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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1930s
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The Village Apartments are built on East Franklin Street
An apartment house went up just east of the University Presbyterian Church, among the street's houses.
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The old West Franklin Street high school becomes Chapel Hill's elementary school
When the new high school on South Columbia Street was finished, the 1916 building on West Franklin was turned over to the elementary grades.
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The sheriff stops serving as the county's tax collector
The sheriff had collected Orange County's taxes since colonial days, and that ended in 1936, with collection moving to the county accountant's office. Carl C. Davis became tax collector in 1938.
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UNC Press publishes Odum's Southern Regions of the United States
The University of North Carolina Press in Chapel Hill published Odum's Southern Regions of the United States, a 664-page study of social conditions across the South prepared for the Social Science Research Council's Southern Regional Committee.
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West End Graded School is built on the old Cadwallader Jones homesite
A larger one-story brick Colonial Revival school for grades one through six, six classrooms and an auditorium, was built in 1936 to replace the two-story frame West End School on Bellevue Avenue, which became a community club building. It stood on the highest ground in West Hillsborough, inside a low stone wall, where the Cadwallader Jones house had stood.
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Hilda Allen asks the state for help with medical care at the Efland Home
When superintendent Hilda Allen raised the need for medical care for the girls at the Efland Home, the state Division of Institutions and Corrections replied on January 13, 1936, only that she should get in touch with the county health officer.
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The WPA turns down Hilda Allen's request for labor at the Efland Home
Hilda Allen asked whether the Works Progress Administration could do manual work at the Efland Home. A field agent answered that the WPA could not approve a project on land deeded to a private body, the North Carolina Federation of Negro Women's Clubs, and that he knew of no other source of aid.
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Dr. W. P. Richardson becomes health officer of the district serving Orange
Richardson followed Dr. M. H. Rourk, who left in February 1936, and served until Dr. O. D. Garvin replaced him in 1944.
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Grace Beatty appointed supervising nurse of the district health unit
Acting district health officer Dr. William P. Richardson appointed Grace Beatty, who held a master's degree in public health nursing from Columbia, as supervising nurse under an enlarged program funded by Social Security money. By July 1936 the Orange-Person staff of 11 included staff nurses Agnes Tolbert in Chapel Hill and Ruth O'Briant and Lieotta Hall in Roxboro.
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The county school board buys land for a new Black school in Hillsboro
The Orange County Board of Education bought the Hillsboro colored school site from Louis Wilson and George Mayo, paying $1,100 to each. The new school for Black students went up there that year.
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The county board applies for home economics and agriculture teachers at Hillsboro School
The board voted in April 1936 to apply for teachers of agriculture and home economics at the Hillsboro School, while seeking federal funds for new buildings and additions.
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Carolina Coach Company opens a new bus station at Rosemary and Columbia streets
Carolina Coach Company moved Chapel Hill's bus station from East Franklin Street to new quarters at the corner of Rosemary Lane and Columbia Street, opened the week of April 24, 1936. It ran ten round trips a day to Durham and four between Raleigh and Greensboro through Chapel Hill.
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The University dedicates its new stadium as Fetzer Field
On "Fetzer Day" the University dedicated its new track stadium, named Fetzer Field for its athletic director of fifteen years, with a track meet against the Naval Academy. The Monogram Club ran the celebration and invited every letterman since athletics began at the University.
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Health officer reports on the preschool clinics in Chapel Hill and Carrboro
The health department finished its round of preschool clinics, with 25 children at the Chapel Hill clinic and 34 at Carrboro. Health officer W. P. Richardson credited a committee of women with much of the success and reported that 56 correctible defects were found among 38 of the 59 children examined.
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Paul and Elizabeth Green sell their village home and lay out a new house east of town
Paul and Elizabeth Green sell their home in the Glen to Mr. and Mrs. J. Manson Valentine and, with advice from a landscape architect, site a family house, gardens and outbuildings on their tract east of the village, hoping to move in by September.
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First field training course for North Carolina public health workers held in the Orange-Person District
A month-long field training course for 29 new public health workers (14 nurses, 6 sanitary officers, 4 sanitary engineers and 5 health officers), described as the first in North Carolina, ended in Chapel Hill in early July 1936 under Dr. William P. Richardson. The Orange-Person and Durham health departments then ran as a joint field training center, and by July 1937 it had trained 109 workers.
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S. A. Nathan wins a place on the Orange County Board of Commissioners ticket
In the June 1936 primary Nathan finished second of six candidates for the three county commissioner places, behind Carl T. Durham. By early 1937 he and Durham were the board's two Chapel Hill members.
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District health department holds midwife classes across Orange County
Classes for midwives were held at Efland and Hillsboro and began for those in and near Chapel Hill at the health department offices, with attendance required before a permit to practice would be issued. Health officer W. P. Richardson said 17 percent of births in the county were attended by midwives, against 31 percent statewide.
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Harry Stern moves his Carolina Grill into a new building on East Franklin Street
Harry Stern moved his Carolina Grill, a restaurant and delicatessen, into a larger new building that T. C. Atwood put up on the lot next to the Model Market. The Weekly counted it among the year's new business buildings.
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A new Chapel Hill High School opens on Columbia Street
Chapel Hill's new high school for white students, beside the Pittsboro road on what is now South Columbia Street, opened to classes on October 5, 1936, three weeks late. Built for $106,000 with Public Works Administration aid to plans by Atwood and Weeks, it came in the same federal program that built an addition at the Orange County Training School.
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Hope Summerell Chamberlain talks about Old Days in Chapel Hill at the Bull's Head Bookshop
The Bull's Head Bookshop on the ground floor of the University Library announced a Tuesday afternoon talk by Chamberlain about her book, with autographed copies on sale for $1.35.
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A puppet Hansel and Gretel is staged in Adeline McCall's music series for children
The Music Club and the Parent-Teacher Association presented Hansel and Gretel, a puppet show with music, at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 9, 1936, in Hill Music Hall. It was the fifth in a series of music events for children under Adeline McCall's direction, and elementary school children sang songs from Humperdinck's opera.
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Betty Smith edits a collection of plays with Frederick Koch and Robert Finch
Smith coedited Plays for Schools and Little Theatres with Koch and Finch in 1937 and wrote a catalog of one-act plays.
