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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1940s
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University controller William D. Carmichael Jr. builds a large brick house in Laurel Hill
William Carmichael and his wife had one of the biggest Colonial Revival houses in town built at 106 Laurel Hill Circle, a red brick house with a classical entrance and flanking wings.
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Wartime orders push the Eno Cotton Mill to about 600 workers
Military demand for cloth during World War II enlarged the Eno Cotton Mill, which by the 1940s employed as many as 600 workers on three shifts.
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White Furniture Company of Mebane takes over Orange Furniture Craftsmen in Hillsborough
The Mebane firm bought the Hillsborough plant and turned it to dining room buffets and cabinets, many of them eighteenth-century reproductions. By 1953 it employed 125.
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William D. Carmichael Jr. returns to Chapel Hill as the university's finance officer
Carmichael left a New York Stock Exchange partnership and came back in 1940 to serve the consolidated University of North Carolina as finance officer. As finance officer, comptroller and then vice-president he raised money from the legislature, foundations, corporations and individuals.
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William Sprinkle designs Frances Gardham's house on Country Club Road
Frances Gardham's Colonial Revival house with vernacular details is one of three Rocky Ridge Farm houses the nomination credits to architect William Sprinkle.
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William Van Sprinkle designs a Colonial Revival house for Horace Crockford on Country Club Road
For professor Horace D. Crockford and his wife, William Van Sprinkle designed a modest two-story Colonial Revival house of brick and weatherboard at 305 Country Club Road, with a garage wing and a cupola, as building in Laurel Hill picked up again at the end of the 1930s.
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District health officer reports one of the district's best years for diphtheria
Although diphtheria was widespread in North Carolina in 1939, the Orange-Person-Chatham district recorded only 18 cases. Health officer W. P. Richardson credited immunization of children under six, warned that immunizations had fallen off over the past twelve months, and urged parents to have young children immunized.
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Col. John K. Ross-Duggan holds 75th-anniversary exercises at the restored Johnston headquarters house
Col. John K. Ross-Duggan, who with his wife had restored the Dickson house outside Hillsborough, marked the 75th anniversary of the war's end there with afternoon exercises and a special postal cachet showing the house. A. H. Graham and W. B. Umstead of Durham were to speak.
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The Janitors' Association puts out the first issue of its newsletter
The Voice of the Janitors' Association set out the group's aims and history and listed officers elected on April 2, 1940. It also reported banquets held at the Orange County Training School and gifts to that school and to Sedalia.
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UNC offers its faculty and laboratories to the national defense
Twenty months before Pearl Harbor, the university president telegraphed Washington putting UNC faculty, laboratories and equipment at the government's service; the trustees confirmed the step at their August meeting.
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Community Center land is deeded to Chapel Hill
The trustees holding the five-acre community-center site deeded it to the Town of Chapel Hill, whose aldermen had voted in May to accept the title and sponsor the project, since the WPA required government ownership. The deed limited the land to a community center and recreation for Black residents.
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UNC makes physical training compulsory for every student
As part of its defense program the university began requiring physical training of students in all classes from September 1940.
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Horace Williams dies and is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Williams died at eighty-two and was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. He left all of his property to the university in trust, the income to pay for fellowships in philosophy.
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Connor returns to the UNC faculty as Craige professor
After resigning as Archivist of the United States in 1941, Connor came back to Chapel Hill to hold the newly established Craige Professorship of Jurisprudence and History until he retired in 1949.
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Fitch Lumber buys the Crawford brothers' spoke plant on Lloyd Street
Walter S. and Charlie M. Crawford had made wooden wheel spokes in a sheet-metal building beside the tracks, probably built about 1930. Fitch made it a planing mill that dressed rough lumber from county sawmills, later adding a raised shavings bin that farmers drove under to load bedding for their stock.
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Illustrator William Meade Prince and his wife Lillian build a house in Greenwood
William Meade Prince, the illustrator who taught art at the university, and his wife Lillian were building a home in the Greenwood neighborhood at the end of 1941. He lived and worked there until his death in 1951.
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J. Spencer Love's $15,000 gift carries the Institute of Government into the university
After the trustees' executive committee approved making the Institute of Government part of the university, William Carmichael, at his and Frank Porter Graham's request, asked J. Spencer Love for help, and Love gave $15,000 to pay the Institute's costs until the legislature could fund it. The full board approved the merger on January 20, 1942.
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Robert H. Wettach serves as dean of the UNC School of Law
Wettach, who also served as an assistant state attorney general, lived with his wife Alpha in the rented Nash house on South Boundary Street.
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Ruby Crews becomes the county's first home demonstration agent for Black women
An assistant agent was added in 1941 to work only with Black farm women, and Crews, later Mrs. Ruby Carraway, was the first to hold the job.
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Sara Thomas Watters buys the Weaver House and its road takes her name
Alexander and Leta Hogan, owners since 1910, sold the old Weaver place to Watters. The dirt lane to it, formerly Old Hillsborough Road, was renamed Watters Road about then; a mapmaker misread the name and it has been Walters Road since.
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The county home closes
The poorhouse on the land bought in 1823 closed in 1941, since most of its residents now qualified for old age assistance and could live in boarding homes.
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The university hosts 108 South American students in its Winter-Summer School
In 1941 the university received 108 students from seven South American countries for English courses and regular classes in a program Leavitt directed. The General Assembly met in special joint session in Chapel Hill in their honor.
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W. Reece Berryhill becomes dean of the UNC School of Medicine
Berryhill, who had been physician-in-chief at the University infirmary and director of the student health service in Chapel Hill since 1933, became professor of medicine and dean of the School of Medicine in 1941. He led the school's expansion from a two-year to a four-year program.
