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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1930s
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Federal money keeps relief director George H. Lawrence out of jail in the Guy Snipes fee dispute
Guy Snipes, a Black man paid from relief funds, was killed in a gravel pit at the edge of Chapel Hill in December 1932, and the state relief office awarded his heirs $2,200 with Lawrence as their guardian. Judge Sinclair ordered Lawrence jailed for contempt unless a $200 fee claimed by Durham lawyers was paid, and the federal government sent the money in time.
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Federal drought cattle arrive at University Station under George H. Lawrence's care
Sixty-nine cows shipped by the government from the drought-stricken Middle West were unloaded at University Station and pastured on part of the old Duke farm, with more bound for pastures near Hillsboro. As county relief administrator, Lawrence had to house and feed Orange County's quota of 669.
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Architect H. D. Carter becomes supervisor of Orange County relief projects
Chapel Hill architect H. D. Carter replaced J. A. Page as supervisor of Orange County's Federal Emergency Relief Administration projects, which included painting and repairing schools. The next year he designed Public Works Administration buildings and additions for nine county schools.
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Catholics organize a congregation in Chapel Hill
The Catholic Church of Chapel Hill was organized under its first priest, Francis J. Morrissey. With no building of its own, it held services in Gerrard Hall on the university campus.
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Popular Government becomes a monthly magazine
With new gifts from Winston-Salem backers and Ceasar Cone and some subscription income, Coates moved the Institute's journal from quarterly to monthly, with advertising to help pay for it. Each monthly issue sold for ten cents and carried a courthouse or other government building on its cover.
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A Chapel Hill branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom is founded
Charlotte Adams founded a Chapel Hill branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The branch is now called WILPF Triangle.
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A Church of God congregation is organized in West Hillsborough
Garland Crabtree and T. E. Boman organized the Church of God of West Hillsborough, with Edd Mize as first pastor. It built a 250-seat church in 1945.
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A Colonial Revival cottage with an attached garage is built on Country Club Road for Robert B. Voitle
The story-and-a-half weatherboarded cottage has an original garage on one side. The 2008 documentation redates it to about 1935 and makes it contributing; the 1989 district nomination had dated it 1955.
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A Mission Revival Sinclair gas station is built at Churton and Corbin streets
A stuccoed Mission Revival gas station with a tiled porte-cochere is built in the late 1930s at 105 West Corbin Street, set at an angle to face the corner of North Churton and West Corbin. A large two-story addition went up behind it in 2003.
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A federal plan to replace the campus rock walls with concrete is dropped after protests
Among the Public Works Administration projects approved in the state was one to replace the stone walls on the Chapel Hill campus with new concrete. Town and campus objected to tearing out Elisha Mitchell's walls, and the approval was withdrawn.
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A house marked as the PWA's Little River Teacherage stands on Warner Lane
The frame house at 116 Warner Lane carries a Public Works Administration sign naming it the Little River Teacherage, project N.C. 1127-F. Warner Lane and its houses are not on the 1924 Sanborn map; the house is on the 1943 map.
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Alethea Burt moves to Hillsboro and takes charge of Ridge Road School's upper grades
Alethea Arrington Burt, a Hampton Institute graduate, came from Currituck County to Hillsboro in 1935, the year her husband Moses became the county's Black farm agent. She taught fifth through seventh grades and served as principal of the two-room school until it closed in 1951.
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Andrews and Lloyd sell their North Greensboro Street cedar mill site to Fitch Lumber
Dick Andrews and Brodie H. Lloyd had kept running a cedar mill on the lot after leasing buildings to Fitch in 1923. They then sold the whole industrial site, including early frame sheds built for the Thelma Knitting Mill, later Blanche Hosiery.
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Attorney and three-time mayor William Roberson is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
William Roberson (1869-1935), a lawyer who served three times as mayor of Chapel Hill, was buried in the cemetery.
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Benjamin Swalin joins the UNC music faculty
Benjamin F. Swalin, a violinist with a Vienna doctorate, took a position in the University of North Carolina's Music Department in 1935. He went on to direct the North Carolina Symphony from 1939 to 1972, and by 1946 was on indefinite leave from the department for the symphony.
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Botanist William C. Coker marries Louise Venable
William Chambers Coker married Louise Venable, daughter of former UNC president Francis P. Venable, in 1935. After her death in 1983 part of the grounds of The Rocks, the Coker home on North Street, became a public garden in her memory.
