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Colonial and Regulator years · 1680–1774
- 1750s
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Orange County begins with fifty taxable enslaved people
When the county was organized its tax lists showed fifty enslaved Black taxables, thirty-five men and fifteen women, a small number for a county of small farms.
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Clerk Richard Caswell reports the county's tithables
Caswell's return for 1754 counted 950 white taxable polls and 50 Black ones, 35 men and 15 women. At a shilling a poll, the county's share of the provincial tax came to no more than 50 pounds.
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Eight percent of Orange families hold people in slavery
In 1755 only 8 percent of the county's families held enslaved people, and the largest holder, Mark Morgan, held six.
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Slavery in Orange County
Enslaved people worked the county’s farms, households, courts and university from the first settlements, building Old East and South Building, appearing in the 1790 tax list and the 1860 census count of more than 5,000, and passing through the courts in the Kirkland suit of 1804 and State v. Mann in 1829. Emancipation in 1865 freed about 6,000 people; the recovery of their graves and names, from Margaret Lane Cemetery to the university’s list of 119, has continued since 1987.
- 1760s
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Orange County's 1766 tax return counts 3,324 white and 649 Black taxables
The return of taxables for 1766 counted 3,324 white men and 649 Black and mulatto men and women in Orange County, 3,973 taxables in all. These were people liable for the poll tax, not the whole population, and the returns do not show the Black population growing faster than the white.
Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
- 1770s
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Richard Bennehan lists 31 enslaved people for taxes
On the 1778 tax list Richard Bennehan of Stagville, one of the largest landholders in Orange County with 4,065 acres, reported 31 enslaved people. Most Orange households of the period held no one in slavery.
- 1780s
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Most Orange enslavers hold fewer than ten people
By 1780, 95 percent of the county's enslavers held fewer than ten people and 3 percent held twenty or more.
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Hillsborough's count at the end of the war: forty white polls and sixty-seven enslaved people
At the close of the Revolution the town listed forty white taxable men and sixty-seven enslaved people between the ages of twelve and fifty, which Nash reads as a population of about three hundred.
- 1790s
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The first federal census counts 2,060 enslaved people in Orange County
The first federal census counted 12,216 people in Orange County: 10,055 white residents, 2,060 enslaved people and 101 other free persons. No other Piedmont county held as many enslaved people, and Richard Bennehan (24) and William Hooper (22, in Hillsborough) were the largest holders.
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Enslaved men owned by contractor James Patterson paint the roof of Old East
James Patterson, the slaveholding contractor who built Old East between 1793 and 1795, reported in a 1795 letter that several of his own enslaved workers had painted the building's roof. Their names were not recorded.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1800s
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Women of Raleigh give the university a new pair of globes
Hearing that the university's globes were too worn to use, sixteen Raleigh women, among them Sarah Polk, Anna White and Eliza Haywood, sent a new pair twelve inches across with a compass to Joseph Caldwell. The letter was written by Winifred Gales.
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Women of New Bern give the university a quadrant
Sixteen New Bern women, among them Susan Gaston and Mary Nash, sent a quadrant for the philosophical class to Joseph Caldwell. In his reply Caldwell blamed the university's unpopularity partly on disappointment over costs and on student misconduct.
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Betsy Nunn carries on the tavern and inn after her husband's death
When William Nunn died, his widow Betsy kept the tavern lot and went on running the inn. She held it until her death in her nineties, and the frontage maps label it Nunn's Tavern and Inn through 1848.
- 1810s
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Polly Burke buys her house on East Queen Street
Mary Williams Burke, the only child of Governor Thomas Burke, bought a modest house on East Queen Street in Hillsborough for four hundred dollars on June 5, 1810, when she was twenty-eight. She added the east bay to the house, which was later enlarged and named Heartsease.
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Orange County's enslaved people are valued at nearly two thirds of its land
The 1815 valuation put the county's enslaved population at $1,216,347 and all its land at $1,917,993.
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Polly Burke helps organize the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church
In September 1816 Mary W. Burke joined eight other people and the Rev. John Knox Witherspoon to organize the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church, which acquired the town's brick church built in 1810. She rented pew 13 on the first pew list and supported the church for the next eighteen years.
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Nancy Hilliard's family moves from Granville County to Chapel Hill
William and Lucy Walker Hilliard moved their family, including their daughter Nancy, from Granville County to Chapel Hill in 1817. She later kept the village's main hotel for students and travelers.
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Dr. James Webb deeds land for Polly Burke's log schoolhouse
On November 6, 1817, Dr. James Webb deeded to his neighbor Mary W. Burke a strip of his lot on East Queen Street, where a log schoolhouse was built for her to teach the Webb children. Known as Miss Polly Burke's School, it took neighborhood children from about 1818 to 1834 and is cited as a forerunner of the Burwell School.
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Mary Walker is born into an enslaved family held by the Bennehans and Camerons
Mary Walker was born to Priscilla, whose mother Aggy had been one of the first enslaved children born on the Bennehan plantation in 1781. Her monument at Mount Auburn Cemetery records her birth in Orange County.
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Drunken students break into a Chapel Hill kitchen and beat an enslaved man
On a Sunday three students full of corn whiskey shouted through the village, broke into a kitchen, beat a Black man there and insulted his owner and family. They were suspended for four months.
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An auxiliary Colonization Society is reported active in Chapel Hill
The Reverend William Meade reported a thriving Chapel Hill branch of the American Colonization Society, which promoted sending free Black people to Liberia.
- 1820s
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Archibald D. Murphey offers forty enslaved people for sale
Murphey put forty people up for sale in 1821, a number the book calls unmatched in Orange sale notices, where most sales involved one or a few people.
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Tavern keeper William Adams builds the house that became the Burwell School
William Adams, a Hillsborough tavern keeper and businessman, builds a two-story house with two rooms on each floor facing West Union Street in 1821. Those rooms survive as the south rooms of the Burwell School.
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William H. Adams buys the lots that became the Burwell School site
Hillsborough sold lots in the old North Town Commons pasture, advertising the town as a healthy place to live and to school children. In November 1821 William H. Adams took the deed for lots 152 and 153, an acre each, for $216.
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John Faddis warns the public not to trade with the men he holds in slavery
Faddis ran a notice in the Hillsborough Recorder naming Jim, Joe, Alfred and Peter and threatening to prosecute anyone who sold them liquor or traded with them without his written leave.