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Brickmason Roosevelt Warner builds his own house on West Corbin Street
Roosevelt Warner, a Black brickmason, built himself a two-story brick Colonial Revival house at 117 West Corbin Street, with a garage apartment of brick and glazed tile behind it. He also laid brick for other Hillsborough houses and in 1963 became the first Black town commissioner.
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Daniel Huston Buchanan builds a two-story house with a gallery on Laurel Hill Road
The Buchanan house, of stone and weatherboard with a two-story pedimented gallery, is one of the Colonial Revival houses of Rocky Ridge Farm's second building period, 1936-40.
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Dudley Carroll builds a red brick house on Country Club Road
A red brick Colonial Revival house with an asymmetrical front and a fanlighted entry went up for Dudley Carroll in Rocky Ridge Farm's second building period.
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Dudley D. Carroll chairs the Orange County Building and Loan Association
Carroll was a director of the Orange County Building and Loan Association from 1920 to 1950 and chaired its board from 1937. He also chaired the county draft board and the county ABC board.
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G. C. Kennedy and Sons build the Piedmont Packing Company plant north of Hillsborough
The meat packing plant about five miles north of Hillsborough was first built in 1937 and later enlarged. It held state permit No. 18, employed about 40 people and supplied markets from Hillsborough to Raleigh.
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Guion Griffis Johnson serves as president of the Chapel Hill PTA
Guion Griffis Johnson was president of the Chapel Hill PTA in 1937–1938 and a district PTA officer the following year.
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Lebanon Methodist Church puts up a new building
A year after its old church was destroyed, the Lebanon congregation built a new one, seating 250.
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The Historic American Buildings Survey records the academy barracks
By the Depression the empty Barracks of the old military academy sheltered homeless families. In 1937 the Historic American Buildings Survey measured and photographed it, a year before it was torn down.
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The Parks family sells the Parks-Richmond House to J. W. and Marguerite Richmond
The house at 175 West King Street, which D. C. Parks had used as the office, reception room and dining room of his hotel, stayed in the Parks family until 1937, when it was sold to J. W. and Marguerite Richmond. It now operates as the Inn at Teardrops.
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The Parks-Richmond kitchen is moved west to face South Wake Street
The kitchen of the Parks-Richmond House, built about 1870, is moved west around 1937 and becomes a house fronting South Wake Street.
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The Standard Theatre building becomes a funeral home and a grocery store
The West Franklin Street movie house that had served the Black community was given over to a funeral home and a grocery.
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The university names its new gymnasium for Charles T. Woollen
The university named its new gymnasium for Charles T. Woollen, its longtime registrar, business manager and comptroller, who had advocated for the building and helped oversee its construction. He died the following year.
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Walker's Funeral Home opens in the enlarged Bill Lloyd house on West Franklin Street
The old "Bill Lloyd" house was enlarged and made over as Walker's Funeral Home, near the Columbia Street end of West Franklin.
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Walnut Grove Methodist Church replaces its wooden church with a stone one
On May 4, 1937 the Walnut Grove congregation in northern Orange began building a rubble-stone Gothic Revival church, with buttresses and stained glass, from fieldstone that local farmers gathered, to replace its frame church of the early 1890s. The church was dedicated on April 14, 1942.
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William Van Sprinkle designs a brick Colonial Revival house on Pine Lane for Richmond and Marjorie Bond
Contractors Ellington & Sparrow built the five-part brick house, a story-and-a-half main block with lower wings joined by hyphens. It is the oldest house in the Laurel Hill boundary increase, and the nomination ranks it the best of the neighborhood's later Colonial Revival houses.
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William de Berniere MacNider serves as dean of the UNC School of Medicine
MacNider succeeded Charles Staples Mangum as dean of the medical school in 1937 and resigned the deanship in 1940 to return to research.
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The Institute of Government opens its first ten-day school for police officers
Sixty-one lawmen, about a quarter of them police chiefs, attended, taught in part by instructors lent by the FBI's new National Police Academy. J. Edgar Hoover then gave agent Edward Scheidt, a former Coates student, a year's paid leave to write Institute guidebooks on arrest, search and seizure, and crime detection.
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Ben Johnson, born enslaved near Hillsborough, recalls the Klan lynching of Cyrus Guy for a WPA interviewer
Interviewed at 85 in Hecktown, Durham, by Federal Writers' Project worker Mary A. Hicks, Johnson said the Ku Klux came for Cy Guy a hundred strong, tried him in the woods and hanged him over the road. He said nobody would touch the body for four days, until the sheriff took it down.
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Hilda Allen resigns as superintendent, leaving Lula Henderson in charge of the Efland Home
Saying she could not handle all her duties, Hilda C. Allen resigned in early May 1937 after making real gains in the home's conditions, and matron Lula Henderson took charge.
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A state welfare agent records the Efland Home matron's account of beating a girl
In a report of June 16, 1937, state welfare agent William R. Johnson wrote that matron Lula Henderson, by then the only adult in charge, told him and two other visitors that she had choked and beaten a girl who snatched her whip from her. He also found a girl locked in a room as punishment.
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George H. Lawrence gives up the county welfare post to stay on the University faculty
When the new state social security law required a full-time welfare superintendent in every county, Lawrence would not leave the University faculty and resigned the county post effective July 1. As director of field work in UNC's division of social work and public welfare, he and his students went on working for the county.
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State inspectors find the Efland Home failing and tell its board to fund it or close it
State welfare agents W. C. Ezell and T. L. Grier visited on July 2, 1937, and found the heat, plumbing and building in poor repair, about twenty acres in crops, the only cow dead and the mules unfit. Grier judged the home was not rehabilitating its girls and told the federation's board to raise enough money to fix it or shut it down.
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The Lost Colony premieres
Paul Green's pageant-drama The Lost Colony opened on Roanoke Island on Sunday evening, July 4, 1937, and the Chapel Hill Weekly reported that it scored a hit. The production had Chapel Hill roots: Frederick Koch's Carolina Playmakers were involved, and at least one actor came to Chapel Hill in June to rehearse.
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The county welfare department is reorganized under Social Security
A new three-member welfare board of O. L. Crabtree, Bruce Strowd and Charlie McDade, a Black member, took charge, and W. T. Mattox became superintendent in July 1937. The office moved to Hillsborough that year and kept a branch in Chapel Hill.
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Racial violence erupts in western Chapel Hill and Carrboro
Late on Saturday, August 21, 1937, a white filling-station attendant struck Tom Atwater, a Black man, with a bottle near West Franklin Street. An angry crowd gathered, some throwing stones and firing guns, and armed white men from Carrboro fired on them from a barricaded truck. Four men were shot before Durham police with tear gas restored calm.
