Search and filters
Search and filters · 1 active
410 dated events and 10 storylines match your filters.
Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–200 of 420, 200 to a page.Back to highlights
Entries
Colonial and Regulator years · 1680–1774
- 1740s
-
A log house, later the Weaver House, is built beside the Hillsborough wagon road
A story-and-a-jump house of hewn logs, one room on each floor, went up a few yards from the wagon road to Hillsborough, whose roadbed could still be traced in 1983. Tradition says it was first a tavern; it is the oldest building standing in Carrboro.
-
Shearley Whatley buys 200 acres from the Earl Granville
Whatley paid thirty pounds for the grant, the first known private ownership of the land where the farmhouse later called Webb's Happy Acres stands. The grant document passed down through the family owners.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1810s
-
Allan Bubberly sells the future Weaver House property to Thomas Weaver
In 1811 Allan Bubberly conveyed the old homestead and tavern property on the Hillsborough road to Thomas Weaver. Weaver's descendants kept it for ninety-nine years, and the house still carries the family name.
- 1830s
-
A two-story frame farmhouse is built on the land later called Webb's Happy Acres
The one-room-deep house with a pegged frame, log sills and end chimneys may have been built by Carolina Kirkland and her husband or by earlier owners. Her grandson J. Richard Webb and his wife moved in about 1954, restored it and named it Webb's Happy Acres.
- 1860s
-
The Weavers add a frame front wing to the log house
A plain one-and-a-half-story frame block with two rooms per floor was built across the front, by family account to shelter the wife and children of a Weaver who went off to the Civil War. The log wing got matching Greek Revival doors and sash at about the same time.
-
Historic Black neighborhoods of Chapel Hill and Carrboro
Northside, Pine Knolls, Tin Top and Pottersfield in Chapel Hill and the Lloyd–Broad neighborhood in Carrboro grew from land bought by freedpeople such as Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, around their churches, the Orange County Training School and Lincoln High. Urban renewal, campus growth and rising land prices pressed them from the 1970s, and conservation districts, a zoning overlay in Carrboro and the Jackson Center’s work have answered since 2004.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
- 1870s
-
James Tilley builds a small frame farmhouse on the NC 54 corridor
About 1870 James Tilley built a modest frame I-house with a separate frame kitchen, which remains in good shape. He lies in a family graveyard on the farm.
-
Herbert McCauley builds an I-house off Old Greensboro Road
Around 1875 a two-story frame house mixing Greek Revival and Victorian trim was built for Herbert McCauley, with a log house and smokehouse on the place. Neighbors know it as the house where the singer James Taylor grew up.
-
Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, formerly enslaved, bought thirty acres in what became Carrboro
The Strayhorns bought about thirty acres and built a one-room log cabin at what is now 109 Jones Ferry Road, and their son William built the house next door at 107 in 1915. Toney Strayhorn is remembered as a founder of First Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, and the house is still owned by a great-granddaughter.
- 1880s
-
Jack Brim, a Black blacksmith, and then Bennie F. Ray open smithies at West End
As the settlement around the depot and Lloyd's mills grew in the later 1880s, Jack Brim, an African American blacksmith, opened a shop at West End, and Bennie F. Ray opened a second smithy after him. Ray's shop was still working north and east of the depot in the early 1910s.
-
Robert F. Hoke raises subscriptions to run the railroad toward Chapel Hill
When iron prices rose in 1880 and shipping ore to Pennsylvania furnaces paid, Gen. Robert F. Hoke, who owned most of Iron Mountain north of Chapel Hill, began organizing the branch line from University Station. His Iron Mountain Company put up $6,000, the largest single pledge, and Julian S. Carr was among the other subscribers.
-
Ruffin Cheek and then Hiram Stone open West End's first general stores
Ruffin Cheek, followed by Hiram Stone, opened grocery and general merchandise stores at West End in the 1880s. The book counts their stores, east of the railroad spur on what became East Main Street, as the start of Carrboro's business district.
-
The Neville Building, thought to be Carrboro's first store, goes up east of the depot
A one-story frame store later called the Old Neville Building was put up in the 1880s on East Main Street between Broad and Lloyd streets and is believed to be the first store building in Carrboro. Its last tenant was the Carrboro Cash Store, run by Cliff and Wilbur Partin.
-
William Cole buys the Smith plantation seat on Smith Level Road
The Smith family held its large plantation south of Carrboro until the 1880s, when William Cole bought the 1845 house. No bigger pre-war house survives in the township, and in 1992 it stood almost unchanged on 130 acres.
-
From West End to Carrboro: railroad, mills, and a new town
In 1882 a university railroad spur ended a mile west of Chapel Hill, and the settlement of West End grew around its boxcar depot. Thomas Lloyd opened a gin and grist mill in 1883 and the Alberta Cotton Mill in 1899, which Julian Carr's Durham Hosiery bought in 1909. Incorporated as Venable in 1911, the town became Carrboro in 1913.
-
Railroad service reaches West End
The first passenger train on the University Railroad left Chapel Hill on Monday, February 6, 1882, and ran through University Station to Raleigh. The line ended about a mile west of the village at West End, where a boxcar served as the depot, and the settlement that became Carrboro grew up around it.
-
Julia Spencer drives a last spike to celebrate the finished University railroad
Chapel Hill celebrated the completed State University Railroad with speeches and the driving of the last spikes, one by Julia J. Spencer, daughter of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, and one by the railroad's agent, J. G. Cooley. Passenger trains had been running to the West End terminus since February.
-
Thomas Lloyd and William Pritchard build a grist mill and cotton gin at the West End depot
Thomas F. Lloyd, a Confederate veteran, and his partner William Pritchard built a steam-powered grist mill and cotton gin in a two-story frame building just north of the railroad depot at West End in 1883. Farmers from southern Orange County brought grain and cotton there, and Lloyd bought out Pritchard's share in 1886.
-
Thomas F. Lloyd buys out his partner and adds a flour mill by the depot
Lloyd bought William Pritchard's share of the steam grist mill and cotton gin the two had built north of the station in 1883, and had a flour mill built on the property.
-
Fred Smith begins about fifty years as conductor on the Chapel Hill branch train
Captain Fred Smith became conductor on the University Station branch in 1889 and kept the job for about half a century, until passenger service ended.
- 1890s
-
Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten was born on Lloyd Street in what became Carrboro
Elizabeth Nevills, later known as Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, was born near the railroad tracks on what is now Lloyd Street in Carrboro. As a child she wrote “Freight Train,” which Folkways released on record in 1958 and which carried her into the folk revival.
-
Brodie Lloyd builds a rental house on Oak Avenue before the Alberta mill opens
The house at 307 Oak Avenue is one of very few in Carrboro older than the Alberta Cotton Mill and among the first investment houses of Brodie Lloyd, Thomas F. Lloyd's cousin; once the mill opened it was rented to its workers. Carpenter Thomas Clark and later his daughter and her husband, knitter Ben Williams, lived there from the 1920s.