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Walter Creech rebuilds a moved antebellum house as a Colonial Revival home on NC 54
In 1941 a two-story frame house from before the Civil War was hauled from Chatham County, turned with its gable end to the road and given one-story wings in the Colonial Revival manner.
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Construction begins on the Negro Community Center
Work on the Negro Community Center began on January 9, 1941, with Clarence Webb directing a crew of 20 and Charles Craig, the Black architect and contractor who drew the plans, helping supervise. A WPA grant paid most of the cost, and Black masons, carpenters and other workers donated their labor.
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Eben G. Merritt opens a new filling station on the Pittsboro Road
E. G. Merritt opened a new filling station on the Pittsboro Road, just above his old stand, with a tiled roof and a large parking lot. It later ran as Merritt's Service Station and store.
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UNC junior Joe Felmet is elected executive secretary of the campus American Student Union
The Daily Tar Heel reported that Felmet, a junior from Asheville who had been active in the American Student Union for two years, was elected unanimously as executive secretary of the Carolina chapter after representing it at the group's national convention in New York. He took his A.B. at UNC in 1942.
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Fire destroys the Bivins Basket Factory east of Hillsboro
A fire of unknown cause razed the Bivins Basket Factory on the Durham-Greensboro highway just east of Hillsboro. The plant had been used mostly for storage, and its owners called it a total loss.
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Chapel Hill appoints its first town planning commission
After more than a year of urging by the Chapel Hill Weekly, the town named a five-member planning commission to review the design of new and remodeled buildings. It set the Colonial Revival look of downtown for the next decade.
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Charles E. Rush takes charge of the university library
Charles E. Rush, head of the Cleveland Public Library and a former vice president of the American Library Association, took over as university librarian, succeeding Carl M. White, who had left for the University of Illinois. Assistant librarian Olan V. Cook had run the library in the meantime.
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Chapel Hill's British war relief committee raises money for a mobile canteen in London
The local committee raised $1,160 to buy a mobile tea kitchen and a large stock of food for Londoners under German bombing.
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Ernest L. Lockhart buys and tears down the closed St. Mary's school for Black pupils
The county board of education sold the former school property northeast of St. Mary's Chapel to Lockhart, who razed the 1904 frame building and took the lumber to his farm on St. Mary's Road.
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Orange County sells the county home and its farm at auction
The county auctioned the old county home, its 241-acre farm, buildings, stock and tools, and a Forrest was the high bidder. Its last residents had been boarded with relatives and friends at county expense, which the welfare superintendent said cost less than half as much.
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The livestock auction market at Hillsborough holds its first sale
The county gave the land, the town installed watering, and the Farmers Exchange built the barn for a livestock auction at Hillsborough. Its first sale was held November 6, 1941, and yearly sales grew from $150,000 to $1,100,000 by 1951.
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Orange County farm leaders divide the county's rural communities into neighborhoods for wartime work
At ten community meetings, selected farm leaders split Orange County's rural communities into neighborhoods and put forward names for neighborhood leaders, the first step in the extension service's wartime neighborhood-leader system. The report's map shows 10 communities and 39 white neighborhoods.
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Chapel Hill organizes civilian defense after Pearl Harbor
Within days of Pearl Harbor, Mayor John Foushee called for hundreds of civilian-defense volunteers, and armed sentries guarded the airport, the University Lake dam and the power plant. A control center opened at the Carolina Inn, with a branch volunteer office for Black residents at Perry's barber shop, and UNC students formed a volunteer training corps.
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UNC forms the Carolina Volunteer Training Corps and opens a War Information Center
In the month of Pearl Harbor the university organized a volunteer military training corps for students and set up a War Information Center.
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A filling station is built at 212 North Churton Street
A parapet-roofed filling station with garage bays goes up at 212 North Churton Street about 1942. Around 1980 it lost its tiled pent roof, was stuccoed and enlarged, and became the John Couch Oil Company.
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A memorial to local Revolutionary War soldiers is placed at New Hope
In 1942 a monument honoring Revolutionary War soldiers from the neighborhood was set in the grounds of New Hope Presbyterian Church, beside its cemetery.
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A state farm forester begins part-time work in Orange County
From 1942 Orange County farmers could call on a state forester part time for help with woodland management and timber sales. The 1947 forester, V. G. Watkins, reported on thinning demonstrations.
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A. L. Stanback succeeds E. C. Hester as principal of Hillsborough's high school for Black students
Albert Leon Stanback, a teacher at the Hillsboro High School for Negroes, replaced its first principal, E. C. Hester, in 1942. The school took the name Central High School the next year, and Stanback later pushed for the Cedar Grove consolidated school to take the lower grades.
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Akers is named dean of the School of Library Science, UNC's first woman dean
Akers, director of the school since 1935, was named dean, the first woman dean at UNC-Chapel Hill. She held the post until 1954.
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Coates trains as a civil defense instructor and Popular Government issues a defense number
Called to a War Department school in Texas in the summer of 1942, Coates returned to run civil defense training through the Institute, and that fall Popular Government published a 'Defense Issue' on espionage, water system protection, gas attacks and air raid warnings. In 1945 an Army Service Forces colonel credited the Institute with the plan for joining local and state forces with federal ones to defend the state.
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Douglas and Frances Hill buy the Cabe-Pratt-Harris House and add a large rear wing
The Hills bought the house and about 180 acres from the Harris family in 1942 and soon added a rear wing, removing the old boxed stair to the loft. The farm's later name, Riverbend Farm, dates from the twentieth century.
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Geologist Joseph Hyde Pratt, first chairman of the Chapel Hill Planning Board, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Joseph Hyde Pratt (1870-1942), professor of geology and the first chairman of the Chapel Hill Planning Board, was buried in the cemetery.
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Guion Griffis Johnson leads home-front work in Chapel Hill and Orange County
During World War II Johnson chaired the Community Service Committee of the Chapel Hill War Price and Rationing Board, was public relations officer for the Orange County Office of Civil Defense, and collected war records for Orange County.
