Chronology

The old Methodist church on Rosemary Street becomes a garage run by Montrose Tull

The long-closed 1853 Methodist church at Rosemary and Henderson streets was converted into an automobile repair station, the Club Service Motor Co., run by Montrose Tull. A platform was built from the rear door to Henderson Street for cars.

Subject: Old Methodist Church (Rosemary Street)

Bayard Wootten opens a Chapel Hill studio over Foister's store

Bayard Wootten arranged with R. W. Foister to use the upper floor of his store as a studio, making portraits there every Saturday and taking photographs in homes and outdoors. By 1928 the Wootten-Moulton Studio over Foister's was her Chapel Hill base.

Susie Sharp enters the law school as the only woman in her class

Sharp was the only woman among sixty first-year law students and met harassment in her early weeks. She later became the first woman superior court judge in North Carolina and chief justice of the state supreme court.

Subject: UNC School of Law

J. Walter Mann, a son of Hawfields Church, is ordained and installed pastor of Eno

Mann began preaching at Eno as stated supply in the spring of 1926 and was ordained and installed that October. Forty-eight members joined during his fifteen years, and his wife, Esther Covington Mann, led much of the women's work.

Subject: Eno Presbyterian Church

The Student Council removes the Carolina Magazine editors over the story 'Slaves'

Just as classes began, the council voted to remove the editor and assistant editor for printing a story with a hint of interracial sex. On appeal, a faculty committee Chase appointed called publication bad taste and poor judgment but not misconduct, and set the council's action aside. Durham textile executive Kemp Lewis protested; Chase defended the committee.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Damascus School burns over the Christmas holidays

A committee from the Damascus community told the board in January 1927 that their school had burned during the holidays and asked for a one-teacher school to replace it. The board voted to build and equip a new building for no more than $800.

A revived Poole antievolution bill dies in committee

Representative David Scott Poole brought his measure back in the 1927 General Assembly, and it died in committee. A university law student presented the institution's side, telling legislators the young cared more about where they were going than where they came from.

A two-story brick building goes up at 121-125 East Franklin Street

The building, called the Strowd Building in the survey text, was put up in 1927. After later damage it was rebuilt in its present form in the 1960s, with a balustraded roofline and hooded windows, and in 1992 it housed the Varsity Theatre.

Subject: Varsity Theatre (the first Carolina Theatre)

Annual benefit football games fund Chapel Hill's Black public health nurse

From 1927 a yearly football game between Black teams, sponsored by the University YMCA, raised money for the public health nurse serving Chapel Hill's Black community, a project run by the Community Club. The 1941 game, played on Fetzer Field, involved the Orange County Training School and raised $275 net.

Subject: Orange County Training School / Lincoln High School · University YMCA

Brodie Thompson builds a brick Colonial Revival house for banker Milton Hogan

At 104 North Boundary Street, Thompson built a two-story brick house for Milton and Carrie Hogan with a Doric-columned entrance, modillion cornice and one-story side porches.

People: Brodie Thompson

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.

Charles T. McCormick becomes dean of the law school

Merton L. Ferson had left in 1926 for the Cincinnati deanship, and the man Chase hired to replace him backed out months before the fall term. Chase then named McCormick, on the faculty only a year. The trustees consented but not unanimously, and James A. Gray Jr. moved that they be consulted before the next dean was chosen.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: UNC School of Law

Chase has an institute researcher's study of Winston-Salem Black businesses destroyed

Robinson E. Newcomb, a Brookings graduate student working with the Institute for Research in Social Science, had pieced together Black wage data from pay stubs outside R. J. Reynolds plants. After trustee James A. Gray Jr., a Reynolds vice president, complained, Chase and Odum gathered every copy, and Chase assured Gray he had seen to the destruction of the draft and notes. One copy survived at Brookings.

People: Howard W. Odum

Eno Church holds what it believes was Orange County's first daily vacation Bible school

Eno held the school with Cedar Grove Methodist Church. Summer Bible school became a lasting part of the church's work and was later held at Camp New Hope.

Subject: Eno Presbyterian Church

Guy B. Johnson joins the UNC faculty

After earning his doctorate at UNC in 1927, Johnson joined the university faculty, where he taught sociology and anthropology until 1969.

Hamilton announces plans for a manuscript collection at UNC

Hamilton announced plans for what he first called the National Southern Collection of manuscripts at the university. It became the Southern Historical Collection after Sarah Graham Kenan's gift in 1930.

Subject: UNC Libraries

Phi Kappa Sigma builds a $45,000 chapter house

Phi Kappa Sigma spent about $45,000 on a new house in 1927 during the fraternity building boom that also eased campus housing.

Samuel Selden joins the Carolina Playmakers as technical director

After five years in New York theater, including the Provincetown Playhouse, Selden came to the University of North Carolina in 1927 as technical director of the Carolina Playmakers.

Part of The Carolina Playmakers and the founding of UNC Press · 44 events

Subject: Carolina Playmakers

The Carolina Theatre and Jeff's Campus Confectionery open in the new Sorrell building

When W. B. Sorrell's building was finished, its first tenants were his optometry shop on the west, the Carolina Theatre in the middle and Jeff's Campus Confectionery on the east.

Subject: Varsity Theatre (the first Carolina Theatre)

The Esso company buys the Lockhart house at Churton and Tryon and moves its front half next door

About 1927 the Esso company bought the eighteenth-century Catherine Lockhart house at the northeast corner of Churton and Tryon streets. The front half was moved to the lot next door on East Tryon Street, and the corner became the site of a filling station.

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 General Assembly votes $2,000 for the Efland home for Black girls

The 1927 legislature added $2,000 for the Efland school for delinquent Black girls to its appropriations bill on the House floor. The clubwomen had asked the state to take the home over entirely, which it did not do.

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

The Rice farm is divided in the settlement of Robert Rice's estate

In 1927 the 130-acre farm long tied to the log house was split in settling Robert Rice's estate. The house kept a 65-acre share, later owned by his grandson Joseph A. Rice.

Subject: Paisley-Rice Log House

The legislature allows $625,000 for a new university library

Plans had called for a library costing as much as $862,000. After Chase's pleading, the 1927 General Assembly provided $625,000, just over half of all the capital money for the campus. Robert B. House kept the project on schedule with the Advisory Budget Commission while Chase was abroad.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · R. B. House

Subject: UNC Libraries

Three brick stores are built at 101-107 North Churton Street after a fire

After fire destroyed the Berry Building on North Churton Street, three brick stores went up on the site together. Plaques saved from the old building, crediting Captain John Berry in 1869, were set between the new storefronts with one reading 'Rebuilt 1927.'