-
A new mill house on Center Street becomes the community's first school
The Alberta Cotton Mill built the house at 109 Center Street about 1898, apparently the first on that side of the street, and it was soon put to use as the village school. It went back to being a house when the Carrboro Public School opened on West Main Street about 1908.
-
Carpenter Thomas Clark moves to West End at Brodie Lloyd's request
Thomas Clark, the earliest carpenter known to have worked in Carrboro, came in from the Cane Creek section of Orange County while the Alberta Cotton Mill was going up, at Brodie Lloyd's urging. He built rental houses for Lloyd, among them 101, 103 and 109 Shelton Street and 205 Weaver Street, and helped Bennie Ray build his two-story house at 301 Weaver Street.
-
Herbert Lloyd takes over his brother's cotton gin and grist mill
As Thomas F. Lloyd turned to building the Alberta Cotton Mill, his brother Herbert took charge of the steam gin and grist mill by the tracks, the frame buildings that had started the settlement in the early 1880s.
-
Thomas F. Lloyd builds the Alberta Cotton Mill
Lloyd built the Alberta Cotton Mill beside the railroad in West End in 1898 and 1899, the brick mill that later became Durham Hosiery Mill No. 4 and then Carr Mill Mall.
-
Manly McCauley is lynched near Carrboro
Manly McCauley, an 18-year-old Black farmhand, left Milton Brewer's farm west of Chapel Hill with Brewer's wife on October 26, 1898. A posse caught them beyond Jonesboro, and on the way back masked men took McCauley from the officer holding him and hanged him. His body was found on November 6, about three miles west of Chapel Hill.
-
Thomas F. Lloyd builds twelve houses for Alberta Cotton Mill workers
On the mill tract east and northeast of the new Alberta Cotton Mill, Lloyd put up a dozen one-story frame houses for his hands. A house of the same period built for Alberta workers still stands at 105 Short Street.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
-
A frame depot replaces the box car that had served West End as a station
From 1882 a box car had been the passenger depot at West End. In 1900 a one-story frame depot was built a few yards north of the later station; after the 1913 station opened it became a freight shed, and a new freight house had replaced it by 1925.
-
Four mill houses go up on Shelton Street for Bill Lloyd
Bill Lloyd, a cousin of Alberta Cotton Mill owner Thomas F. Lloyd, had four identical one-story houses built to rent to the mill's workers. Each had two front doors so family members on different shifts could come and go; carpenter Thomas Clark, brought from Cane Creek by the Lloyds, built number 107.
-
Lloyd and Neville's cotton gin operates on Laurel Street
The gin occupied the lot at 108 Laurel Street from the first years of the century into the 1930s. When it was dismantled its materials are said to have gone into houses, perhaps the two porcelain-enamel-tile houses at 108 and 110 Laurel Street.
-
Southern Railway begins buying cross ties from farmers at the Carrboro depot
In the 1900s the Southern Railway began buying hand-hewn oak cross ties at the depot, where its agent graded them and paid the farmers who hauled them in from Orange and nearby counties. By the early 1920s Carrboro was among the largest tie markets in the East, and tie wagons crowded its streets into the early 1930s.
-
Thomas F. Lloyd gives a church lot facing his mill to Chapel Hill's four congregations
Lloyd offered a Weaver Street lot to the Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists and Methodists of Chapel Hill. The first two gave up their rights, and the Baptists and Methodists built Union Chapel on it in 1901 or 1902, a frame building about twenty by thirty feet.
-
The state charters the Blanche Hosiery Mills Company at West End
The secretary of state issued a charter to the Blanche Hosiery Mills Company, formed by W. R. Lloyd, T. J. Hogan, John Lloyd and W. E. Lindsay to make hosiery. The company began on $6,500 in stock, with leave to raise it to $15,000.
-
The Blanche Hosiery Company builds its own knitting mill near the West End depot
After more than a year in the upper story of Tom Lloyd's cotton mill, the Blanche Hosiery Company put up a $1,500 building of its own near the depot and planned to move in about July 1. The owners said Lloyd charged too much for power.
-
Baptists organize Union Chapel in West End
On land Thomas Lloyd deeded for churches, Baptists and Methodists shared a small Weaver Street building on alternate Sundays, and the Baptists organized as Union Chapel with seventeen charter members; the congregation became Venable Baptist in 1911 and Carrboro Baptist in 1914.
-
Sidney W. Crabtree starts a farm on land from the Smith plantation
A 54-acre farm on Smith Level Road was formed in 1903 from part of the old Smith plantation. Its Triple-A farmhouse and six outbuildings survive, and a graveyard there is thought to hold people enslaved on the plantation.
-
Elizabeth Cotten composes Freight Train
At about age eleven, growing up near the railroad tracks in the settlement that became Carrboro, Elizabeth Cotten wrote "Freight Train." She played a right-handed guitar upside down, and the song became a folk standard after Folkways released her recording in 1958.
-
The Carrboro Public School is built on West Main Street
The one-story frame school at 114 West Main Street replaced the first school, held in a Center Street mill house, and taught seven grades under Mr. McDuffie, also the Baptist pastor. After the graded school opened late in 1921 it became the Methodist parsonage, serving until 1955.
-
Estelle Ray builds a two-story house on Oak Avenue and takes in boarders
The Ray-Upchurch House at 301 Oak Avenue went up in 1909, likely with help from Estelle Ray's carpenter son and other relatives who later worked on the Lloyd yarn mill. For almost fifty years Ray, and after her, her daughter Bedie Upchurch, let rooms there to boarders.
-
Julian Carr's Durham Hosiery Mills buys the Alberta Mill
In early February 1909 Julian S. Carr and his sons closed a deal for both the Alberta Cotton Mill that Thomas F. Lloyd had built at West End and the Blanche Hosiery Mill, to change hands on April 1 and run together as Durham Hosiery Mills' Mill No. 4. The deeds were recorded in March.
- 1910s
-
Blacksmith Bennie Ray builds a two-story house on Weaver Street
With carpenter Thomas Clark, Ray built a cross-shaped two-story house at 301 Weaver Street, rare among Carrboro's early houses; his family still owned it in 1983. He ran a blacksmith shop on Lloyd Street with his brother Tom and son Atlas, who kept it going after Bennie died in 1933.
-
Carrboro Methodist Church is organized
Methodists in the mill village that became Carrboro organized a church in 1910 with W. A. Stanbury as first pastor.
-
Carrboro businessman Miles Andrews builds a frame house on East Main Street
Miles Andrews, a Carrboro businessman and farmer, builds a one-story, hip-roofed frame house in the 100 block of East Main Street and lives there for many years. It was the only frame building on the block to survive the 1924 fire.
-
Carrboro's business district shifts from Weaver Street to East Main Street
In the late 1910s the center of Carrboro's trade moved from the Weaver Street block by the Alberta mill to East Main Street. Some frame store buildings were hauled over from Weaver Street, and others were newly built on East Main.
