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- Colonial and Regulator years · 1680–1774
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Mark Morgan sits in the General Assembly for Orange County
Mark Morgan, a justice of the peace and militia officer who had settled on Morgan Creek near present Chapel Hill, was a member of the colonial General Assembly for Orange County for the 1753-54 session.
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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.
- Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
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James Patterson keeps an inn on the road where Chapel Hill will be laid out
Before the university existed, James Patterson's inn stood near the sharp bend in the road west of the later campus, serving travellers on the two roads that met at New Hope Chapel. It was the only inn on the site when the first village lots were sold in 1793.
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Christopher Barbee buys his brother Francis's share of their father's land grant east of Chapel Hill
Christopher Barbee buys from his brother Francis the western half of the 585-acre grant their father William Barbee took up in 1753, which included the hilltop later called The Mountain. Barbee made his plantation there, and a stone foundation at Meadowmont is thought to be his house.
Subject: The Mountain (Christopher Barbee plantation, now Meadowmont)
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The founding of the university and Chapel Hill
The General Assembly chartered the university on December 11, 1789. Meeting at Hillsborough in August 1792, the trustees voted to build within fifteen miles of Cyprett's Bridge, and that November their commissioners chose New Hope Chapel Hill. The Old East cornerstone was laid October 12, 1793, and the first student, Hinton James, arrived February 12, 1795.
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University of North Carolina is chartered
Meeting in Fayetteville, the General Assembly adopted William R. Davie's bill chartering the University of North Carolina. The act named some forty trustees and, instead of an appropriation, gave the school escheated property and uncollected debts; the trustees later placed it in southern Orange County, where Chapel Hill grew up around it.
Part of The founding of the University and Chapel Hill, 1789–1795 · 37 events
People: William Richardson Davie
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William Lenoir is chosen the first president of the university's trustees
At the board's second meeting, held at Fayetteville, the trustees made William Lenoir of Wilkes County their president and elected State Comptroller John Craven treasurer. Lenoir soon gave up the chair and Governor Alexander Martin succeeded him.
People: William Lenoir · Alexander Martin
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The university's treasury receives its first money
John Harvey, clerk of the Perquimans court, paid over $2,706.41 recovered from a delinquent state collecting officer under the arrearages the Assembly had granted the university. As the charter required, the trustees invested it in United States stock.
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John B. Tenney is said to build a farmhouse northeast of the village
Local tradition credits John B. Tenney with building the one-story frame farmhouse now at 381 Tenney Circle around 1791, and says it stayed in the family into the mid-twentieth century and took in boarders early in the 1800s.
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Trustees adopt a university seal showing Apollo and the rising sun
A committee of James Hogg, Alfred Moore and John Haywood, given sole power to choose a device for the corporation's seal, picked the face of Apollo with the rising sun, meant to stand for the dawn of higher education in the state.
People: James Hogg · John Haywood
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James Hogg of Hillsborough gathers Orange County land and money for the university site
Hogg, a Hillsborough merchant who sat on the commission that fixed the university's place, brought in pledges of land and about 1,600 dollars from people in Orange County for the New Hope Chapel Hill site. The ground chosen lay roughly twelve miles from Hillsborough on the road running from Petersburg through the town and on south to Pittsboro.
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Meeting in Hillsborough, UNC's trustees adopt the ordinance placing the university within fifteen miles of Cyprett's Bridge
Twenty-five of the university's forty trustees gathered at Hillsborough on August 2, 1792. They balloted for Cyprett's Bridge as the center point on August 3 and on August 4 adopted the ordinance fixing a fifteen-mile radius and naming the site commissioners. In early November a commission chaired by Frederick Hargett toured the area and recommended New Hope Chapel Hill in southern Orange County.
People: Alexander Martin · Hugh Williamson · Richard Dobbs Spaight
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Willie Jones views New Hope Chapel Hill as a university commissioner and signs for the site
Jones was one of six commissioners the trustees sent to fix the seat of the university. On November 5, 1792 he handed the commissioners Joel Lane's offer of 640 acres in Wake County; the commissioners then went on to view New Hope Chapel Hill in Orange County, where they took offers of 1,390 acres and about 798 pounds. Jones signed the report.
People: James Hogg · David Stone · Joel Lane
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Trustees fix the university at Chapel Hill and list its Orange County land donors
Meeting on December 5, 1792, the trustees voted unanimously to place the university at New Hope Chapel Hill and recorded nine donors of Orange County land, among them Matthew McCauley (150 acres) and William McCauley (100 acres). Each donor could have one student educated free of tuition.
People: John Hogan · Edmund Jones · Mark Morgan
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A trustee committee under Samuel McCorkle reports the university's first plan of studies
Named at New Bern on December 4, 1792, the committee proposed teaching languages with English first, history, mathematics, natural philosophy, botany, agriculture and architecture, and buying scientific apparatus. A newspaper notice of December 12 inviting teachers for this course drew no applicants.
People: David Stone · Samuel Ashe · Hugh Williamson · Samuel Eusebius McCorkle
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The building committee buys Hardy Morgan's 80-acre tract beside the university site
Finding that Morgan's land ran too close to the planned buildings, the committee bought the 80 acres for $200. Battle took it to be the oldest cleared land on the university grounds, lying east of the buildings along the Raleigh road.
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James Patterson of Chatham County is hired to build the university's first building
The commissioners contracted with Patterson for 2,500 pounds to build a house about 96 feet long and 40 feet wide. It became Old East, the first building raised on the campus of a state university in the United States.
Subject: Old East
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Commissioners mark out the sites of the university's buildings and grounds
Davie, Alfred Moore, Alexander Mebane and Thomas Blount met on the Chapel Hill tract and fixed the building sites, with land set aside for offices, avenues and ornamental grounds.
People: Thomas Blount · William Richardson Davie
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Old East cornerstone is laid
William Richardson Davie and fellow trustees laid Old East’s cornerstone; October 12 is observed as University Day.