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James C. McFarling gives up dairying on the Bennett-McFarling farm on Erwin Road
McFarling, given the farm by an uncle, raised cotton on 170 acres and ran an 80-cow dairy with his wife Alice at the Triple-A farmhouse at 101 Erwin Road until he quit the dairy business in 1942. A milk house and cotton house were still standing in 1992.
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James Collins buys the closed Black Presbyterian church and its lot
About fourteen years after the congregation disbanded, James Collins bought the church building and land on Orange Street.
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James J. Freeland builds his first house at US 70 and Faucette Mill Road
Three years after marrying Maxine Hayes, Freeland built the family's first home where Highway 70 crosses Faucette Mill Road, next to land that became the Fairview subdivision the following year.
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Jim Tatum coaches UNC football for a single season
Tatum was UNC's head football coach for one year in 1942. He then joined the navy and learned the split-T formation as an assistant to its founder, Don Faurot, at Iowa Pre-Flight.
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Lucy Morgan starts the health education program at the School of Public Health
Three young women on State Board of Health fellowships enrolled in health education at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1942, and Rosenau asked for Dr. Lucy S. Morgan, a Public Health Service educator then working in Fayetteville, to build the curriculum. With twenty W. K. Kellogg Foundation scholarships, the first class of public health educators numbered twenty-five in the spring of 1943.
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Maurice Julian opens The College Shop, a men's clothing store
Julian moved into the space Durham Dairy Products had left at 140 East Franklin and opened a men's clothing store he called The College Shop.
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Orange County farmers bring in more than a hundred beef cattle
Over a hundred beef cows and heifers arrived in the county in 1942, and purebred bulls were placed as well. Fourteen 4-H boys bought Hereford heifers, and the Farmers Exchange Market bought the State Fair's first-place Hereford bull.
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The Carolina Theatre is built on East Franklin Street to a Williamsburg design by Archie Davis
The new two-story brick theatre at 108 East Franklin Street, with a steep roof, dormers and brick pediments and arches, was the one building in the 100 block of East Franklin to follow the Williamsburg plan.
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The Institute of Government becomes part of the university
The Institute of Government, begun as a separate body, was made part of the university in 1942.
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The Janitors' Association reorganizes as a CIO union local
The Janitors' Association became Local 403-P of the State, County and Municipal Workers of America, a CIO union. Minutes of July 2, 1942 name pay as the most important matter, and laundry worker Rebecca Clark became a shop steward.
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The Methodist church annex on Franklin Street becomes a recreation center
The former Methodist church, kept as an annex when the new church went up in 1926, was converted into a recreation center.
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The Paul Riley Store is built on Eno Street
A one-story brick store with a stepped parapet and inset entrance went up at 907 Eno Street, carrying the West End commercial style farther west. A longtime resident recalled it, with the nearby Methodist church, as a center of childhood life in West Hillsborough.
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The old Carolina Theatre is renamed The Village
With the new Carolina Theatre open on the south side of the street, the 1927 house on the north side took the name The Village.
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UNC starts a pre-induction curriculum for students bound for the service
The university set up a course of study for all students entering military service; it later grew into the College for War Training.
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Wilbur Kutz opens The Varsity, a clothing store with a basement soda fountain
Kutz's clothing store on the north side of East Franklin had a soda fountain downstairs that drew a crowd.
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William Picard Jacocks retires to Chapel Hill
After about thirty years of public health work for the Rockefeller Foundation, much of it against hookworm in India and Ceylon, Jacocks retired and moved back to Chapel Hill, where he was active in alumni affairs.
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Woodward Byars serves as Orange County's home demonstration agent
In 1942 Miss Woodward Byars was Orange County's home demonstration agent, alongside farm agent Don S. Matheson and assistant agent Joe N. Howard. She handled publicity for edible soybeans, worked the wartime programs through the home demonstration clubs and wrote on the new crop for the county papers.
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Thirty-nine neighborhood meetings in Orange County choose wartime neighborhood leaders
During the week of January 12, 1942, thirty-nine meetings explained the neighborhood plan and picked leaders, drawing 1,677 people in all, about 43 a meeting. Discussion covered bonds and stamps, more food, nutrition, machinery repair, scrap iron and a camp survey; a typical neighborhood of 45 white families got five leaders.
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Eleanor Roosevelt speaks at Memorial Hall to close a post-war planning conference
Eleanor Roosevelt spoke in Memorial Hall at UNC to a capacity audience of about 2,000 people, closing a two-day conference on post-war planning sponsored by the Carolina Political Union and the International Student Service. She warned the audience that there was no going back to normalcy.
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Neighborhood leader training starts the Victory Garden program in Orange County
In the week of February 2, 1942, a training meeting was held in each of Orange County's 39 neighborhoods, where 163 of the 272 leaders made family lists, split the families among themselves and took instructions for the Victory Garden campaign. Leaders called on their neighbors that month with a garden leaflet and went back in March to leave a poster with each family that had planted.
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German, Italian and Japanese aliens re-register at the Chapel Hill post office
All German, Italian and Japanese aliens over 14 living in Chapel Hill had to re-register, with three photographs, at the post office. Postmaster William S. Hogan and Assistant Postmaster Strowd ran the registration, following the procedure of one held there in 1940.
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Three farm machinery repair meetings in Orange County draw 160 people
As part of the wartime push to keep farm equipment working, Orange County held three machinery meetings on February 26 and 27, 1942, with 160 attending. Neighborhood leaders handed out a repair checklist that farmers filled in and took to their dealers.