-
Charlie and Sophie Minor, Black farm owners, build a pyramidal cottage on NC 54
About 1910 Charlie and Sophie Minor had a hip-roofed frame cottage with tall inside chimneys built on their farm west of Carrboro. The report uses it to show the better-off farmhouse types that appear around that year; four frame outbuildings of different dates remain.
-
Durham Hosiery Mills builds a two-story company house on New Hill for the Oakley family
The L-shaped house at 303 South Greensboro Street was one of three two-story houses for large families in the last group the mill built for Mill No. 7. The company recruited the experienced Oakleys from Burlington, whose men became superintendents and foremen, and Cora Oakley ran part of the house as a boardinghouse at 25 cents a room a week.
-
Jesse and Allie King build a two-story house on Old Greensboro Road
After living in the log house across Sesame Road, Jesse and Allie King built a frame I-house about 1910. It was remade in the Colonial Revival style in the 1940s; frame and log outbuildings remain.
-
Luther Sturdivant and Knute Mann plat Partridge Field for houses
In the late 1910s Carrboro businessmen Luther Sturdivant and Knute Mann laid out streets, blocks and lots on the open ground called Partridge Field, east of the railroad spur, and each built a bungalow there in the early 1920s. Few buyers followed them in the 1920s; most new builders chose wooded lots on Hillsborough Road.
-
Mill houses go up for the Lloyd Manufacturing Company's workers
One-story frame houses with front porches were built between 1910 and 1915 as worker housing for the Thomas F. Lloyd Manufacturing Company; 25 of them form the Thomas F. Lloyd Historic District on the National Register.
-
The Carrs open a night school for Carrboro children working in the mills
In the early 1910s the Carr family's company started a night school for children who spent their days in the Carrboro mills. It soon closed because the pupils were too tired after work and had chores waiting at home.
-
The Smith Level School is built for white children south of Carrboro
A frame one-and-a-half-story rural school with a front gable went up on Smith Level Road about 1910. It became a dwelling in the 1930s, which cost it much of its original character.
-
The Strayhorn log cabin on Jones Ferry Road reaches its two-story form
Toney Strayhorn, born enslaved in Orange County, became a farmer and brick mason and in the late 1800s built a one-room log cabin on his tract. He and later his son William enlarged it until, by about 1910, it stood two stories high with a rear ell and big brick end chimneys that show the family's skill.
-
Lloyd organizes a second mill company and builds a yarn mill
Thomas F. Lloyd organized the Thomas F. Lloyd Manufacturing Company in February 1910 and built a second mill across Main Street from the Alberta mill in 1910 and 1911 to spin cotton yarn.
-
Venable is incorporated
The General Assembly incorporated the mill settlement west of Chapel Hill as the Town of Venable in an act ratified March 3, 1911, naming William H. Parker mayor and T. N. Mann, J. F. Ragan, T. A. Ray and J. F. Partin commissioners until the first election. The town, named for UNC president Francis P. Venable, became Carrboro in 1913.
-
Thomas F. Lloyd, founder of Carrboro's first two mills, dies
Thomas F. Lloyd died in May 1911, close to the time his second mill, a one-story brick yarn mill a block south of the Alberta mill, was finished. A Confederate veteran with no schooling, he had built the gin, grist mill and flour mill by the depot before starting the Alberta mill in 1898.
-
Dr. Braxton Bynum Lloyd begins practicing medicine in the Chapel Hill community
A Chapel Hill native with an M.D. from the University of North Carolina (1909) and three years at the Newark Eye and Ear Infirmary, Lloyd began a medical practice in the community that lasted until his death in 1947.
-
Durham Hosiery Mills nearly doubles Mill No. 4
In 1912 the company added a two-story extension to the west end of the old Alberta mill, enlarged the one-story south wing as an office with a hooded entrance, and put up a new power house northeast of the reservoir. Orders for cotton hosiery had outgrown the building.
-
Union Baptist Church becomes Venable Baptist Church
Once the Methodists stopped meeting there around 1910, the chapel was known as Union Baptist Church. In 1912 the congregation took the name of the newly incorporated town of Venable.
-
A new wood-frame railroad station is built in Carrboro
The depot that still stands beside Carr Mill was built around 1913, replacing the earlier West End stop that had drawn settlement to the end of the line.
-
Venable is renamed Carrboro
A 1913 act of the General Assembly changed the name of the Town of Venable to Carrboro. Julian S. Carr, owner of the local mill since 1909, had asked UNC president Francis Venable's consent in January 1913, and the town's own history says Carr agreed to supply the community with electricity.
-
The Lloyd yarn mill becomes Durham Hosiery Mill No. 7
The Thomas F. Lloyd Manufacturing Company mill was sold to Durham Hosiery Mills, which ran it as Mill No. 7 alongside Mill No. 4, the former Alberta mill.
-
The Blanche Hosiery Mill Company is chartered again with $100,000 in authorized capital
Four years after Julian Carr's company bought the first Blanche mill, W. E. Lindsay, Blanche Gilbert Lindsay and W. S. Robertson took out a new charter for the Blanche Hosiery Mill Company. By late April its new plant was finished, with 58 knitting machines and work for about 40 hands.
-
A. J. Blackwood recruits Cora Oakley's family from Burlington to the Carrboro mills
In 1914 A. J. Blackwood, a Burlington neighbor lately made superintendent of Mill No. 4, drew Cora Oakley and her large family to Carrboro with slightly higher wages and a ten-hour day. Durham Hosiery Mills hired many experienced hands away from Burlington-area mills in this way.
-
An I-house front is added to the Lloyd family's log house on Dairyland Road
About 1914 a two-story frame front was built onto an older log section on the Lloyd place. Lemuel and Ola Cheek owned it for most of the century and ran it as a dairy farm.
-
Carrboro Methodists build their first church
Organized in 1910 as a mission of the Chapel Hill Methodists, the congregation met in the public school until early 1914, when it built a plain frame church on the large lot east of the school, later the Britt Building site. From about 1900 the town's Methodists had shared Union Chapel with the Baptists.
-
Venable Baptist Church becomes Carrboro Baptist Church
In 1914, the year after the town was renamed for Julian S. Carr, the Baptist congregation changed its name again, to Carrboro Baptist Church.
-
Claude and Ola Neville build a foursquare farmhouse on their dairy farm
Claude Neville, a farmer who also kept a grocery in Carrboro, and his wife Ola built a two-story frame foursquare on Old Greensboro Road. A pegged frame kitchen from an earlier house on the land still stands behind it.
-
Contractor Charles Craige builds a gambrel-roofed bungalow for mason William Strayhorn
The house at 107 Jones Ferry Road was built for William and Margie Strayhorn beside the home of his father Toney, head of a family of brick masons. William died young in 1933; his daughter Laura and her husband Albert Reaves kept the house in 1983.
-
Durham Hosiery Mills builds a house on West Main Street for its Carrboro superintendent
Some time between 1915 and 1925 the company built a one-and-a-half-story house with a tall hipped roof and Tuscan porch columns at 103 West Main Street for the head of its Carrboro mills; it was long thought the best house in town. Ralph Ward of Mill No. 4 lived there first and Floyd M. Durham of Mill No. 7 later, and Marvin J. Dawson bought it at the 1939 company sale.