William C. Coker plats the Laurel Hill subdivision

On his land southeast of the campus, Coker had T. Felix Hickerson lay out Laurel Hill Road along a ridge beside the golf course, with short cul-de-sacs and large lots. Coker approved every house plan and seems to have sent builders to Atwood and Nash; seven houses were built before the 1929 crash.

People: William Chambers Coker · Thomas Felix Hickerson

Subject: Rocky Ridge Farm Historic District (Laurel Hill)

William C. Coker's Rocky Ridge lot deeds restrict the race of residents

In selling the lots of his Rocky Ridge Farm development, Coker wrote covenants into the deeds that set the number of buildings, the cost of houses and, in the early deeds, the race of the residents. These private restrictions governed the neighborhood before Chapel Hill had residential zoning.

People: William Chambers Coker

Subject: Rocky Ridge Farm Historic District (Laurel Hill)

Zeta Psi moves into a new brick house on Cameron Avenue

The Zeta Psi chapter left its old hall on Fraternity Row for a new Colonial-style brick house on Cameron Avenue designed by Arthur Nash. Kappa Sigma and Kappa Alpha later built on either side of it to form a court.

People: Arthur Cleveland Nash

Zeta Psi, Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sigma jointly buy the Patterson property on Cameron Avenue

The three fraternities bought the Patterson land together to lay out a second fraternity court; Kenneth Ellington later designed the Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sigma houses there with Arthur Nash's advice so they matched Zeta Psi.

Fire destroys the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house

A midnight fire destroyed the Phi Delta Theta house at the northwest corner of the campus, behind the library. Students on the upper floor jumped from windows, and firemen kept the flames from the Kappa Sigma and Sigma Delta Phi houses next door.

The county board auctions seven more schoolhouses closed by consolidation

Early in 1927 the board sold the Pleasant Green, Orange Chapel, Oaks, Union Grove and Meredith schools, most for between $60 and $150, and turned down the bids for New Bethel and Poplar Grove.

First-year law students protest Coates's failing grades

Coates failed fifteen of fifty-two students in personal property and gave seven more Es. Class leaders including Dan K. Moore pressed him to grade on a curve and talked of a boycott; he kept the grades but gave a new examination.

People: Dan K. Moore

Subject: UNC School of Law

Howard Mumford Jones opens the Bull's Head Bookshop in Murphey Hall

English professor Howard Mumford Jones announced the Bull's Head Book Store, a non-profit shop for modern novels and short stories in his office at 214 Murphey Hall. It later moved to the YMCA building, the ground floor of the university library and, in 1968, the Daniels Building.

Subject: UNC Libraries · University YMCA

UNC library worker Elizabeth Janet Gray sells her first book

Gray, a member of the University library staff, signed a contract with Doubleday, Page & Co. for Meredith's Ann, a story for girls set in the New Hampshire mountains. She went on to write several more books while living in Chapel Hill.

Subject: UNC Libraries

Joseph H. Jones deeds a quarter acre of his farm to the Jones Grove church trustees

John Jones's father, Joseph H. Jones, gave a quarter-acre of his farm to the trustees of the new Jones Grove congregation: his son John, Joe Brooks and Joe's brother William Brooks. The deed also marks the line of the Ridge Road School lot to the south.

People: Joe Bethel Brooks

Subject: Jones Grove Missionary Baptist Church

James Weldon Johnson speaks at the YMCA's Institute of Human Relations

Harry F. Comer's weeklong institute, approved by Chase, brought speakers on race, labor and world affairs. Johnson, NAACP executive secretary, spoke in Memorial Hall and met classes. History chair J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton walked out when Howard Odum introduced him as 'Mister Johnson' and protested to Chase, while a Tar Heel editorial by David Donald Carroll welcomed the visit.

People: Howard W. Odum · J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton

Subject: Memorial Hall · University YMCA

Chapel Hill Community Club women question local legislators on the women's bills

The Community Club's legislative committee asked the state women's lobby how Orange County's legislators had voted on measures backed by women's organizations, including the Australian ballot, child labor and the Efland school for Black girls, and then voted to write each legislator for a statement of his position.

W. B. Sorrell begins building a moving-picture theatre on Franklin Street

Contractor Charles Martindale began preparing the ground for the theatre on the north side of Franklin Street next to Berman's store. It was leased to Publix-Saenger Theatres and was expected to open in September 1927, with Sorrell's jewelry and optical shop in one of its two storefronts.

People: Charlie Lee Martindale

Contractor Brodie Thompson is elected to the Chapel Hill board of aldermen

In a light vote Zeb P. Council was elected mayor, and P. L. Burch with 127 votes, R. D. W. Connor with 121 and contractor Brodie Thompson with 117 were chosen councilmen. A petition had put Thompson forward as the only declared candidate for alderman.

People: R. D. W. Connor

Press governors object to Paul Green's introduction to Congaree Sketches

Called before Chase and the press's board, assistant editor William T. Couch heard Royster and the others condemn Green's introduction, which said neither race could leave the ditch until whites gave Blacks a hand. Couch pointed out that some 150 advance copies were already out, and the book went out as printed. Six months later, at Chase's order, unsold copies went to a commercial publisher, which reprinted it without Green's introduction.

People: William T. Couch · Paul Green · Harry Woodburn Chase · James Finch Royster

The Carolina Magazine prints an issue of work by Black writers, including Langston Hughes's 'Mulatto'

The student magazine's 'Negro Number' carried only work by African American writers. Hughes's 'Mulatto' drew none of the reaction that the story 'Slaves' had caused the fall before, though both dealt with the same subject.

Mack and Julie Rigsbee buy lots in the Bankhead Forest development

The Rigsbees bought lots 72 to 75 in Block D of the Bankhead Forest property east of Hillsborough in June 1927 and the adjoining lots 68 to 71 in April 1928. Their stone country house and its outbuildings went up on the combined lots.

Subject: Rigsbee’s Rock House

Trustees appoint Sallie Belle Marks and Cecilia Hatrick Bason, the first women on the faculty

With little discussion, the June trustees made both women assistant professors as part of a push to improve teacher training. Marks became supervising principal of the elementary grades at the university's training school in Chapel Hill; Bason worked for the Extension Division from Asheville. Once women were on the faculty, women graduates could join the American Association of University Women.

People: N. W. Walker

Trustees name the women's dormitory for Cornelia Phillips Spencer

At the same meeting that appointed the first women faculty, the trustees named the campus's one women's dormitory, in use for two years, Spencer Hall.

A temporary radio station, WKBG, begins a week of broadcasts from the Pickwick Theatre

A traveling station set up on a stage in front of the Pickwick screen to broadcast music and talks by students and townspeople for a week, opening with the village ministers on a Sunday evening.