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The Orange County Public Library bookmobile makes stops in Chapel Hill
In late February 1942 the Chapel Hill Weekly announced that the county bookmobile, with librarian Ernestine Grafton in charge, would park in front of the Texaco station from noon to 2 p.m. for browsers and borrowers. That spring the bookmobile offered a $5 prize to the school collecting the most waste paper, with the proceeds buying children's books, and a state aid increase let the library order books on readers' requests.
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Orange County's Black farm neighborhoods are mapped and elect their own neighborhood leaders
In March 1942 the neighborhood plan was carried to Black rural families: Black neighborhoods were laid out, leaders were elected and family lists drawn up. The report's map shows 27 Black neighborhoods, worked by county agent M. C. Burt and home agent Ruby Crews.
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Orange County counts 272 wartime neighborhood leaders
On April 1, 1942, Orange County's neighborhood-leader system had 117 white men, 78 white women, 54 Black men and 23 Black women serving as leaders, 272 in all.
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Orange County is picked as one of four counties in the nation to test the neighborhood-leader plan
On April 18, 1942, the federal and state extension services invited Orange County to show how well neighborhood leaders could reach every rural family with wartime programs, and the next day the agents met the chairman of the county defense council. The county's letter to farm families credited the choice to their response to the earlier scrap iron, Victory Garden and machinery repair drives.
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Orange County's neighborhood leaders meet at the Hillsborough courthouse to launch the wartime test
The county-wide training meeting on the afternoon of April 28, 1942, drew 265 people, among them 149 of the 195 white and 66 of the 77 Black neighborhood leaders. A. H. Graham, general chairman of Orange County defense, spoke after a chorus from the Black high school sang; other speakers took up war bonds, the Farmers Exchange's "Buy a Bond Pig" offer, salvage, gardens and edible soybeans, which the crowd tasted afterward.
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Neighborhood leaders ask Orange County farm families to pledge a pig or an acre for war bonds
In the same canvass, leaders took pledges under the "Buy a Bond Pig" and "Buy a Bond Acre" plans, in which a family promised the sale price of a pig or an acre of crops toward war bonds and stamps; the Farmers Mutual Exchange Livestock Market supplied pigs to families who could feed them out. In the June survey 58 percent of white families and 30 percent of Black families had bought or pledged bonds and stamps.
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Neighborhood leaders introduce edible soybeans to Orange County farm families
On their scrap calls, leaders gave a half-pound package of edible soybean seed to each family that agreed to collect scrap and sent others to stores stocking the seed, promoting the bean as a protein food that could take the place of meat. By the June survey the program had reached 96 percent of 269 families, and 78 percent had planted it.
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Neighborhood leaders run a scrap metal and rubber drive across rural Orange County
From April 29 to May 9, 1942, leaders called on farm families asking them to gather scrap iron, old rubber, rags and worn-out bags for the county war fund, listed pickup points for WPA trucks and hauled some scrap to dealers themselves. Of 269 families surveyed in June, 93 percent had heard the appeal and 76 percent had turned in scrap or had it ready.
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The Chapel Hill Weekly prints a special edition for the farm war campaign, sent to every rural family
On May 8, 1942, the Chapel Hill Weekly put out a special edition backing the county's neighborhood-leader campaign, and a sample copy went to every rural family in Orange County. Stories in the county's papers that spring covered the leaders, edible soybeans, scrap and war bonds; the Mebane Enterprise printed the leaders' names on April 30.
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Orange County home demonstration clubs take up the whole wheat and enriched bread program
During May 1942 every home demonstration club in Orange County worked on the whole wheat and enriched bread program, which Lee County ran through its neighborhood leaders. Of the 183 surveyed Orange families who bought wheat bread or flour that month and had not already used it, 9 percent bought whole wheat or enriched bread or flour for the first time.
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Orange County rural families pledge $50,000 in war bonds and stamps for
The spring 1942 canvass ended with the county's rural families pledged to buy $50,000 worth of war bonds and stamps during the year, and 200 families signed up to raise a "Bond Pig."
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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.
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The federal extension service publishes its report on the Orange and Lee County neighborhood-leader test
In June 1942 the U.S. Department of Agriculture issued Extension Service Circular 387, prepared by Barnard Joy and J. P. Leagans, tracing step by step how Orange and Lee counties had organized neighborhood leaders and what the June survey found. It concluded that trained leaders chosen by their neighbors could carry wartime messages quickly to nearly every rural family.
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Chapel Hill aldermen elect Robert W. Madry mayor
The board of aldermen unanimously elected Robert W. Madry, director of the University news bureau and an alderman, as mayor to succeed John M. Foushee, who had moved out of town after ten years as mayor. The Weekly believed no one in the University's service had headed the town government before.
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University laundry workers reject a piece-work plan and demand a wage increase
Meeting by shifts, the laundry workers turned down the university's offer of piece rates with no assured raise. Their union wrote that it would take the matter to President Graham within a week if nothing changed.
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Chapel Hill High School burns
Fire destroyed the Chapel Hill high school building on South Columbia Street, then the Pittsboro highway, early on Saturday, August 8, 1942. The school board arranged to hold grades 10 to 12 in rooms at the Baptist church and the ninth grade at the elementary school, and wartime material shortages delayed a new building for years.
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UNC's General Faculty names John M. Booker to chair a committee on University government
The General Faculty authorized a committee, chaired by English professor John M. Booker, to study faculty government and write a uniform set of principles for the powers and duties of the University's divisions. Reporting in sections over eight years, its work became the 1950 Faculty Legislation on University Government.
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A regimental review in Kenan Stadium honors Commander Kessing as he leaves for the Pacific
With Admiral Halsey asking for him in the southwest Pacific, Commander O. O. Kessing was ordered to sea duty, and the Pre-Flight School held a regimental review in his honor in Kenan Stadium. Lieutenant Commander John P. Graff succeeded him in command.