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Named enslaved workers build the third story of Old East
Bills from William Nichols's 1822 to 1824 enlargement of Old East list enslaved carpenters, bricklayers and laborers including Bob, Henry, Nelson, Allman, Tony, Luke, Isaac and Ned Peek, with their pay due to their owners. One bill from John C. White came to about $395.
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A branch Manumission Society meeting at Trotter's Creek issues an address against slavery
Meeting at Trotter's Creek, a branch of the Manumission Society, strong among Orange Quakers, adopted an address calling on citizens to end slavery by consent and to open schools to Black as well as white children.
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People freed by David Patterson of Orange sail for Liberia
Under the auspices of the Colonization Society, the formerly enslaved people of David Patterson left for Liberia in 1825.
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Sarah Grove buys lots 152 and 153 for $800
Adams sold the two lots to Sarah Grove for $800, a rise that suggests he had built the first four-room house and its outbuildings. About eighteen months later she sold them to the attorney Nathaniel J. Palmer for $1,200.
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Caroline Lee Hentz befriends and tutors the poet George Moses Horton in Chapel Hill
While her husband Nicholas Hentz taught languages at the university, Caroline Lee Hentz befriended the enslaved poet George Moses Horton, tutored him in grammar and helped edit his work. She sent some of his poems to the Lancaster Gazette in her Massachusetts hometown, which printed them in 1829.
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Duncan Cameron records tobacco sales of nearly 30,000 pounds
Cameron's accounts for 1826 show close to 30,000 pounds of tobacco sold from the Bennehan-Cameron plantations, where the crop was grown with the labor of enslaved people.
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The Phillips family, with infant Cornelia, moves to Chapel Hill
James Phillips moved his family from New York to Chapel Hill in 1826 when he became professor of mathematics at the University of North Carolina, where he taught until his death in 1867. His daughter Cornelia, born in Harlem in March 1825, grew up in the village.
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Orange Superior Court tries Jim, Sherod and Harry, three enslaved men
The 1828 term convicted Jim, held by Willie P. Mangum, of manslaughter in the death of another enslaved man and ordered 39 lashes. Sherod got 15 lashes for larceny, and Harry was sentenced to death for burglary but won a new trial on appeal.
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William Cabe's estate offers his residence and 14 or 15 enslaved people for sale
After a sale of Cabe's household goods, stock and crops set for October 22, 1828, a December notice in the Hillsborough Recorder offered his late residence together with 14 or 15 enslaved people.
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The county court levies a tax on Black polls to pay for the patrol
Along with its taxes for county costs and the poor, the August 1829 court ordered ten cents collected on each Black poll to pay the patrol, the county's slave patrol.
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Thomas Clancy advertises Lucy and her five children for sale
Pressed for money, Clancy offered a woman named Lucy and her five children, the eldest about thirteen, saying he preferred to sell the family together to a buyer in or near Hillsborough.
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James, an enslaved college servant, escapes from Chapel Hill
Samuel M. Stewart advertised a $20 reward in the Hillsborough Recorder for James, who had worked four years as a college servant at the university. Stewart thought he was headed for Norfolk or Richmond to reach the free states or Africa through the Colonization Society.
- 1830s
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Fred Hartgrove, a free Black man, holds three enslaved people
The 1830 records show Hartgrove holding three people and Lucy Peters, also free and Black, holding one. No free Black resident of Orange held anyone in 1860.
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Professor James Phillips hires David Barham from his owner as a college servant
In 1830 Professor James Phillips hired David Barham from William Barham to work as a college servant. A university account book page from the same year shows students paying a two-dollar fee to compensate the slaveholders whose people were hired as servants.
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The census finds Orange County's enslaved population at its peak
The 1830 census counted 7,339 enslaved people beside 15,918 white residents, a little under 31 percent of the county. The number fell afterward through sales, migration, manumission and the loss of territory to new counties.
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Fannie Breeze is born enslaved in the household of Samuel Breeze
Fannie Breeze was born in 1832, enslaved in the household of Samuel H. Breeze, a farmer and member of Pleasant Green Methodist church in what was then eastern Orange County. She joined Pleasant Green before the Civil War and later worked as a midwife along the Eno.
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Duncan Cameron of Orange is elected president of the state Colonization Society
Cameron, a leading Orange planter and banker, took the presidency of the North Carolina branch of the colonization movement in 1834.
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Polly Burke leaves Hillsborough for Alabama
In August 1834 Mary W. Burke sold most of her household goods and moved to Greensboro, Alabama, with her niece's family, part of a wider migration of Hillsborough people to Alabama. After her nephew-in-law died there she settled in Marion, where she taught again for many years.
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Elizabeth Hobbs is brought to Hillsborough in the household of Robert and Anna Burwell
When the Reverend Robert Burwell became minister of the Presbyterian church in Hillsborough, he moved his household from Virginia, bringing the enslaved Elizabeth Hobbs, later Keckly. By her own account she was nearly eighteen.
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Slave trader George Lewis advertises in Hillsborough to buy 100 young people
Lewis, a commercial trader visiting the town, announced he would pay cash for one hundred young Black people.
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Schoolmaster William J. Bingham repeatedly beats Elizabeth Hobbs at Anna Burwell's urging
Anna Burwell had William J. Bingham, the Hillsborough schoolmaster, flog Elizabeth Hobbs over a period of weeks in an attempt to break her spirit. Her memoir says Robert Burwell also beat her, and that she was eighteen at the time.
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Hillsborough Presbyterian Church buys the house as its manse
The church's trustees bought lots 152 and 153 in January 1836, renovated the house, and gave it to their minister, Robert Armistead Burwell, and his family, who had arrived from Virginia late the year before.
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Henry Harris, held as a suspected runaway, is charged with burning the Orange County jail
At the spring term of Superior Court the case against Henry Harris, a man of color charged with setting fire to the county jail, was moved to Caswell County for trial. He had been jailed as a runaway because he could not prove his freedom, and he escaped soon after.
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Alexander McKenzie Kirkland subjects Elizabeth Hobbs to about four years of sexual coercion
Alexander McKenzie Kirkland, a white man from a prominent Hillsborough merchant-planter family, repeatedly sexually assaulted Elizabeth Hobbs over about four years. In her memoir she did not name him and wrote that a white man pursued her for four years.
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Burwell School for young women operates
Robert and Margaret Anna Burwell operated their Hillsborough school for girls from 1837 to 1857.