-
Durham Hosiery Mills builds its last group of mill houses on South Greensboro Street
Around 1915 carpenter John Squires built five houses on South Greensboro Street south of Carr Street, thought to be Durham Hosiery Mills' last housing project in Carrboro. The company then planted Lombardy poplars along the street, which was called Poplar Street until the diseased trees came down in the 1930s.
-
Mill worker Jesse Riggsbee builds his own house on South Greensboro Street
Riggsbee and his wife both worked for Durham Hosiery Mills but chose to build rather than rent from the mill or a speculator, and two relatives later built on adjoining West Carr Street lots. A humidifier mechanic, he lived there until his death in 1946.
-
The Lloyd grist mill burns and is rebuilt in brick
The original wood-frame grist mill buildings burned in 1916 and were replaced by the brick mill that survives on B Street; lightning gutted its interior in 1921.
-
Julian S. Carr Jr. starts the Industrial Democracy plan in Durham Hosiery's mills
In 1917 Julian S. Carr Jr., who ran Durham Hosiery Mills, set up a plan of worker representation and profit sharing in all sixteen company mills, Carrboro's among them. Its Senate of superintendents and foremen and House of elected workers met twice a month in the Carrboro clubhouse, voted help for families hit by sickness or death, and paid for repainting most of the mill houses.
-
The Chapel Hill Red Cross gathers country women into auxiliaries across southern Orange County
Auxiliaries of the Chapel Hill chapter formed at Bethel Church, Calvander, Antioch, Williams Chapel, Smith Level, Mount Moriah, Union Grove, Damascus, Carrboro and Orange Church, and among Chapel Hill women who could not come to the workroom. They sewed hospital shirts and refugee garments, paid for supplies by selling eggs, jelly and apples, and passed magazines and papers to families who could not buy them; Mrs. H. C. Hogan of the Calvander circle made 100 hospital bed shirts in 100 days.
-
The Colonial Movie Theatre on Weaver Street closes
The Colonial Movie Theatre, one of the frame businesses in the Weaver Street block facing the Alberta mill by 1914, closed around 1917, about when Carrboro's stores started moving to East Main Street.
-
W. H. Parker serves as Carrboro's first listed mayor
W. H. Parker heads the list of Carrboro mayors in 1917, four years after the mill town of Venable took the name Carrboro. He served again from 1937 to 1941.
-
Chapel Hill and Carrboro residents vote to form a Red Cross chapter at the Graded School
Dr. Louis H. Webb, charged with organizing chapters in his medical district, called a Monday night meeting of Chapel Hill and Carrboro people at the Graded School building on May 28, 1917, which voted almost unanimously for a full chapter rather than an auxiliary. Seventy-one people enrolled at the chapter's first meeting, which elected George Howe chairman and Alice Noble vice-chairman.
-
Durham Hosiery sets up looping machines in a Center Street house
After the former school at 109 Center Street was lengthened at its north end, the company, out of room in Mill No. 4, installed extra looping machines there for closing the toes of hose. It became a house again a few years later, once the mill was enlarged.
-
Farmer and lumber dealer Brodie Lloyd builds a large bungalow at Calvander
Around 1918 Brodie Lloyd, who farmed and ran a lumber business in Carrboro, had a roomy bungalow built on Old NC 86. The report ranks it among the biggest and best kept in the township.
-
The power house wing of Mill No. 4 is raised to two full stories
In 1918 Durham Hosiery Mills built the original power house wing of Mill No. 4 up to two full stories and gave it a taller two-story tower on the north side.
-
Carrboro opens an influenza diet kitchen in the mill club rooms
When influenza spread from the university to Carrboro, a volunteer nursing committee worked night and day, and J. S. Carr gave the club rooms for a diet kitchen and paid its costs. For two weeks Mrs. R. B. Lawson and Mrs. Arthur Blackwood served at least seven gallons of soup a day, and orderlies checked homes each morning.
-
Influenza epidemic strikes Chapel Hill
Spanish influenza swept the University in early October 1918, putting the campus and its student soldiers under a three-week quarantine. By October 23 about 300 students had been ill and three had died, and President Edward Kidder Graham died of influenza and pneumonia on October 26.
-
The Bank of Chapel Hill opens a branch, the Bank of Carrboro
The Bank of Chapel Hill raised its capital in the summer of 1919 so it could open a bank in the mill town, and the Bank of Carrboro opened for business on a Saturday late that fall. Deposits on the first day came to more than $30,000.
-
The county war record lists 23 Orange County servicemen who died in the war
Annie Sutton Cameron's record for the Council of Defense lists 23 Orange County soldiers killed in action or dead of wounds or disease, four of them Black. The list includes men from Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, Blackwood and Rougemont.
- 1920s
-
A fenced playground is built beside Mill No. 7
Around 1920 a fenced playground with swings and horseshoe pits went up on the north side of Mill No. 7, one of the projects of the mills' Industrial Democracy plan. It was taken apart in World War II so its metal could go to the war effort.
-
A wedge-shaped brick store replaces a frame general store at 111 East Main Street
The one-story building, nicknamed the Flatiron for its nearly triangular plan, took the place of a frame store that had sold general goods and then drugs. It served as Carrboro's post office in the early 1930s.
-
Braxton Bynum Lloyd serves as mayor of Carrboro
Dr. Lloyd, who lived and practised in Carrboro, was elected a town alderman in May 1917, when T. N. Mann won the mayoralty, and served as the town's mayor in 1920 and 1921.
-
Brodie Glenn, founder of Glenn Oil Company, builds a bungalow on Ragan Street
When built, the house at 503 Oak Avenue, then Ragan Street, was the only one on the west side of the street north of Shelton Street, facing six older houses across the way.
-
Carrboro's lettered streets receive names
Until about 1920 the mill village's streets went by letters. Around then most got the names they still had in 1983; the H, I and J streets north of Mill No. 4 became Ice Avenue, Durham Street and Hosiery Street.
-
Dr. Brack Lloyd has Charlie Martindale build a bungalow with Carrboro's first central heating
Around 1920 Dr. Brack Lloyd, the village doctor, hired Chapel Hill contractor Charlie Martindale to build a large one-story bungalow at 406 South Greensboro Street. It was the first house in Carrboro with a central heating system.
-
Luther R. Hargraves built the tin-roofed houses that gave Tin Top its name
Luther R. Hargraves, a carpenter and Chapel Hill's first African American mortician, built a row of houses with tin roofs on Hargraves Street near the railroad tracks behind St. Paul AME, and the cluster became known as Tin Top or Tin Top Alley.
-
Merchant Dwight Ray builds a bungalow on Hillsborough Road
Ray, co-owner of Lloyd-Ray Hardware and later an Orange County commissioner, had the one-and-a-half-story house built at 218 Hillsborough Road. Bungalows lined the road through the 1920s and early 1930s, among them one next door built for businessman Miles Andrews.