People: Luther James Phipps

Subject: Pickwick Theatre

The county board hires a rural school supervisor at the urging of Edgar W. Knight

After Edgar W. Knight explained the value of a rural supervisor, the board authorized one at $2,400 a year plus $600 for travel, provided the state paid half. Mary Hyman held the post by 1929 and was kept on in 1931 over some local opposition, but the board did not rehire her after her 1932 report.

People: Edgar Wallace Knight

Fire destroys the Everett building, a meat market on King Street

A fire that started soon after midnight destroyed R. O. Everett's two-story brick building on King Street, which held a meat market with roomers upstairs. A bucket brigade and fire trucks from Durham and Mebane kept it from spreading; the loss was put at about $5,000.

Orange County operates under a budget for the first time

After 175 years without a budget or central accounts, the county adopted its first budget for fiscal 1927-1928 under the new County Fiscal Control Act. That year it spent $3,363.21 on the county home and farm and $730.50 on outside poor relief.

Subject: Orange County poorhouse (County Home)

Professor Ernest R. Groves buys the Marshall house in the Gimghoul colony

Ernest R. Groves, newly come to UNC's school of public welfare, buys the Marshall house in the Gimghoul colony. He and his wife Gladys Groves, both writers on marriage and the family, lived there into the 1930s and added a small stone library.

Subject: Gimghoul Castle and neighborhood

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.

Alexander H. Graham inherits Montrose on the death of his father, John W. Graham

When John W. Graham died in 1928, Montrose passed to his son Alexander H. 'Sandy' Graham, later lieutenant governor.

People: John W. Graham

Subject: Montrose

Black stonemasons build the stone walls of Rocky Ridge Farm

The curving walls of random-coursed stone that line Country Club Road, Laurel Hill Road and Laurel Hill Circle were built alongside the houses by local Black masons, among them James Blackwell and Jesse Jones.

Subject: Rocky Ridge Farm Historic District (Laurel Hill)

Botanist Henry Roland Totten builds a Tudor Revival house on Laurel Hill Road

Botanist Henry Roland Totten, a protege of W. C. Coker, and his wife built a stuccoed Tudor Revival house at 110 Laurel Hill Road, with one wing in stone. Plans were drawn in June 1928, the excavation was finished by early August, and the house was finished about 1929.

Botanist John Couch builds an Elizabethan Revival house on Ridge Road

Botanist John Couch, a colleague of Coker, built a dormered two-story frame house at 5 Ridge Road in Laurel Hill, its front wing lit by a broad bay window. The 1989 nomination credits the design to the Durham architect George Watts Carr.

People: John N. Couch

Chapel Hill homes and businesses get street numbers for mail delivery

Numbers were given to residences and places of business on the street so the post office could deliver to them.

Contractor Charlie Lee Martindale opens an airfield north of Chapel Hill

Martindale bought a 50-acre plot from philosophy professor Horace Williams and laid out an airfield he called Martindale Field. By 1931 it was known as the Chapel Hill airport.

People: Henry Horace Williams

Subject: Horace Williams Airport

Don S. Matheson becomes Orange County's full-time farm agent

After years of on-and-off support for extension work, the county hired Matheson full time. Over the next quarter century he moved farmers from soil-depleting row crops toward grass and livestock.

People: Don S. Matheson

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.

Subject: Carr Mill

Fire destroys Ralph Pendergraft's Chevrolet agency on West Franklin Street

The frame building of the Chevrolet dealership Pendergraft had opened at Franklin and Roberson streets burned. A small brick building went up on the site and later housed a grocery and an auto service.

Gustav Harrer builds a shingled house on Laurel Hill Road

The Harrer house, a two-story, L-shaped Colonial Revival dwelling with shingle siding, is one of the first houses of Rocky Ridge Farm's opening building period, 1928-30.

H. Scott and Alice Cates build a stone house on South Hillsborough Avenue

A Colonial Revival house faced in rough-coursed stone was built for H. Scott and Alice Cates at South Hillsborough Avenue and West Margaret Lane. It is one of only two stone houses in Hillsborough.

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.

Hillsborough's Black Presbyterian church closes

The small congregation had never been strong in numbers or money, and as its older members died there were too few younger ones to carry on. It closed about 1928.

John Maddry builds a bungalow on his Airport Road dairy farm

Maddry put up the story-and-a-half bungalow at 1500 Airport Road in place of an older house and milked 25 cows by hand. Eleven log and frame outbuildings, some older than the house, still stood in 1992.

Latin professor George Howe builds a Tudor Revival house on Buttons Road

George Howe's stuccoed house at 2 Buttons Road in Laurel Hill takes its medieval character from a steep hipped roof, dormers, front wings and casement windows.

People: George Howe

Mattie Compton Vernon becomes the first burial in Mount Adar's cemetery

Mattie Compton Vernon, a charter member who had married the Rev. John H. Vernon in 1895, died in 1928 and was the first person buried in the Mount Adar Baptist Church cemetery.

Rupert B. Vance joins the UNC sociology faculty and the Institute for Research in Social Science

After taking his doctorate at UNC in 1928, Vance was appointed to the staff of Howard W. Odum's Institute for Research in Social Science and the Department of Sociology. He was named Kenan Professor in 1945.

People: Howard W. Odum

The Lower Quad dormitories are finished and named

By September 1928 the four three-story red brick men's dormitories of the Lower Quad stood in Battle Woods, soon to be named Aycock, Graham, Everett and Lewis. The quad had gone up from 1924; Everett was not a later addition.

The fraternity slate wins 28 of 30 elected campus offices

In the fall 1928 elections the fraternity political machine carried twenty-eight of thirty posts, making its hand-picked "frame-up" slates impossible to deny; a backlash followed but the machine survived.

UNC lets fraternities pledge freshmen in their first weeks

Until 1928 students could not join a fraternity before their sophomore year; the new rule let houses pledge freshmen on arrival and strengthened the fraternity grip on campus elections.

W. C. Coker buys Dr. Jones's Gothic cottage, which becomes the Chi Psi fraternity house

In 1928 W. C. Coker bought the property at 321 West Cameron Avenue, and the 1850s Gothic cottage of Dr. Johnston Blakeley Jones became the Chi Psi fraternity's house.

People: William Chambers Coker

Fire destroys the Pickard Hotel on Franklin Street

A fire that started in the attic destroyed the old Pickard Hotel late on Saturday night, January 7, 1928, at a loss of about $20,000. Firemen thought they had put it out, but were called back to find the whole roof burning. The hotel, built by the Pickards, was then owned and run by Colonel Uzzell.