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Enslaved plasterers, masons and laborers work on South Building's new roof
Thomas Waitt's bill for 1837 work on South Building, including its tin roof, lists wages for enslaved plasterers and masons Stewart, Chester, Peter, Calvin and Evans and laborers including Lewis, Tom, Redin, Abraham and Jordan.
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Polly Burke's Queen Street house passes to Dennis Heartt's family
On May 4, 1837, Mary W. Burke, then living in Alabama, gave Dr. James Webb power of attorney to dispose of her remaining Hillsborough property. Her East Queen Street house was sold that year to the family of Recorder editor Dennis Heartt, who named it Heartsease and added a Greek Revival wing about 1840.
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The Burwell School and the Burwell household
Anna Burwell opened a school for girls in Hillsborough in 1837 that ran until the family moved to Charlotte in 1857. In the same household Elizabeth Hobbs, later Elizabeth Keckly, was enslaved from 1835, beaten at Anna Burwell’s urging and subjected to years of sexual coercion before being sent back to Virginia in 1842; she bought her freedom in 1855.
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Elizabeth Hobbs writes to her mother from Hillsborough
Elizabeth Hobbs wrote to her mother Agnes Hobbs in Virginia asking for news of home and saying she did not expect to see her family again. She wrote that Anna Burwell planned to go to Petersburg without her and that she had been told she would belong to Elizabeth Burwell once that daughter married. She also wrote that she had been a bridesmaid at Ann Nash's wedding a week before Christmas 1837.
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Frances Armistead Burwell is born to Robert and Anna Burwell of Hillsborough
Frances Armistead Burwell, called Fanny, was the fourth of the twelve children of Robert and Margaret Anna Burwell.
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Lucy Watts buys the hotel on Lot #13
Lucy Watts, widow of Thomas D. Watts, bought the hotel lot and the western half of Lot #15 from Dr. James Webb and kept the house open as the Watts Hotel until 1846.
- 1840s
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A Female School House is built for the Burwells' school
As the school grew, subscribers in town paid for a 36-by-20-foot schoolhouse north of the Burwell home, built by the carpenter George A. Faucette.
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Elizabeth Hobbs gives birth to her son George in Hillsborough
Elizabeth Hobbs gave birth to her only child, George, whose father was Alexander Kirkland. George later took the surname Kirkland.
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Elizabeth Hobbs and her son are sent from Hillsborough back to Virginia
The Burwells sent Elizabeth Hobbs and her son George back to Dinwiddie County, Virginia, where she rejoined her mother in the household of Ann Burwell Garland and Hugh Garland. The Garlands later took the family to St. Louis, where she bought her freedom and George's in 1855.
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An armed posse captures Tom, a freedom seeker who had hidden for months in the woods east of Chapel Hill
Tom, enslaved by Samuel Morgan, ran away after being sold to a trader bound for the Southwest and hid in a rock shelter in the woods and in a cave on Morgan's Creek. Men with shotguns beat the woods, shot him in the legs and sent him south for sale; the shelter became known as the Robber's Den or Tom's Lair.
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Brothers Albert and Osborne, enslaved by Dabney Cosby, plaster the lengthened Old East
The additions to Old East and Old West, contracted in December 1844 and finished in 1848, used the labor of Albert and Osborne, brothers enslaved by Dabney Cosby, who plastered the lengthened Old East in 1845 and 1846. Cosby praised Albert's plastering as first-rate work.
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Richard Mayo, a free cabinetmaker of color, buys three town lots
Richard Mayo paid $200 for three lots on Occoneechee Street between West Tryon and West Queen streets, and in 1849 gave them to Levi McCollum to settle a debt. His brother William later waited tables at the Burwell School.
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Trustees bar students from bringing their own enslaved servants to the university
After 1845 the trustees prohibited students from bringing enslaved people of their own to Chapel Hill. The university went on hiring enslaved college servants by the year from local slaveholders.
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Mitchell asks the Burwells to sell his wife Mary Ann with him
Mitchell, an enslaved man who had run from his owner, came to Robert Burwell asking that he and his wife Mary Ann, enslaved in the Burwell household, be sold together. He worked at the house for a week; then Burwell told him to go back to his master, and he left on February 17.
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Smallpox at the Turner house sends students out of town
Anna Burwell wrote that William Turner had caught smallpox from the clothes of a brother back from medical lectures in Philadelphia. Twenty or thirty students of the Institute left town, and both Burwell boarders went home, though no second case followed.
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Free Black cabinetmaker Thomas Day supplies woodwork and furniture for the new society halls
Thomas Day, the free Black cabinetmaker of Milton, North Carolina, supplied woodwork and furniture for the halls and libraries of the Dialectic and Philanthropic societies in A. J. Davis's north additions to Old East and Old West. Little names him, with the Virginia builder Dabney Cosby, among the craftsmen who carried out Davis's design.
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Robert Burwell buys the house and has John Berry enlarge it
Burwell resigned his pulpit and bought the two lots from the church for $800 and back pay. The builder John Berry added a central hall and two rooms and turned the house to face Churton Street. A deed of trust of July 16, 1850 shows Burwell still owing Berry $2,500 and the church trustees $800, secured on the lots and on enslaved members of the household.
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Sarah Kollock becomes the Burwell School's teacher of French and drawing
Sarah Kollock, one of the Burwell School's first pupils, had helped teach the younger children and in 1848 became its full-time teacher of French and drawing. By September 1851 Molly Burwell had taken her place and she was in Oxford.
- 1850s
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Builder John Berry holds 44 enslaved people, most working in his building trade
By 1850 the Hillsborough brick mason and builder John Berry held 44 enslaved people, most of them working with him in masonry and construction. Some, including his head carpenter Joseph Nichols, stayed with him after emancipation, and much of the carpentry in Berry's buildings after 1840 was likely Nichols's.
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Enslaved workers build the stone dam at Trimm's Mill near Cedar Grove
Enslaved laborers build a large stone dam for Trimm's Mill near Cedar Grove in the 1850s. The dam is all that survived of the mill by 1993.
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The 1850 census lists four enslaved people on Joseph Faucette's farm
Joseph Faucette, David's son, grew wheat, corn, oats, potatoes and hay on the home farm and held four enslaved people in one household, a number the nomination calls typical of a yeoman farmer.
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The 1850 census records 47 enslaved people on James H. Pratt's farm by the Eno
James H. Pratt and his wife Malvina worked a farm of 300 improved and 500 unimproved acres with 47 enslaved people, raising wheat, corn, oats, flax and livestock.