Part of The founding of the University and Chapel Hill, 1789–1795 · 37 events
People: William Richardson Davie · Samuel Eusebius McCorkle
Subject: Old East
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The first town lots in Chapel Hill are sold at auction
After the Old East cornerstone was laid, the commissioners auctioned the village lots on the spot; 29 lots brought more than 1,500 pounds, and one was held back for the president's house.
People: Thomas Blount · William Richardson Davie
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Richard Bennehan gives shells for mortar for Old East
Bennehan donated fifty bushels of shells for making mortar for the university's first building. In 1796 he gave an air pump and thirty-two books.
Subject: Old East
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The trustees elect David Ker presiding professor of the university
Balloting on January 10, 1794, the trustees elected David Ker, who had come from Fayetteville, the university's first professor, with the title of presiding professor. He took charge at the opening in January 1795, lived in the house meant for a future president and held the post until July 1796.
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Trustees adopt the plan of instruction and set the university's opening for January 15
The board ordered the McCorkle committee's scheme into effect, fixed tuition by subject and created a presiding professor at $300 a year plus fees. It also resolved to build a steward's house before the opening and set a bill of fare for Commons with no drink but water.
People: John Haywood · William Lenoir · Samuel Eusebius McCorkle
Subject: Steward’s Hall
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The General Assembly grants the university unsold confiscated lands
The act gave the trustees confiscated Loyalist lands still unsold, chiefly the forfeited claims of Henry Eustace McCulloch, but sent anything above $20,000 to the state. The university's suits to collect under it angered landholders in Mecklenburg and nearby counties.
People: Adlai Osborne
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Black workers and campus labor
Enslaved men built and served the university from its first buildings, Wilson Caldwell led its labor force after Reconstruction, and the janitors organized an association in 1930 that became a CIO local in 1942. The university named the laundry for Kennon Cheek and Rebecca Clark in 1998, dedicated the Unsung Founders Memorial in 2005 and published the names of 119 enslaved workers in 2018.
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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.
Part of The founding of the University and Chapel Hill, 1789–1795 · 37 events
Subject: Old East
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James Mebane serves as the first president of the Dialectic Society
Orange County student James Mebane is the first president of the university's Dialectic Society, one of the two student debating societies formed in the university's first year.
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Old East is finished as a two-story dormitory of sixteen rooms
The university's first building was ready in 1795 as a two-story brick dormitory with sixteen rooms. Its plan is in effect two center-hall houses joined end to end, with a fireplace for every room, and it kept that height until a third story went on in 1822.
Subject: Old East
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The university finishes a house for its president at Cameron Avenue and Columbia Street
A Federal side-hall house for the head of the university was completed in 1795 at the northeast corner of what are now Cameron Avenue and South Columbia Street. Each of its two bedrooms had a pair of built-in closets, uncommon at the time.
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Walter Alves serves as a university trustee and board treasurer
Walter Alves of Orange County was a trustee of the University of North Carolina from 1795 to 1813 and treasurer of its board from 1795 to 1799.
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William Nunn buys James Patterson's inn and adds a tavern
Captain William Nunn, a Revolutionary War officer and former Orange County sheriff, bought Patterson's inn. He and his wife Betsy enlarged the rooms for lodgers and added a tavern, and the business stayed in the Nunn family for more than half a century.
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UNC opens to students
The University formally opened at Chapel Hill on a cold, rainy January 15, 1795, with Governor Richard Dobbs Spaight and trustees present, but no students had yet arrived. Hinton James came on February 12, and by March two professors taught 41 students; UNC was the only public university to graduate students in the eighteenth century.
Part of The founding of the University and Chapel Hill, 1789–1795 · 37 events
People: Hinton James · David Ker
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Trustees adopt the university's first by-laws
Drafted by Samuel McCorkle and amended in committee, the by-laws set four classes, prayers at sunrise and evening, a monitor in each class to report absences and misconduct, and punishments from admonition to expulsion. Students could not keep liquor in their rooms or gamble.
People: Samuel Eusebius McCorkle
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Hinton James arrives as UNC’s first student
Hinton James became UNC’s first student on February 12, 1795.
Part of The founding of the University and Chapel Hill, 1789–1795 · 37 events
People: Hinton James
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Charles Wilson Harris joins the new university as professor of mathematics
Harris joined the faculty in March 1795, weeks after the university opened, as professor of mathematics. On June 3, 1795 he organized the students into the debating club that became the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies.
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Harris sets up a small store of medicine for students and neighbours
Writing from the university on June 1, 1795, Harris told his uncle, a physician, that with no doctor nearer than Hillsborough he would keep a small stock of medicine for students and the neighbourhood, at cost. He enclosed a plan of the university lands and village.
People: David Ker · Charles Harris
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UNC’s Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies take shape
UNC students held the first recorded meeting of a Debating Society on June 3, 1795, and voted on July 2 to split in two, the new body being the Concord Society. They took the names Dialectic and Philanthropic in late August 1796 and for over a century served as debating clubs, student government and keepers of large libraries.
Part of The founding of the University and Chapel Hill, 1789–1795 · 37 events
People: Hinton James · Charles Wilson Harris
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Samuel Hopkins opens the accounts of Chapel Hill's first post office
Samuel Hopkins, the first postmaster appointed for Chapel Hill, files his first account with the Post Office as of July 1, 1795, the earliest record of the village post office.
Subject: Chapel Hill Post Office and Peace and Justice Plaza
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UNC holds its first public examination, announced by Governor Spaight
The University's first public examination took place at Chapel Hill on July 13, 1795, after notice appeared in the newspapers over the signature of Governor Richard Dobbs Spaight. The governor's wife, Mary Spaight, was the only woman present, and about a dozen men attended, including William R. Davie, James Hogg, Alfred Moore and James Glasgow.