Subject: Pickard Hotel

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.

People: Toney Strayhorn · Alfred David Barbee Sr.

White Rock Church is organized

Laura Atwater, Henry Thompson and others organized White Rock Church, a United Holy Church congregation, and built it the same year. R. C. Turner, pastor of the Temple of Truth, was also its first pastor.

People: R. C. Turner

Jones Grove Missionary Baptist Church dedicates its first sanctuary

Members and neighbors built a front-gable weatherboarded church, finished early in 1928, with Buck Jacobs giving a large cash gift, William Brooks the sand and Aldolphus Hester the logs; John Jones hauled lumber in a white neighbor's truck. Rev. Joe B. Brooks led the dedication.

People: Joe Bethel Brooks

Subject: Jones Grove Missionary Baptist Church

Chase's memorandum warns faculty against advocacy that embarrasses the university

Under attack from textile editor David Clark, Chase sent Howard Odum, Dudley D. Carroll and Frank Graham a discussion memo on proper activities for social scientists. Faculty whose causes involved colleagues in general embarrassment should leave, he wrote; in North Carolina such causes included certain taxes, labor organizing, racial equality and socialism.

People: Howard W. Odum · Dudley Dewitt Carroll · Frank Porter Graham

The Playmakers publish the first issue of The Carolina Play-Book

The Carolina Playmakers began The Carolina Play-Book, a small quarterly on building a native theatre, in March 1928. It was one of three American theatre journals shown at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago.

Subject: Carolina Playmakers

The Southern Regional Conference on the Drama meets in the Playmakers Theatre

Drama leaders from colleges and civic groups across the South met at the Playmakers Theatre for a regional conference in April 1928. It was one of two Chapel Hill festivals the book counts as reaching beyond the state.

Subject: Smith Hall (Playmakers Theatre)

Fire guts the old Zeta Psi house on Fraternity Row

The old Zeta Psi house by the Mary Ann Smith dormitory caught fire from a chimney at about noon on a Sunday. The Phi Delta Thetas, renting it after losing their own house in 1927, were burned out a second time; damage passed $4,000.

The trustees name a Lower Quad dormitory Graham Residence Hall for John W. Graham

Meeting shortly after his death, the university trustees named the dormitory finished in 1924 on the Lower Quad for John Washington Graham, class of 1857 and a trustee since 1876. They praised his service at the 1864 Battle of Plymouth, where Confederate troops massacred Black soldiers and people who had fled slavery.

University trustees give Chapel Hill three more acres for the cemetery

Answering an aldermen's petition of June 11, 1928 about crowding, the trustees granted two acres on the east, laid out as Sections III and IV, and an acre on the south that extended the Black Sections A and B. Lot sales went into a maintenance fund overseen by a joint town and faculty committee.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

A model law office and courtroom are fitted out in Manning Hall

Through the Law School Association, Coates had lawyers around the state pay for a model courtroom and a practice law office stocked with real forms, so students could join theory to practice. Coates had put $2,600 of his own money into the office over four years.

People: Albert Coates · Robert W. Madry

Subject: UNC School of Law

Chapel Hill adopts its first zoning ordinance

The Board of Aldermen unanimously adopted an ordinance dividing the town into two residence zones and two business zones, with height limits, setbacks, yard rules and a board of adjustment. The published text makes no reference to race.

Meeting in the unfinished Graham Memorial, trustees add courses in religion

Chase seated the trustees on folding chairs in the empty lounge of Graham Memorial to shame alumni over the unfinished building. There they adopted the faculty's proposal for courses in the history and literature of religion with one dissenting vote, ending nearly ten years of debate.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: Graham Memorial

A new pipe line to the town plant ends the Battle Park sewage plant

Under an agreement among the university, the town and the Gimghouls, a pipe line to the municipal plant in Strowd's lowgrounds was finished, and the park's disposal plant was abandoned so the woods could be restored.

Subject: Battle Park

The Southland Motor Company opens a Studebaker and Erskine agency on Rosemary Street

The Southland Motor Company, a Raleigh firm headed by J. F. Cooper, opened for business in the building near the fire station lately used by the Burroughs Motor Company, with Herbert Pendergraft in charge. It sold Studebaker and Erskine cars and ran a service station and repair shop.

George H. Lawrence becomes the county's first full-time welfare superintendent

The commissioners and school board, in joint session, elected Lawrence full time. For years he worked with only a part-time clerk, from an old university-owned house in Chapel Hill.

People: George H. Lawrence

Gilbert W. Ray becomes Orange County's first county accountant

Under the 1927 County Fiscal Control Act the county hired Ray as accountant and purchasing agent, and he set up its first working system of books and central buying. Ray stayed in the job until August 31, 1947.

People: Ira Ward

George Lawrence describes the county home near Efland in the Chapel Hill Weekly

George Lawrence described the county home two and a half miles north of Efland: two narrow brick buildings, probably of 1824, heated by fireplaces and lit by kerosene, with no plumbing. It held 19 residents and two prisoners, and white and Black residents ate in separate rooms.

People: George H. Lawrence

Subject: Orange County poorhouse (County Home)

The university hosts a national conference on education in the South

More than thirty college and university presidents, a dozen state superintendents, librarians, governors and others met at Chapel Hill. The gathering tied the university to leading educators nationwide and supported its new emphasis on training high school teachers, principals and superintendents.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Chase's annual report tallies a decade of growth at the university

More than $5 million in state money had built nine dormitories, five classroom buildings and laboratories. State operating funds had risen from $215,000 to $880,000; faculty above instructor from 66 to 158; the Graduate School from 40 to 205 students; and the library from 88,316 to 193,867 volumes. Enrollment had reached 2,825 and the press had issued fifty titles.

Chi Psi announces a Norman-style house for West Cameron Avenue

Chi Psi announced plans for a $50,000 Norman-style stone house by the university architects Atwood and Nash on the old McCauley place on Cameron Avenue. The design broke with the campus's Colonial theme: steep slate roof, casement windows with stone trim, an arched entrance and a stone terrace. The old McCauley house, the chapter's home, burned on Christmas night 1929, and in November 1930 the chapter was still without a new house.

People: William Chambers Coker · Arthur Cleveland Nash · Thomas C. Atwood

A workmen's compensation law that Frank Graham and Harry Wolf helped write passes

Sixteen earlier bills had failed, but with Governor O. Max Gardner's backing the 1929 General Assembly passed a no-fault workmen's compensation act. Frank Graham lobbied for it, and he and economics professor Harry Wolf helped draft it; the governor's support kept textile interests from objecting to Graham's role.