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The census counts 5,244 enslaved people in Orange County
The 1850 census found 11,330 white residents, 5,244 enslaved people and 481 free Black people in Orange County. The share of enslaved people had risen sharply since 1790, even though the new Alamance County had taken part of Orange in 1849.
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The old Burwell schoolroom is said to be moved to West Orange Street during John Berry's work on the Burwell School
The west wing of the bungalow at 114 West Orange Street is reputed to be the old Burwell schoolroom, moved there in 1850 while John Berry was renovating the Burwell School. The house around it dates from 1922.
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Robert Burwell pledges Mary Ann and her children against his building debts
A deed of trust set out Burwell's debts of $2,500 to the builder John Berry and $800 to the Presbyterian trustees, and offered as security the enslaved seamstress Mary Ann, her four children and any children born to her, and a girl named Ann.
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Ellington Burnett's grave becomes the earliest dated African American burial in the Chapel Hill graveyard
A brownstone ledger for Ellington Burnett, 1831-1853, son of Cornelius and Caroline Burnett, is the oldest inscribed stone in Section B, the burial ground used for enslaved people. The section was almost certainly in use earlier, its graves marked only by fieldstones.
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Mary Burwell marries Frederick Nash Strudwick
Mary Susan Burwell, one of her mother's first pupils and later a teacher at the school, married the neighbor Frederick Nash Strudwick in Hillsborough, with the Rev. F. K. Nash officiating, joining two families who lived a town lot apart.
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Elizabeth Keckly purchases freedom for herself and her son
Elizabeth Keckly purchased freedom for herself and her son in St. Louis, after earlier enslavement in Hillsborough.
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Aunt Fariby saves Jane from burning
Jane, a young enslaved servant at the Burwell School, caught fire. Anna Burwell wrote that she would have burned to death but for Aunt Fariby, who saved her life.
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The first through trains run on the finished North Carolina Railroad, with mail trains at Hillsborough
The North Carolina Railroad was finished on January 29, 1856, when the last rail was laid about four and a half miles west of Greensboro. Two days later the regular mail and passenger trains made their first through run from Charlotte to Goldsboro, with a westbound train due at Hillsborough each morning and an eastbound one before dawn, replacing the coach connection that had carried the Burwells' letters to their daughter Fanny in New York.
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The Burwells resolve to sell their cook Hannah
Hannah, who had come from Virginia with the family and cooked for the school, had been drinking heavily through 1855. Anna Burwell wrote to her daughter Fanny that she had made up her mind: Hannah would be sent to Richmond to be sold.
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Fanny Burwell dies aboard the steamer Jamestown as her parents bring her home to Hillsborough
Fanny Burwell had gone to New York to complete her music education, but fell ill with erysipelas in early March. Her mother went north to nurse her, and she died at dawn on the steamer Jamestown between New York and Norfolk with both parents beside her, in her eighteenth year; her body was brought home to Hillsborough for burial.
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Anne Call Cameron, piano teacher to Burwell School students, dies
A widow known as Nancy, she gave piano lessons at the Burwell School to help pay for the care of her daughter Anna McKenzie Kirkland, whose illness followed her husband's death in 1843. She died in Hillsborough in June 1856.
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A Black child and then a student die of illness at the Burwell School
Writing to her mother, the student Lizzie Glass mentioned a small Black boy who had died at the school the previous day, at a time when Nannie Burwell and three of the Burwell children lay sick. Within a few weeks Lizzie Glass herself died at the school.
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The General Assembly lets Emily Hooper, a citizen of Liberia, return to slavery in Chapel Hill
A private act allowed Emily Hooper, who had emigrated to Liberia, to come back and live again as the enslaved property of her former owner, Sally Mallet of Chapel Hill.
- 1860s
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Brick quarters for enslaved people are built at the Mangum House on St. Mary's Road
Around 1860 two four-bay brick buildings, likely quarters for enslaved people, and a brick smokehouse were built to serve the Priestly Mangum House on St. Mary's Road. The house later burned, and the Ruffin-Hill House went up near its site in 1877-1878; the quarters still stand at 311 and 313 St. Mary's Road.
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Paul C. Cameron holds 470 people in slavery in Orange County
The 1860 count listed Cameron of Fairntosh as the owner of 470 enslaved people in Orange, and the joined Bennehan-Cameron holdings ran to as much as 30,000 acres worked by about 900 enslaved people.
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Seven in ten free Orange County residents hold no one in slavery
In 1860, 70 percent of the free population held no enslaved people. Of the slaveholders, only seven percent held 20 or more, and more than half held fewer than five.
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Women organize Ladies Aid Societies in Hillsborough and Chapel Hill
Soon after secession women in the two towns formed aid societies, later joined by others, that made clothing and bandages, gathered food and money, met troop trains and nursed the sick and wounded until the war ended.
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A carved brownstone headstone marks Thomas Fletcher's grave in the enslaved people's section
Thomas Fletcher, 1838-1862, received a round-topped brownstone headstone with a monogrammed footstone in Section B, as did George, son of Samuel Barbee (no dates). The rough local stone points to a mason cutting gravestones on the side; with Burnett's ledger they are among the few inscribed antebellum markers in a North Carolina slave cemetery.
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The Collins family buys the former Burwell School and calls it the Beehive
Members of the Collins family of Somerset Place, who had left Union-held eastern North Carolina, paid Robert Burwell $3,500 for the house and four lots. By 1863 about forty family members and enslaved servants lived there, and the family named it the Beehive.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer publishes The Last Ninety Days of the War in North-Carolina
Encouraged by her friend, former governor David L. Swain, Spencer published her first book, an account of the war's last months in North Carolina that describes Wheeler's Confederate cavalry passing through Chapel Hill and the town's occupation by Union cavalry in April 1865.
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The Collins women sell their shares of the Beehive to Dr. Thomas D. Warren
After the war the Collins relatives who had lived at the Beehive left Hillsborough, and the women sold their shares of the house to Dr. Thomas D. Warren, who had married Elizabeth Alethea Collins.
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Thomas and Anne Ruffin move from the Haw River plantation to Hillsborough
Thomas Ruffin and his wife Anne left their Haw River plantation early in 1866 and moved to Hillsborough, where he had bought the house he called Little Hawfields the year before.
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer moves into Sam Phillips's house and takes in boarders
After her father's death the family had to leave their university-owned home, so Spencer, her widowed mother and her daughter moved into her brother Sam's empty house on East Franklin and took boarders to make ends meet.