People: James Hogg · William Richardson Davie
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Trustees vote to build a house for the university's grammar school
With Old East crowded and many students too young or unprepared for college classes, the board ordered a separate preparatory school building with lodging rooms, in the woods south of Rosemary Street. Richard Sims, an advanced student, seems to have been its first master.
Subject: Old East · University grammar school (Preparatory School)
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Joseph Green becomes the first student dismissed from the university
Green and Frank Burton went to a cotton-picking frolic after being forbidden. Burton accepted public admonition, but Green refused and was dismissed by the faculty under David Ker.
People: David Ker
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Trustees adopt William R. Davie's plan dividing the university into a preparatory school and professorships
Davie's plan put English at the center, let French stand beside the classics and set up chairs of moral and political philosophy, natural philosophy, mathematics, chemistry with agriculture and the mechanic arts, and languages. The board elected Samuel McCorkle a professor, but he declined when refused extra pay in place of the president's house.
People: David Ker · William Richardson Davie · Samuel Eusebius McCorkle
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Charles Wilson Harris acts as presiding professor
After David Ker resigned under pressure from the trustees in the summer of 1796, Harris acted as presiding professor until his own resignation that December. He had persuaded Joseph Caldwell to join the faculty in October 1796.
People: David Ker · Joseph Caldwell
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The two student societies stage a play in place of their regular exercises
Both societies voted to give up their usual exercises for a dramatic performance, probably urged on by tutor William Richards, a former strolling actor, and bought scenery at Williamsboro. One member who failed without excuse to take his two parts was expelled from his society.
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Thomas Person gives $1,050 to complete the university chapel, later named Person Hall
Trustee Thomas Person gave $1,050 to finish the chapel then under construction at Chapel Hill. The trustees thanked him for his liberality and the building, completed in 1798, was named Person Hall.
Subject: Person Hall
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Trustees forbid students to visit village taverns without leave and allow dancing lessons
Meeting at the July examinations, the board barred tavern visits without a professor's permission and gave the preparatory teachers authority over all students. The same meeting let students attend dancing schools with faculty consent.
People: Samuel Ashe · William Richardson Davie
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David Gillespie receives the earliest document resembling a university diploma
Leaving to help Andrew Ellicott fix the southern boundary of the United States, Gillespie was given a certificate of his studies signed by professors Charles W. Harris and Samuel Holmes and teacher William Richards. Governor Samuel Ashe attached a certificate under the state seal.
People: Samuel Ashe
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Joseph Caldwell arrives in Chapel Hill as professor of mathematics
Joseph Caldwell, a Princeton graduate and tutor, moved to Chapel Hill in October 1796 to teach mathematics at the new university. He became presiding professor the next year.
People: Charles Harris
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James Smiley Gillaspie is made principal of the university
To keep Joseph Caldwell, who meant to leave rather than carry the executive duties, the trustees elected Gillaspie professor of natural philosophy with the title of principal. Caldwell stayed as professor of mathematics and taught French in the preparatory school.
People: Joseph Caldwell
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Student John Pettigrew draws Old East
Pettigrew sent his father a colored drawing of the building, then two stories high and two-thirds its later length, with a white band between the stories and a platform at each door. Battle reproduced it as the frontispiece view of Old East.
Subject: Old East
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Mumps spreads among the students
John Pettigrew wrote home that thirty or forty students had the mumps, none badly. Smallpox brought by a man from Norfolk was seven or eight miles away, but Battle says it never reached Chapel Hill.
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Pleasant Henderson is chosen steward of the university
Pleasant Henderson moved from Mt. Pleasant to Chapel Hill in 1797 and was chosen steward of the University of North Carolina, following John Taylor in the post. A UNC Libraries exhibit records that he owned nineteen enslaved people.
Subject: Steward’s Hall
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Charles Gerrard leaves the university his Tennessee lands
Gerrard, a Revolutionary lieutenant living in Edgecombe County, bequeathed his 2,560-acre service tract on the Cumberland River below Nashville, asking that it stay university property forever, along with warrants for 11,364 more acres. The gift emboldened the trustees to begin the Main Building.
Subject: South Building
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Eagle Lodge meets in Chapel Hill and initiates Joseph Caldwell
By special dispensation, Hillsborough's Eagle Lodge met in Chapel Hill and made Masons of Joseph Caldwell, then presiding professor of the university, and three other faculty members.
Subject: Eagle Lodge
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George Clarke is buried in the ground that becomes the Chapel Hill town cemetery
The oldest dated stone in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, at Raleigh and Country Club roads, marks the 1798 grave of George Clarke, a member of the university's Philanthropic Society. It shows the burial ground in use by that year.
Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
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UNC holds its first commencement
UNC’s first graduating class included Hinton James and six other students.
Part of The founding of the University and Chapel Hill, 1789–1795 · 37 events
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The cornerstone of the Main, later South, Building is laid
A special Grand Lodge of Masons met at the university to lay the cornerstone of the principal building. Its walls rose a story and a half and then stood roofless for years for want of money.
Subject: South Building
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Archibald D. Murphey graduates from the university and joins its faculty
Archibald D. Murphey graduated with honors from the University at Chapel Hill in 1799 and was hired at once as a tutor. The next year he became professor of languages, one of three faculty members, and also served as librarian before resigning to study law in Hillsborough.
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John Taylor Sr. opens a tavern on Franklin Street
By 1799 the former steward had put up a tavern on Lot #13, which he had bought in 1796. The lot stayed in the hotel trade for decades: Alsobrook's hotel, the Watts Hotel, the Eagle Hotel and the Union Hotel all stood on it.
Subject: Eagle Hotel (Chapel Hill)
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Students rise against the faculty and beat principal Gillaspie
In the term before the 1799 commencement students beat Gillaspie, waylaid and stoned tutor William E. Webb and threatened Caldwell and Archibald Murphey, and for a week exercises stopped. Three leaders were dismissed and the faculty offered to resign, and by that November Caldwell was chosen again to head the university.