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Farm women open the Orange County curb market in Carrboro
A curb market run by Orange County farm women opened in the former McCauley store in Carrboro, selling vegetables, fruit, chickens, eggs, sausage, preserves and canned goods. It was organized with the county home demonstration agent, with thirteen women signed on as sellers before opening.
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The first of the new women's dormitories, later Alderman Residence Hall, opens
Built in 1937 with Public Works Administration money, the university's new women's dormitory, later named for Edwin Alderman for his support of women's education, was occupied by September 1937. Two more women's dormitories, later Kenan and McIver, opened in September 1939.
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Lloyd descendants dedicate a memorial stone to Thomas Lloyd north of Chapel Hill
The Thomas Lloyd Memorial Association set up a granite marker to Thomas Lloyd near Old Highway 86 at Stony Hill Road, northwest of Calvander. Its inscription mixes in details from the life of a different Thomas Lloyd of New Hanover County.
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Chatham County joins the Orange-Person Health District
District health officer Dr. William P. Richardson announced that Chatham County had joined the Orange-Person Health District, which would provide a physician, a nurse and a sanitary officer for the new county. The State Board of Health had kept a nurse in Chatham for the past year with U.S. Children's Bureau funds.
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Second Baptist Church is organized in Chapel Hill
A second Black Baptist congregation was organized in Chapel Hill and put up its building in April 1938.
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The first air mail leaves Chapel Hill by plane
Mayor Foushee, Postmaster Robert A. Eubanks, Assistant Postmaster William S. Hogan and other residents went to the airport to see off the first mail to leave Chapel Hill by plane.
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Louis H. Hackney dies in Chapel Hill
Louis H. Hackney, pastor of Rock Hill Baptist Church for sixty years, a teacher who had kept a school on West Franklin Street, and founder in 1912 of the private school on Merritt Mill Road that became Orange County Training School, died at his home in Chapel Hill on December 19, 1937, at 83. He was buried in a Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Bruce Strowd is named Chapel Hill's most valuable citizen
The Carolina Theatre's yearly trophy for the town's most valuable citizen went to automobile dealer Bruce Strowd, chosen by Dr. S. A. Nathan, Mrs. Isaac Manning and W. M. Pugh. The committee cited his work for the town's schoolchildren, the free rides he gave rural children coming to school, his help with unemployment and his work on the county welfare board.
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Archaeologists excavate the wall site believing it to be Occaneechi Town
Joffre Coe began digging a village site on a bend of the Eno at Hillsborough in 1938 in the belief that it was the town John Lawson visited in 1701, and Robert Wauchope carried the work on in 1940 and 1941 with federal funding. A state highway marker for the Occaneechi village was erected at Hillsborough in 1941. The village Coe had found was in fact an earlier settlement of about 1400 to 1600.
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Chapel Hill builds a new town hall with WPA help
The Works Progress Administration paid about half the cost of the town hall at 100 West Rosemary Street, on the site of the town's first town hall; it went into use in late March 1939. University architects Atwood and Weeks designed the two-story brick building in a Williamsburg-inspired Colonial style with a hipped slate roof, cupola and swan's-neck pediment.
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Chapel Hill voters approve bonds for the new town hall
The bond issue for the town's share of the town hall went to the voters in July 1938 and passed 211 to 27. The campaign drew the Weekly's first calls for more citizen part in town affairs.
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Daphne Athas's family moves to Chapel Hill
Athas came to Chapel Hill as a teenager in 1938 with her Greek family, who during the Depression traded a large Massachusetts home for a small house on Merritt Mill Road. She spent most of the rest of her life in Orange County.
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Durham architects Hackney and Knott design Carl Pegg's house on Laurel Hill Road
A three-bay brick Colonial Revival house for Carl Pegg was designed by the Durham firm of Hackney and Knott in the district's second building period.
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Eno Methodist Church is moved back from the road and remodeled
In 1938 the congregation shifted its frame church back from Eno Street and remodeled it.
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F. Vernon Altvater restores the Faucett House and joins a moved early house to it as a wing
F. Vernon Altvater and his wife, who bought the Faucett House tract in 1937, restored the house between 1938 and 1940 and called it the Coach House. They took down the early 1800s Naile Johnson House from the St. Mary's Road area and rebuilt it as the rear wing.
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Piedmont Electric Membership Corporation is incorporated and energizes its first lines
Piedmont Electric, a rural electric cooperative formed under the federal Rural Electrification Administration loan program, received its North Carolina incorporation papers in 1938. In 1939 its first substation, in Hillsborough, energized lines to members' homes for the first time.
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Professor Urban T. Holmes builds a painted-brick Colonial Revival house on Pine Lane
The deck-on-hip house, with a basement garage set into the slope, was one of two Pine Lane houses built before the war. The nomination takes the two late-1930s houses as proof that Pine Lane was part of Coker's original plat.
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Robert Varley opens a men's clothing store on East Franklin Street
Varley's store took the space of Alfred Williams's stationery on the south side of the street.
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Stacy Residence Hall is completed and named for Marvin H. Stacy
Stacy Residence Hall was finished in 1938 and named for Marvin Hendrix Stacy, the dean and acting president who died of influenza in 1919.
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The Chapel Hill post office opens on Franklin Street
A new federal post office was built in two stages on the site of the old one at Franklin and Henderson streets, begun in July 1937. Postal workers moved into its rear section early in 1938 while the old building was torn down and the front half built, and the finished post office began full operation on July 5, 1938.
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The Dr. Efland Forrest House is built at West King and North Wake streets
A two-story Neoclassical Revival house with a full-height Corinthian portico, one of few in Hillsborough, was built around 1938 at 202 West King Street; a sign in the yard names it the Dr. Efland Forrest House.
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The Hillsborough Military Academy's brick barracks are torn down
The academy's three-story brick barracks, later used by the Farm Life School, were dismantled in 1938. Only the Commandant's House and a frame dining hall survive, with parts of the barracks foundation in the woods south of the hall.
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The Neuse River Soil Conservation District is formed with Orange County in it
Created in 1938 under state enabling law, the district covered Durham, Johnston, Orange, Wake and Wilson counties. Orange later had three men on its board.