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Sarah J. Woodson teaches at the freedmen's school in Hillsborough
Sarah J. Woodson, an Oberlin graduate from Ohio, was principal of the school for Black children in Hillsborough, which she taught with V. S. Williams. The Freedmen's Bureau's report of January 1868 named it among the large, well-run schools in North Carolina.
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Reconstruction trustees vote down admitting women
The executive committee of the new Republican board of trustees recommended co-education, but the full board refused to admit women as students.
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David McCauley lets Nancy Hilliard live rent free in her old hotel
After losing her house and failing at hotel work in Raleigh, Nancy Hilliard came back to Chapel Hill destitute, and David McCauley, who now owned her former Eagle Hotel, let her live rent free in a room there. Former students sent her money until her death in 1873.
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The sheriff auctions the former Burwell School to David C. Parks
Dr. Thomas D. Warren was deep in local debt, and the Orange County sheriff sold the house at auction to David C. Parks for $600. Parks and his brother Charles traded the property between them for the next quarter century.
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Wilson Caldwell resigns from the university and founds a school for Black children
In 1869 Wilson Caldwell, who had worked at the university as an enslaved servant and janitor, resigned and started a school for children of color in Chapel Hill.
- 1870s
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Eliza Beaty keeps a boarding house in the William Whitted House
In the late nineteenth century Mrs. Eliza Beaty runs a well-known boarding house in the old William Whitted House at East Queen and North Churton streets. The Italianate wing facing Churton Street may have been added for her.
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The Camerons move a two-story building thought to be slave quarters to Burnside
In the late nineteenth century the Cameron family moves a two-story frame building, thought to have been built as quarters for enslaved people, to the southeast corner of the Burnside house at 201 South Cameron Street. It was joined to the main house at the second floor in the 1950s.
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Henrietta Heartt is appointed Hillsborough's postmaster
Henrietta Heartt becomes the first woman on the list of Hillsborough postmasters, succeeding Dennis Heartt. Harriet H. Strayhorn in 1873 and Mary E. Berry in 1882 followed her.
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November Caldwell, once enslaved by President Joseph Caldwell, dies
November Caldwell (1791-1872), held in slavery by Joseph Caldwell, brought firewood to the students, who were fond of him for his humor. A memorial in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery on the campus honors him.
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Harriet H. Strayhorn serves as Hillsborough's postmistress
Harriet H. Strayhorn, who with William F. Strayhorn owned Twin Chimneys on West King Street, was Hillsborough's postmistress from 1873 to 1881.
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Nancy Hilliard, longtime Chapel Hill hotel keeper, dies
Nancy Segur Hilliard, whose family moved to Chapel Hill in 1817 and who fed students and stage travelers for decades, died on November 8, 1873. Cornelia Phillips Spencer appealed to alumni to help her in her last illness and to pay for her burial and a modest monument.
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Wilson Caldwell returns to the reopened university and later heads its labor force
When the university reopened in 1875 Wilson Caldwell went back to work there. He became curator of South Building and head of the campus labor corps, and held the post until his death in 1898.
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Women's groups give scientific apparatus to the reopened university
At the board's request Cornelia Phillips Spencer gathered gifts of instruments from women around the state, including Plateau's apparatus from the pupils of the Nash and Kollock school in Hillsborough. The women of Hillsborough gave a Holtz electrical machine in memory of William A. Graham, which Paul C. Cameron presented at the 1877 commencement.
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer learns on her fiftieth birthday that the university will reopen
A telegram from Raleigh on March 20, 1875, reported that the legislature had passed a bill letting the closed University of North Carolina reorganize with some state support. Spencer, whose letters to state leaders had pressed for the reopening, and a few friends entered South Building and tolled the college bell to celebrate.
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Anne Ruffin dies and Little Hawfields passes to her heirs
Anne Kirkland Ruffin, who had inherited the Hillsborough house on Thomas Ruffin's death in 1870, died on October 28, 1875. The estate passed to her children and a grandchild.
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer edits the Chapel Hill Weekly Ledger
For some months in 1879 Cornelia Phillips Spencer edited the Chapel Hill Weekly Ledger, with students R. P. Pell and Francis D. Winston as assistants. The book calls her the county's only woman editor; Charles B. Aycock took over from her.
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Legislature extends Normal School benefits to women
The 1877 act limited state money for the Summer Normal School to men, though women attended by invitation. When the two-year act ran out it was renewed with the restriction as to sex removed.
- 1880s
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The Berry family moves to Sunnyside south of Hillsborough
Dr. John and Mary Strayhorn Berry moved from their West King Street house, now known as Two Chimneys, to Sunnyside, the Berry family plantation two miles south of town. Mary Berry tutored her daughter Harriet at home until she was twelve.
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Old students start a subscription for a monument over Nancy Hilliard's grave
E. T. McKethan of Fayetteville began collecting money from former Chapel Hill students to put a plain stone over Nancy Hilliard's neglected grave, and Cornelia Phillips Spencer endorsed the plan. The stone records the alumni's gratitude for her kindness and hospitality.
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Wilson Caldwell is elected to the Chapel Hill board of commissioners
Placed on the Republican ticket without seeking it, Wilson Caldwell, head of the university's labor force, was elected a Chapel Hill commissioner in 1886, defeating Professor Ralph Graves.
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David S. Payne marries Eliza Mayo
The marriage joined two Black Hillsborough families tied to the Burwell School: Eliza was a granddaughter of the school's laundress Eliza Chavious, and David was the son of Bettie Payne and a grandson of Rev. William Payne, a founder of Dickerson Chapel.
- 1890s
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Jule Gilmer Korner remodels the former Burwell School
In the 1890s the old Burwell School house was remodeled by Jule Gilmer Korner of Kernersville, who gave it a bracketed cornice, a sawnwork porch, a new hall stair and new mantels, including a marble one in the parlor. Several of the older mantels were lost in the work, which was done for an owner thought to be Mrs. Charles M. Parks.
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Edwin Alderman leaves Greensboro to teach at the university
Alderman, an 1882 graduate of the university and a founder of the State Normal in Greensboro, accepted a teaching position at UNC in 1893.
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Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten was born on Lloyd Street in what became Carrboro
Elizabeth Nevills, later known as Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, was born near the railroad tracks on what is now Lloyd Street in Carrboro. As a child she wrote “Freight Train,” which Folkways released on record in 1958 and which carried her into the folk revival.