People: Joseph Caldwell · Archibald D. Murphey
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The Philanthropic Society adopts rules for marking its members' graves
When its minutes resumed in January 1799, after George Clarke's burial, George Long of Halifax County moved that the society honor members buried at Chapel Hill. Three weeks later a committee called for a black-painted oak or poplar railing around each grave with the name, date and society lettered in white, and a black armband worn for three months.
Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery · Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies
- Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
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The General Assembly takes back the university's confiscated lands and escheats
Amid hostility to the university as a Federalist school, and anger at its suits over old McCulloch claims, the legislature repealed the 1794 grant of confiscated property and the 1789 grant of escheats. The courts later held the escheat repeal unconstitutional in University v. Foy.
People: Joseph Caldwell
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Students stone steward Pleasant Henderson's house
Complaints about the food at Steward's Hall under stewards John Taylor and Pleasant Henderson helped fuel the student uprising of 1799. In 1801 Henderson's house was stoned, and he did not reapply for the stewardship.
Subject: Steward’s Hall
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The university builds a house for its Grammar School
Six years after the trustees ordered it, a one-story frame schoolhouse for the university's preparatory Grammar School was built in 1801. John M. Goodloe was paid about $320 for the work; until then the boys had been taught in a rented building.
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The university raises money for the Main Building by lottery
The legislature of 1801 let the trustees raise up to $4,000 by lotteries. Two drawings, the first of 1,500 five-dollar tickets and the second in 1802, cleared $5,080.81, though agents were slow to account for tickets.
People: William Polk · John Haywood
Subject: South Building
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Cameron becomes a trustee of the University of North Carolina
Cameron joined the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina in 1802, while he was practicing law at Hillsborough.
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Pleasant Henderson gives up the stewardship and opens a store
Henderson gave up the university stewardship in 1802 and declined the trusteeship he was elected to. About this time he went into business as Henderson and Searcy, and he kept his Chapel Hill residence while serving as clerk of the House of Commons from 1807 to 1830.
Subject: Steward’s Hall
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William Gaston serves as a trustee of the university
William Gaston sat on the university's board of trustees from 1802 until his death in January 1844, some forty-two years.
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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.
People: Joseph Caldwell
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A student duel brings expulsions and a trustee order against dueling
Quarrels in the spring of 1803 led to challenges and at least one meeting. Samuel G. Hopkins was expelled for fighting and John H. Hawkins for acting as second, and the trustees ordered that anyone in a duel be expelled and handed to the civil authorities.
People: William Polk · Joseph Caldwell
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John McCauley builds a store on Franklin Street
By 1803 John McCauley had a store on the northeast corner of Lot #11, one of the village's first. James Hogg's large house, built on the same part of the lot a year or two later, may have grown out of it.
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William Norwood gives $100 toward finishing South Building
William Norwood of Hillsborough contributed $100 toward finishing South Building at the university.
Subject: South Building
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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.
People: Joseph Caldwell
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Court rulings force the university to give up its McCulloch collections
In Ray's Executors v. McCulloch and Trustees v. Rice, the Court of Conference held that the 1783 peace treaty protected Henry Eustace McCulloch's claims. The General Assembly then ordered the money collected under the 1794 act refunded to the state treasury in trust for the debtors who had paid.
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James Hogg builds a large house on Franklin Street
James Hogg acquired the eastern half of Lot #11 from William R. Davie when his son Gavin entered the university, and built a ten-room house there. Debts forced him to sell in 1806, though he kept living in it; the house later passed to merchants and became the core of the Central Hotel.
Subject: Central Hotel (Chapel Hill)
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Joseph Caldwell is elected the first president of the university
When the trustees created the office of president in 1804 they elected Caldwell to it unanimously. He resigned the presidency in 1812 to teach and returned to it a few years later, holding it until his death in 1835.
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Trustees make Greek a requirement for a degree
After electing Caldwell president, the board ruled that no degree be granted without Greek, set Greek tests for entering the junior and freshman classes and repealed the degree for English and the sciences. It also ordered the president to wear a black gown at commencement.
People: Joseph Caldwell
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Nervous fever kills a student
A fever the doctors called nervous fever struck the university early in 1804. A student named Philips, of Edgecombe County, died and Lemuel Sessoms was not expected to live, and the dance planned for Washington's Birthday was dropped.
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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.
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The General Assembly restores the university's escheats
The bill passed the House 82 to 35 and the Senate 32 to 23, returning escheated property whose Tennessee land warrants later became the university's endowment. Maurice Moore, one of the first students, was among its strongest advocates.
People: Benjamin Smith · William Gaston
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The governor becomes ex officio president of the university's trustees
The act restoring the escheats made the governor president of the board and gave the General Assembly, on joint ballot, the power to fill vacancies. A trustee absent from meetings for two years could lose his seat.
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Pleasant Henderson writes to trustee Walter Alves about a student secession at the university
Pleasant Henderson wrote to Walter Alves that about 45 students had left the university in protest over the trustees' rule requiring student monitors to take an oath, and urged Alves and the board to act.
People: Pleasant Henderson
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Trustees repeal the monitor ordinance that set off the student secession
The 1805 law made student monitors swear to report every breach of the rules, and forty-five students signed a remonstrance and left when it was only softened. The board repealed it unanimously in December, but few of the seceders came back.
People: Archibald D. Murphey · Duncan Cameron · William Polk
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The name Franklin Street appears in Chapel Hill documents
The village's main road was being called Franklin Street in written records by 1806, about thirteen years after the first lots along it were sold.
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Frederick Nash is elected a trustee of the University of North Carolina
Nash was elected a trustee of the University of North Carolina in 1807 and remained an active supporter of the university. It awarded him an LL.D. in 1853.
