame I-house at the Cates-Dodson-Minnis Farm was first owned by Arch Cates. It later passed to Albert Dodson and then to Albert and Lois Dodson Minnis, and was remodeled in the 1940s.
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Blackwood Station grows into a small railroad settlement
In the early twentieth century a cluster formed where Mount Sinai Road meets NC 86, with a store, a building remembered as store and post office, and two bungalows. The Blackwoods are said to have kept a post office and store on their farm nearby once the railroad arrived.
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Brodie Lloyd builds a row of rental houses on Weaver Street for Alberta mill workers
The one-story house with a triple-A roof at 302 Weaver Street and nearly identical houses at 300, 304 and 306 Weaver were built by Brodie Lloyd to rent, directly or through the mill, to workers at his cousin Thomas F. Lloyd's Alberta Cotton Mill. By 1983 only 302 stood on its lot; 300 had been moved and the others were gone.
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Charles Baskerville heads UNC's chemistry department
When Francis P. Venable became university president in 1900, Baskerville succeeded him as chairman of the chemistry department, Smith Professor and director of the chemical laboratory, posts he held until 1904.
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Damascus Christian Church builds a Gothic Revival frame church
Damascus Congregational Christian Church southwest of Chapel Hill builds a frame church with Gothic Revival details around 1900; its cemetery lies beside it.
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Eben Alexander becomes the university's first dean of the faculty
Back from diplomatic service in Greece, Eben Alexander was named the first dean of the faculty under President Francis P. Venable in 1900, heading the College of Liberal Arts and graduate studies and supervising the library until poor health forced a leave in 1909.
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Ernest Graves captains the Carolina baseball team
Graves, the team's catcher, captained the university baseball team in 1900, the year he graduated.
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Four mill houses go up on Shelton Street for Bill Lloyd
Bill Lloyd, a cousin of Alberta Cotton Mill owner Thomas F. Lloyd, had four identical one-story houses built to rent to the mill's workers. Each had two front doors so family members on different shifts could come and go; carpenter Thomas Clark, brought from Cane Creek by the Lloyds, built number 107.
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Francis P. Venable serves as president of the university
Elected president in 1900, Venable enlarged the student body, faculty and campus and built an administration for a growing institution. He asked for leave in 1913 and resigned in 1914, returning to teaching and research.
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Fraternity members make up about 18 percent of UNC students
In 1900 the university counted 93 fraternity men against 419 non-members, yet the fraternities ran much of student life, including the athletic association that published the Tar Heel.
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Julian S. Carr gives the university the Carr Building
At the 1900 commencement the trustees accepted the Carr Building, a three-story dormitory that Julian S. Carr paid for at a cost of $18,000. It was designed by Pearson and Ashe and housed seventy-four students.
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Lloyd and Neville's cotton gin operates on Laurel Street
The gin occupied the lot at 108 Laurel Street from the first years of the century into the 1930s. When it was dismantled its materials are said to have gone into houses, perhaps the two porcelain-enamel-tile houses at 108 and 110 Laurel Street.
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Mill owner Isaac W. Pritchard builds a large frame house on Ransom Street
Isaac Pritchard, who ran one of the first textile mills near the Carrboro depot, built a spacious house at 400 Ransom Street combining a hipped roof and Palladian dormer with a Queen Anne entrance and wraparound porch. Most of his land later became part of the Westwood subdivision.
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Mount Hermon, Bethel and Crossroads Baptist congregations build new churches
With farm prices rising after 1900, three established rural Baptist congregations each replaced their meeting houses with new buildings in the first decade of the century.
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Orange County replaces log schoolhouses and opens forty rural libraries
Between 1900 and 1910 the county went from no rural libraries to forty. Log schoolhouses for white children fell from twenty-two to none, while those for Black children fell only from twenty to eight. School terms grew from seventy to eighty-nine days for white pupils and from sixty-five to eighty-two for Black pupils.
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Pender Store is moved across the road at Cedar Grove
In 1900 the Pender Store building was moved to the other side of the road, where it still stands.
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Southern Railway begins buying cross ties from farmers at the Carrboro depot
In the 1900s the Southern Railway began buying hand-hewn oak cross ties at the depot, where its agent graded them and paid the farmers who hauled them in from Orange and nearby counties. By the early 1920s Carrboro was among the largest tie markets in the East, and tie wagons crowded its streets into the early 1930s.