-
Merchant Luther Sturdivant builds a house in Partridge Field
Sturdivant and his wife, longtime principal of the Carrboro Graded School, expected the empty tract called Partridge Field to become the town's new fashionable neighborhood. Knute Mann and builder John Squires soon built nearby, but by about 1940 only three more houses had followed and families were moving to the Hillsborough Road area instead.
-
Mills own only a third of Carrboro's houses
In 1920 Carrboro had about 280 textile workers and 223 houses, and the mills owned only about a third of those houses. Most of the rest were private, many of them rentals put up by local farmers and businessmen such as Brodie Lloyd.
-
R. H. Marks builds Carrboro's first brick commercial building on East Main Street
R. H. Marks' Dry Goods Store, built around 1920 at 104 East Main Street, was the first brick store in Carrboro. It came through the 1924 fire that burned its frame neighbors, and the other owners on the block rebuilt in brick after its example.
-
William Clarence Cole builds a Craftsman farmhouse on Smith Level Road
About 1920 William Clarence Cole put up a side-gabled Craftsman farmhouse with a front dormer on a tract split off from the Smith plantation. Four early outbuildings stand with it.
-
A rail spur from Carrboro brings building materials to the campus
With the nearest railhead in Carrboro, convict labor built a $73,000 spur that ran south of Franklin Street, crossed Pittsboro Street and ended near Raleigh Road at the new dormitory sites; it was later moved toward the new mall. Neighbors blamed the Chapel Hill Limited for cracked plaster, cinders and smoke.
-
Lightning sets fire to the new brick grist mill
A few years after the brick mill replaced the burned frame buildings, a strike burned out its interior. It was soon repaired, and W. Albert Lloyd is said to have made it a grocery and his home; the 1925 Sanborn map lists it as his grocery warehouse.
-
Toney and William Strayhorn begin Carrboro Baptist's brick church
When the Rev. J. B. Davis called for full-time services, the Baptists traded their lot for a larger Durham Hosiery lot on North Greensboro Street and hired the Strayhorns, who laid the foundation and ground-floor walls in 1921. Money ran short and work stopped until 1924, a break visible in two shades of brick.
-
Carrboro's new school building goes up
Carrboro's new brick school building was under construction in the summer of 1921 and was expected to be ready for the September term. The old schoolhouse was advertised for sale at the end of the year.
-
Dwight Ray and Seaton Lloyd open the Lloyd-Ray hardware store in Carrboro
Dwight Ray and Seaton Lloyd, both from families of the White Cross and Carrboro communities, opened their hardware and furniture store in April 1922. Over the next 37 years it became the place where Carrboro talked over town and county politics.
-
Jody and Mattie Sparrow open a concrete swimming pool below their house
The Sparrows built the pool, a novelty for the area, across the stream from their hilltop house on Old Pittsboro Road, with parking above and bath houses and refreshment stands nearby; it had its first swim in late May 1922 as the Maple Spring pool. Sparrow's Pool charged admission and drew swimmers from Burlington to Raleigh, and Mrs. Sparrow kept it running until about 1959.
-
The county board agrees to build a new school at Cedar Grove
On August 11, 1922, under superintendent Claytor, the county board agreed to build a modern school at Cedar Grove once state building-fund money came. The building was accepted in January 1924 and named Aycock School. Carrboro's new school, planned under the same program, was already going up in 1921.
-
Fitch-Riggs Lumber Company buys Andrews and Lloyd's Carrboro lumber business
In 1923 the Mebane firm Fitch-Riggs took over Andrews and Lloyd, a small Carrboro lumber business with one employee, and R. Bernice Fitch ran the Carrboro plant. It traded as Fitch-Riggs Lumber Co. into 1925 and as Fitch Lumber Co. by 1927, and by 1953 it was Carrboro's oldest small concern, with 20 men, a planing mill and a coal yard.
-
Carrboro's old schoolhouse is moved and split between the Methodist parsonage and church
The Carrboro school replaced by the new graded school was being moved in March 1923. Part became the Methodist parsonage at 114 West Main Street, which served until the Methodists built a new parsonage on Oak Street in 1955, and part was added to the Methodist church for Sunday school rooms, with John T. Squires as contractor.
-
Carrboro Baptist Church completes its brick church at Greensboro and Main
The mill-town congregation borrowed $50,000 to build a brick church at the corner of Greensboro and Main streets, paying off the debt in 1942; the building is now the Town's Century Center.
-
Cleveland Lindsay puts up a nine-foot-wide brick building on Carrboro's Main Street
Cleveland Lindsay of the Damascus section built a one-story brick building nine feet wide and about 50 feet deep next to J. D. Webb's store, near the depot. He would not say what it was for, and the Chapel Hill Weekly called it Carrboro's "mystery house."
-
J. F. Sturdivant completes a master's thesis on the Carrboro mill village
In 1924 J. F. Sturdivant finished a UNC master's thesis studying Carrboro as a small mill village. It found every house painted and about two-thirds with electric lights, and it counted 197 workers at Mill No. 4 and 81 at Mill No. 7 in the early 1920s.
-
Jesse Nevilles builds a cow barn and milking barn on the family farm
Bryant Nevilles's son Jesse turned the log homestead farm into a dairy, adding a gable-roofed cow barn in 1924 and a frame milking barn in 1925 that still held its machinery in 1992. His son Lacy added a concrete-block milk cooling house and two silos in the 1950s.
-
Fire on East Main Street in Carrboro leads to brick rebuilding
Early on December 3, 1924, a fire that started in Lueco Lloyd's boarding house burned five frame buildings on East Main Street in Carrboro before it was stopped at Marks's brick store. By late December Lloyd was preparing to put up two brick stores on the site, and the rebuilt block was brick.
-
A narrow brick store goes up at 106 East Main Street
The narrow unit at 106 East Main Street went up when the block was rebuilt in brick after the December 1924 fire; the 1983 inventory remembers it as built for the post office, though in December 1924 the burned-out post office was to move across the street into Mrs. Stone's new building. Beside it stood the R. H. Marks dry goods store, the town's first brick commercial building.
-
A two-story brick store block rises in stages at 114 to 120 East Main Street
Beginning in the mid-1920s brick buildings replaced the frame stores at the east end of the block, among them the two-story row at 114 to 120 East Main Street. Samply Merritt's drug store held the east end and Gurnie H. Ray ran the Melba movie theater at 118.
-
Lueco Lloyd builds the brick store that houses Hearn's grocery
After the December 1924 fire that began in the Pendergraph boarding house, Lueco Lloyd put up a one-story brick building at 102 East Main Street as rental property, with T. C. Thompson as contractor. His only tenant was John Hearn, who had moved his grocery from Chapel Hill after World War I and ran what by 1983 was Carrboro's oldest business.
-
Southern Railway adds a larger freight house at the Carrboro depot
In 1925 the railroad built a bigger freight house at the Carrboro station, following its 1913 depot and freight shed, to handle the growing traffic in goods for Carrboro and Chapel Hill.