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Dixie Lee Bryant teaches at the summer school in Chapel Hill
Bryant, head of science at the State Normal and Industrial School in Greensboro, was on the faculty of the 1894 Summer School for Teachers and Students in Chapel Hill, teaching physical geography and botany.
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Dr. John S. Spurgeon buys the former Burwell School
The dentist paid Charles Parks $2,500 for lots 152 and 153. The Spurgeons, whose household included Carrie Waitt Spurgeon, daughter of a Burwell student, lived there for about seventy years and added electricity and plumbing.
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UNC gives Cornelia Phillips Spencer an honorary LL.D., its first honorary degree to a woman
The University of North Carolina awarded Spencer the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws in 1895, the first honorary degree it gave to a woman. She had moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, the year before to live with her daughter.
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Edwin Alderman serves as president of the university
Alderman was named president in 1896 and held the office until 1900, when he left to lead Tulane University. His inauguration, first set for University Day 1896, was put off into 1897 because of that year's heated political campaigns.
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Women enroll at UNC for the first time
After the trustees opened UNC's post-graduate courses to women early in 1897, four women registered in September for the 1897–98 session, which The Tar Heel called the start of coeducation: Dixie Lee Bryant, Sallie Walker Stockard, Cecye Dodd and Mary MacRae. President Edwin Alderman let women enter junior and senior classes as well.
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Sallie Walker Stockard becomes UNC's first woman graduate
Sallie Walker Stockard, a Guilford College graduate, entered UNC's senior class in the fall of 1897, the first year the university admitted women. She became the first woman to graduate from UNC when the class of 1898 received its degrees on June 1, 1898, and she earned a master's degree there in 1900.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
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Harriet Berry works for the state Geological and Economic Survey in Chapel Hill
Berry began work in Chapel Hill with the North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey in 1901 and rose from stenographer to secretary and, in 1917, acting head. She left in 1921, the year her Good Roads lobbying produced the state highway commission law.
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Elizabeth Cotten composes Freight Train
At about age eleven, growing up near the railroad tracks in the settlement that became Carrboro, Elizabeth Cotten wrote "Freight Train." She played a right-handed guitar upside down, and the song became a folk standard after Folkways released her recording in 1958.
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The old Joseph Caldwell obelisk is taken down, later to stand for four college servants
In July 1904 the remains of President Joseph Caldwell and his wife were moved to the base of the 1858 marble monument, and the original sandstone obelisk was taken down, to be set up again in the Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. It was later raised over Wilson Caldwell's grave, and a marble tablet placed in its base by the Class of 1891 names Wilson Swain Caldwell, November Caldwell, David Barham and Henry Smith, who served the university.
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Chapel Hill holds a memorial service for Cornelia Phillips Spencer
Cornelia Phillips Spencer died in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 11, 1908. On May 17 the university held a service in her memory in Gerrard Hall, opening with the hymn she wrote for the 1875 reopening.
- 1910s
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Students start night classes for the Black men who served the dormitories
Asked for help by the young Black workers who cut firewood and carried water in the dormitories, students began teaching them reading and arithmetic in what were called moonlight schools. Under Frank Porter Graham at the campus YMCA the classes grew to take in history, English, writing, debating, home sanitation and the Bible.
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Barbara Bynum Henderson of Chapel Hill becomes president of the Equal Suffrage League of North Carolina
Barbara Bynum Henderson, wife of UNC professor Archibald Henderson, organized the Equal Suffrage League of North Carolina and was elected its president, bringing the woman suffrage campaign to Chapel Hill. She was reelected unanimously in 1915.
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Cora Zeta Corpening enrolls as the university's first woman candidate for a medical degree
When the 1914-15 session opened, Cora Zeta Corpening of Mars Hill became the first woman to enroll at the university as a candidate for a medical degree.
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Margaret Berry becomes the first woman to graduate from UNC's law school
Margaret Berry of the Hillsborough Berry family, who had finished her UNC undergraduate degree in 1913, graduated from the university's law school in 1915, the first woman to do so. That summer she passed the state bar examination, listed as Margaret Kollock Berry of Orange.
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Mary Owen Graham is endorsed as supervisor of Orange County's canning clubs
The commissioners approved Graham, of Charlotte, to lead the county's canning clubs, the start of extension work with farm women. In 1916 they renewed $250 a year for tomato club work.
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Emilie Holmes starts Mayfair War Relief work in Chapel Hill
Emilie R. Holmes (Mrs. J. S. Holmes) organized Chapel Hill war relief work for the Mayfair War Relief of New York in October 1915 and directed it until September 1917. About a dozen workers sent 13 boxes holding 1,183 surgical dressings, 300 rolled bandages, 160 pads and 36 hospital shirts.
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Eno Cotton Mill reports 150 women among its 500 workers
Reports from the years before the wartime changes count about 500 workers at Hillsborough's Eno Cotton Mill, 150 of them women and 50 children under 16, on a 60-hour week. The top average daily wage for women was $1.75 against $4.00 for men; at the smaller Bellevue mill nearby women's top average was $2.50.
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Susan Moses Graham, the president's wife, dies at Chapel Hill
Susan Moses Graham, 34, died on the last day of the fall session after six weeks of infection. Remaining classes were called off, and she was buried in the Chapel Hill cemetery on December 23 after a service at the Chapel of the Cross. She had helped found the Chapel Hill Community Club.
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Clara S. Lingle becomes the university's first advisor to women
Graham hired Clara S. Lingle as advisor to women, the first woman given administrative duties at the university. Formally on the extension staff working with women's clubs, she was meant to speak for the two dozen women students within the administration.
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Cornelia Spencer Love works as a librarian at the University of North Carolina
Love came to Chapel Hill and worked in the university library from 1917 to 1948. She later wrote When Chapel Hill Was a Village, published in 1976.
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Mary Lindsay Thornton becomes librarian of the North Carolina Collection
Fresh out of library school, Mary Lindsay Thornton took charge of the university's North Carolina Collection, then about 1,500 items kept in a small upstairs corner room of the library building that later became Hill Music Hall. She led it for forty years.
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Orange County mobilizes for World War I
Orange County organized a Council of Defense, Red Cross chapters in Chapel Hill (May 28, 1917) and Hillsborough (June 1, 1917), Liberty Loan and War Savings drives, and food conservation committees. On October 1, 1918, 650 UNC students were inducted into the Student Army Training Corps, and volunteers nursed the sick during the influenza epidemic.