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St. Matthew's receives a brass alms basin in memory of Rev. Joseph W. Murphy
Dr. Samuel W. Murphy and Mrs. Walter E. Stumph, the former rector's brother and daughter, gave a brass alms basin in his memory.
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The Blackwood family settles the farm that becomes the Blackwood Brothers Dairy
From the early twentieth century the Blackwoods held a farm on Mount Carmel Church Road with a story-and-a-half house and a complete set of log and frame farm and dairy buildings.
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The Bradsher House is built in northwest Orange County
The one-story Bradsher House, a plain cottage given a shingled center gable and factory-made porch trim, dates from about 1900.
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The Carr Store is built on NC 49
A store is built at Carr on NC 49 early in the twentieth century; it was later enlarged and altered. Carr Store Road takes its name from the crossroads.
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The Foxes Knob schoolhouse is enlarged and becomes a house
Soon after 1900 the one-room log Foxes Knob School near Mebane is enlarged; after its school years it served as a residence.
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The George Washington Walker Farm is laid out on St. Mary's Road
A farm of nearly 75 acres was set up on both sides of St. Mary's Road around 1900, with a one-story house and frame barns that still stand. Its later buildings follow the county's shifts from grain to dairy, poultry and beef.
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The Hillsboro Milling Company is chartered
The state chartered the Hillsboro Milling Company with $10,000 in capital stock. By early 1901 it had put in a corn mill and was buying wheat, with H. Winder Webb as secretary and treasurer, and it later ran roller mills in a large brick building east of the courthouse.
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The Lloyd-Webb Building goes up on the south side of East Franklin Street
This row of two-story brick shops at 138-142 East Franklin Street, with stepped brick cornices and two-over-two windows upstairs, dates from about 1900. The store at 144 next door was built to the same pattern.
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The Morrow-Neville House is built on Mallette Street
The two-story hip-roofed house at 118 Mallette Street, with a small rear ell and a square-columned porch that are probably original, dates from about 1900.
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The Sparrow family builds a two-story farmhouse on Old Lystra Road
Around 1900 a frame I-house was built on the Sparrow farm, reportedly around a smaller house from before the Civil War. The family had held the place from the start.
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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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The Thomas Laws House is built in the Little River community
A two-story T-shaped farmhouse with a wraparound porch was built for the Laws family in the Little River community around the turn of the century.
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The Walter Hawkins farmstead with its tobacco barns takes shape near Caldwell
The Walter Hawkins farm near Caldwell is laid out around 1900 and keeps several tobacco barns the survey singled out. It is on the Study List.
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The Warriole-Tilley House is built on Mallette Street
The one-story frame house at 113 Mallette Street, with a center front gable, a tall hip-roofed rear ell and a bracketed porch that looks original, dates from about 1900.
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The William Woods McDade House is built in the Cedar Grove area
Around 1900 a story-and-a-half house with a decorated center gable, a cutaway bay and a wraparound porch with turned posts was built near Cedar Grove. The county survey knows it as the William Woods McDade House, though William Woods McDade himself died in 1862; the 1993 survey form dates it about 1890.
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Tobacco farmer Ira Rogers builds tenant housing in upper Orange County
In the early 1900s Ira Rogers built many frame and log houses for the tenants who worked his tobacco land. One that survives has two stories, a chimney in the middle and two front doors, which suggests it housed two families.
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William Cole builds a house near Chapel Hill as a wedding present for his daughter
In 1900 William Cole gave his daughter a new one-story house near Chapel Hill, covered in patterned shingles and trimmed with turned porch work. Mattson calls it the showiest house of its kind in the county.
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William Edgar Shambley builds a log house near his grandfather's
About 1900 William Edgar Shambley, grandson of William Shambley, built a one-room log house of the usual local type at Cornwallis and Mount Hermon Church roads, a sign that log building went on into the new century.
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A state Supreme Court ruling unseats a legislature-named school director in Orange
Following a North Carolina Supreme Court decision on the 1899 school act, the county board reorganized: director Stephen Forrest lost his seat and A. R. Holmes of the old Board of Education returned to finish a term running to July 1900.
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The school board rules the Cannadas' Chapel Hill school is not a public school
The Chapel Hill district had contracted J. W. and C. S. Cannada to teach all its school-age children, but the teachers had not met the school law. The board declared the school was not a public school and withheld pay until they complied.