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The Walker farm builds cinder-block chicken houses
In the late 1930s the Walker farm moved from dairying to poultry and put up several cinder-block chicken houses in 1938. The farm turned to beef cattle in the 1960s.
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The county begins small yearly grants to Hillsborough's Confederate Memorial Library
Even before state library grants were available, and at least as early as 1938, Orange County made small annual appropriations to the Confederate Memorial Library in Hillsborough.
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With its money gone, the Institute's first staff leave for state jobs
By 1938 the Cone gifts were spent and the staff had gone weeks without pay. Brandis became research director of the State Tax Commission, Dillard Gardner joined the state supreme court staff and Grice the state auditor's office, while two young assistants stayed on at reduced pay; the last regular monthly Popular Government went out in January 1938.
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Lula Henderson reports jobs found for former Efland Home girls
In January 1938 Lula Henderson reported that former residents of the Efland Home had been placed in work in Mebane, Greensboro, Washington, D.C., and Seneca, South Carolina. Churches and patrons gave clothing, food and supplies, but not enough to keep up the home.
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Chapel Hill rededicates its Daniel Boone Trail marker opposite the post office
At a town ceremony Ella Boone Dixon, a Boone descendant, placed a flag over the Boone Trail plaque and J. Hampton Rich explained its legend. Mayor John M. Foushee led the program.
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Brodie Thompson rebuilds Howard Odum's burned house in record time
After fire gutted the Odum house on February 20, 1938, the insurance was settled in five days and Thompson began clearing the ruins the next day. Within 26 days the new house on the old foundations had walls, roof and most of its weatherboarding, which the Weekly called the fastest building job Chapel Hill had seen.
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The Bowman Gray Memorial Pool opens in the new Woollen Gymnasium
The pool, named for the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company president Bowman Gray Sr., opened with Woollen Gymnasium. His widow and his sons Bowman Gray Jr. and Gordon Gray gave much of the university's share of the cost; a Public Works Administration grant paid the rest.
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UNC field work director George H. Lawrence reports the Efland Home's conditions as appalling
After a visit in April 1938, George H. Lawrence, field work director at the University of North Carolina, wrote to the state welfare director that the home was doing more harm than good and that the girls would be better fed in a county jail. Gifts from churches and neighbors had not kept up with the girls' needs.
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State offers the three-county district $5,900 for venereal disease control
At a meeting of county commissioners in Chapel Hill, State Board of Health executive officer Dr. Carl V. Reynolds offered the Chatham-Orange-Person district $5,900 from the Smith Reynolds Foundation fund for venereal disease control, if the district matched it. The program called for examinations and clinics to bring every infected person in the district under treatment.
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Durham Hosiery closes its last Carrboro mill
Durham Hosiery Mills dissolved its business at Mill No. 7 in June 1938 and laid off the workers, ending the company's operations in Carrboro.
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John M. Booker offers to buy a Franklin Street lot for the new town hall
In a letter to the Chapel Hill Weekly, professor John M. Booker objected to the hurried choice of the old site and offered to buy and give a lot on Franklin Street, hoping it would start a civic center. Editor Louis Graves backed the idea and called for town planning.
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Chapel Hill auctions off its old town hall to clear the site for a new one
With WPA money available for 45 percent of a new building, the town decided to rebuild on its own lot at Rosemary and Columbia streets. The old town hall, whose courtroom the Weekly called filthy, was sold at auction and hauled away.
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John Parker becomes the first Black Orange County farmer to get a Farm Security Administration purchase loan
Under the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, John Parker borrowed $3,915 through the Farm Security Administration to buy a 145-acre farm, the first such loan to a Black farmer in Orange County. He paid it off in about six years on a 40-year note.
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John M. Booker calls for town-sponsored planning in Chapel Hill
After voters approved financing for the new town hall 211 to 27, John M. Booker wrote a longer letter to the Chapel Hill Weekly faulting the rush with which it was planned and proposing planning as a town function, with public planning meetings citizens could attend. Editor Louis Graves took up the call.
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Coates clears the old Pickard Hotel and Ledbetter lots on Franklin Street for the Institute building
With the campus site no longer available, Coates arranged to buy two lots on the north side of Franklin Street facing Graham Memorial, the university-controlled Ledbetter property and the privately owned old Pickard Hotel property, for $8,700. In late September he borrowed to clear them; the old buildings came down, and the excavation filled with water through a wet winter until town officials called it a nuisance.
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Bowling Carolina opens a four-lane alley in the former Lyon Hardware store
John McCauley and J. B. Johns opened four regulation bowling alleys in the old Lyon Hardware store on East Franklin Street, selling sandwiches and soft drinks and inviting women bowlers in particular.
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Nunn's Chapel Baptist Church is organized
W. N. Nunn and other ministers organized Nunn's Chapel Baptist Church, a Black congregation, which built a church in 1946.
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The old Pickwick reopens as the Pick, a second movie house under the Carolina's management
After standing empty for several years, the remodeled Pickwick reopened as the Pick under the Carolina Theatre's management, planned for second-run, foreign-language and Western films.
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Chapel Hill pharmacist Carl T. Durham is elected to Congress from the Sixth District
Durham, who had been named the Sixth District nominee, won the general election over write-in candidate Oscar G. Barker, and Chapel Hill voters gave him 703 votes to Barker's 57. He went on to serve 22 years in the House and retired in 1961.
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UNC rejects Pauli Murray's graduate application
Pauli Murray, who grew up in Durham and lived in New York, applied to UNC's graduate school in 1938 to study with Howard Odum and Guy B. Johnson. On December 14, two days after the Supreme Court's Gaines ruling, Dean W. W. Pierson rejected her because of her race, and her appeals to President Frank Porter Graham became national news.
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A Cape Cod house is built at 698 Gimghoul Road
The story-and-a-half house with gabled dormers and a stone end chimney, dated to about 1939, sits at the head of the south side of Gimghoul Road.
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A new movie theater for Black audiences, the Hollywood, opens on Main Street in Carrboro
In May 1939 an auction notice pointed buyers to a business lot on Main Street in Carrboro near 'the new colored theatre.' By 1940 the Weekly called it the Hollywood theatre, at the west end of Franklin Street.
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Alexander Residence Hall is built and named for Eben Alexander
A men's dormitory built at the university in 1939 with funds from the New Deal's Public Works Administration was named for Eben Alexander, the former professor of Greek and first dean of the faculty.