People: O. Max Gardner

Cornelia Spencer Love designs and builds her own house in Laurel Hill

Cornelia Spencer Love, granddaughter of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, planned her own one-story frame house in Laurel Hill; the architect Arthur Nash contributed the flared roof ends and a little porch.

People: Arthur Cleveland Nash

Drama professor Preston Farrar builds a house with an outdoor stage on Laurel Hill Road

UNC drama professor Preston Farrar built a two-story stucco house in the manner of an English cottage. It had indoor and outdoor stages for rehearsals and small productions, including a stone terrace used as a theatre, and a specimen garden.

Eben and Ruby Merritt open a gas station on the Pittsboro Road

Eben and Ruby Merritt began running an Esso gas station on the Pittsboro Road south of Chapel Hill in 1929 and kept it for nearly fifty years. It is the business that became Merritt's Store and Grill.

People: Eben G. Merritt

Subject: Merritt's Store and Grill

Elizabeth Janet Gray marries Morgan Vining of the University Extension division

Gray married Morgan Fisher Vining, associate director of the University's Extension division, in Chapel Hill. The couple moved to New York in 1932, and he was killed in an automobile accident in 1933.

Eno Cotton Mill installs new machinery and switches to combed yarn

New machinery went in at the Eno mill in 1929, and combed yarn replaced coarse carded yarn. Broadcloth shirting and corduroy became its main products.

Subject: Eno Mill

Gaines AME Chapel builds its church at Efland

The Black congregation of Gaines AME Chapel at Efland builds its church in 1929. It was covered in brick veneer in 1964.

George Livas and James Gust go into partnership at the Carolina Confectionary

George Livas formed a partnership with James Gust in 1929 and began operating the Carolina Confectionary as a restaurant as well; it became the Carolina Coffee Shop.

Herbert Ledbetter and Clarence Pickard open Ledbetter-Pickard Stationery

Ledbetter, a former clerk at Alfred Williams's stationery, and Clarence "Doc" Pickard, whose grocery had failed, opened the store in part of Foister's photo shop. It did well enough to move to a larger space in 1932.

Kappa Alpha begins a new house on Cameron Avenue

Kappa Alpha, whose old hall stood on Fraternity Row, started a pink granite Colonial house on Cameron Avenue designed by Kenneth Ellington. With Kappa Sigma next door it flanked the Zeta Psi house to form a court.

Mack and Julie Rigsbee build a white-quartz country house east of Hillsborough

Around 1929 the Rigsbees built a rambling story-and-a-half house faced with white quartz on two wooded acres east of Hillsborough, with a quartz wall, garage, pump house and swimming pool to match. Local stories say the couple sold whiskey and hid it in the roof.

Subject: Rigsbee’s Rock House

Mary Bayley Pratt, namesake of Chapel Hill's public library, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Mary Bayley Pratt (1874-1929), for whom the Chapel Hill public library of the time was named, was buried in the family plot she shares with Joseph Hyde Pratt.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Odum's institute wins a $240,000 Rockefeller grant

The Institute for Research in Social Science secured $240,000 from a Rockefeller foundation for studies of social and child welfare, crime and justice, taxation, industry and cooperatives.

Robert Oscar Cate builds a bungalow and dairy barn on his farm near Chapel Hill

In 1929 Robert Oscar Cate finished a large gambrel-roofed dairy barn and milk sheds on his farm near Chapel Hill and built a story-and-a-half bungalow on the rise above them. It is a clear case of a farm turning to dairying in the 1920s.

Shepperd Strudwick resigns as president of Bellevue, and L. E. Beard takes over

After twenty-five years as president, Shepperd Strudwick stepped down in 1929, the year its stock value fell from $500,000 to $419,600. L. E. Beard succeeded him and his partner Norfleet Webb as president and treasurer.

Subject: Bellevue Mill

Sophia MacNider, who kept a boarding house and preparatory school on Franklin Street, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Sophia MacNider (1846-1929), who ran a boarding house and a preparatory school in her Franklin Street home, was buried in the cemetery.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

The Beta Theta Pi fraternity house is completed on South Columbia Street

The Beta Theta Pi house at 114 South Columbia Street, apart from the fraternity courts, is a brick house laid in Flemish bond with a slate roof and dormers, a Doric portico across the front and wings on each side, set back on a wide lawn.

Subject: Beta Theta Pi Fraternity House

The Chapel Hill recorder's court is established

The new court heard all misdemeanors from Chapel Hill Township every Tuesday, with a judge elected by town voters and a clerk and prosecutor named by the aldermen.

The Efland Home's farm cuts its yearly cost per girl

The home's 1928-1929 report showed the girls working ten acres, 24 fruit trees and a small stock of mule, cows, hogs and chickens, which helped bring the cost per resident down from about $598 in 1928 to $182.50 in 1929. That year fifteen girls were paroled and eleven placed in working homes; assistant matron Margaret Cromwell taught classes and Mebane physician Thomas David Tyson came when needed.

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

The Gothic cottage serving as the Chi Psi house burns

Dr. Jones's board-and-batten cottage at 321 West Cameron Avenue burned in 1929, a year after it became the Chi Psi fraternity house. The fraternity's Tudor Revival house now stands on the site.

The University Press publishes Harriet L. Herring's study of mill villages

Herring, a research associate of the Institute for Research in Social Science, had visited 322 of the state's roughly 500 mills after the manufacturers refused formal cooperation. It was the first systematic look at mill communities. Chase mailed copies to leading textile men, including Charles A. Cannon, as a model of social research.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

The university gives Robert W. Winston an honorary Doctor of Laws

UNC conferred an honorary LL.D. on Robert Watson Winston, class of 1879, in 1929, while he was living and writing in Chapel Hill after his return as a freshman.

The university names Bingham Hall for Robert Bingham

In 1929 the university named Bingham Hall on its Chapel Hill campus for Robert Bingham, class of 1857, an alumnus who often spoke at campus events and helped reopen the university in 1875.

People: Robert Worth Bingham

The county board funds a two-room Morris Grove School, with Black families paying part

The school board approved a gable-roofed, two-room frame school at Morris Grove in Chapel Hill Township. Black residents gave $250 toward it and supplied the lumber, and Louis Webb and Labon Hogan built it; the building survives, long vacant.

The university sets aside land on the Pittsboro highway for fraternity houses

The university set aside a strip on the west side of the Pittsboro highway for a new fraternity colony, taking fraternity lots on old Fraternity Row in exchange. Phi Delta Theta and Pi Kappa Phi began building there first and moved into their brick houses that fall.