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President Alderman resigns to head Tulane University
Offered the Tulane presidency in April 1900 at more than twice his Chapel Hill pay, Alderman resigned in May despite the trustees' pleas. The book suggests thin state funding after the 1898 campaign, when Democrats promised the church colleges not to seek more for the university, weighed on his decision.
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The university opens its first summer term of regular courses
For the first time the university offered a twelve-week summer term of regular courses that counted toward a degree, opening on June 12, 1900, alongside the four-week Summer School for Teachers. Tuition was twenty dollars.
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Commencement marks twenty-five years since the university reopened
The 1900 commencement was given over to the reopening of 1875, with nineteen members of the 1875-76 student body present and addresses by Kemp Battle, George T. Winston, W. J. Peele and President Alderman.
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Hillsboro Township petitions for and votes a special road tax
A petition presented on October 1, 1900 led to an election that carried, and the commissioners levied 10 cents per $100 and 30 cents a poll for Hillsboro Township roads. Bingham followed, and by 1903 all seven townships taxed themselves for roads.
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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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Hillsboro's commissioners refuse to deed the old Female Academy to the town school
The board had asked the town to deed the old Hillsboro Female Academy lot, near E. A. Rosemond's house, to the school committee. The town offered only a ten-year lease, which the board said the law did not allow it to accept, and it told the committee to find another site.
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Hillsborough Baptist Church ordains Robert P. Walker
The church ordained one of its own, Robert P. Walker, to the Baptist ministry, the first of the ordinations the book lists for the congregation.
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Chapel Hill gets its first long-distance telephone
Through the efforts of Professor Joshua W. Gore, the first long-distance telephone line was set up at the university during the 1900-01 session, connecting by way of Durham.
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Charles E. Maddry serves as superintendent of the Orange County schools
While a student at the University of North Carolina, Charles Edward Maddry served as superintendent of the Orange County schools.
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Clyde Eubanks moves his drugstore into a building of his own
Eubanks left the Central Hotel and set up his drugstore in a new building he had put up on the west corner of the Tankersley property on Franklin Street.
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Eben Alexander has the first telephone in Chapel Hill
Bryant lists Professor Eben Alexander, who lived in the old Tom Taylor house on East Franklin Street, as the first in town to have a telephone; in 1901 his number was 1.
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Fairfield Presbyterian Church is remodeled with pointed Gothic windows
The one-story frame church near Cedar Grove, built about 1834, kept its gable-front shape but got pointed-arch windows and doorway in a 1901 renovation.
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Gerrard Hall is renovated and its south portico torn down
Gerrard Hall got a new roof and interior: chairs replaced the pews, the old doors were walled up and two new doors opened on the east. The decaying south porch and its columns were pulled down.
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Harriet Berry works for the state Geological and Economic Survey in Chapel Hill
Berry began work in Chapel Hill with the North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey in 1901 and rose from stenographer to secretary and, in 1917, acting head. She left in 1921, the year her Good Roads lobbying produced the state highway commission law.
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Isaac Hall Manning joins the UNC medical faculty
Manning came to the School of Medicine in 1901 as professor of physiology and began teaching bacteriology in 1902.
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John W. Canada's school closes and its building becomes a rooming house
The John W. Canada School closed, and the old building on the southwest corner of Franklin and Columbia streets where it had met became a rooming house. The brick building beside it was used as a Masonic hall.
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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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Segregation and access to medical care
Black patients in the county went to Durham’s Lincoln Hospital from 1901, well-baby clinics were held separately in the 1940s, and the new hospitals of the 1950s opened with separate wards. UNC admitted its first Black medical student in 1951, the NAACP picketed Memorial Hospital in 1963, and the hospital ended racial segregation in 1965.
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The Alumni Building is finished
The Alumni Building was completed in 1901 with fourteen lecture rooms and the university's administrative offices. Venable put its cost at $36,000.
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The Mary Ann Smith Dormitory is completed
The Mary Ann Smith Dormitory was finished in 1901, adding thirty-eight student rooms. Venable later gave its cost as $16,000.
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The Yackety Yack replaces the fraternity-sponsored Hellenian as UNC's yearbook
The Hellenian, the yearbook put out by the fraternities, gave way in 1901 to the Yackety Yack.
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The pharmacy department is made part of the university
The department of pharmacy, run by Dean Edward V. Howell, was formally incorporated into the university in 1901. Its laboratory and lecture space was then doubled.