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Alpha Delta Pi moves into Blanche Patterson's former home on East Franklin Street
The sorority moved into the house Mrs. Fred Patterson had built in the late 1910s.
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Alpha Gamma Delta moves into the old "Crystal Palace" on East Franklin Street
The sorority took over the house known as the Crystal Palace, once Algernon Barbee's home.
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Architect Bradford Eddy designs James Clarence Andrews's house on Buttons Road
A two-story shingled Colonial Revival house for James Clarence Andrews was designed by Bradford Eddy, an architect who practiced outside North Carolina.
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Architect William Van Sprinkle designs a brick house on Gimghoul Road for Benjamin Edkins
The two-story brick Colonial Revival house with a one-story side wing at 739 Gimghoul Road was built for salesman Benjamin Edkins and his wife to a design by Durham architect William Van Sprinkle.
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Cedar Grove Methodist Church's stone building goes up
The stone church replaced earlier facilities serving the congregation. Masons laid its cornerstone in late November 1939 at the request of the pastor, S. F. Nicks.
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Construction begins on the Institute of Government building on Franklin Street
A $10,000 gift from Will Reynolds, given after Congressman William Umstead won an IRS ruling that the Institute was a charity, paid for the land. Gifts from Gordon and Bowman Gray covered half of the $50,000 cost and Julian Price's Jefferson Standard Life lent the rest on Coates's signature, against more than half his salary, for a scaled-down Federal-style building of three floors over a raised basement.
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Durham Hosiery Mills sells its Carrboro houses and land at auction
A year after its last Carrboro mill closed, the company auctioned much of its Carrboro property in 1939. Most houses went for $500 to $550, many to the families living in them, while Marvin J. Dawson of Chapel Hill, merchant Ernest Hearn, former foreman W. A. Riggsbee and Dick Andrews bought others as investments.
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Granville wilt first appears in Orange County tobacco
The bacterial disease known as Granville wilt showed up in the county's tobacco crop for the first time in 1939. Growers later turned to wilt-resistant varieties.
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Jim Tatum returns to UNC as director of freshman athletics
After following Carl Snavely to Cornell as an assistant football coach and head baseball coach, Tatum came back to Chapel Hill in 1939 as UNC's director of freshman athletics.
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Law students Terry Sanford and William Cochrane join the Institute's legislative team
Elmer Oettinger led the Institute's daily coverage of the 1939 General Assembly, mailing bulletins to a list that had grown to 7,000 names. Late in the session Cochrane recruited first-year law student Sanford, later governor, who came back to the Institute as an assistant director after the war.
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Lenoir Hall is built as the new campus dining hall
Atwood and Weeks designed Lenoir Hall, a red brick dining hall with large windows near Wilson Library, completed in 1939.
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MacNider Hall is completed as the first building of the medical school complex
The first building constructed in UNC's medical school complex was completed in 1939 and named for MacNider, then dean.
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Maurice Julian opens a shoe store on East Franklin Street
Julian started out selling shoes at 167 East Franklin, in the space James R. Ellis's dress shop had left.
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Music department chair Glen Haydon builds a brick house on Laurel Hill Road
Glen Haydon, chair of the UNC music department, built a two-story brick and weatherboard Colonial Revival house with a stone retaining wall.
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Public health dean Earl Brown builds a red brick house on Laurel Hill Road
The house of Earl Brown, described as dean of the UNC School of Public Health, is a two-story red brick house that mixes Colonial Revival and Cotswold features.
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R. E. Coker is named a Kenan professor
The university gave Coker a Kenan professorship in 1939.
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Sample and Ina Forbus make the old Morrow's Mill on Cane Creek their home
Sample B. Forbus, later director of Watts Hospital, and the writer Ina B. Forbus bought the 1878 grist mill on Cane Creek in 1938 and converted it into their permanent home in 1939, keeping its hand-hewn beams and setting millstones in the garden. The mill had run until 1930.
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Soil Conservation Service work begins in Orange County
Federal soil conservationists started farm planning in the county in 1939, with R. L. Mohler as work unit conservationist. By June 1953 plans covered 1,265 farms and about 142,000 acres.
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The Alumni Building's interior is renovated
The building had held the Atwood and Nash office during the 1920s campus campaign. A second renovation followed in 1973, and the two left little of that interior.
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The Bryan Building goes up on South Columbia Street as an apartment house
The two-and-a-half-story brick Colonial Revival building at 230 South Columbia Street, known as the Bryan Building, was built in 1939 as apartments.
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The Durham Bank and Trust Company takes over the Farmers and Merchants Bank of Hillsborough
The Durham bank acquired Hillsborough's second bank, the Farmers and Merchants Bank, in 1939. From then on it ran a single Hillsborough branch.
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The Hargraves Center and Chapel Hill’s Negro Community Center
Chapel Hill’s Black residents bought land for a Negro Community Center in 1939; the Navy finished the building as quarters for the B-1 Band during the war, and it opened for community use in 1945. It gained the A.D. Clark Pool in 1961, was renamed for William M. Hargraves in 1973 and added the Northside Gymnasium in 1998, and its gym was named for Nate Davis in 2022.
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The state casts a highway marker for Governor Thomas Burke's capture at Hillsborough
The North Carolina highway marker G-16, cast in 1939, stands on Churton Street in Hillsborough. It records that Governor Burke was captured in the town by David Fanning and his Tories on September 12, 1781, and taken to Charleston.
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UNC Press editor William Couch builds a brick and stone house on Laurel Hill Road
William Couch, editor of the University of North Carolina Press and brother of botanist John N. Couch, built a two-story brick and stone Colonial Revival house with a two-story gallery, designed by William Sprinkle.
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UNC Press publishes These Are Our Lives
The University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill published These Are Our Lives in 1939, life histories gathered by Federal Writers' Project workers in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, with a preface by W. T. Couch.
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UNC tennis coach John Kenfield opens the Carolina Sports Shop
Kenfield started a sporting goods store on the north side of East Franklin. New owners bought him out in 1942 and made Henry Sawtelle McGinty manager.
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Chapel Hill Methodists sell their parsonage and buy the Frink house
The Methodist church sold its parsonage to Marguerite M. Judson, mother of a university student, and bought the Frink house on Pittsboro Street as its new parsonage. By that September Mrs. Judson owned and lived in the old parsonage on Rosemary Lane near the Town Hall.