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Caesar Cone sells the former Hume house, a Zeta Beta Tau home, to the University
Cone had bought the house from Milton Hogan between 1929 and 1933 and rented it to the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. He sold it to the University in 1935; the high school used it after the 1942 fire.
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Dean Charles Mangum approaches Milton Rosenau as UNC sets up a Division of Public Health
At State Health Officer Carl Reynolds's urging, medical school dean Charles Mangum reached out to Milton Rosenau. In 1935 the university created a Division of Public Health in the medical school under Rosenau, which began classes in fall 1936 and became the School of Public Health in 1940.
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Dr. I. H. Manning leads the founding of the Hospital Saving Association
After a 1933-1934 study of hospital care for people of small means, the Hospital Saving Association of North Carolina, known as the Chapel Hill Blue Cross plan, was founded in 1935. Dr. Isaac H. Manning, longtime medical dean, was its leading figure and first president.
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Federal Public Works money pays for thirteen new university buildings
Once the state supreme court settled the legal questions in the fall of 1935, the university could apply to the Public Works Administration. Between 1935 and 1941 it added thirteen buildings with nearly $3 million in federal aid, among them a swimming pool, dormitories for men and for women, and a dining hall to replace Swain Hall.
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Graham refuses to move Albert Coates out of the law school
In May 1935 Dean Van Hecke reported that Coates's teaching had failed again and, with the whole law faculty behind him, asked that Coates be freed from law school duties to run the Institute. Coates threatened to demand an academic trial; Graham declined the transfer and again refused Van Hecke's offer to resign, and Coates rejoined the law faculty in February 1936 and taught there for thirty years.
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Hilda C. Allen becomes superintendent of the Efland Home after a poor state report
Following a critical June 1935 state inspection and complaints about the home's management, the board's executive committee met in Durham in July and soon hired Hilda C. Allen as superintendent, keeping Lula Henderson as matron.
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Kenneth Tanner builds West House on the campus's old Fraternity Row
Textile manufacturer Kenneth S. Tanner, a 1911 alumnus, put up the one-story brick West House near Swain Hall to lodge his son and other relatives at the university, with room for five students.
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M. C. Burt begins work as the county's agent for Black farmers
From 1935 Burt served Orange County's Black farmers as extension agent, for a time shared with Chatham County. Edwin P. Barnes became assistant county agent the same year.
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Mr. Brooks and J. I. Chandler open the NC Cafeteria in the later Porthole building
Mr. Brooks, a former manager of Gooch's cafe and the Carolina Coffee Shop, and J. I. Chandler opened the NC Cafeteria in 1935 in the building later home to the Porthole restaurant. The cafeteria moved to a new location in 1944.
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Oliver K. Cornwell leads UNC's new Department of Physical Education
When the university created a Department of Physical Education in 1935, Oliver K. Cornwell directed its academic program. He chaired the department, in its various forms, until Richard E. Jamerson replaced him in 1967.
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R. E. Coker chairs UNC's zoology department
Coker chaired the zoology department from 1935 to 1944 and at the same time chaired the Division of Natural Sciences.
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Shelby Foote arrives in Chapel Hill to enroll at UNC
Shelby Foote came to Chapel Hill in fall 1935 to register at UNC despite having been turned down, following his Greenville friends Walker and LeRoy Percy. He stayed two years and contributed nine stories to Carolina Magazine.
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Standard Oil builds a Spanish Revival service station on West Main Street
Brothers Stacy and Eric Neville ran the stuccoed station at 210 West Main Street, with its stepped pilasters and imitation tile roof, for many years. Before it was built they had worked from a frame station on the small paved triangle across the street.
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Superintendent Hilda Allen sends the girls' Efland Quartette to sing in local churches
To raise money and show the home's progress, Hilda Allen taught the girls spirituals and arranged for the Efland Quartette to sing at churches around the area during her superintendency.
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The Methodist parsonage is moved to face Rosemary Street to make way for a Pure Oil station
The parsonage built on the old John Wesley Carr homesite was shifted and turned toward Rosemary Street, clearing the Franklin Street frontage for Ben Strowd's Pure Oil service station.