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The university completes its water works, sewerage and central heating plant
During 1900-01 the university finished its water works and sewer system, installed a forced-circulation hot-water heating plant, and built a boiler house, workshop and printing office. Two new dynamos doubled its electric lighting.
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The university track team wins the Southern championship at New Orleans
Running on a cinder track given by student Henry S. Lake, a university track team competed at New Orleans against Vanderbilt, Tulane and Texas and won the Southern championship.
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Thomas F. Lloyd gives a church lot facing his mill to Chapel Hill's four congregations
Lloyd offered a Weaver Street lot to the Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists and Methodists of Chapel Hill. The first two gave up their rights, and the Baptists and Methodists built Union Chapel on it in 1901 or 1902, a frame building about twenty by thirty feet.
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The Hillsboro school committee buys the town's first public schoolhouse and lot
The committee bought a house on a two-acre lot, known as the Wash Bruce or Gill lot, from E. S. Cooley for $500. Pender says Hillsboro had never before owned a school building; the county board furnished it and paid for repairs.
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The school board refuses to let Mormon elders preach in county schoolhouses
Among grievances heard in January 1901, the board went on record against allowing Mormon missionaries to preach in Orange County school buildings.
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Jesse Ruffin, coachman and stagecoach driver, dies
Jesse Ruffin died in his nineties at his grandson Lindsey Faucette's house, out between Hillsborough and Durham. The Durham Sun remembered him as Judge Ruffin's servant and later Paul Cameron's, and a stagecoach driver before the railroad came; he was carried to Hillsborough by train for burial.
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Archibald Henderson receives the first Ph.D. in mathematics from UNC
Archibald Henderson, who had graduated from UNC in 1898, received the university's first doctorate in mathematics at the June 1901 commencement. He stayed on the Chapel Hill faculty until 1948.
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A school district is created south of White Cross on donated land
The board approved a new district south of White Cross whose land and building were given on condition that they revert when no longer used for a public school, with Sunday school and preaching allowed. Children of the Old Field school were moved to it.
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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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A Pilgrim Holiness congregation is organized in West Hillsborough
A Holiness congregation, later the Pilgrim Holiness Church of West Hillsborough, was organized in 1902. It had a 250-seat building and 27 members in 1953.
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Charles E. Maddry is pastor of First Baptist Church, Hillsborough
Charles Edward Maddry was pastor of the First Baptist Church in Hillsborough while finishing his studies at the University of North Carolina.
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John W. Graham builds the present house at Montrose
After his 1893 fire, John W. Graham lived in the enlarged law office until 1902, when he built the two-story frame house that is the core of the present Montrose, the third house on the site.
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Merchant B. B. Forrest has a Victorian cottage built on North Wake Street
A one-story T-shaped cottage with shingled gables and bracketed porches was built for B. B. Forrest, partner in the O. J. and B. B. Forrest general store, about the year he married Mollie Belle Smith of Leasburg. The 2014 district update calls it a rare, intact example of a T-shaped Victorian cottage.
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S. J. Brockwell builds a three-story brick building at Franklin and Columbia streets
Samuel Jackson Brockwell put up a three-story brick building on the northeast corner of Franklin and Columbia streets. Its first tenant, Samuel Weldon Andrews, took both ground-floor storefronts, with groceries on the Columbia Street side and dry goods on the other.
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Shepperd Strudwick brings his family back to Hillsborough
Shepperd Strudwick, a native of Hillsborough, returned to the town with his family when his son Clement, born in Tennessee in April 1900, was two.
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The university offers the clinical years of medicine in Raleigh
From 1902 to 1910 the university tried offering the two clinical years and an M.D. degree, but those courses were taught in Raleigh rather than Chapel Hill. Otherwise it gave only the first two years of medicine until 1952.
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The university withdraws from the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association
After two years as a member, the university left the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Association in 1902. Its schools lay in Tennessee, South Carolina and farther south, out of touch with Chapel Hill.
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Walter Dallam Toy builds a new house on West Franklin Street
Newly married, Professor Toy built a new house on the land he had bought from Julia Graves. In 1912 Robert B. House noted it near the corner of Church Street.
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Cedar Grove district finishes a new $279 schoolhouse with county help
The board paid $150 from the general fund toward the new schoolhouse of Cedar Grove District No. 6, which cost $279.
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The county pays $214 toward a schoolhouse at Pleasant Green
The board paid Pleasant Green, District No. 1 of Little River Township, $214 for its school building.