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John P. Graff takes command of the Navy Pre-Flight School
When Commander O. O. Kessing was sent to sea in November 1942, his executive officer John P. Graff was placed in command and promoted to commander. Graff, recalled from retirement, had been the first line officer to arrive in the spring of 1942.
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Kenneth Tanner lends West House to the Carolina Volunteer Training Corps
Tanner gave the student officer-training corps the use of West House as its headquarters for the rest of the war. The corps then had 125 students in eight companies under Lt. Col. W. A. Raborg.
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Fire destroys Orange Grove School
Fire destroyed Orange Grove School in December 1942. On December 6, 1943 the county board sought a $16,000 insurance settlement, and at the Orange Grove committee's request classes went on in the old Orange Grove building rather than moving to Hillsboro.
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A Freewill Baptist church meets in a former store on South Nash Street
A small frame building at 219 South Nash Street, shown as a store on the 1911 and 1924 Sanborn maps and later a hot dog stand and a house, appears as the Freewill Baptist Church on the 1943 map. It keeps a small square steeple in its front gable.
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Black shank disease first strikes tobacco in Orange County
A new tobacco disease, black shank, appeared first in 1943 and spread quickly through the tobacco belt. The book ranks it with wilt for damage and notes a partly resistant seed.
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Daphne Athas graduates from UNC
Athas graduated from the university in 1943 after studying writing with Betty Smith and Phillips Russell.
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Dr. H. W. Moore restores the Hasell-Nash House with architect Archie Royal Davis
Dr. H. W. Moore restored the Federal-style Hasell-Nash House on West Queen Street with the help of architect Archie Royal Davis, who extended the rear of the two side wings around 1943.
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Elizabeth Janet Gray wins the Newbery Medal
Gray received the 1943 John Newbery Medal for Adam of the Road, a story of 13th-century England, a decade after she left Chapel Hill. She was then living in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.
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Engineer Thomas C. Atwood dies, ending the firm of Atwood and Weeks
Atwood's death in 1943 closed the partnership that had carried out much of the university's building since the 1920s.
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Fairview is platted as a neighborhood for Black families north of US 70
The first of Hillsborough's mid-century African American subdivisions was laid out in 1943 along roads that were already there, with twenty-five-foot lots meant to be bought in combination. Local builder James J. Freeland, who owned land in Fairview, built many of its houses.
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Kessing Pool opens behind Woollen Gymnasium for Pre-Flight swimming training
An outdoor pool behind Woollen Gymnasium opened in 1943 for the Navy Pre-Flight School's aquatic training and was named for Oliver Owen Kessing, the school's first commanding officer. Thousands of servicemen trained in it, among them Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush.
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Pre-meteorology and aviation training units arrive at UNC
In the first half of 1943 the university took in pre-meteorology and aviation training units, adding to the Navy programs already on campus.
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Rachel Crook opens a fish and produce market on West Franklin Street
Crook made an old service station, lately a chicken house, into a fish and produce market.
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Robert Rhinehart buys the Hill Bakery from Mrs. William Neal
Rhinehart bought the bakery that William Brumfield Neal's widow had run since his death in 1935.
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St. Mary's School closes as its pupils are merged into the Hillsborough schools
Consolidation with the Hillsborough schools closed St. Mary's School in 1943.
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The 1844 Orange County Courthouse is rehabilitated
The county rehabilitated its courthouse of about 1844 in 1943 and later added an annex, but the building stayed too small, and a new courthouse was finished just south of it in 1954.
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The Black women's clubs pay off the last of the Efland Home's debt
Four years after the home closed, the North Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs cleared its remaining debt on the Efland reformatory in 1943, the year the legislature voted $25,000 for a state-run training school for Black girls.
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The Farmers Mutual Exchange builds a slaughterhouse on Occoneechee Farm
In summer 1943 the Exchange put up an abattoir next to the Hillsborough livestock market on Occoneechee Farm. Farmers could bring cattle and hogs for slaughter at cost and collect the meat the next day.
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The General Assembly passes a resolution commending the Institute of Government
Peyton Abbott, a Winston-Salem lawyer who moved into the Institute building on December 1, 1942, led its coverage of the 1943 session, winning a seat at the press table and a copy of every bill. Before adjourning, the legislature passed a joint resolution praising the Institute's service to it.
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The Hillsborough High School for Negroes takes the name Central High School
Under principal A. L. Stanback, the school for Black students in Hillsborough changed its name to Central High School in 1943.
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The McLartys sell the Berry Brick House to Mr. and Mrs. F. Ross Porter
In 1943 F. S. McLarty and his wife, who had bought the Berry Brick House in 1936 and added dormers, sold it to Mr. and Mrs. F. Ross Porter.
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William Meade Prince becomes head of the university's art department
William Meade Prince took charge of the University of North Carolina's art department during World War II, while also making posters and drawings for wartime causes.
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The NROTC holds its annual dance to open the new armory
The Naval ROTC dedicated its armory with its annual Navy dance on the drill deck, with the Navy B-1 Band, the Black enlisted musicians stationed with the Pre-Flight School, named as the band. The drill deck stayed a favorite dance floor through the war.
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Person and Caswell sign a tri-county library contract with Orange
On March 29, 1943 the Person and Caswell library boards signed a contract forming a tri-county library arrangement with Orange, already in effect, which used state aid to serve all three counties by bookmobile, with its Orange office in the Confederate Memorial Library. Chatham dropped out of the earlier arrangement, which from 1941 had joined Person, Orange and Chatham.
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The Pre-Flight School marks its first anniversary with a review in Kenan Stadium
The school celebrated the first anniversary of its commissioning with a regimental review in Kenan Stadium. Commander Graff gave the Silver Star to Cadet Anthony E. Kujawinski for gallantry in combat, and Dean Francis F. Bradshaw brought the university's greetings.