Trustees approve a library school paid for by a $100,000 Carnegie grant

At commencement Chase won the trustees' permission to set up a school to train librarians in the new library, with its first five years funded by a $100,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: UNC Libraries

Coates holds a Law School Association conference on criminal justice

About thirty lawyers, judges and state officials, including Attorney General D. G. Brummitt and Justices George W. Connor and Willis J. Brogden, met at the law school and split up sections of the American Law Institute model code to begin a new state code of criminal procedure.

People: George Whitfield Connor

Subject: UNC School of Law

County welfare superintendent notes Orange has no health officer or public health nurse

In a letter to the Chapel Hill Weekly, county welfare superintendent George H. Lawrence wrote that Orange County had no county health officer, no county health department and no public health nurse, and that little preventive health work was being done. He contrasted Orange with Vance County, which had a health officer, a hospital and a tuberculosis sanatorium.

People: George H. Lawrence

The Daily Tar Heel counts 31 fraternities with over 900 members and $500,000 in property

By the end of the 1920s about a quarter of UNC students belonged to one of thirty-one national fraternities, whose houses and land were valued at around half a million dollars.

Chase asks alumni to build a private endowment for the university

With state money in doubt, Chase broke with the unwritten rule that state schools left private gifts to the church colleges and asked alumni to build an endowment alongside tax support. The Durham Herald endorsed the appeal, but four weeks later the stock market crashed and little came of it.

Chase refuses a mill official's demand that Frank Graham be fired

After the Southern Textile Bulletin wrongly placed Graham at a Communist Labor Day rally, an official of the company that owned Gastonia's Loray Mill asked Governor Gardner to have him dismissed. In the reply Gardner passed along, Chase said Graham had been in New York and that faculty had the same right as other citizens to form and voice opinions, and he would resist any censorship of those seeking change by lawful means.

People: Frank Porter Graham · O. Max Gardner

Chase seeks money for a school of public affairs to train state and local officials

Chase asked Governor Gardner to help find about $30,000 a year in private money for a school to train city and county officials, public health and public safety officers and others, saying none existed in the South. Albert Coates's Institute of Government soon took up the same mission.

People: O. Max Gardner

The Playmakers stage Loretto Carroll Bailey's mill play Job's Kinfolks, their first original full-length play

Job's Kinfolks, a three-act play about mill workers by Loretto Carroll Bailey, ran for three nights in November 1929. It heads the book's list of original full-length plays produced by the Playmakers.

People: Loretto Carroll Bailey

Subject: Carolina Playmakers

Thomas C. Atwood reports that Memorial Hall could collapse

After President Chase closed Memorial Hall over a bulge in its slate roof, university architect Thomas C. Atwood found the bases of the wooden roof arches rotted to powder. In a late November report to the building committee he warned that the building could fall at any minute and endanger passersby.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: Memorial Hall

Will W. Alexander delivers the Weil Lectures at the University

Will W. Alexander, then with the Commission on Cooperation between the Races, gave the three Weil Lectures at the University. His announced topics were "Truth and Fiction about the Old South," "The New Rulers" and "The Older Values and the New Life."

Marie Clay Clinton of Charlotte becomes interim superintendent of the Efland Home

Marie Clay Clinton, a Charlotte widow active in the federation's work but not a trained teacher or social worker, was named interim superintendent in December 1929. Her assistant Bertha Vincent, a Scotia Seminary graduate, taught the classes, and both women served as house mothers.

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

A Phillips grandchild sets a headstone for Dilsey Craig

A small granite headstone was placed over the grave of Dilsey Craig, who died in 1894 after sixty years enslaved, mostly in the household of Professor James Phillips. Its inscription says a Phillips grandchild erected it, and its style suggests the 1930s.

People: James Phillips

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

A brick building that housed the post office goes up at 118 South Churton Street

A one-story beige brick commercial building is put up about 1930 at 118 South Churton Street and is labeled post office on the 1943 Sanborn map. The post office moved to a new building farther down South Churton Street in 1958.

A new Memorial Hall with a Doric portico replaces the Victorian auditorium

In January 1930 the university decided to raze Old Memorial Hall and build a larger auditorium to plans by Atwood and Nash. The new Colonial Revival hall, with three entrances under a monumental Doric portico facing Cameron Avenue, stood by early 1931, one of three buildings the university completed in the early Depression under Frank Porter Graham.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Alexander H. Graham chairs the committee that chooses Frank Porter Graham as UNC president

Alexander H. Graham chaired the committee that hired Frank Porter Graham as president of the University of North Carolina in 1930. His papers hold the committee correspondence from February to May 1930.

People: Frank Porter Graham

Alpha Tau Omega builds a Tudor Gothic house on East Franklin Street

Architect Courtland Curtis designed Alpha Tau Omega's house on East Franklin Street in Tudor Gothic, one of the few big fraternity houses of the era not in the Colonial Revival mode.

An owner of Durham's Erwin Cotton Mill builds a log retreat above New Hope Creek

In the 1930s a log house was built on a steep ridge over New Hope Creek, reportedly as a getaway for Mr. Erwin of the Erwin Cotton Mill in Durham. Older log outbuildings, among them a tobacco barn, mark an earlier house site.

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.

Clay Hogan builds a large dairy complex off Homestead Road

In the 1930s a notable group of frame dairy buildings went up for Clay Hogan on what is now Lake Hogan Farm Road. By 1992 the farmhouse had apparently been lost.

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.

Subject: Carr Mill

Frank Graham circulates his Industrial Bill of Rights

Answering the 1929 Gastonia strike deaths, Graham gathered more than four hundred signers across the state, among them Odum, Branson, Poteat and Walter Murphy, though not Chase. He made it the theme of his mid-April 1930 address as president of the North Carolina Conference for Social Service, ignoring advice to soften it while the trustees searched for a president.

Herman G. Baity serves as dean of UNC's School of Engineering

Baity, head of sanitary engineering since 1928, was dean of the School of Engineering from 1930 until 1936, when the sanitary engineering department moved to the School of Public Health. He chaired it there until 1955.

Subject: UNC School of Public Health

Johnson-Moore Hardware goes bankrupt and Orange Hardware takes its place

The hardware store that had succeeded Chapel Hill Hardware failed in 1930, one of several Franklin Street businesses lost in the Depression, and Orange Hardware took it over.

Kappa Sigma builds a $35,000 house on the Cameron Avenue fraternity court

Kappa Sigma's new house, designed by Kenneth Ellington to match its neighbors on the Cameron Avenue court, cost about $35,000.

Miss Ruffin's will leaves Sans Souci to Samuel T. Latta

Under the will of Miss Ruffin, proved on March 16 of a year in the 1930s, Sans Souci and her other property went to Samuel T. Latta, who was living there in 1971.