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Trustees bar students expelled from other colleges
An ordinance sent to every college president in the country refused admission to anyone expelled from another college or who had left it to avoid trial, and required applicants to declare they had not. Colleges were asked to exchange lists of expelled students.
People: Benjamin Williams
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Thirty-eight students petition the faculty over food at Steward's Hall
Signers including John Branch complained of too little butter and of beef often unsound and full of vermin. The faculty found the wording defiant and had it rewritten, and suspended John R. Stokes and Elias Foord for refusing to sign the milder version.
Subject: Steward’s Hall
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President Joseph Caldwell marries Helen Hooper and moves to her Franklin Street house
Caldwell married Helen Hogg Hooper and left the President's House on campus for her home on Lot #19, which he appears to have owned already. The house stayed in the family until 1849, when the university bought it as President Swain's residence.
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The university divides the state into ten escheat districts with its own attorneys
To collect the restored escheats, the trustees named attorneys in ten districts, among them Archibald D. Murphey for the district beginning with Chatham, paid by commission on sales and collections. The same year the legislature gave the university estate balances unclaimed for seven years.
People: Archibald D. Murphey
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Thomas H. Taylor builds and runs a shoe store on Franklin Street
Tom Taylor, son of John Taylor Sr., put up a shoe store on the western half of Lot #14, which his father bought in 1812. The building later housed Dr. Walter Norwood's medicine shop.
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The university makes David Caldwell of Guilford a Doctor of Divinity
At the 1810 commencement the university gave honorary doctorates of divinity to David Caldwell, James Hall and James McRee. Caldwell's Latin diploma, dated in Person Hall, calls Chapel Hill Sacrarii Mons, the hill of the chapel.
People: Joseph Caldwell
Subject: Person Hall
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A student outbreak leaves the university with no graduates
After an insubordination whose details are lost, every senior except John A. Ramsey forfeited his diploma, and the 1811 commencement conferred only an honorary A.B. on Ramsey. Three of the six who later passed examinations received diplomas in 1813.
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William R. Davie receives the university's first honorary Doctor of Laws
The University of North Carolina awarded William R. Davie an honorary LL.D. in 1811, the first Doctor of Laws it conferred; honorary master's degrees had gone to Joseph Caldwell and others in 1799. Davie had sat on the board of trustees from 1789 to 1807.
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A sacred music society forms and an organ is ordered for the university chapel
The Raleigh Register reported a new society for the study of sacred music at the university and an organ, paid for by private gifts, already built in New York. The trustees later paid $50 to bring it to Chapel Hill.
Subject: Person Hall
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Professor Andrew Rhea buys the Hillsborough Street land where the log "Old Tavern" stands
In 1812 professor Andrew Rhea bought a tract a few blocks north of the campus, and he may have built the log house still standing at 419 Hillsborough Street as his own home. The house goes by the name Old Tavern, although nothing shows it was ever used as one.
Subject: Old Tavern (419 Hillsborough Street)
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Upperclassmen shut out of the literary societies form the Kappa Alpha order
When the Dialectic and Philanthropic societies stopped taking juniors and seniors to make room for new members, older students met in new secret clubs, the first being an order of Kappa Alpha.
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Robert H. Chapman is elected president as Caldwell returns to teaching mathematics
Caldwell asked to give up the presidency to finish his geometry and study astronomy. The board accepted his resignation, elected the Presbyterian minister Chapman president at $1,200 a year and kept Caldwell as professor of mathematics at $1,000.
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Thomas Ruffin serves on the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees
Ruffin served on the university's Board of Trustees from 1813 to 1831 and again from 1842 to 1868. The residence hall completed in 1922 was named for him and for his son Thomas Ruffin Jr.
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William Watson and William Barbee open a lumber yard
William Watson came to Chapel Hill in 1813 to work on South Building and went into the lumber business with William Barbee. Their yard supplied much of the lumber used in village building; its site is not known.
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Christopher Barbee opens a blacksmith shop on Franklin Street
Christopher Barbee, the university's largest land donor, rented the southwest corner of Matthew McCauley's Lot #8 for a smithy with a 33-foot front on the street. He bought the corner in 1824, and William D. Kirksey was advertising as the village blacksmith by 1833.
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James Thompson and George Trice build a store on Franklin Street
Thompson and Trice bought a 20-by-30-foot piece of Matthew McCauley's Lot #8 and put up a store on its narrow street front. Known later as Trice's store, it was held back when McCauley's heir sold the rest of the lot in 1822.
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Margaretta Chapman's marble headstone becomes the oldest surviving monument in the Chapel Hill graveyard
The Baroque-style marble headstone of sixteen-year-old Margaretta Chapman, who died in 1814, was probably set soon after her death and is thought to be the oldest stone monument in the cemetery. Like other early stones it was likely shipped in, since no gravestone carvers worked in North Carolina before the 1820s.
Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
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Professor William Hooper builds a house on East Franklin Street
About 1814 William Hooper, professor of ancient languages, put up a plain two-story Federal house at 504 East Franklin Street, one block east of the campus, with brick chimneys at the gable ends and a center door under a transom. It is one of only two houses from the village of that decade still standing.
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Students move into the finished South Building
Subscriptions Caldwell gathered on tours of the state in 1809 and 1811, about $8,220, let contractor John Close finish the Main Building begun in 1798. Students moved in during 1814.
People: Joseph Caldwell · John Haywood · William Gaston
Subject: South Building
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Thomas H. Taylor buys Lot #17 and builds the Tom Taylor house
Taylor bought Lot #17 from Frances Benton, enlarged the log cabin on it, and later built a much larger house around it, moving in about 1817. The university acquired the house in 1835, and it became President Swain's home and then housing for faculty.
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Caldwell takes students before a justice of the peace over attacks on President Chapman's property
After night raids on Chapman's stable, cart and gate, and tar and feathers on his gatepost, Caldwell asked justice Pleasant Henderson for a general warrant. Refused, he named five students, and a hearing questioned the student body under oath.