-
The old Blanche Hosiery mill building on Lindsay Street is cut into two houses
Blanche Hosiery's small frame mill, about 50 by 24 feet, was already a dwelling by 1915. It was sawn in half to make the mirror-image cottages at 102 and 104 Lindsay Street, which stayed rental houses into the 1970s.
-
Carrboro organizes a fire department
Carrboro's fire department dates from about 1927, by the Weekly's count in 1954, when it described the department's 27-year history and its fourth fire truck.
-
The Fitch family buys out W. T. Riggs and the business becomes Fitch Lumber Company
The Carrboro yard had opened in 1923 as a branch of the Mebane firm Fitch-Riggs Lumber Company, run by R. B. Fitch Sr. In 1927 the Fitches bought Riggs's share and renamed the company; in 1983 it was Carrboro's oldest working industry.
-
The Church of God of Carrboro is organized
C. T. Boyd and others organized a Church of God congregation in Carrboro and built a 450-seat church the next year.
-
Durham Hosiery Mills begins cutting back its Carrboro operations
With demand for cotton stockings sliding since silk hosiery came in during the mid-1910s, the company began curtailing work at its Carrboro mills in 1928. The 1929 crash deepened the slump, and Mill No. 4 shut in 1930.
-
Henry A. Bowden builds a bungalow farm on Bowden Road
Around 1928 the cotton and tobacco farmer Henry A. Bowden built a frame bungalow with three frame outbuildings of the same years off Jones Ferry Road.
-
Mason Toney Strayhorn and his grandson Alfred Barbee finish a stone dam across Morgan Creek
Toney Strayhorn, a formerly enslaved Carrboro mason and preacher, completed a thirty-foot-wide stone dam spanning Morgan Creek near University Lake with his grandson Alfred Barbee, whose first masonry job it was. Alfred and his brother Willis Barbee went on to build walls, dams and chimneys around Chapel Hill and Carrboro for sixty years.
- 1930s
-
Carrboro builds a small brick town hall and fire station at Lloyd and Cobb streets
Around 1930 a small one-story brick building went up at the corner of Lloyd and Cobb streets, east of the railroad, to house Carrboro's town hall and fire department.
-
Durham Hosiery closes Mill No. 4, the former Alberta mill
Durham Hosiery Mills stopped operations at Mill No. 4 in 1930 as the Depression cut into the hosiery business.
-
Numa Taylor builds a stuccoed block house on a lot he won in a raffle
Taylor built the one-story, hip-roofed house at 700 North Greensboro Street of cement block covered with stucco, with unusually tall windows. Martin and Myrtle Luther bought it about 1960.
-
The Black neighborhood on the Chapel Hill line spreads west into Partridge Field
In the late 1930s the African American neighborhood straddling the Chapel Hill and Carrboro line grew west into Partridge Field. Only then, the book says, was it readily counted as part of either town; segregation and the community's own sense of itself had kept it apart, with its churches and schools facing Chapel Hill.
-
The McClenan family builds a big gambrel-roofed dairy barn on Old Greensboro Road
In 1930 a very large gambrel-roofed barn was added to the McClenan farm, where an older log house lies inside a two-story frame farmhouse. The report rates the barn among the best of its type and uses the farm as its example of a dairy barn.
-
The county board merges Chestnut Ridge, Jordan's Grove, Smith Level and Grover into larger schools
Over objections from families who wanted to keep neighborhood schools, the board sent the pupils of Chestnut Ridge to Gravelly Hill, those of Grover and Jordan's Grove to Aycock, and those of Smith Level to Carrboro. It then adopted a school budget of $180,849.25 for 1930-31.
-
The county board merges nine more rural schools into larger ones
At a special meeting on reorganizing the schools, the board sent Merritts to Chapel Hill, Damascus to Carrboro, Tom's Creek and Rock Hill to Orange Grove, Union and Rehobeth to Efland, and Harmony with others to Aycock, leaving few one-teacher schools for white children.
-
A community library begins at the Carrboro school
In 1933 Nellie Roberson gave the Carrboro school 145 books as the nucleus of a library for grown people as well as children. Built up by teachers, pupils and parents, it was formally dedicated in May 1937 and lent adult books to Carrboro residents.
-
The Bank of Chapel Hill closes its Bank of Carrboro branch
With the Carrboro mills idle and other business falling off, the Bank of Chapel Hill closed its Carrboro branch and moved its accounts to the parent bank. The branch cashier, W. E. Thompson, went with them.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
- 1940s
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
A wartime munitions plant opens in the former Mill No. 7
National Munitions Corporation converted the empty Mill No. 7 on Roberson Street into a shell-loading plant that pressed tetryl pellets for Navy anti-aircraft ammunition, growing from about 126 workers to more than 500; an explosion hit its pellet houses on September 6, 1942.
-
Len Hearn buys the East Main Street building his family grocery rents
After John Hearn died his son Len ran the store as L. D. Hearn, bought the building in 1944 and extended the back three times. It became L. D. Hearn & Son in the 1950s and, under grandson James, Hearn's Grocery.
-
Wartime day nursery opens for the children of Black working mothers in Chapel Hill and Carrboro
A federally funded day nursery for Black children opened at the Orange County Training School, caring for thirty children aged two to six from 7:15 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. while their mothers worked. Parents paid for food, and by October 1944 two nursery schools were running, one in the Masonic building on the edge of Carrboro and one on Brooks Street.
-
Jeter and Ethel Neville buy a corner lot at Cobb and Broad streets in Carrboro
On September 13, 1944, Jeter and Ethel Neville bought a small lot at the northwest corner of Cobb and Broad streets, in the Lloyd-Broad section of the Black Northside neighborhood, from Guilford Realty and Insurance Company. Jeter Neville was a janitor at Northside Elementary School.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
-
Black mason John Wesley Campbell and his sons build the stone Neville House in Carrboro
John Wesley Campbell and his sons, with Jeter Neville and mason Earnest Farrar, built the Nevilles' one-and-a-half-story bungalow of granite fieldstone trimmed in red brick, with an arcaded porch and a star and crescent moon set in stone beside the front windows. Campbell's son Handy said the stones came by army truck from Chatham County; the house is the least altered of Campbell's five 1940s stone buildings in Northside.
-
Fitch Lumber moves its Mebane business to Carrboro after the Mebane branch burns
A. B. Fitch and all of the firm's Mebane operations came to Carrboro, and the Lloyd Street plant was enlarged around the same time.
-
Mason Alfred Barbee builds his own house on Jones Ferry Road
After working at the Carrboro munitions plant during the war, the African American mason Alfred Barbee spent three years building his own house on Jones Ferry Road near the Strayhorn family homes, using his carpentry as well as his masonry skills.
-
The former Alberta mill reopens as Carrboro Woolen Mills
After fifteen idle years the modernized Mill No. 4 building reopened as Carrboro Woolen Mills, which ran until the early 1960s.