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The University again makes Archer House a residence for women students
Archer House, the old boardinghouse also called the Battle house or Russell Inn, had housed the University's women students from about 1921 until fire gutted it in January 1925. From 1926 Mrs. Victor Humphreys ran it as lodging and a dining room for men students; in 1935 the University made it a women's residence again, with Mrs. Humphreys in charge until 1937.
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The Williams family buys a 38-acre farm on Mount Carmel Church Road
In 1935 the Williams family acquired a farm whose buildings were already old: an antebellum frame hall-and-parlor house, two log outbuildings of the same age and two log tenant houses.
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UNC creates the General College
The university added a new division, the General College, at Chapel Hill in 1935.
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Walter Spearman joins the UNC journalism faculty
Spearman, a 1929 UNC graduate and former Daily Tar Heel editor, returned to Chapel Hill after five years at the Charlotte News to teach journalism at the university.
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The commissioners turn relief money over to welfare officer George Lawrence
As Depression requests multiplied, the board stopped voting on each small grant and paid Lawrence $150 a month for January and February 1935 to put into the ERA fund for totally disabled people on the relief list. In March it gave him charge of all relief for March and April.
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Robert A. Eubanks receives his regular appointment as Chapel Hill postmaster
Eubanks, acting postmaster since April 5, 1933, was given his regular appointment on January 16, 1935. He held the office until he resigned in 1939.
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Institute of Government staff begin daily bulletins on the General Assembly
From rented offices in the Raleigh Building, Brandis, Dillard Gardner and T. N. Grice followed every bill of the 1935 session from the gallery and put a bulletin of the day's action on each member's desk by the next morning. A weekly digest of statewide bills went to every newspaper in the state, so local officials learned of bills before they became law.
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Parents turn back a plan to merge the Aycock, Efland and Hillsboro schools
A large crowd of parents appeared before the board to fight a plan that would have folded the Aycock, Efland and Hillsboro schools into one. The opposition was strong enough that the board dropped the plan, which returned in 1963 as Orange High School.
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Black families from five northern Orange schools ask for a brick consolidated school
Parents from five schools for Black children, Cedar Grove, Carr, Harmony, Sartins and White Oak, asked the board for a new brick building to replace them. The board promised to look into it; a site near Vincent's Store for a Cedar Grove school for Black children was bought in 1946.
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Matron Lula B. Henderson and farm manager Lewis Walker are hired at the Efland Home
After J. A. Lassiter's husband was let go in March 1935, the home hired Lula B. Henderson as matron and Lewis Walker to run the farm in April. Henderson's husband, a retired minister living in Chapel Hill, taught the girls under the Emergency Relief Administration's adult education program.
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Paul Green finishes a small writing retreat on his land east of Chapel Hill
Playwright Paul Green finishes a small building for study and writing on the tract he had bought about two years earlier beyond the Strowd farm, between the Durham and Raleigh roads. He meant to build a family house near it later.
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Popular Government launches a campaign for an Institute of Government building
The April 1935 issue spread across its center pages a drawing of a three-story 'governmental laboratory building' by the university's architects, Atwood and Weeks, and opened a public drive for funds. Coates told Roscoe Pound that building-supply dealers would donate the materials.
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A runaway tells a Greensboro official that the new Efland Home matron whipped her with a board
During a wave of runaways in May 1935, a month after Lula B. Henderson was hired as matron, Corinne Cannady of Greensboro returned a twelve-year-old girl who said the matron had whipped her with a board and that girls were locked in small rooms on bread and water for days. Cannady asked the state welfare commissioner, Mrs. W. T. Bost, for an investigation at once.
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The Hill family gives the Carolina Inn to the university
John Sprunt Hill and his family gave the Carolina Inn, which he had built in 1924, to the university on the condition that its income support the North Carolina Collection.
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Dr. Charles Mangum outlines a proposed federally aided health district tied to UNC training
Dr. Charles S. Mangum described a proposed public health district of Orange, Person and Caswell counties, largely paid for by the U.S. Public Health Service. It would also train health officers, sanitary inspectors, public health nurses and secretaries, building on UNC's 1934 to 1935 public health administration courses.
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Temporary county health unit starts work in Orange during a typhoid outbreak
Because typhoid fever had appeared in the county, a temporary health organization, set up as part of the planned district unit, began operating in Orange County on July 1, 1935. Its staff were acting health officer Dr. G. A. Sumner (lent by the State Board of Health), acting health nurse Marie Strickland, secretary Ida Lloyd and sanitary inspector E. B. Caruthers.