People: Pleasant Henderson · Robert H. (Robert Hett) Chapman
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Edward Robson keeps a store and the post office on Franklin Street
Before selling the property to Thomas H. Taylor in 1816, Edward Robson ran a store on the eastern half of Lot #10 and kept the village post office in it.
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Senior William B. Shepard speaks forbidden political passages and sets off a student revolt
Chapman had struck Republican passages from Shepard's oration and ordered him to sit when he spoke them anyway, but students cheered him on and the next day met in the chapel to back him. The trustees expelled Shepard and George C. Dromgoole, others were suspended, and most of the rest signed apologies.
People: Robert H. (Robert Hett) Chapman
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A gunpowder bomb explodes outside tutor John Patterson's door
Apparently in revenge for the Shepard suspensions, someone filled a brass door knob with powder, lit a match fuse and left it at Patterson's door. A student picked it up and dropped it moments before it went off, and no one was hurt.
People: William Mercer Green
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Robert H. Chapman resigns the university presidency
At the first board meeting after the Shepard affair Chapman resigned, saying he wished to give himself to the ministry. The trustees made it effective at once, paid him half a year's salary and let him keep the president's house to the end of the session.
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Joseph Caldwell is elected president a second time
After William Neill and Lewis von Schweinitz declined the office, the trustees returned the presidency to Caldwell by a commission taking effect January 1, 1817.
People: John Haywood · William Polk
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John Motley Morehead serves as a tutor at the university
After graduating in 1817, Morehead was one of the university's two tutors for that year, with Priestly Hinton Mangum.
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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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A student of 1818 recalls the village's two stores and Hilliard's tavern
Writing to Elisha Mitchell in 1853, William D. Moseley of the class of 1818 remembered about a dozen houses on the main street in his student years, with two stores, Trice's and Tom Taylor's, and Hilliard's tavern. Of the private buildings he named, only two houses on East Franklin Street survive.
People: William Dunn Moseley
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George Moses Horton begins selling poems to UNC students
By about age twenty, George Moses Horton, enslaved on a Chatham County farm, was carrying fruit to the UNC campus on Sundays, and students began paying him to compose love poems and acrostics. His first printed poem appeared in April 1829, the year The Hope of Liberty was published.
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Students James K. Polk and William Horn Battle board at the Tenney farmhouse
The one-story frame house at 381 Tenney Circle, a dwelling on John B. Tenney's farm northeast of the campus, was probably standing by 1818 and keeps much of its early interior. James K. Polk of the class of 1818 and William Horn Battle of the class of 1820 took room and board there and walked two miles to classes.
People: William Horn Battle
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The Puckett house stands on East Franklin Street across from Hooper's
John Puckett, a former postmaster, bought the lot at 501 East Franklin Street from John Craig in 1817, and by early 1818 his widow lived in a two-story Federal house there; Denison Olmsted bought it from her about 1820 and remodeled it. Before the Civil War it was the home of mathematics professor James Phillips, whose family held Ben and Dilsey Craig in slavery; the Craigs lived in a brick kitchen in the back yard.
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Trustees add a professorship of rhetoric and logic
Counting on money from Tennessee land warrants, the board created a chair of rhetoric and logic and an adjunct chair of moral philosophy over one dissenting vote. Shepard K. Kollock took the rhetoric chair in the fall of 1819, and critics complained that the faculty was filling with Presbyterian ministers.
People: Joseph Caldwell · Denison Olmsted
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Elisha Mitchell arrives in Chapel Hill as professor of mathematics
Elisha Mitchell, a Yale graduate from Connecticut, arrived at the University of North Carolina in January 1818 as professor of mathematics and natural philosophy. He taught at Chapel Hill until his death in 1857, moving to chemistry, geology and mineralogy in 1825.
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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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Amendments drawn by Bartlett Yancey reshape the university's board of trustees
The act raised the board to 65, the number of counties, left vacancies to the General Assembly, fixed a quorum of seven and let an annual meeting of fifteen remove a trustee for improper conduct. Special meetings could not undo votes of an annual meeting.
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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.
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Denison Olmsted begins teaching chemistry at Chapel Hill
Appointed in November 1817 to the university's new professorship of chemistry, Olmsted spent a year studying with Benjamin Silliman at Yale and began teaching at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1819. He stayed until the end of 1825, when Elisha Mitchell succeeded him.
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General Assembly appoints commissioners for the Town of Chapel Hill
The General Assembly named Joseph Caldwell, Pleasant Henderson, Thomas Taylor, Ezekiel Trice and William Barbee commissioners for the town of Chapel Hill, with power to fix its boundaries and make bylaws. Elected commissioners and a corporate charter followed in the 1850-51 session.
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The university closes its grammar school and makes Hillsborough Academy its preparatory school
When Abner W. Clopton gave up the grammar school the university dropped it. Caldwell arranged for Hillsborough Academy, under John Witherspoon with John Rogers teaching, to prepare boys for the university, whose faculty could attend its examinations and admit its top pupils on certificate.
People: Abner Wentworth Clopton · John Knox Witherspoon · Joseph Caldwell
Subject: Hillsborough Academy · University grammar school (Preparatory School)
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The university stops running Steward's Hall and lets students board where they choose
Ending the old commons, the trustees rented Steward's Hall to Mrs. Burton, who had to feed students for no more than $9 a month the first year and allow the commencement ball in the dining room free. Board there had risen from $30 a year in 1795 to $95 in 1818.
Subject: Steward’s Hall
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Students give up pistols and dirks after a Washington's Birthday brawl
After Walker Anderson's oration a dinner ended in drunken fighting, a dirk was drawn and a peacemaker was stabbed in the arm. The students were made to hand in their weapons, six pistols and two dirks, to be held while they remained at the university.