-
The Farmers Exchange opens its Carrboro branch
The cooperative's Carrboro unit opened in March 1945, joining its Hillsborough branch. In the year to June 1952 the two branches bought $303,096 in produce and sold $1,149,392 in supplies.
-
The National Munitions plant in Mill No. 7 closes
The shell-loading plant that National Munitions Corporation had run in Mill No. 7 since 1942 closed in August 1945. At its peak it employed 1,600 people, many of them former mill hands assembling anti-aircraft rounds, and it won the Army-Navy E award for production three times.
-
The Campbells build a stone bungalow for carpenter Vance Thompson on Broad Street
Next door to the Neville House, John Wesley Campbell and his sons designed and built a fieldstone Craftsman bungalow at 201 Broad Street for carpenter Vance Thompson and his family just after World War II. Land records show it finished by 1947; a Thompson son recalls moving in in 1946, and the family kept it until 2013.
-
Orville Campbell starts the Colonial Press in Carrboro
Established in 1947, the Colonial Press did commercial printing for the university and state agencies and had 20 workers by 1953. Its owner also wrote the football song All the Way Choo-Choo.
-
The Farmers Mutual Exchange opens a pulpwood yard in Carrboro
In 1947 the Exchange began buying pulpwood at its Carrboro warehouse, paying cash for any amount from a wagonload up. The book calls this new market the main advance in county farm forestry.
-
The Terrace View supper club opens a new building beside its first one
George J. Captain, who ran the Terrace View, held the official opening of a new building with a main floor and a mezzanine, added to the old one, which was kept for private parties. Ads that fall invited students to dine and dance in its "NEW home".
-
P. L. and Lloyd M. Senter open their new drugstore building next to Lloyd-Ray Hardware
Father and son pharmacists P. L. Senter and Lloyd M. Senter held a formal opening for their new Carrboro drugstore building, with a new soda fountain, on the evening of January 27, 1948. They treated it as the store's fifteenth anniversary.
-
The Whitfield and Oakley department store moves into a new building on Carrboro's Main Street as White Oaks
The Whitfield and Oakley department store moved from across the street from the Carrboro post office into a new building facing the Carrboro bank, under a new neon sign reading "White Oaks." The White Oaks Department Store advertised in local papers into the mid-1960s.
-
Bethel Baptist Church puts up an educational building beside its church
In the spring of 1949 Bethel Baptist Church, six miles west of Chapel Hill on the Greensboro highway, was finishing an educational building on its grounds and invited members to its May homecoming to look over the work.
- 1950s
-
A Weaver farm barn is rebuilt as a house, the Barnstable
While Sara Watters owned the Weaver House she deeded its two-story board-and-batten barn and several acres to her sister, a Charlotte interior decorator. The sister made it a dwelling with log and frame wings built from salvaged materials.
-
A two-story company house is moved from Maple Avenue to East Carr Street
Thomas F. Lloyd built a few identical L-shaped two-story houses about 1910 for large families working at his new mill. This one stood at the southwest end of Maple Avenue until it was moved to 203 East Carr Street in the 1950s.
-
Census counts Orange County, Chapel Hill and Carrboro in
The 1950 census counted 34,435 people in Orange County, 9,177 in the town of Chapel Hill and 1,795 in Carrboro. Chapel Hill township as a whole had 18,222.
-
Andrews and Riggsbee sell their Carrboro grocery to two other men named Andrews and Riggsbee
The partners Andrews and Riggsbee sold their Carrboro grocery to two men also named Andrews and Riggsbee, who kept the store's name. The sellers kept the tractor business they had bought from Bruce Strowd, which was moving into a new building on Greensboro Street.
-
Carrboro Civic Club opens a public library
The Carrboro Public Library, a project of the Carrboro Civic Club, opened on March 22, 1950, with an open house at the club's building near the Carrboro school. Mrs. Jack Shields was librarian, and books were lent free each Wednesday afternoon, with loans from the bookmobile and the county library in Hillsborough adding to the collection.
-
The Carrboro Church of God is organized
Clyde Maynor, Frank King and Robert Hill organized a second Church of God congregation in Carrboro in July 1950. It built a 300-seat church in 1952.
-
The Parkvue Drive-In Theatre opens west of Carrboro
The Parkvue, a drive-in theater for 280 cars on the Greensboro highway (N.C. 54) west of Carrboro, opened with two evening showings of Three Little Girls in Blue. J. W. Thompson and C. M. Rumley owned and ran it.
-
The Terrace View Supper Club is advertised for foreclosure sale
After Efthimios and Virginia Mariakakis defaulted on a deed of trust, a trustee advertised the 32.5-acre tract "commonly known as the Terrace View Supper Club" for auction on the premises on December 9, 1950. A second trustee advertised a sale for December 30 under another deed of trust.
-
Bethel Baptist Church marks its hundredth anniversary
Bethel Baptist Church celebrated its centennial with an all-day program and picnic on the grounds. UNC Chancellor Robert B. House gave the morning address and Annie Strowd read notes on the church's history.
-
Stephen J. Edwards's Midway Barber Shop is open on West Rosemary Street
Edwards's Midway Barber Shop was advertising on West Rosemary Street, at the Chapel Hill and Carrboro line, by late 1952. His son Stepney Edwards later ran the Black-owned shop.
-
Carrboro adds a fire station to its town hall on Lloyd Street
With a new Ford fire truck delivered in February 1954, Carrboro finished a fire house addition to the Town Hall on Lloyd Street. In April the firemen posed in front of the new annex with all four trucks the department had owned.
-
Carrboro's last general store closes
Cliff Partin bought the Carrboro Cash Store on Lloyd Street in 1945 and ran it with his son Wilbur until competition from newer stores closed it in 1954. The store building, which dated from 1888, was torn down about 1960.
-
Chapel Hill-Carrboro churches name a committee to help schools desegregate peacefully
Two weeks after the Brown decision, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Ministerial Association set up a steering committee to study how the churches could help bring a peaceful transition to non-segregated schools. Its members were the Rev. Charles Jones, Mrs. Harold Walters, George Esser Jr., the Rev. T. P. Duhart and Mrs. J. Snipes.
-
Pacific Mills closes its Carrboro woolen mills
Pacific Mills, which had reopened Mill No. 4 as Carrboro Woolen Mills in 1945 and later bought the idle Mill No. 7, shut the woolen operation in the mid-1950s. By then the university and nearby businesses had taken industry's place as Carrboro's employers.
-
Mrs. Marvin Ivey reopens Ivey's Cafe in Carrboro after her husband's death
Ivey's Cafe, run for 29 years by Marvin C. Ivey and his wife, closed for eight months after his death the spring before. Mrs. Ivey reopened it herself in May 1955.
-
La Pizza holds its grand opening on Carrboro's West Main Street
La Pizza opened on Friday, November 8, 1957, selling only pizza, in eight kinds and two sizes, under candlelight with checkered tablecloths. Chuck Gerke ran it as operator.