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Hillsborough Baptists resolve to build a baptismal pool in honor of Charles E. Maddry
After a week of preaching by Charles E. Maddry, then executive secretary of the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board, the deacons and trustees voted to build a baptismal pool named for him and to mark it with a plaque.
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A lent library truck carries books to schools and crossroads stores across Orange County
For May, June and July 1939 a bookmobile with a revolving shelved turret was lent to the county, run by Lucile McDade and her assistant Louise Carroll, who stopped at schools and crossroads stores. The county board of education and the Confederate Memorial Library in Hillsboro paid its operating costs, and the WPA and the Hillsboro library lent the books.
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The county board agrees to build an agriculture building at Aycock School
Aycock principal Mrs. V. L. Warren and the school committee asked the board for a two-room brick building for agriculture classes, and the board agreed to provide it.
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North Carolina's first Boys State meets on the UNC campus
The Institute ran the week-long civics program for the state American Legion, modeled on one begun in Illinois in 1935. About 135 high school boys spent up to three hours a day in class on government besides sports, heard Governor Hoey and other officials, and elected Douglass Hunt their governor.
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William S. Hogan is appointed Chapel Hill postmaster
President Roosevelt appointed Hogan, assistant postmaster, to succeed Robert A. Eubanks on the nomination of Congressman Carl Durham, and the Senate confirmed him. Durham waived an examination because Hogan had served in the office about twenty years.
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Citizens buy land for a Negro Community Center
Ten Chapel Hill men, among them Louis Graves, R. B. House and Paul Wager, signed a $1,500 note at the Bank of Chapel Hill to buy about five acres of the old Craig place at the west end of Rosemary Lane for a Black community center. The project grew out of concerns raised by the Negro Civic Club.
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Edward Danziger opens a candy kitchen on Franklin Street
Edward G. Danziger, a candy maker whose family name was well known in Vienna, opened a candy kitchen with a tea-and-coffee room in the Munch building on Franklin Street, where Gooch's restaurant had been. He sold candy and ice cream with fresh fruit and planned to add Viennese and Turkish coffee, tea and pastries. The family business later included Danziger's Old World Gift Shop.
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William Meade Prince joins the university's art department
The illustrator William Meade Prince, who with his wife, Lillian Hughes Prince, had moved from Westport, Connecticut, to Chapel Hill in the 1930s, joined the university's art department as a lecturer for the 1939-40 year. The Princes still spent summers in Westport.
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A memorial tablet for Robert Bingham is installed in Memorial Hall
A memorial tablet in Robert Bingham's name was installed in the university's Memorial Hall in Chapel Hill on October 12, 1939.
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House Speaker William Bankhead dedicates the Institute of Government building
On the eve of Thanksgiving a standing-room crowd in Hill Music Hall heard Bankhead, Governor Clyde Hoey and President Frank Graham praise Coates, with eight of the state's eleven congressmen and former governor O. Max Gardner on hand. A reception followed in Graham Memorial, and guests stayed for the Virginia football game the next day.
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Albert Coates completes the Institute of Government's Franklin Street building
Albert Coates built the Institute's Franklin Street headquarters with private gifts and a Jefferson Standard Life loan, and it opened in November 1939. The University took title only on June 30, 1945, after the legislature paid off the mortgage. The building later carried the Coates name.
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Ralph H. Graves is buried in Chapel Hill
Ralph H. Graves, a New York editor and newspaper syndicate agent born in Chapel Hill, died at his home in Garden City, Long Island, on December 1, 1939. After a funeral there, a burial service was held at the Chapel Hill cemetery on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 5.
- 1940s
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A Chapel Hill chapter of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies is organized
Frank Graham and Durham banker George Watts Hill were among the first North Carolinians to sign on with the national committee formed in 1940, and chapters were organized in Chapel Hill and Asheville. Covington describes Chapel Hill as a center of support for the Allies while both of the state's senators opposed involvement.
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Alice Noble becomes first adviser to the pharmacy school's Kappa Epsilon chapter
When the Lambda chapter of the Kappa Epsilon fraternity was set up at the School of Pharmacy in 1940, the school's librarian Alice Noble became its first adviser.
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Archie Royal Davis becomes architect for the University of North Carolina
The Durham architect Archie Royal Davis took the post of university architect at Chapel Hill in 1940. He then helped give Franklin Street's business district its Colonial Revival look, designing several store buildings and painting watercolor views to persuade owners to rebuild in that style, with backing from George Watts Hill and town leaders.
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Architect Eugene Stroud designs physician John J. Wright's house on Laurel Hill Circle
A two-story, three-bay shingled Colonial Revival house was built for physician John J. Wright to a design by Eugene Stroud.
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Census finds nearly half of Orange County's Black-owned farms in Cedar Grove Township
The 1940 census counted 1,753 Black and 1,671 white residents in Cedar Grove Township, the county's only township with a near-even racial balance, and about three-fourths of the township lived on farms. Nearly half of Orange County's 503 Black-owned farms were in the township, which also had the county's highest share of Black tenant farmers.
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Crabtree Store No. 2 is built north of Cedar Grove
A frame country store, Crabtree Store No. 2, is built north of Cedar Grove around 1940.
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Dudley Cowden builds a galleried house with a specimen garden on Country Club Road
The Cowden house is a two-story frame Colonial Revival dwelling with a two-story stone west wing, a front gallery, a stone terrace, a stone garage and a formal specimen garden.
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Good-roads advocate Harriet Morehead Berry is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Harriet Morehead Berry (1877-1940), who campaigned for North Carolina road improvements in the 1920s, was buried in the cemetery.
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Harvey's Chapel builds a frame church near Efland
The Harvey's Chapel congregation near Efland built its present front-gable frame church in the 1940s. Lefler and Wager put it about 1946 and the congregation's own history about 1940; the 1993 county survey had estimated about 1930 from the building's style.
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Henry P. Brandis Jr. joins the UNC law faculty
After two state tax posts, Brandis, the Institute of Government's first full-time staff member, joined the university's law school faculty in 1940. He became its dean in 1949 and a Graham Kenan Professor of Law in 1965, and retired in 1972.
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Hillsborough Methodist Church builds an educational wing
The congregation added a two-story educational wing behind its 1859 church in the 1940s. Another addition and a covered breezeway followed in 1985.
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Isaac Hall Manning retires from the medical faculty
After leaving the deanship Manning stayed on as a professor until he retired in 1940.