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Professor Denison Olmsted buys the Widow Puckett house on East Franklin Street
In 1820 Denison Olmsted bought the two-story Federal house and lot at 501 East Franklin Street from the Puckett family. From 1826 it was home to the family of mathematics professor James Phillips.
People: James Phillips
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The core of the Saunders-Pritchard House is built on land that later became Northside
The two-story I-house at 208 Pritchard Avenue stands at right angles to the street because it is older than the street. Local tradition carries its core back as far as 1820; an early owner was the Civil War veteran, preacher and farmer Joseph Hubbard Saunders, and merchant and landowner William N. Pritchard owned it later.
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Chapel Hill Academy prepares boys for the university under James A. Craig
James A. Craig announced that the Chapel Hill Academy would begin its session on June 20, 1820, with a course arranged as preparation for the University of North Carolina and sessions matching the university's.
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The university rents the empty Grammar School house to hunter Peyton Clements
Two years after closing its preparatory school, the university let the building on the Grand Avenue ground to Peyton Clements, a hunter who supplied game to the college and the village boarding houses.
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Trustees vote to raise Old East a story and build Old West
At Caldwell's urging, and against the faculty's plea to spend on books and apparatus, the board voted to enlarge Old East, build Old West to match and start a new chapel, borrowing from banks against Tennessee land sales. Architect William Nichols ran the work, and the South Building's Prayer Hall became a chemistry laboratory.
People: Joseph Caldwell · Elisha Mitchell · William Nichols
Subject: South Building · Gerrard Hall · Old East · Old West
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David B. Alsobrook buys Taylor's tavern and makes it a hotel
Attorney David B. Alsobrook bought John Taylor Sr.'s tavern and, after improvements, ran it as a hotel with a ballroom that became a favorite in the village.
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Dr. Charles R. Yancey builds a house and farm buildings on Franklin Street
Dr. Yancey bought most of Lot #8 from William McCauley and put up a large house with a barn, carriage house, smokehouse, separate kitchen and quarters for enslaved people. Jesse Hargrave bought the place in 1840; the house burned in 1866.
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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.
People: William Nichols
Subject: Old East
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State architect William Nichols designs Old West and Gerrard Hall
In 1822 William Nichols, the English-born architect who was North Carolina's first state architect, drew Old West as a match for Old East and designed a new chapel, Gerrard Hall. Gerrard's south portico of four two-story Ionic columns made it the campus's first building in the Romantic Classical mode.
People: William Nichols
Subject: Gerrard Hall · Old West
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Faculty send ten new students out of Chapel Hill in a smallpox scare
Word that ten arriving students had spent a night in Tarboro, where smallpox was spreading, set off a panic. The faculty ordered them to stay five miles from Chapel Hill until the danger passed.
People: Augustus Moore
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Professor Denison Olmsted is hired to make the state's geological survey
The Board of Agriculture, created in 1822, was allowed in 1823 to employ someone to survey the state's geology and minerals at $250 a year. It chose Olmsted, whose published report Battle thought probably the first of any state, and Elisha Mitchell later carried on the work.
People: Elisha Mitchell
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Seniors hold a drinking party at the Foxhall spring
After final examinations nineteen of the twenty-eight seniors took whiskey and brandy to a spring north of the village called Foxhall, and one poured the liquor into the spring to make toddy. The faculty granted their diplomas only after they made formal acknowledgments.
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Faculty and Orange County trustees expel two students who attacked professors
Two students, drunk from the village grog shop and armed with a club and a pistol, went out after members of the faculty and assaulted two of them. The trustees living in Orange County were called to sit with the faculty, and the two were expelled.
People: Elisha Mitchell · Duncan Cameron · Thomas Ruffin · James Webb
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The trustees settle William Nichols's accounts for Old West and the campus repairs
The university settled with William Nichols, its supervisor and builder, for Old West, the new chapel, the bricks made on university land and repairs to South Building, the President's House and Steward's Hall. Battle gives the cost as about $26,587 and says the accounts showed a want of careful superintendence.
Subject: Old West · South Building · Steward’s Hall
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Trustees send Caldwell to Europe to buy books and scientific instruments
Acting on Caldwell's February 1824 plea that the university could not go forward without books and apparatus, the trustees set aside $6,000, half for each, and accepted his offer to buy them abroad at his own expense. He wrote from London on August 31, 1824, after visiting booksellers and instrument makers and touring Scotland.
People: Denison Olmsted
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University Lodge No. 80 is chartered at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill's first Masonic lodge, University Lodge No. 80, was chartered. It stopped meeting in 1849 as older members died or moved away.
Subject: University Lodge
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General Assembly gives the faculty power to bar traveling shows at Chapel Hill
After a band of strolling players performed nightly for a week in a room over a village store and took an estimated $383, most of it from students, the faculty asked for power to stop such shows. The General Assembly passed a law giving it to them.
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Students illuminate the college to welcome Caldwell home from Europe
When President Caldwell came back from nearly a year in Europe buying books and apparatus, the students lit up the college buildings and escorted him to a stand by the well in front of South Building, where he spoke to them and the villagers. In December 1825 the trustees formally thanked him for his work.
People: Paul C. Cameron · George E. Badger
Subject: South Building · The Old Well
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Trustees take over Denison Olmsted's house for the professors of chemistry
When Olmsted resigned in December 1825 to teach at Yale, the trustees bought at cost the house he had purchased from Mrs. Puckett for $1,300 and repaired. The lot was set apart for the professors of chemistry, and the house was later the home of James Phillips and then of President Venable.
People: James Phillips
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Trustees adopt by-laws creating a resident superintendent and a student uniform
On Bartlett Yancey's motion the trustees created a superintendent of university property living at Chapel Hill, who was to receive and pay out all student money, and they prescribed a plain uniform dress and forbade boots. Chapel Hill merchant Thomas H. Taylor was appointed; in January 1829 the office passed to the faculty, who chose Elisha Mitchell.