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The Chapel Hill Community Club offers its women to the government for war work
Early in the summer of 1917 the Community Club offered itself to the federal government, through the county Council of Defense, as an organized body of women for war service. Over the next year it handed out Food Administration pledge cards across Chapel Hill Township, pushed gardening and canning, and canvassed for Liberty Loans.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross gathers country women into auxiliaries across southern Orange County
Auxiliaries of the Chapel Hill chapter formed at Bethel Church, Calvander, Antioch, Williams Chapel, Smith Level, Mount Moriah, Union Grove, Damascus, Carrboro and Orange Church, and among Chapel Hill women who could not come to the workroom. They sewed hospital shirts and refugee garments, paid for supplies by selling eggs, jelly and apples, and passed magazines and papers to families who could not buy them; Mrs. H. C. Hogan of the Calvander circle made 100 hospital bed shirts in 100 days.
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Laura Hutchins Benson of Chapel Hill joins the Army Nurse Corps
Laura Hutchins Benson enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps on May 2, 1917, and served first at Walter Reed hospital. During the pneumonia epidemic in the camps in the winter of 1918 she went to Base Hospital No. 1 at Fort Sam Houston, where she became head nurse.
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The Daughters of the Confederacy in Hillsborough move to start a Red Cross chapter
At its May 1917 meeting the Gen. George B. Anderson Chapter, United Daughters of the Confederacy, discussed the war, and presiding officer Rebecca Cameron named a committee to form a Red Cross chapter in Hillsborough. The committee wrote many letters for information, which led to the organizing meeting of June 1.
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Nurse Mrs. R. B. Hayes starts a surgical dressings class in the Hillsborough Red Cross room
Mrs. R. B. Hayes, a registered nurse, began a class in surgical dressings that met Tuesday and Friday mornings in the Red Cross room, John Norwood's old law office east of the court house, which J. Cheshire Webb lent for as long as the Red Cross needed it. Notice of the classes went to Cedar Grove.
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Orange County women organize the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense
About fifty women representing every women's organization in the county met at the Hillsborough court house on August 1, 1917, and elected Mrs. J. Cheshire Webb chairman, Lula Cassidy secretary and Mrs. Isaac Manning treasurer. On Labor Day they replaced township units with one central committee of eleven departments.
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The Orange County Red Cross takes on a quota of 200 knitted sets for soldiers
Headquarters allotted the Hillsborough-based chapter 200 sets of a sweater, muffler, socks and wristlets, and on August 20, 1917 the executive committee named committees to find knitters and raise money for wool, asking the Cedar Grove branch for ten to twenty-five sets. By September 1 Mrs. C. H. Robertson had sixty experienced knitters waiting for yarn.
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Orange County women sign the food pledge at their school houses
On Saturday, October 27, 1917, committees at every school house in the county registered the women of the district and asked each to sign the Food Administration pledge. A house-to-house canvass of every housewife followed from October 29 to November 4.
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More than 200 Orange County women register for war service
In October 1917 the Woman's Committee held the Registration of Women for Service, and more than two hundred women filled out and signed service cards.
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Ida Lloyd becomes the first clerk in the county superintendent's office
Ida Lloyd was hired as office assistant to the county superintendent in 1918, the first to hold the post, and worked under R. H. Claytor, Glenn Proffit and G. P. Carr for about forty-two years.
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Orange County women's committees sell $59,600 in Third Liberty Loan bonds
With Harriet M. Berry of Chapel Hill as county chairman, women organized in every township made $59,600 of the county's $99,150 in Third Liberty Loan sales, more than two-thirds of the allotment. Mrs. T. J. Wilson's Chapel Hill committee took 85 subscriptions for $18,500 and the Hillsborough committee raised $36,000.
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University janitors organize with the Industrial Workers of the World
Black janitors at the university formed an affiliate of the IWW and weighed a strike for higher wages as the spring term closed. Business manager Charles T. Woollen answered that he would hire a new crew from Durham, and the effort faded. That fall all the campus help lost their jobs when the SATC took over the buildings.
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The county agrees to pay for a home demonstration agent
The commissioners ordered two-thirds of an $800 salary paid for a home demonstration agent, with the school board paying the rest. The work stopped after the war and did not resume until 1935.
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Mrs. J. Cheshire Webb is named the Orange County Red Cross's director of woman's work
At the request of Mrs. John W. Grant, the executive committee named Mrs. J. Cheshire Webb director of woman's work on May 11, 1918, and set supervisors over the work: Sue B. Hayes for surgical dressings, Mrs. S. Strudwick for hospital garments, Mrs. W. H. Webb for supplies and shipping, and Henrietta P. Collins as chief clerk.
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Orange County Red Cross knitters report more than 1,100 garments in seven months
Mrs. C. H. Robertson, chairman of knitting, reported in May 1918 that from September 10, 1917 to April 10, 1918 the chapter bought 381 pounds of yarn for $877.03 and its knitters made 234 sweaters, 211 mufflers, 214 wristlets, 521 socks and 6 helmets. The count included work taken over from the Navy League when its knitting merged into the Red Cross.
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Jean Blue enlists as a Red Cross nurse and goes to France
Jean Blue enlisted in Unit 65 from Watts Hospital on May 27, 1918, trained at Camp Lee and in New York, and sailed for France at the start of September. At Brest she nursed soldiers with influenza and wounded men on their way home.
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The Orange County Red Cross sends literature to women in outlying communities to start Red Cross work
On May 31, 1918, after accepting the Oaks branch's certificate of organization, the chapter sent Red Cross literature to Nellie Perry at Cane Creek, Mrs. Cain Roberts near St. Mary's and Mrs. Clyde Compton at Carr in hopes of organized work there. Carr became a branch that August.
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The Orange County Red Cross's June box of 8,000 compresses goes straight to France
The chapter's June 1918 box to headquarters held 8,000 compresses, which were sent on to France without repacking, as the executive committee heard on July 19.
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Eight Orange County women enroll in the U.S. Student Nurse Reserve
A canvass of the county by the Woman's Committee in July 1918 for the U.S. Student Nurse Reserve enrolled eight young women, six white and two Black.
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The university Woman's Association holds a Thanksgiving peace festival
To pay for layettes and other war relief, the Woman's Association planned a Thanksgiving Peace Celebration: a Gypsy Festival moved by rain into the Y.M.C.A., ending with a pageant in Gerrard Hall. It raised $350, $150 of it for the United War Fund.