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Orange-Person District Health Department organized with Dr. Malcolm Rourk as health officer
Full-time public health service began in Orange County on July 1, 1935, when a temporary unit under Dr. G. H. Sumner of the State Board of Health answered a typhoid outbreak. By August the district health department for Orange and Person counties was organized as a model unit linked to UNC's public health teaching, with Dr. Malcolm Henderson Rourk as district health officer, sanitary inspector E. B. Caruthers, and a public health nurse and clerk in each county. The district officer also took over Chapel Hill's municipal health authority.
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The county board hires builders for White Oak Grove, Sartin, Piney Mountain and New Branch schools
After architect H. D. Carter ran the bidding, the board chose the contractors Forrest and Roberts to build a two-room White Oak Grove School and add second rooms to Sartin and Piney Mountain schools, all for Black children, and W. H. Woods to build a one-room New Branch School.
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Grace E. Holcombe revives home demonstration work in Orange County
Hired jointly by Orange and Chatham counties, Holcombe organized four home demonstration clubs and nine 4-H clubs within a year. By 1941, under her successor Woodward Byars, the county had 17 home demonstration clubs.
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The Institute prints 250,000 copies of a highway safety issue of Popular Government
The September 1935 issue was given over to traffic safety, using fatality figures gathered by law student Harry McGalliard at a time when North Carolina had the most deaths per mile driven. Standard Oil helped pay for a pocket-size 32-page edition sent to high schools, police departments and civic groups.
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Trustees offer land and the PWA approves a grant for an Institute of Government building
University trustees agreed to give the Institute a site valued at $15,000 on the western edge of the campus south of the Carolina Inn, the building to go to the university if the Institute ended. The Public Works Administration approved $55,498 for labor, one of 52 grants from 300 applications in the state, toward a building then estimated at $123,000.
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A state mental health survey finds the Efland Home's building failing its girls
At Hilda Allen's request, the state welfare board's Division of Mental Health studied the home in November 1935. It urged more vocational training, and reported one bathroom for all, a furnace idle every winter because the basement flooded, a pump that often failed, and barbed wire over every window to stop runaways, which it advised removing.
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County welfare officer George H. Lawrence calls for more sterilizations in Orange County
The Chapel Hill Weekly reported that ten people judged mentally deficient had been sterilized in Orange County under the 1933 state law. Lawrence said there ought to be many more and that the cost, paid from the county's small relief fund, held them back.
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A WPA-funded auditorium wing is added to Murphey School
A 30-by-80-foot brick auditorium with a Doric portico was built onto the west end of the school with federal WPA money, together with a water tank, a new sewer and plumbing system, and repairs to the teacherage, for $16,365. George W. Kane was the general contractor, and the county board inspected and accepted the auditorium on June 1, 1936.
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A federal WPA grant pays for ten Orange County school building projects
A federal grant of $155,454 to the county school board in 1936 paid for new buildings at West Hillsboro School, Hillsboro Negro School and Chapel Hill High School, and for additions and updated equipment at Murphey, Carrboro, Aycock, St. Mary's, Orange Grove, Chapel Hill Negro School and Hillsboro schools.
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A state survey finds only one brick building among Orange County's 28 schools for Black children
The state's administrative survey of Orange County school units, compiled from 1934-35 figures, counted 28 schools for Black pupils, all but one of them frame, and rated 19 in bad condition. White pupils by then attended ten consolidated schools, and all but one of their twelve buildings were brick.
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Betty Smith comes to Chapel Hill with the Federal Theatre Project
The Federal Theater sent Smith to Chapel Hill in 1936 to work with Frederick H. Koch of the Carolina Playmakers. She stayed when the federal project expired, helped Koch compile American Folk Plays and took his classes for him in his absence.
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Dillard Gardner sells Institute of Government memberships to cities and counties
Taking a city manager's suggestion, Coates offered local governments yearly 'unit memberships' priced by population, from $413 for Charlotte to $7.50 for the smallest towns, covering guidebooks, the magazine, legislative bulletins and staff help. Gardner set out in the winter of 1936 and enrolled more than a hundred cities, towns and counties; memberships brought in over $10,000 in 1937.