Subject: Sans Souci

Nash retires and leaves Chapel Hill, staying on as consulting architect

Nash retired in 1930 and moved to Washington, D.C., but continued as the university's consulting architect until 1953, advising on later campus work.

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.

Orange County consolidates most of its small white schools

After a county survey by the Board of Education and Superintendent Claytor, most small white schools were merged by 1930, with buses provided. As late as 1925 the county still had 21 one-teacher white schools and several one-teacher Black schools.

People: R. H. Claytor

Postmaster, mayor and state senator William Pritchard is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

William Pritchard (1850-1930), Chapel Hill postmaster and mayor and a state senator, was buried in the cemetery.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Russell Gruman builds a Dutch Colonial house on Laurel Hill Circle

A gambrel-roofed Dutch Colonial Revival house of rough brick and shingle, with a matching garage, went up for Russell Gruman at the close of the district's first building period.

St. Mary's Chapel stops holding regular services during the Depression

Its members were moved to the rolls of St. Matthew's in Hillsborough.

Subject: St. Mary’s Chapel

Students boycott the Carolina Theatre over ticket prices

University students stayed away from the Carolina Theatre on Franklin Street to push the price of admission down from forty cents to thirty.

Subject: Varsity Theatre (the first Carolina Theatre)

Texaco builds a service station at Franklin and Columbia after the town lets nine elms come down

To put a station on the southeast corner, Texaco needed nine old elms cut. The town agreed, with reluctance, once the company promised a tasteful yellow building with roses in the planting.

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 Dubose estate builds Colonial Revival tenant houses near the Durham County line

In the 1930s the Dubose estate put up several Colonial Revival tenant houses along NC 54 Business just inside Orange County, joining older tenant dwellings from about 1910 and the late 1800s.

The Efland Home's eighteen girls come from ten counties across the state

In 1930 the home held eighteen girls, all committed by juvenile courts, from Buncombe, Carteret, Durham, Forsyth, Guilford, Mecklenburg, Pasquotank, Robeson, Vance and Wake counties; Durham sent the most, five. It was then one of ten such institutions for Black girls in the United States.

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

The Hillsborough Manufacturing Company builds a warehouse and woodworking shop on North Churton Street

Around 1930 the Hillsborough Manufacturing Company puts up a building supply warehouse at 503-505 North Churton Street and a woodworking shop next door at 507-513, both on the 1943 Sanborn map. The warehouse was made into two apartments in the 1950s and the shop into five apartments by the 1960s.

The Martin School is consolidated into Pleasant Grove Union School

The Martin School, attended almost entirely by Indian children, was merged in 1930 with several other small schools to form Pleasant Grove Union School. The change was unpopular in the community because the school would no longer be exclusively Indian, though it brought better facilities and was in time accepted.

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 Mercantile Center building on North Churton Street is remodeled in the Spanish Mission style as a dime store

The two-story brick building at 121 North Churton Street, put up soon after 1911, is remodeled in the 1930s with a tiled pent roof on large brackets, apparently when it became the dime store. Its storefront dates from 1988.

The University gives up its Service Plants appliance business to two employees

The UNC Service Plants, which supplied water, power and laundry, had begun selling electrical goods. After the state barred the University from competing with private business, Harvey D. Bennett and Frank C. Blocksidge took over the shop in the same place.

The county board approves H. F. Pickett as principal of Murphey School

The Orange County board approved H. F. Pickett as principal of Murphey School, which taught grades one through seven with three or four teachers, one of them doubling as principal. He is the first principal the record names.

Subject: Murphey School

The university's Black janitors back John J. Parker's Supreme Court nomination

The Negro Janitors Association of the University of North Carolina, forty-six members, supported President Hoover's nomination of Parker, a UNC alumnus and federal appeals judge, which the Senate rejected amid opposition over his segregationist statements as a 1920 candidate for governor.

Thomas Atwood's new firm, Atwood and Weeks, moves from Chapel Hill to Durham

With campus building stopped by the 1929 crash and Nash retiring, Atwood took H. Raymond Weeks as his partner and moved the practice to Durham. Weeks succeeded Nash as university architect, with Nash advising him until 1953.

People: Thomas C. Atwood · Howard Raymond Weeks

University students plant donated fruit trees and grapevines at the Efland Home

In the spring of 1930 Lindley Nurseries gave the Efland Home 75 fruit trees and 25 grapevines, and University of North Carolina students set them out on the farm.

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

Chase resigns to become president of the University of Illinois

The evening before, a full-dress reception at the Carolina Inn marked ten years since Chase's inauguration, with Governor Gardner already holding his resignation. When the Illinois trustees elected Chase the next day, Gardner announced it from Raleigh. The Illinois post reportedly paid $20,000, twice his salary.

People: R. B. House · O. Max Gardner

The Daily Tar Heel raises a relief fund for Orange County's poor

As hard times reached the county, the student paper asked students and townspeople for gifts. From January 31 through May 12, 1930, it collected $202.73, enough to give food to more than forty families.

Subject: The Daily Tar Heel

UNC tears down the old Memorial Hall

The first Memorial Hall, closed in the fall of 1929 and declared unsafe in December 1929, was torn down in February 1930 after the trustees voted on January 28, 1930 to replace it with a new auditorium on the same site.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Farmers of Durham and nearby counties organize the Farmers Exchange cooperative

About 400 farmers and farm leaders formed the Farmers Exchange in March 1930 to market farm products and buy supplies at cost. John Sprunt Hill of Durham backed it, and by 1952 it served about 4,100 members in five counties including Orange.

People: John Sprunt Hill

Subject: Farmers Mutual Exchange

Black janitors organize the UNC Janitors' Association

Facing a threatened 10 percent pay cut, janitors Kennon Cheek, Frank Hairston, Elliot Washington and Melvin Rich organized the Janitors' Association, with Cheek as its first president. Its early gains included a week's paid vacation and showers in the janitors' bathrooms.

People: Kennon Cheek

Howard Mumford Jones leaves Chapel Hill for the University of Michigan

Howard Mumford Jones, a member of the university's English faculty since coming from the University of Texas in 1925, left for the University of Michigan in 1930 and handed his syndicated book-review column, The Literary Lantern, to Paul Green and his wife.

People: Paul Green

The Friendly Cafeteria opens on East Franklin Street in the old University Cafeteria space

The Webber brothers of High Point, who ran Friendly Cafeterias in several North Carolina cities, bought the fixtures of the failed University Cafeteria at auction and reopened the space as a Friendly Cafeteria able to serve about 200 people.