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The state charters the Blanche Hosiery Mills Company at West End
The secretary of state issued a charter to the Blanche Hosiery Mills Company, formed by W. R. Lloyd, T. J. Hogan, John Lloyd and W. E. Lindsay to make hosiery. The company began on $6,500 in stock, with leave to raise it to $15,000.
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Buckhorn residents build an academy that will also house the public school
The board approved a Gravelly Hill committee's plan to build an academy at Buckhorn and locate the public school there, retiring the old Buckhorn schoolhouse. The trustees guaranteed the board use of the building for school purposes permanently.
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Caldwell Institute gets a large new school district
A committee from Caldwell Institute asked for one district made from parts of the Wilson, Little River and Poplar Grove districts. The board approved and had the boundary surveyed.
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Charles E. Maddry is ordained at the Chapel Hill Baptist Church
Charles Edward Maddry was ordained to the Baptist ministry at the Chapel Hill Baptist Church, now University Baptist Church.
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Lightning burns the race track barn at Occoneechee Farm
During an electrical storm, lightning struck the "Pocahontas" or race track barn on Julian Carr's Occoneechee Farm, destroying it with its feed and farm machinery. No livestock were inside, and the loss was insured.
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The Blanche Hosiery Company builds its own knitting mill near the West End depot
After more than a year in the upper story of Tom Lloyd's cotton mill, the Blanche Hosiery Company put up a $1,500 building of its own near the depot and planned to move in about July 1. The owners said Lloyd charged too much for power.
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A northeast windstorm tears two limbs from the Davie Poplar
A fierce wind from the northeast on August 6, 1902, destroyed many old trees on the campus and tore two large limbs from the Davie Poplar. The tree later put out new growth.
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Caldwell asks for an election on a rural graded school
The Caldwell community asked for a vote on establishing a rural graded school, and the board asked the county commissioners to call the election.
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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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Charles Baskerville announces two new elements, carolinium and berzelium
Baskerville's research at the university on thorium and other rare earths led him in 1903 to announce two previously unknown elements, which he named carolinium and berzelium.
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Charles T. Woollen becomes the first director of the university band
Charles T. Woollen, a university administrator, became the first director of the university band in 1903 and led it until 1919. The band first performed at a university baseball game in 1904 and was giving concerts on the Alumni Building steps by 1906.
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Commissioners create Cheeks and Eno townships
Acting on a 1903 act, the county board carved Cheeks Township out of western Hillsboro Township and formed Eno River Township out of pieces of Hillsboro and Little River.
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Edward Vernon Howell owns Chapel Hill's first automobile
Pharmacy dean Edward Vernon Howell, then living in the old Fetter house on East Franklin Street, became the first in town to own a car, a one-cylinder Oldsmobile.
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Frank Nash publishes Hillsboro, Colonial and Revolutionary
Nash collected his articles on the town from the Charlotte Observer and the North Carolina Booklet into a book, printed in Raleigh by Edwards & Broughton. It was reprinted in 1953.
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George Howe is elected professor of Latin at the university
The trustees elected George Howe, who held a Ph.D., professor of Latin for 1903-04 in place of Dr. H. F. Linscott, who had died in December. Howe kept the chair until 1936.
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Gooch's Café opens in Chapel Hill with seven seats
Gooch's Café began feeding university students in Chapel Hill about 1903, with seven seats by its own later account. It stayed a student gathering place for more than fifty years.
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John Sprunt Hill endows a fellowship in history
In his 1903 alumni address John Sprunt Hill gave the interest on $4,000 to set up a fellowship in the department of history. The first year's interest was to go toward a YMCA building.
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Mount Bright Baptist Church's first building burns
Fire destroyed Mount Bright Baptist Church's original building, on the lot Susan Graham had given the congregation. The 2014 Hillsborough Historic District documentation places that first church on South Churton Street near the Eno, before the congregation moved to West Union Street early in the twentieth century.
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Sidney W. Crabtree starts a farm on land from the Smith plantation
A 54-acre farm on Smith Level Road was formed in 1903 from part of the old Smith plantation. Its Triple-A farmhouse and six outbuildings survive, and a graveyard there is thought to hold people enslaved on the plantation.
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The Bingham house is moved down East Union Street to clear the corner for Shepperd Strudwick's house
The 1831 William J. Bingham House is moved half a block east on East Union Street so that Shepperd Strudwick can build on its lot at the corner of Churton and Union. Much of the old house's outside dates from the move.