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Dr. Bryan Roberts buys the Roulhac-Hamilton House and remakes it as a brick Colonial Revival house
In 1936 the Hamilton heirs sold the old Laburnum Cottage on West Tryon Street to Dr. Bryan Roberts and his wife. About 1940 they covered it in brick veneer and added a new Colonial Revival entrance and a two-story rear wing, leaving little of the 1840s house visible.
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Former summer school and education dean N. W. Walker dies
Walker had headed the university's summer school and its school of education until he retired with a heart ailment in the summer of 1934. After his death his house at 517 East Rosemary Street was sold to education professor Guy B. Phillips, and Albert and Gladys Coates stayed on in the cottage behind it.
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Hillsboro High School gets an addition built with PWA money
An addition to the Hillsboro high school was under construction in May 1936 as part of the county's $346,000 school building program, paid for partly by a federal Public Works Administration grant.
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Hillsborough's new high school for Black students is built
Hillsborough's new school for Black students was built in 1936 with Public Works Administration aid on land the county board bought from Louis Wilson and George Mayo. When the Chapel Hill Weekly toured it in May it had eight rooms and an auditorium, with completion expected in about six weeks. It opened as Hillsboro High School for Negroes under principal E. C. Hester. A. L. Stanback became principal in 1942, and in 1943 the school became Central High School. From 1948 the PTA staffed the school library three times a week so it could be opened to the Black community.
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James M. Pritchard buys out Thomas Lloyd and becomes sole owner of the drugstore
Pritchard took sole charge of the former Patterson Brothers store, now Pritchard's Drugstore. Lloyd opened his own Carolina Pharmacy in 1940.
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Lebanon Methodist Church loses its old building
The old church of the Lebanon congregation, one of the rural churches tied to the Hillsborough charge, was destroyed in 1936.
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Mr. and Mrs. James Webb Cheshire buy Over-the-River
The Norwood house across the Eno, which James Webb Jr. and his wife had bought in 1848, was sold in 1936 to Mr. and Mrs. James Webb Cheshire.
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Oak Grove Baptist Church is organized
Oak Grove Baptist Church was organized in 1936, led by Robert A. Thompson, Jesse E. Sykes, Woody Thompson and M. E. Thompson.
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Orange County builds a brick school for Black students in Hillsboro
Under a PWA-aided building program the county built an eight-room brick school for Black children in Hillsboro in 1935-36, with an auditorium, steam heat and plumbing. High school grades are first reported there for 1938-39, as the Hillsborough High School for Negroes; it became Central High School.
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Passenger trains stop running on the University Railroad
Mixed passenger service on the ten-mile line between University Station and Carrboro ended as car ownership spread and roads improved, leaving the line to freight.
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Rose's 5-10-25 cent store opens on East Franklin Street
When John P. Crowder closed his variety store and left town, Rose's took his space and shared the building with the A&P.
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S. H. Hobbs Jr. buys an Orange County farm for agricultural experiments
The rural sociologist acquired a farm in Orange County in 1936 to use for agricultural experimentation.
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St. Mary's School gets a WPA brick auditorium
St. Mary's School, a Colonial Revival brick school built in 1931 near Murphey School to replace a log schoolhouse, received a Neoclassical brick auditorium in 1936 through the same WPA program, plainer than the one at Murphey.
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T. Felix Hickerson stays in Chapel Hill when the School of Engineering is dissolved
When the university's School of Engineering was dissolved in 1936, Hickerson chose to stay in Chapel Hill in the mathematics department rather than move to Raleigh. He received a Kenan professorship in 1945 and retired in 1952.
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The Berry Brick House leaves the Berry family after 131 years
The Berry family sold the West Queen Street brick house in 1936 to Mr. and Mrs. F. S. McLarty, who added rear dormers and perhaps the front ones. The McLartys sold it in 1943 to Mr. and Mrs. F. Ross Porter.
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The Durham Bank and Trust Company buys the Bank of Orange
The Bank of Orange stayed independent until 1936, when the Durham Bank and Trust Company bought it. Its assets were about $750,000 at the sale.
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The PWA withdraws its grant for the Institute of Government building
Coates won two thirty-day extensions, the first from President Roosevelt at Senator Josiah Bailey's request, and in February 1936 was allowed to let a contract on his word that the money was in hand. The promised materials and cash never fully came through, and in the summer of 1936 PWA administrator H. G. Baity rescinded the grant; a brief revival by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes in 1937 also failed.
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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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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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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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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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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.