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John Scott Trotter turns the old Bryan boarding house into The Hill House
Mrs. Green Bryan's heirs sold her West Franklin Street boarding house to Trotter, who renovated it and named it The Hill House, with hotel rooms and rental apartments.
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Kennon Cheek dies at his home in Northside
Cheek, born in Chapel Hill about 1890, lived out his life in the house he built on land in Northside bought from the university's holdings, and died there in 1940 after diabetes and overwork wore him down in the late 1930s.
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Little River Presbyterian Church builds a brick church
Little River Presbyterian, organized in 1761, replaces its church with a brick building in the 1940s. The large cemetery around it is one of the county's oldest.
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Louis Graves starts a newspaper campaign to give Franklin Street a Williamsburg look
Feeling the business district looked shabby beside the new campus, Chapel Hill Weekly editor Louis Graves began praising Colonial Williamsburg's shops in editorials. Joseph Hyde Pratt, John M. Booker, W. D. Carmichael Jr., Collier Cobb and George Watts Hill backed the plan, and architect Archie Davis gave the planning commission watercolors showing owners how to remodel.
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McDade and Laws stop functioning as crossroads communities
In the 1940s the crossroads of McDade and Laws in northern Orange ceased to hold together as communities and their stores closed, while Cedar Grove, where the Pender Store stayed open, kept its identity.
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Orange County tobacco growers begin farming under acreage allotments
From 1940 each grower's tobacco acreage was allotted and enforced after a referendum on compulsory control that more than 90 percent of growers backed. The book credits the controls with better quality and yields.
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Pastor S. F. Nicks leads a $12,000 addition of rooms to the Hillsborough Methodist Church
Soon after returning to Hillsborough in 1940, Nicks proposed adding rooms to the church. Robert Forrest and A. A. Lloyd raised the money with a match of one dollar from the Duke Endowment for every three raised, and much of the work was volunteer labor, Nicks included.
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St. Mary's Road is paved and straightened
The old Trading Path route east of Hillsborough, later the Oxford Road, was paved and straightened in sections around 1940, though its side roads stayed dirt.
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St. Paul's A.M.E. builds a bungalow parsonage beside the church
The congregation put up a one-story bungalow next to the sanctuary as its parsonage.
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The Agricultural Services Building is built on East King Street in two stages
A thirteen-bay, two-story brick Colonial Revival office building at 110 East King Street, running through to Court Street, was built in two parts: the left side before World War II and the right side after the war.
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The Carolina Inn completes the first of its rear additions
The Carolina Inn, which Arthur Nash designed for John Sprunt Hill, gained a rear addition in 1940, the first of three (later ones in 1970 and 1995) that tracked the university's growth.
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The Efland Knitting Company is started
A second family hosiery firm, the Efland Knitting Company, began about 1940 as an offshoot of John L. Efland's mill.
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The Farmers Mutual Exchange installs a 30,000-egg electric incubator
About 1940 the Exchange put in an all-electric incubator holding 30,000 eggs, supplied by blood-tested county flocks. It sold baby chicks and gave farmers a steady market for eggs and broilers.
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The James Hogg House on the Burnside grounds is torn down
The house associated with James Hogg, the Revolutionary-era merchant, was demolished in the 1940s. The remains of one chimney still stand northeast of Burnside.
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The University Laundry is built on West Cameron Avenue
The university laundry at 609 West Cameron Avenue was built in 1940 of brick over a steel frame, with an Art Moderne front block and a long industrial rear wing. An addition came after 1960.
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The WPA rebuilds the Forest Theatre in stone
Works Progress Administration crews remade the amphitheatre in local stone: a screen wall along Country Club Road, curved seating following the hillside, towers for lights and sound, and a rough stone stage. The present structure dates from this rebuilding.
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The William Whitted House becomes Hillsborough's American Legion post
In the 1940s the William Whitted House at 306 North Churton Street becomes the home of the local American Legion post. It has since become a private residence again.
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The cotton warehouses beside Carrboro's two mills are torn down
The large cotton warehouses next to Mill No. 4 and Mill No. 7, where ginned cotton was bought and stored for Durham Hosiery Mills, were torn down and hauled away in the 1940s.
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The university builds a heating and power plant on West Cameron Avenue
In 1940 the university put up a large steel-frame heating and power plant with brick walls at 503 West Cameron Avenue, two to four stories high. Its stepped facade and rounded corners are in the Art Moderne manner.
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The university founds the Inter-American Institute, with Leavitt as director
President Frank Porter Graham founded the Inter-American Institute in 1940, growing out of Leavitt's work building Latin American research collections. Leavitt directed it until 1959; it took the name Institute of Latin American Studies in 1947.
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Thomas P. Lloyd opens the Carolina Pharmacy
Lloyd, once James Pritchard's partner, opened his own drugstore in the space Ledbetter-Pickard Stationery left when it moved a door east.
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UNC Press publishes Charles S. Mangum Jr.'s The Legal Status of the Negro
The University of North Carolina Press in Chapel Hill published The Legal Status of the Negro by Charles S. Mangum Jr.
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UNC School of Public Health runs a Rockefeller-funded syphilis study in Orange and neighboring counties
The School of Public Health's first research project, a field epidemiological study of syphilis funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, ran from 1940 to 1950 with the state venereal disease control program in Orange, Chatham, Person and Durham counties. Project staff held clinics, lectured and traced contacts in the health departments.
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UNC establishes a School of Public Health
UNC's Division of Public Health, created within the School of Medicine in 1936 under Dr. Milton Rosenau, separated from the medical school in 1940 and became the School of Public Health, with Rosenau as its first dean. The school is now the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.
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UNC expansion and neighborhood change
The university’s growth pressed on the streets around it, from Victory Village for veterans in 1946 to the main-campus development plan of 2001, the Carolina North agreement of 2009 and the campus extension announced in 2026. Northside and Pine Knolls answered with conservation districts, a building freeze in 2011 and a community plan, while a 2025 state law removed the town’s zoning control over university projects.
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UNC purchases Chapel Hill's airfield
In 1940 the university bought the Chapel Hill airport that Charlie Martindale had opened in 1928 on land bought from Professor Horace Williams. By August the trustees had set aside $15,000 for land, the university had agreed terms with Martindale and neighbor Fred Sparrow, Williams had given over 200 acres, and the field was to bear his name.