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The Martha Patterson House is built on McCauley Street
A two-story Triple-A house with a center front gable went up about 1903 at 223 McCauley Street. It takes its name from a former owner, Martha Patterson.
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William C. Coker begins turning a boggy pasture into the campus arboretum
UNC's first professor of botany began developing a five-acre boggy pasture on the campus into an outdoor classroom for the study of trees, shrubs and vines native to North Carolina. From the 1920s through the 1940s he added many East Asian trees and shrubs.
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William D. Moss becomes pastor of the Presbyterian Church of Chapel Hill
Coming from pastorates in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, William Dygnum Moss arrived in North Carolina in 1903 to lead the Presbyterian Church of Chapel Hill. Apart from six years in Washington, he served the congregation until his death in 1932.
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Hillsborough Methodist Church buys town lot 94 and its house for a new parsonage
The church bought lot 94, with a one-story five-room house, from James Webb, son of Dr. James Webb, and used it as the parsonage. The lot later held the 1958 parsonage.
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The university confers its first Doctor of Medicine degrees
On the evening of May 7, 1903, Dean Hubert A. Royster presented four graduates of the Medical Department, and the M.D. degree was conferred for the first time in the university's history.
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A survey enlarging the graveyard is laid before the Chapel Hill aldermen
After a 1902 trustee resolution to enlarge the crowded burying ground, a survey by James O. Webb presented to the town board on December 12, 1903 added two-thirds of an acre on the west and one and one-third acres on the east. No approval is recorded, but the east addition matches Section II, where regular burials began in the early 1900s.
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A Mr. Graham grains the doors and wainscot of the Faucette House
The six-panel doors and pine wainscot of the house were given their combed graining in 1904-05, work that survives.
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A Phi Beta Kappa chapter is established at the university
As dean of the faculty, Eben Alexander, himself a Phi Beta Kappa member from Yale, helped establish a chapter of the honor society at the University of North Carolina in 1904.
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Brockwell turns his building's ground floor into a skating rink
When Samuel Weldon Andrews was elected sheriff and closed his store, Brockwell remodeled the first floor of his building at Franklin and Columbia streets as a skating rink.
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Efland Baptist Church is organized
Baptists at Efland organized a church in 1904. It had 55 members in 1953.
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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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Eugene M. Armfield gives $5,000 for books in English philology
Eugene Morehead Armfield of the class of 1888 gave the university $5,000, with the interest to buy books for advanced study of English philology.
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Joseph Hyde Pratt teaches economic geology at UNC
Pratt was professor of economic geology at the University of North Carolina from 1904 to 1925, while also serving as state geologist.
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Kappa Alpha opens its chapter house near the campus
Chapters had begun leaving the dormitories in the 1890s, renting houses before they built them; Alpha Tau Omega had a chapter house by 1893. Kappa Alpha's house of 1904 began the row of fraternity houses near Franklin and Columbia streets that became Fraternity Row.
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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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Shepperd Strudwick builds a Churton Street house designed by Ralph Adams Cram
Shepperd Strudwick built a Neoclassical Revival house on Churton Street to a design Ralph Adams Cram drew about 1904; Cram's wife Elizabeth was the sister of Strudwick's wife Susan. The site had been cleared in 1903 by moving the antebellum W. J. Bingham House down East Union Street, and the house was finished about 1908. It was later named Tamarind.
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The old Joseph Caldwell obelisk is taken down, later to stand for four college servants
In July 1904 the remains of President Joseph Caldwell and his wife were moved to the base of the 1858 marble monument, and the original sandstone obelisk was taken down, to be set up again in the Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. It was later raised over Wilson Caldwell's grave, and a marble tablet placed in its base by the Class of 1891 names Wilson Swain Caldwell, November Caldwell, David Barham and Henry Smith, who served the university.
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The university opens a summer course in library work
By 1904 the university had begun a summer course of instruction in library work, meant to train librarians as workers with books rather than custodians. Louis Round Wilson taught library methods in the 1905 Summer School.
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The university organizes a Graduate Department with C. Alphonso Smith as dean
By the 1904 commencement the university had organized its Graduate Department, with Dr. C. Alphonso Smith as dean. An alumni committee on the university's condition praised the step.
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Orange County teachers are offered the university summer school and pay tied to exam scores
The board accepted Dr. Venable's offer to admit county teachers to the University Summer School and set pay by the July examination: $35 a month for an average of 95 and $40 for 98.