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President Frank Porter Graham dedicates the remodeled Forest Theatre
President Frank Porter Graham dedicated the rebuilt Forest Theatre at the opening of the Playmakers' A Midsummer Night's Dream in May 1943. The Daily Tar Heel set that opening for Friday, May 14; Henderson's chronology gives May 19.
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Governor Broughton speaks at a Pre-Flight School graduation in Kenan Stadium
Broughton and UNC president Frank Porter Graham both spoke at Navy Pre-Flight School graduation exercises in Kenan Stadium on June 2, 1943.
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CIO Local 403 demands vacations for janitors and equal pay for women campus workers
The union protested a ruling that cut vacations for hourly janitors and asked for ten days of sick leave for laundry workers. It also asked that women in campus buildings be paid the same as men for nearly the same work.
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, written in Chapel Hill, is published
Smith wrote the novel in a one-room house on North Street in Chapel Hill, rising about half past five and working against the chimney wall to keep warm. Harper published it on 17 August 1943 and it sold more than 150,000 copies within two weeks.
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The Burke grave plot is given to the State of North Carolina
The university chapter of the Sons of the American Revolution gave the state the small plot holding Governor Thomas Burke's grave. The chapter had cared for the site since students found it in 1923 and was raising money for a monument.
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Chapel Hill High School moves into the old Hume house on West Franklin Street
After fourteen months of classes in the Baptist church following the 1942 fire, the high school moved into the former Hume house, once the Hogan house and the Zeta Beta Tau house, owned by Caesar Cone. It held the principal's office, the library and four classrooms, with larger classes in the elementary school basement.
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Reader's Digest profiles Albert Coates and the Institute of Government
Roving editor J. P. McEvoy visited Chapel Hill that summer, and his article, titled 'Don't Shoot Your Sheriff: Teach Him,' ran in the October issue. It brought Coates speaking invitations from several states and an offer from founder DeWitt Wallace to pay him to tour the country, which Coates declined.
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A one-story brick store is built at 109 East King Street
A three-bay brick commercial building with a central entrance between large multi-light display windows was put up at 109 East King Street around 1944.
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Charles S. Mangum Jr. sells the old Mangum house on East Rosemary Street to Betty Smith
Charles S. Mangum Jr. inherited the old Mangum house at East Rosemary and Hillsborough streets from his aunt, Mary Elizabeth Mangum Wilson, who died in 1944, and sold it that year to the novelist Betty Smith.
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Coates publishes his first history of the Institute of Government, paid for by DeWitt Wallace
In place of a speaking tour, Coates wrote a 76-page account of how the Institute grew out of his law classroom, issued under the Popular Government name in the National University Extension Association's studies series. Wallace paid for 30,000 copies for national distribution, and on the advice of Louis R. Wilson and W. T. Couch, Coates took out the profanity before it went to press.
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Governor Broughton asks the Institute of Government to help towns plan for after the war
As Allied armies advanced across Europe, Broughton called on the short-staffed Institute to help plan for life in North Carolina's towns and cities once the war ended. State payments for this work and for civil defense training steadied the Institute's budget.
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John N. Couch chairs the university botany department
John N. Couch succeeded his teacher William C. Coker as chairman of the botany department in 1944 and led it until 1960. He was given a Kenan professorship in 1945.
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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.
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Polio and vaccination
Polio closed the county’s schools in 1944 and 1948, the University pool in 1950 and two UNC football games in 1952, and the county’s polio chapter bought iron lungs. The first Salk vaccinations reached first and second graders in 1955, and more than 25,000 residents took the Sabin oral vaccine on one Sunday in 1964.
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Pritchard's drugstore on East Franklin Street closes after its owner dies
James Manning Pritchard died and his drugstore shut. Rachel Crook sold pecans in the empty store for a short while before the North Carolina Cafeteria, formerly on Fraternity Row, bought the building and moved in.
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Samuel Selden becomes acting head of Dramatic Art and director of the Playmakers
After Koch's death in August 1944, Samuel Selden took over as acting head of the Department of Dramatic Art and director of the Playmakers.
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The B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation buys a lot on Cameron Avenue
The North Carolina B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation bought a lot on Cameron Avenue in Chapel Hill and later built a house there where a rabbi held services for students and townspeople.
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W. B. Thompson sells the Chapel Hill News, which becomes the News of Orange County
W. B. Thompson, who had published the Chapel Hill News since its start, sold it in 1944 to J. Roy Parker. The paper was renamed the News of Orange County.
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Orange County FSA honors 15 Black farm ownership borrowers
The county Farm Security Administration office awarded certificates of merit to 15 Black farm ownership borrowers, former tenants it had helped to buy farms. By March 1944 the county had 22 approved tenant-purchase loans.
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Vic and Rebecca Huggins run Huggins Hardware on East Franklin Street
The Hugginses bought the University Hardware Company and opened Huggins Hardware on March 22, 1944, adding kitchenware and general merchandise to the keys, paint and tools. They sold the store in 1968.
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Rev. Joe Brooks is a Ridge Road leader in the Black farm families' wartime food drive
Black neighborhood, 4-H and home demonstration club leaders across Orange County pooled efforts to produce and conserve more food for their families and the war effort in 1944. Rev. Joe Brooks was one of the leaders named for the Ridge Road neighborhood.
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Hillsborough well-baby clinics are held separately for Black and white babies
The Junior Service League and the district health department held two well-baby clinics each month in Hillsborough, one for Black babies and one for white babies, focused on preventive care.
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Quakers organize the Chapel Hill Monthly Meeting of Friends
The Chapel Hill Monthly Meeting was organized, the first Friends meeting in Orange County since the old Eno Meeting was laid down about a century earlier. It had no building and had bought a lot on Highway 54.