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UNC receives the Horace Williams tract by bequest
The core of what became the Carolina North tract, north of Estes Drive and west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, came to the university as a bequest from Professor Horace Williams. The university later bought adjoining land, and parts of the site were used as an airport, landfill, town operations center and animal shelter.
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University controller William D. Carmichael Jr. builds a large brick house in Laurel Hill
William Carmichael and his wife had one of the biggest Colonial Revival houses in town built at 106 Laurel Hill Circle, a red brick house with a classical entrance and flanking wings.
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Wartime orders push the Eno Cotton Mill to about 600 workers
Military demand for cloth during World War II enlarged the Eno Cotton Mill, which by the 1940s employed as many as 600 workers on three shifts.
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White Furniture Company of Mebane takes over Orange Furniture Craftsmen in Hillsborough
The Mebane firm bought the Hillsborough plant and turned it to dining room buffets and cabinets, many of them eighteenth-century reproductions. By 1953 it employed 125.
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William D. Carmichael Jr. returns to Chapel Hill as the university's finance officer
Carmichael left a New York Stock Exchange partnership and came back in 1940 to serve the consolidated University of North Carolina as finance officer. As finance officer, comptroller and then vice-president he raised money from the legislature, foundations, corporations and individuals.
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William Sprinkle designs Frances Gardham's house on Country Club Road
Frances Gardham's Colonial Revival house with vernacular details is one of three Rocky Ridge Farm houses the nomination credits to architect William Sprinkle.
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William Van Sprinkle designs a Colonial Revival house for Horace Crockford on Country Club Road
For professor Horace D. Crockford and his wife, William Van Sprinkle designed a modest two-story Colonial Revival house of brick and weatherboard at 305 Country Club Road, with a garage wing and a cupola, as building in Laurel Hill picked up again at the end of the 1930s.
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District health officer reports one of the district's best years for diphtheria
Although diphtheria was widespread in North Carolina in 1939, the Orange-Person-Chatham district recorded only 18 cases. Health officer W. P. Richardson credited immunization of children under six, warned that immunizations had fallen off over the past twelve months, and urged parents to have young children immunized.
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Col. John K. Ross-Duggan holds 75th-anniversary exercises at the restored Johnston headquarters house
Col. John K. Ross-Duggan, who with his wife had restored the Dickson house outside Hillsborough, marked the 75th anniversary of the war's end there with afternoon exercises and a special postal cachet showing the house. A. H. Graham and W. B. Umstead of Durham were to speak.
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UNC offers its faculty and laboratories to the national defense
Twenty months before Pearl Harbor, the university president telegraphed Washington putting UNC faculty, laboratories and equipment at the government's service; the trustees confirmed the step at their August meeting.
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Community Center land is deeded to Chapel Hill
The trustees holding the five-acre community-center site deeded it to the Town of Chapel Hill, whose aldermen had voted in May to accept the title and sponsor the project, since the WPA required government ownership. The deed limited the land to a community center and recreation for Black residents.
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UNC makes physical training compulsory for every student
As part of its defense program the university began requiring physical training of students in all classes from September 1940.
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Horace Williams dies and is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Williams died at eighty-two and was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. He left all of his property to the university in trust, the income to pay for fellowships in philosophy.
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Connor returns to the UNC faculty as Craige professor
After resigning as Archivist of the United States in 1941, Connor came back to Chapel Hill to hold the newly established Craige Professorship of Jurisprudence and History until he retired in 1949.
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Fitch Lumber buys the Crawford brothers' spoke plant on Lloyd Street
Walter S. and Charlie M. Crawford had made wooden wheel spokes in a sheet-metal building beside the tracks, probably built about 1930. Fitch made it a planing mill that dressed rough lumber from county sawmills, later adding a raised shavings bin that farmers drove under to load bedding for their stock.
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Illustrator William Meade Prince and his wife Lillian build a house in Greenwood
William Meade Prince, the illustrator who taught art at the university, and his wife Lillian were building a home in the Greenwood neighborhood at the end of 1941. He lived and worked there until his death in 1951.
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J. Spencer Love's $15,000 gift carries the Institute of Government into the university
After the trustees' executive committee approved making the Institute of Government part of the university, William Carmichael, at his and Frank Porter Graham's request, asked J. Spencer Love for help, and Love gave $15,000 to pay the Institute's costs until the legislature could fund it. The full board approved the merger on January 20, 1942.
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Robert H. Wettach serves as dean of the UNC School of Law
Wettach, who also served as an assistant state attorney general, lived with his wife Alpha in the rented Nash house on South Boundary Street.
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Ruby Crews becomes the county's first home demonstration agent for Black women
An assistant agent was added in 1941 to work only with Black farm women, and Crews, later Mrs. Ruby Carraway, was the first to hold the job.
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Sara Thomas Watters buys the Weaver House and its road takes her name
Alexander and Leta Hogan, owners since 1910, sold the old Weaver place to Watters. The dirt lane to it, formerly Old Hillsborough Road, was renamed Watters Road about then; a mapmaker misread the name and it has been Walters Road since.
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The county home closes
The poorhouse on the land bought in 1823 closed in 1941, since most of its residents now qualified for old age assistance and could live in boarding homes.
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The university hosts 108 South American students in its Winter-Summer School
In 1941 the university received 108 students from seven South American countries for English courses and regular classes in a program Leavitt directed. The General Assembly met in special joint session in Chapel Hill in their honor.
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W. Reece Berryhill becomes dean of the UNC School of Medicine
Berryhill, who had been physician-in-chief at the University infirmary and director of the student health service in Chapel Hill since 1933, became professor of medicine and dean of the School of Medicine in 1941. He led the school's expansion from a two-year to a four-year program.
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Walter Creech rebuilds a moved antebellum house as a Colonial Revival home on NC 54
In 1941 a two-story frame house from before the Civil War was hauled from Chatham County, turned with its gable end to the road and given one-story wings in the Colonial Revival manner.
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Construction begins on the Negro Community Center
Work on the Negro Community Center began on January 9, 1941, with Clarence Webb directing a crew of 20 and Charles Craig, the Black architect and contractor who drew the plans, helping supervise. A WPA grant paid most of the cost, and Black masons, carpenters and other workers donated their labor.
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Eben G. Merritt opens a new filling station on the Pittsboro Road
E. G. Merritt opened a new filling station on the Pittsboro Road, just above his old stand, with a tiled roof and a large parking lot. It later ran as Merritt's Service Station and store.
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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.