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The superior court orders the old Ruffin place sold to Nannie Russell Roulhac
Under a superior court judgment, Allen J. Ruffin was named commissioner to convey the ten-acre Ruffin place to Mrs. Nannie Russell Roulhac of Rockingham County for $100 in cash and a mortgage note of $1,455.
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Mebane School District becomes the first to tax itself for a longer school term
After a district election, the commissioners gave the sheriff a tax list for the Mebane district at 30 cents per $100 and 90 cents a poll. By 1910 special school taxes were collected in six districts.
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The Bank of Orange opens in Hillsborough
Started in May 1904 with $5,000 in capital, it was Hillsborough's first bank since the Civil War. Dr. J. S. Spurgeon was president and Paul C. Collins cashier for its whole life.
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The Rev. John C. Hocutt replaces Charles Maddry as county school superintendent
Maddry resigned in July 1904 to study at the Southern Baptist seminary, and the board chose his friend and former pastor John C. Hocutt to serve out the term. Hocutt stayed until 1908.
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P. C. Collins buys the southern part of the future Bellevue mill site from J. W. Hooker
Before the Bellevue company was incorporated, P. C. Collins bought the south half of the mill site near the West Hillsborough depot from J. W. Hooker; a later hand added that he acted as the mill's agent. Collins, a shareholder, passed the land to the company in 1905.
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Shepperd Strudwick heads the new Bellevue Manufacturing Company in west Hillsborough
The Bellevue Manufacturing Company, a cotton mill in west Hillsborough, was incorporated on October 13, 1904, with Shepperd Strudwick as its president and Norfleet Webb as secretary and treasurer. Strudwick remained president until he resigned in 1929. By 1912 the mill ran 5,000 spindles and 200 looms making dress ginghams.
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A West King Street house becomes the Cole Hotel
The house at 132 West King Street, a one-story residence on the 1905 Sanborn map, is labeled the Cole Hotel by 1911. It was raised to two full stories with a wraparound porch by 1924 and was a private house again before 1943.
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Beta Theta Pi builds a house on the original Fraternity Row
The Eta chapter put up its first house at the edge of campus on Fraternity Row in 1905, which brought the chapter a run of growth until World War I.
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Edward Kidder Graham organizes the Odd Number Club for student writers
Members met monthly to hear poems, sketches and prose by one another, kept ties with like clubs at Tennessee, Georgia, Virginia, Texas and Vanderbilt, and worked to build up campus journalism.
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George Howe buys an East Franklin Street lot from the university and builds a house
In 1905 the university sold George Howe the lot at 620 East Franklin Street, and the two-story hip-roofed house on it probably went up within a year or so.
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Isaac Hall Manning is dean of the UNC School of Medicine
As dean for 28 years, Manning improved the school's departments, faculty, facilities and entrance requirements.
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John O'Daniel builds a Queen Anne cottage on McCauley Street
John O'Daniel's Queen Anne cottage at 237 McCauley Street has a tall hip roof, a projecting wing with a bay, and a porch that wraps around to a gazebo at the corner.
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Martha Hall sells the Ellis house to Sheriff R. D. Baine
After Nelson Hall died, his widow Martha bought the house and farm from his estate and sold them two years later to Orange County sheriff R. D. Baine.
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Mathematician and historian Archibald Henderson builds his house on East Franklin Street
Archibald Henderson, who taught mathematics at UNC from 1898 to 1948 and later wrote a history of the campus buildings, built a large frame house at 721 East Franklin Street in 1905. It mixes Colonial Revival porch, entrance and widow's walk with leftover Queen Anne diamond-pane windows and bays.
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Merchant John Edward Clark builds a two-room schoolhouse on Old Oxford Road
Clark, a Chapel Hill storekeeper, replaced a one-room school he had also built on the site at 108 Old Oxford Road. In 1992 it was the only schoolhouse known in Chapel Hill from before school consolidation.
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Mill engineer Richard C. Biberstein lays out the machinery for the Bellevue mill
The new company hired Richard C. Biberstein, a Charlotte mill designer trained in Massachusetts, to plan the arrangement of its machinery; his drawings run from 1905 to 1907. Fifteen years later he designed the mill's weaving room.
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Patterson Mill miller George Brown buys a farm on Mount Moriah Road
In 1905 George Brown, the miller at Patterson Mill, acquired the 1885 farmstead; his children still owned it in 1992.