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District health officer reports the season's typhoid cases
Dr. William P. Richardson, district health officer, reported two confirmed cases of typhoid fever in the district in the past two months, one in Chatham County and one in Person County, with a suspected case in Person County and indirect reports of two cases in Orange County that health officials had not been able to confirm.
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Mrs. E. G. Danziger buys Henrietta Smedes's house on Hillsborough Street
The Danzigers, Austrian refugees whose candy and pastry shop was on Franklin Street, bought the 1919 house at 211 Hillsborough Street from Henrietta Smedes, who had retired from the university staff. That September they advertised their Forest Hills house for sale.
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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.
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The Chapel Hill Baptist Church dedicates its paid-off building
Twenty years after moving in, the congregation held a dedication service for its church, now fully paid for and redecorated. Howell read a short form of his history at the service; the church then had over six hundred members and no debt.
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Frederick Koch dies and is buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Koch, who taught dramatic literature and playwriting at UNC for twenty-six years and organized the Carolina Playmakers, died on August 16, 1944 and was buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery. Samuel Selden succeeded him as chair of the Department of Dramatic Art and director of the Playmakers.
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Orange County schools stay closed until after September 18 during the polio epidemic
On the recommendation of the State Health Officer and Governor Broughton, the State Board of Education kept all North Carolina public schools closed until after September 18 because of the infantile paralysis epidemic. Orange County schools, which Superintendent R. H. Claytor had planned to open September 14, were held back with the rest, though teachers still reported on September 14.
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Orange County's Black home demonstration clubs hold their first dress contest in Hillsboro
Women from every Black home demonstration club in the county modeled thirty-six dresses, suits and accessories they had made at the Hillsboro high school auditorium. By 1946 the clubs met monthly in rural communities including White Oak Grove, Jordan Grove, Cool Springs, Cedar Grove, Harmony, Ridge Road, St. Mary's, Sartin and Carr.
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O. David Garvin becomes health officer of the district covering Orange County
Garvin came to the district in 1944 on assignment from the North Carolina State Board of Health and the Public Health Service during the war emergency, after a year and a half in Scotland and Richmond counties. A later account of his resignation gave his starting date as September 4, 1944.
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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.
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Smith Furniture Company opens on West King Street in Hillsborough
Smith Furniture Company opened in the building formerly occupied by the Scott store, selling furniture, stoves and rugs. R. J. Smith ran it as proprietor, and it was still selling G-E appliances and heaters on West King Street in the 1960s.
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A granite monument is dedicated at Governor Thomas Burke's grave
The Sons of the American Revolution and the Lloyd Memorial Association dedicated a memorial monolith at Burke's grave on the Latta plantation northeast of Hillsborough and presented it to the state. Governor J. Melville Broughton and Archibald Henderson were among the speakers.
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James Freeland opens the Fairview Bowling Alley in Hillsborough
James Freeland opened the Fairview Bowling Alley in a building he put up himself, casting the cinder blocks and laying the concrete floor. It opened with three duckpin alleys and room for a tenpin lane.
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Home demonstration clubs report the year's work at Achievement Day in Hillsboro
At the county home demonstration clubs' Achievement Day at the courthouse, the home agent reported that women had canned an average of 350 quarts and that 94 percent made their own clothes, and that the women's curb market in Chapel Hill had taken in $30,280.68 over the past year. Clubs from Caldwell, Carr, Cedar Grove, Efland, New Hope, Orange Grove, St. Mary's, Schley and Murphy had made 699 garments and 744 other articles for the Red Cross.
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The county school board sells the closed Harvey's Chapel schoolhouse
The Orange County Board of Education approved the sale of the Harvey's Chapel schoolhouse, a school for Black children about three miles from Hillsboro. It had closed several years before, its pupils sent to the Hillsboro school, and Mary E. Breeze bought the building.
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The Playmakers present the 100th program in their experimental series of new plays
On December 12, 1944 the Playmakers gave the 100th program in their Experimental Series, the evenings where student plays were staged and the audience then talked back to the author.
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Commissioners' chairman Collier Cobb Jr. lays a county revaluation plan before the Chapel Hill aldermen
Collier Cobb Jr., chairman of the Orange County commissioners, told the Chapel Hill aldermen the county would raise the tax valuation of plainly under-valued property for 1945, naming Franklin Street business property, suburban lots selling far above farm-land values and some northern tobacco land.
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Nelson Callahan and Morris Timmons open the Village Printshop next to the Porthole
The Village Printshop opened at 7 Fraternity Row, next door to the Porthole, run by Nelson Callahan, who had worked at the Orange Printshop since 1928, and Morris Timmons, operator of the Porthole. It did job printing by letterpress and offset.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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A Negro library committee was already running library service for Black readers in Orange County
The committee met in September 1945 under chairman Mrs. M. D. McPherson, reported over a hundred new books received and 800 books circulated during the summer, and was assembling book kits for rural areas. Miss Annie Cameron was named as one of the people who started the library for Black residents of the county.
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A brick Colonial Revival office building is built at 115 East King Street
A one-story Flemish-bond brick office building with a slate roof and a large central display window was built at 115 East King Street around 1945.
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A row of Colonial-style stores fills the 300 and 400 blocks of West Franklin Street
As downtown pushed west after the war, an unbroken row of Williamsburg-inspired shops went up along West Franklin Street, many designed by Archie Davis.
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A. H. Poe buys Ben Strowd's Pure Oil station on West Franklin Street for his DeSoto dealership
Poe bought the Pure Oil service station from Ben Strowd and moved his DeSoto car agency into it.
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Andy Griffith plays his first role, in The Gondoliers at Memorial Hall
Andy Griffith, who had arrived at Carolina in July 1944, auditioned on a whim and made his stage debut in a Carolina Playmakers production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers at Memorial Hall.
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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.