The university loses 20 percent of its next year's state budget

A month after Chase warned Governor Gardner that the university was at a crisis, $175,000 was cut from its budget for the coming year, a 20 percent reduction deeper than any Chase had seen as president.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · O. Max Gardner

Trustees elect Frank Porter Graham president of the university

Meeting in Howell Hall during commencement, the trustees voted without nominations. R. D. W. Connor led the first ballot 26 to 20, but Graham took a majority of 47 on the fourth, and the vote was made unanimous. Found walking by Battle Park and brought in, Graham asked that Connor be chosen instead, then accepted.

People: R. D. W. Connor · O. Max Gardner

Commencement is held outdoors at the Davie Poplar, and Chase receives an honorary degree

With Memorial Hall torn down, the 339 graduates received diplomas at a stage by the Davie Poplar, seated on the old hall's benches as loudspeakers in the trees carried John H. Finley's address. Honorary degrees went to Ellen Glasgow, Martha Berry, Francis P. Venable and Governor Gardner, and Gardner conferred one on Chase that the trustees had voted without consulting the faculty.

People: Ellen Glasgow · Francis Preston Venable · O. Max Gardner

Subject: McCorkle Place (with the Davie Poplar)

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.

Subject: Jordan’s Grove School · Aycock School

Alexander H. Graham builds a stone law office on Churton Street

Graham, a former speaker of the state House, tore down the small frame building that held his law office and began a one-story building of local stone with a columned front for himself and his new partner Bonner Sawyer. Its cornerstone reads "Graham Building 1930."

Chapel Hill charity circle reports taking a patient to Lincoln Hospital in Durham

The Burden Bearers' Circle of the King's Daughters and Sons of Chapel Hill reported that it had taken a man to Lincoln Hospital in Durham for an operation and driven him back weekly for two months of treatment. The circle also made gowns for the hospital.

An Efland merchant kills a robber outside the Bank of Efland

A holdup at the Bank of Efland failed when Mrs. George Shambley warned merchant Carl Forrest, a bank officer, who shot robber Bruce Carpenter of Durham as he came out. His partner escaped by car, and a coroner's jury found Forrest acted in self-defense.

Subject: Bank of Efland

St. Mary's School burns and the county builds a new one

Fire destroyed St. Mary's School on November 3, 1930. With $2,500 from the county commissioners on top of $1,800 already set aside, the board let J. H. Liner of Cedar Grove build a new school for 84 children for $4,638.30 and received it on January 5, 1931.

Subject: St. Mary's School

The old Carnegie Library is dedicated as the music building

After the library moved to its new building, the Carnegie Library was remodeled for the music department with an auditorium and a Reuter organ, most of the cost given by the Hill family. It was dedicated on November 14, 1930, and named Hill Music Hall by trustee resolution in the summer of 1931.

Subject: UNC Libraries · Hill Hall

The Bank of Efland fails and goes into receivership

Efland's small bank failed in November 1930. Days after a robbery in which a merchant shot the robber dead, the cashier, Roberts Riley, handed the state bank examiner the keys; the bank was found $15,000 to $40,000 short and put in receivers' hands, and Riley was jailed at Hillsboro.

Subject: Bank of Efland

Albert and Gladys Coates mail the first issue of Popular Government

The seventy-page first issue, built on Coates's paper The Convict's Question, called for a scientific overhaul of the state's criminal justice system. The Coateses paid about $1,500 to print it and addressed some two thousand copies by hand at the Chapel Hill post office before year's end.

People: Gladys Hall Coates

A bungalow goes up on the old Bivins Basket Factory lot on South Occoneechee Street

By 1931 the Bivins Basket Factory, shown at South Occoneechee Street and West Margaret Lane on the 1924 Sanborn map, had left the site, and a bungalow was built there. The factory's small office may have been moved next door when the house went up.

A second storefront is built beside the old general store at 115 West King Street

A new brick store went up on the west side of an 1880s general store building, the two were joined inside, and the older store got a new front. The pair later housed the Dual Supply hardware store.

Addie Williams Totten organizes the Chapel Hill Garden Club

Addie Williams Totten, who had lived in Chapel Hill since her 1923 marriage to botanist H. R. Totten, organized the Chapel Hill Garden Club in 1931. It joined the state federation in 1932, and she was again its president in 1958.

C. B. and Myrtle Ray Stanley's house is built on Allen Ruffin Avenue in West Hillsborough

The house at 406 Allen Ruffin Avenue was built for Charles B. and Myrtle Ray Stanley in the Eno mill neighborhood of West Hillsborough. Charles Stanley died at home there in 1958, and his funeral was held at the nearby Eno Methodist Church.

Charles S. Mangum Jr. stays on to do research in the UNC law school

After finishing law school with the class of 1931, Charles S. Mangum Jr. stayed in Chapel Hill to do research in the university law school. He was still a research fellow at the university in 1960.

Subject: UNC School of Law

Graham Memorial is completed as the university's student union

The building named for Edward Kidder Graham was completed in 1931 and served as the student union, holding the Horace Williams Library, a barber shop, a bowling alley, a game room and offices for student publications.

Subject: Graham Memorial

John Henry Blue and his wife take charge of the Efland Home

John Henry Blue and his wife ran the Efland Home in 1931-1932 with a second matron. The farm then had forty acres in cultivation and supplied beef, pork, chicken, eggs, milk, butter, fruit and vegetables.

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

Mack and Julie Rigsbee lose their Rock House after defaulting on the mortgage

About two years after moving into their white flint house, the Rigsbees defaulted on the mortgage in 1931, and the place passed through a series of owners. Court records later tie Mack Rigsbee to whiskey convictions in Durham and Granville counties.

Subject: Rigsbee’s Rock House

Ora Mae Davis builds the Playmakers' costume department

Ora Mae Davis arrived in 1931 to find almost no costume department beyond the volunteer help of faculty wives. By her death in the spring of 1942 she had made costuming a full technical department and a course in the curriculum.

Subject: Carolina Playmakers

Phillips Russell returns to Chapel Hill to teach creative writing

After years as a newspaperman in New York and London, Russell came back in 1931 and taught writing at the university for twenty-five years, first in the English department and then in the School of Journalism. The Atlantic Monthly called his class, often held outdoors under the trees, one of the four best in the country.

State health officer James M. Parrott plans a Chapel Hill training school that would also serve as Orange County's health department

Working with university officials, the State Board of Health drew up a plan for a training school for county health workers at Chapel Hill. Because Orange County had no full-time health officer, the school's director would fill that post and the county nurse, sanitary officer and health secretary would teach, but the Rockefeller Foundation could find no money for it.

People: Herman G. Baity · Frank Porter Graham

The Christian church congregation near Mebane builds a brick church

The congregation now known as Mebane United Church of Christ builds a cross-gable brick church near Mebane in 1931.