-
Carrboro voters approve merging their school district with the Chapel Hill unit
On August 5, 1958 the Carrboro school district voted 713 to 303 to merge with the Chapel Hill city school unit and levy a 15-cent school tax, after a spring vote had failed. The county board sold the old Carrboro School to R. B. Todd for $30,000 in September 1959.
-
A new Carrboro Elementary School is built at the end of Ash Street
With the new school open, the 1921 graded school on West Main Street, where Josie Sturdivant had been principal until about 1947, was converted to Carrboro Town Hall.
-
Carrboro's schools join the Chapel Hill city unit
The merger Carrboro voters approved in August 1958 took effect with the 1959-60 school year, taking 462 pupils out of the Orange County system; in 1958-59 Carrboro Elementary had stayed under the county board while high school pupils and Black elementary pupils could attend Chapel Hill schools free.
-
The Chapel Hill News Leader suspends publication
The semiweekly Chapel Hill News Leader announced in its January 29, 1959 issue that it was stopping publication. The paper had gone into receivership.
-
Dwight Ray and Seaton Lloyd sell the Lloyd-Ray Hardware Store after 37 years
The partners sold the Carrboro hardware store they had opened in 1922, long a gathering place for local politics. Tilden Hardware and Furniture Store held its grand opening in the same space on May 1, 1959.
-
Stanley Vickers's parents apply for his transfer from Northside Elementary to Carrboro Elementary
After ten-year-old Stanley Boya Vickers finished fifth grade at Northside Elementary School in June 1959, his parents, Thomas Lee and Lattice Vickers, filed a written application to have him reassigned to Carrboro Elementary School, which was much nearer their home. The school board denied it on August 3, 1959.
-
Chapel Hill school board refuses Stanley Vickers a transfer to all-white Carrboro Elementary and adopts a first-grade proximity policy
The Chapel Hill City Board of Education denied ten-year-old Stanley Vickers a transfer from all-Black Northside Elementary to the nearer all-white Carrboro Elementary School, and at the same meeting adopted a policy of limited integration at the first-grade level starting with the 1960-61 year. UNC law dean Henry Brandis, who had twice moved to approve the transfer, resigned from the board in protest and called the action both morally and legally indefensible.
-
The county school board sells the old Carrboro School to the Town of Carrboro
After the new Carrboro elementary school opened, the Orange County Board of Education accepted the town's $30,000 bid, the only one at an August auction, for the empty 14-classroom building and auditorium on West Main Street. The town planned to make it a municipal building, and voters approved a $95,000 bond issue for the purchase and renovation on March 19, 1960.
- 1960s
-
Census counts Orange County, Chapel Hill and Carrboro in
The 1960 census counted 42,970 people in Orange County, 12,573 in Chapel Hill and 1,997 in Carrboro. Chapel Hill township had 25,030, up from 18,222 in 1950.
-
Carrboro Elementary School enrolls its first Black pupils
Eight Black first graders were assigned to Carrboro Elementary under the 1961 zoning map, the school Stanley Vickers had been refused two years earlier. All but two requested and received transfers back to the Black school, so two Black children enrolled at Carrboro that fall.
-
Desegregating the Chapel Hill and Carrboro schools
After the school board refused in 1959 to admit ten-year-old Stanley Vickers to Carrboro Elementary, his parents sued, and their 1961 win in federal court set the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools on the course to desegregation. In 1966 all-Black Lincoln High merged into Chapel Hill High, and Lincoln's name, colors and mascot were left behind.
-
Carrboro shows off its new town hall in the old Carrboro School
Several hundred people toured the renovated school at an open house. It now held the mayor's and clerk's offices, an auditorium, the public library, the police and fire departments with a jail, and National Guard quarters; the town had begun moving in that winter.
-
Workmen begin tearing down Dave Neville's old store at Main Street and the railroad
Dismantling began on the frame store at Main Street and the University Railroad tracks, known over the years as Dave Neville's general store, Partin's grocery and the Carrboro Feed and Seed Store. Owner Harvey Bennett took it down at the town board's informal request, since Carrboro's fire code barred prolonging the life of frame buildings downtown.
-
The Railway Express Agency moves its office to East Main Street in Carrboro
The Chapel Hill express office moved into new quarters at 209 East Main Street in Carrboro, with room for customers to park. Its old building on North Columbia Street was coming down for the new Orange Savings and Loan office.
-
The Orange County Council on Alcoholism opens its headquarters in an addition to Calvin Burch's cabinet shop
The council's rehabilitation committee moved into a new office built onto Calvin Burch's cabinet shop on old NC 86, rented as a round-the-clock place for counseling and advice. Burch chaired the committee, which reported 54 cases in its first year there.
-
Inter-Church Council forms
Seven women’s organizing led to coordinated local poverty relief.
-
Police carry out demonstrators sitting in at the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Merchants Association office
Members of the Committee for Open Business sat in and sang in the Merchants Association office on West Franklin Street to press merchants to desegregate. Police carried out 27 on trespass warrants signed by director Joe Augustine, and 34 were arrested that day in all.
-
Carrboro Baptist Church remodels its sanctuary
Work on an extensive remodeling of the sanctuary began after the first Sunday in October 1963, alongside a new educational building. By September 1964 the renovation was finished and the church invited the community to see the new facilities.
-
More than 25,000 Orange County residents take Sabin oral polio vaccine on one Sunday
The Durham-Orange County Medical Foundation ran a Sunday oral polio vaccine campaign at eight public school feeding stations in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, Cedar Grove and Efland. A total of 25,679 people took the vaccine on a sugar cube, about 56 percent of the county, with Glenwood School alone serving 5,063; a second dose was set for May 17.
-
Health care across language and immigration
From the student-run SHAC clinic of 1967 to UNC’s interpreter services, the CAMPOS program and the Center for Latino Health of 2008, care for the county’s newcomers has grown with its languages, and the health department was serving clients in almost 20 languages by 2014. El Futuro’s bilingual mental health work in Carrboro and the refugee wellness program of 2015 carry it on.
-
Orange County voters approve $3 million in school bonds for the county and Chapel Hill units
In 1967 voters approved a $3,000,000 school building bond, with $1,000,000 for the Orange County schools and $2,000,000 for the Chapel Hill schools. It was the third school bond passed during Superintendent Carr's tenure.
Suggest a correction to an entry →
A dated event is a fact, filed on the page of the subject it belongs to: a person, a place, a theme, or a named event or history. Pages are subjects, with their own works and sources; the Place, community, or institution filter also gathers the institutions that recur in the entries without a page of their own. The page opens on the highlights; a search or any filter looks through every dated event and storyline, and each filter’s counts say how many entries choosing it would show alongside the others. A storyline is a longer history that gathers related dated events, and each storyline’s page lists its own. Counts give dated events and storylines separately. Dates come from the sources named on the cards and from the index’s event pages; where sources disagree, the card follows the county records. Entries marked approximate or needing research say so on the card; the rest were checked against the source named on it. The correction link under the entries opens the contact form; name the entry and its date and the Friends will check the source. Suggest an event →
Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated October 2, 2026.