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Classics professor J. P. Harland builds the first postwar house in Laurel Hill
His shingled Colonial Revival cottage on Laurel Hill Road has an attached garage wing turned to face the street. Earlier Laurel Hill houses kept their garages at the far end of the driveway, so the nomination reads the wing as a sign of the car's new place in the suburb.
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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.
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Four Orange County farmers run hybrid corn demonstrations
Four farmers ran corn demonstrations in 1945 on Experiment Station lines, using hybrid seed, shallow cultivation, close spacing and heavy nitrogen. The results showed yields could be more than doubled.
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George Livas becomes sole owner of the Carolina Coffee Shop
George Livas's partnership with James Gust ended and Livas became sole owner of the Carolina Coffee Shop, which he ran until his death in 1956.
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Hesslein and Company buys the Belle-Vue mill, ending local ownership
Belle-Vue Manufacturing Company had been run from Hillsborough since 1904, lately under L. E. Beard. In 1945 Hesslein and Company bought it and spent over half a million dollars on new machinery and on baths for the mill village houses.
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Homemont is platted as a Black neighborhood north of Hillsborough
Laid out in 1945 with gently curving streets and evenly spaced lots on Torain and Lawndale streets, Homemont filled mostly in the 1950s and 1960s with small Minimal Traditional houses, several of exposed concrete block, built by more than one builder for sale or rent. Next to a trash dump, it had no paved streets until the 1970s.
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John Scott Trotter sells the Hill House on West Franklin Street to the Baptist church
Trotter sold the Hill House, next to the Baptist church, to the congregation, which went on renting out its apartments. In 1958 the town's first public library opened in one of its rooms.
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John Wesley Campbell builds a fieldstone house for a pastor on North Graham Street
John Wesley Campbell designed and built a large fieldstone house at 214 North Graham Street in Northside for a local pastor, finished in 1945 and one of the first houses on the street. It is the largest of his four stone houses in the neighborhood, with a broad arched corner porch and a stone end chimney.
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Laurel Hill Road is extended south beyond the 1927 plat
On the 1927 plat the road stopped at the south edge of 603 Laurel Hill Road. The extension carried it south toward the line later taken by the 15-501 Bypass and opened lots for postwar houses.
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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.
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Morehead creates the foundation behind his Chapel Hill gifts
In 1945 Morehead created the Morehead Foundation to pay for the Morehead Building on the campus at Chapel Hill and to establish the scholarship that carries his name.
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Only 950 Orange County farmers have electricity
A dozen years after the county's pioneering rural power line, only 950 Orange County farmers had electric service in 1945.
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R. B. House becomes the first chancellor at Chapel Hill
North Carolina created chancellorships for its three campuses in 1945, and President Frank Porter Graham turned to House, who had been executive secretary from 1926 and dean of administration from 1934. House held the post until 1957, the longest chancellorship at Chapel Hill.
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The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen runs its headquarters from Chapel Hill
The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, an interracial group of Southern church people founded in 1934, kept its headquarters in Chapel Hill while Nelle Morton was general secretary from 1945 to 1949, working on race relations, labor conditions and the rural South.
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The State Eugenics Board begins a county-wide study of mental illness and disability in Orange County
The North Carolina Eugenics Board chose Orange, a county of about 24,000 people that it judged typical of the state, to measure how many residents had been labeled mentally ill or mentally deficient, with an eye to its sterilization program. Field secretary George H. Lawrence gathered the records of the board, state hospitals, Caswell Training School, the draft board, school group tests and the county welfare and health departments.
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The Wesley Foundation takes up Methodist student work at Chapel Hill
Student work had lapsed for lack of money in 1931. After a committee of the Wesley Foundation Commission and the church drew up a plan, the commission raised its grant in December 1944, and Roy Everett came as the foundation's first director in the summer of 1945.
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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.
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The old campus infirmary is renamed Abernethy Hall
The university renamed its 1907 infirmary building Abernethy Hall in honor of Dr. Eric A. Abernethy, the university physician from 1919 to 1933. The infirmary itself moved to a new building in 1946.
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Town electricity and water are extended to West Hillsborough
Before the town took over in the late 1940s, the mills supplied power and water to their workers, cutting electricity to the houses during the day so the machinery could run, which left families without refrigeration.
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UNC begins marking Hinton James Day each February 12
The university started Hinton James Day in 1945, during the sesquicentennial of its first student's arrival. It falls on February 12 and now also honors other Carolina firsts, including Sallie Walker Stockard and Henry Owl.
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UNC establishes its Communication Center
The university set up a Communication Center at Chapel Hill in 1945. Departments of radio and religion followed in 1947.
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Newspaper describes the work of Orange County's public health nurses
A News of Orange County piece described the county public health nurses' duties: school inspections, immunization against diphtheria and smallpox, well-baby clinics twice a month, a monthly maternity clinic, tuberculosis and venereal disease clinics, orthopedic referrals, and the wartime maternity and infant care program for servicemen's wives.
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The Saturday Evening Post profiles Coates as 'The Ugly Duckling at Chapel Hill'
Warner Olivier's article cast Coates as the law school's misfit who had overcome objections to build an Institute admired around the country. It opened with a photograph of Albert and Gladys Coates in front of the Institute building.
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Black laundry workers take complaints of racial pay discrimination to the Fair Employment Practice Committee
Press operators Bessie Hargraves and Etta Guthrie said white folders earned more because of race. At President Graham's request the personnel officer investigated, and his memo denied that race set the pay.
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Black rural school districts more than double their Red Cross gifts
A Red Cross drive among the county's rural Black residents, run through the rural schools by A. L. Stanback and county agent M. C. Burt, closed with $472.55 from 428 people, against $224 the year before. Ridge Road district, with Mrs. A. A. Burt as principal, gave $36.32.
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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 3, 2026.