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Alice Noble writes the history of the Chapel Hill Red Cross chapter
As chapter historian, Alice Noble signed the Chapel Hill chapter's account of its war work, from the 1917 first aid class through the 1919 welcome home for soldiers and sailors in Memorial Hall.
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Charlotte Hawkins Brown starts the clubwomen's drive for a home for delinquent Black girls
As president of the North Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown of Palmer Memorial Institute began a public campaign in late 1919 for a reformatory for Black girls, the same year the legislature set up juvenile courts. The drive led to the Efland Home in western Orange County.
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Inez Koonce Stacy becomes the University's adviser to women
After Clara Lingle left, the post went to Inez Koonce Stacy, widow of acting president Marvin Stacy. For years she was the only woman on the regular University payroll apart from stenographers and library aides.
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The Woman's Committee of the Council of Defense is discharged
Gov. Bickett advised in February 1919 that the legislature would not fund the Council of Defense, and on February 15 the state chairman gave all members of the Woman's Committee an honorable discharge, ending the county organization.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross reports 66 cases of supplies shipped since its founding
The chapter's report of woman's work to April 12, 1919 counted 66 cases shipped from its workroom and auxiliaries: 200 comfort kits, 306 oakum pads, 8,155 dressings, 1,004 hospital garments, 20 cases of refugee clothing weighing 2,500 pounds, 235 Christmas packages and about 725 knitted articles.
- 1920s
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Orange County women vote in a presidential election after the Nineteenth Amendment
Orange County women could vote for president for the first time on November 2, 1920, after registering by October 23 without paying a poll tax. In an October 15 speech at the Chapel Hill high school auditorium, Governor Thomas Bickett said women should cast their votes. Literacy tests and hostile registrars kept many Black women off the rolls.
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Alice Noble joins the UNC School of Pharmacy staff
Alice Noble was hired as assistant secretary of the School of Pharmacy in 1921, the start of a decades-long tenure in which she was later librarian and secretary to Dean Edward Brecht.
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The campus contractor builds separate quarters for white and Black workers
The trustees made T. C. Thompson and Brothers of Charlotte sole contractor for the $1.1 million building program, a first in the state. Its first job was housing the initial 200 workers, in one dormitory for white men and another for African American men.
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Women students at UNC organize a basketball team
Women, then a small group mostly in upper classes and graduate study, formed a basketball team in 1921, and men on campus wondered whether a woman would have to be given a letter.
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Plans are drawn for the first cottage of the Efland Home
In a letter of September 5, 1921, to state welfare commissioner Kate Burr Johnson, Charlotte Hawkins Brown reported that plans were under way for a cottage at the Efland site estimated at $5,000. The architect is not known, but the finished building follows a professional drawing except for its weatherboard walls, which replaced brick to save money.
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Black clubwomen sell two-cent stamps across the state to build the first cottage at Efland
The state federation of Black women's clubs, led by Charlotte Hawkins Brown, sold two-cent stamps across the state in November 1922 to raise $5,000 for the first cottage of the North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls at Efland, on land it had bought the year before.
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Lettie Glass serves as acting superintendent of the Chapel Hill schools
Lettie Glass ran the Chapel Hill schools as acting superintendent while Fred W. Morrison was away, and again in 1923-1924. She is the only woman in the book's list of superintendents.
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UNC and the North Carolina College for Women agree to limit women to UNC's upper levels
After a quarrel over Chase's remarks and a meeting with President Julius I. Foust at a Durham hotel, the two schools agreed that women would enter UNC's graduate and professional schools but not its first two years, even if they lived in Chapel Hill, and that transfers from NCCW would need NCCW's consent.
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A Tar Heel special edition attacks coeducation
While Chase sought $224,000 for a women's dormitory, students voted 937 to 173 against it in a Tar Heel poll, and on March 14 a special edition ran editorials headed "Women Students Not Wanted Here." Chase answered in a long statement read at chapel and printed in the paper.
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Bayard Wootten photographs the Playmakers' outdoor Taming of the Shrew
Bayard Wootten of New Bern came to Chapel Hill to photograph the Carolina Playmakers' outdoor production of The Taming of the Shrew, the start of years of Playmakers work. That month she also urged the University to have aerial photographs made of the growing campus.
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UNC national championships beyond women’s soccer
National titles won by Carolina teams other than women's soccer: the 1924 basketball team's later Helms recognition, men's basketball's six NCAA championships from 1957, women's basketball in 1994, and the field hockey, lacrosse, men's soccer and women's tennis titles since 1981.
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Black clubwomen open the North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls at Efland
After years of fundraising, the North Carolina federation of Black women's clubs led by Charlotte Hawkins Brown opened a home and school for Black girls on a 143-acre farm on US 70 at Efland. The state gave only occasional small grants; the federation's board voted in October 1938 to close within five months, and the home closed on March 15, 1939. The state later opened a training school for Black girls, first at Rocky Mount and then at Dobbs Farm near Kinston.
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Hillsborough women organize the Hillsborough Garden Club
Twelve Hillsborough women met in an old school building in 1925 to form a garden club, and began by cleaning lots in the business district and planting crepe myrtles along the downtown streets. The club later sponsored the founding of the Orange County Historical Museum.
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Contractor James Henry Liner and others finish the Efland Home cottage
By May 1925, when the clubwomen marked its completion at their annual meeting in Wilson, a one-story weatherboarded cottage with a hip roof stood on the Efland farm, built for about $4,600 by contractors including James Henry Liner of Cedar Grove. It held a classroom-living room, dormitory rooms, matrons' quarters, dining room and kitchen; a Greensboro firm added a pump and Delco generator house, and Efland merchant S. C. Forrest drilled the well and held the mortgage.
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Hope Summerell Chamberlain's Old Days in Chapel Hill is published
Chamberlain's life and letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, illustrated with her own drawings, was published in 1926. The University of North Carolina Press was still advertising it in the Chapel Hill Weekly in 1927 and 1930.
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The Efland Home takes in thirty girls in two years under matron Mary E. Hill
Juvenile courts had sent twelve girls to Efland by 1926. Between July 1, 1926, and June 30, 1928, matron Mary E. Hill, who had worked at the Virginia home for Black girls, cared for thirty; seven ran away and seventeen remained, more than the cottage's fifteen places.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
- 1930s
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The last known burials are made at Margaret Lane Cemetery
Margaret Lane Cemetery, begun as a burial ground for enslaved people before 1852, was used until 1931, according to the plaques placed in 1987. The oldest legible stone is for George W. Hill (1844-1900).
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Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated October 2, 2026.