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Roy Thayer builds a Queen Anne house on McCauley Street for William H. Haward
Builder Roy Thayer put up the two-story Queen Anne house at 219 McCauley Street for William H. Haward in 1905. Haward rented it out, and it later passed to his granddaughter, Margaret Webb Callihan.
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Sam Nunn and neighbors raise the last recorded log house in the township
About 1905 Sam Nunn built a two-story log house for his family with help from Monroe Partin, Green Johnson and one more neighbor. His daughter Annabel Lloyd remembered the four builders, one at each corner, and the survey found no later log dwelling.
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Shepperd Strudwick buys Allen Ruffin's land north of the future Bellevue mill
Four years before the Bellevue mill was built, Strudwick acquired the tract north of the site from Ruffin, one of the Eno Cotton Mill's founders, probably to build company housing there.
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Swain 'Kern' Pendergraft opens a fruit store and newsstand
Pendergraft opened a fruit store and newsstand where Merritt Cheek's house had stood. By 1912 he also ran a jitney service in competition with J. T. Durham.
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T. Felix Hickerson returns to Chapel Hill as an instructor in mathematics
A year after taking his Ph.B. at the university, Thomas Felix Hickerson came back to Chapel Hill in 1905 for graduate work in mathematics and engineering and taught as an instructor in mathematics. He stayed on the faculty until 1952.
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The General Assembly votes $50,000 for a chemistry building
After Professor Charles Baskerville described the crowded chemistry laboratories, the legislature raised the university's yearly appropriation to $45,000 and gave $50,000 for a chemical laboratory. Venable called the building grant a new departure.
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The Peoples Bank is organized
The Peoples Bank was organized in Chapel Hill. By 1911 it was in a building just east of W. B. Sorrell's shop on East Franklin Street, which may or may not have been its first home.
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The old Belle Hutchins house becomes a restaurant
The former home of Miss Belle Hutchins, daughter of John R. Hutchins, was turned into a restaurant with living quarters.
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W. B. Sorrell keeps a jewelry and optometry shop on East Franklin Street
W. B. Sorrell sold jewelry and fitted eyeglasses from a building just west of Adam A. Kluttz's stores, likely the site of the earlier Pritchard and Lloyd store.
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William de Berniere MacNider organizes UNC's first Department of Pharmacology
MacNider, a Chapel Hill native and 1903 graduate of the medical school's first class, organized the university's first Department of Pharmacology and led it as professor.
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H. S. Bradshaw returns to the Hillsborough Presbyterian pulpit for a 33-year second pastorate
Bradshaw, pastor from 1894 to 1900, came back in 1905 and stayed until 1938, giving him thirty-nine years in all, the longest service in the church's history. He is buried in the churchyard.
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The Leonidas Polk Chapter of the UDC holds Confederate memorial exercises
On May 10, 1905, the Leonidas Polk Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy held memorial exercises in Gerrard Hall, reading the roll of students who had served in the Confederate army. Children and adults then carried flowers to decorate soldiers' graves in the village cemetery.
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Efland Methodist Church is organized
Methodists at Efland organized a church and built it the same year.
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Judge W. P. Bynum gives the university a gymnasium
Judge William Preston Bynum paid for a gymnasium on the campus in memory of his grandson and namesake, a student who died before graduating, and presented it to the trustees by letter in May 1905. Dr. Richard H. Lewis accepted it at commencement.
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Hillsboro grants John D. Morris a franchise to build a telephone exchange
The town commissioners gave John D. Morris of Roxboro the exclusive right for twenty years to build and run a telephone system and central office in Hillsboro, if he began work within six months of July 1, 1905. By late 1906 the Morris Telephone Exchange was advertising service in town.
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The county counts 17 rural school libraries for white children and one for Black children
The 1905 annual statistical report found 18 rural school libraries in the county, holding 1,581 volumes in white schools and 92 in the single Black school library.
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A Southern Railway freight train wrecks at the Eno railroad bridge in Hillsboro
Eastbound freight No. 72 left the track just west of the Eno bridge; one car went over the side into the river and eleven more piled up, twisting the bridge's iron supports. No one was hurt, and mail trains crossed again the next morning.
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Gains Chapel AME Church is organized at Efland
Robert Watson, Shurman Morrow and Brown Wright led the organization of Gains Chapel, an African Methodist Episcopal church at Efland, about 1906.
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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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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 October 2, 2026.