People: Elisha Mitchell
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Fever outbreak kills three university students
A serious sickness, which Battle identifies as typhoid fever, struck the university in August and September 1825 and three students died, among them William H. Beard and Zenas Johnston. The acting president urged the trustees to engage a resident physician.
People: Elisha Mitchell
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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.
People: George Moses Horton · Nicholas Marcellus Hentz
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Nicholas Marcellus Hentz becomes the university's professor of modern languages
Hentz took the chair of modern languages at the university, the first professor at Chapel Hill whose duties were to teach French and Spanish regularly. While there he also studied spiders and published on them in scientific journals.
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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.
People: James Phillips
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Young Andrew Johnson, walking from Raleigh to Tennessee, is fed and lodged at James Craig's
On his way west on foot, the future president Andrew Johnson stopped at James Craig's farmhouse about a mile west of the village and was given supper, a night's lodging and food for the road. He told the story from the steps of the president's house when he returned for the 1867 commencement.
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Chapel Hill celebrates the fiftieth anniversary of independence
The village marked the semicentennial of the Declaration of Independence with a procession to Person Hall, where Revolutionary veteran Major Henderson read the Declaration and William McCauley gave the oration. A dinner at S. B. Alsobrook's hotel and a ball to Ilai Nunn's violin followed.
Subject: Person Hall
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Dr. Hudson Cave builds a house on Franklin Street
Dr. Cave bought the eastern half of Lot #6 from his father-in-law William Barbee and built a house set well back from the street. The frontage maps show the Cave residence there through 1868.
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Trustees prescribe a student uniform and forbid boots
The board ordered students to wear dark gray in summer and blue in winter, changing winter to gray six months later, and banned boots, probably because of hard times after the panic of 1825. Seniors were excused from the boot rule at their commencement, and the other classes soon won the same privilege.
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Archibald D. Murphey gives the first commencement-eve oration in Person Hall
On June 27, 1827, the day before commencement, Murphey delivered an oration in Person Hall at Chapel Hill under the appointment of the Dialectic Society. Addressing the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, he argued that a college course only prepared the mind for later learning; the speech was printed and reissued in 1843.
Subject: Person Hall · Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies
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Dr. Walter A. Norwood opens a medicine shop opposite Alsobrook's hotel
Dr. Norwood's medicine shop stood on Thomas H. Taylor's half of Lot #14, probably in Taylor's old store building, which Norwood later bought. From 1841 the shop housed the practice of Drs. Jones and Moore.
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Thirty students walk out of Sunday worship in the chapel
One Sunday morning thirty students left divine service in the chapel one by one. The faculty examined each; thirteen gave acceptable excuses and the other seventeen denied any plan, so the case was dropped.
People: Cadwallader Jones
Subject: Person Hall
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George Moses Horton publishes The Hope of Liberty
George Moses Horton’s The Hope of Liberty was published in Raleigh, with supporters hoping sales could finance his freedom.
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Presbyterians begin worshipping together in Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill's Presbyterians began meeting about 1829 in homes and university buildings, with university faculty serving as ministers, according to the church's own history. The congregation's surviving session records begin in 1845, the year Lefler and Wager give for its formal organization, on June 8. Its first sanctuary on Franklin Street was dedicated September 23, 1849, and the congregation took the name University Presbyterian Church in the 1960s.
Subject: University Presbyterian Church
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Students organize a temperance society
Some students formed a Temperance Society in the summer of 1829, and Battle credits it with reducing drinking of spirits at the college. At its request Elisha Mitchell gave an address on intemperance in 1831 that was printed.
People: Elisha Mitchell
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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.
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Anne Royall publishes a hostile account of Chapel Hill
The traveling writer Anne Royall visited Chapel Hill in 1829 and in her Southern Tour, published in 1830, charged that the president's wife, Helen Caldwell, ruled the university. Battle answers with the faculty's account of the student she defended, who had been dismissed for disorder at a Sunday service.
People: Joseph Caldwell
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Caldwell builds the first college observatory in the United States
Caldwell began an astronomical observatory on the campus in 1830 and finished it in 1831, paying more than 400 dollars himself, to house instruments he had bought in Europe in 1824. The DocSouth biography calls it the first American observatory built for teaching.
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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.
People: James Phillips
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Robert Donaldson has A. J. Davis design a campus hall for the Philanthropic Society that is never built
In the 1830s alumnus Robert Donaldson, by then living in New York, hired Alexander Jackson Davis to design a hall for the Philanthropic Society on the campus. It was not built, but Donaldson kept up a correspondence with President Swain about gardens, architects and furnishings that led to Davis's later work at Chapel Hill.
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The core of the Huskey House is built on East Rosemary Street
The heavily altered house at 215 East Rosemary Street probably dates from the 1830s; only its Greek Revival doorway still shows its age. It is named for a later resident, village blacksmith John Huskey.
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Trustees meet in emergency session over the university's debts
With debts of about $37,500 and only some 82 paying students, a special meeting of trustees at Chapel Hill on June 21, 1830 called the whole board to Raleigh on July 19. There a committee under James Iredell reported on the finances, and the board adopted a memorial drawn by Thomas Ruffin asking the General Assembly for relief.
People: Joseph Caldwell · Willie P. Mangum · Thomas Ruffin · William Gaston
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Trustees refuse a state loan tied to legislative control of the university
The General Assembly answered the trustees' memorial with an act having the Literary Board lend $25,000 for five years, but only if the loan became a lien on all university property and the trustees agreed that the legislature could take over the charter. The trustees unanimously rejected it and borrowed $4,000 from the Bank of the United States branch at Fayetteville.
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Giles Mebane stays at Chapel Hill as a university tutor
After graduating from the University of North Carolina in 1831, Giles Mebane remained in Chapel Hill as a tutor before starting to practice law.
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Hentz leaves the university and Chapel Hill for Kentucky
Hentz left the university in 1831. The local Presbyterian community had frowned on his Roman Catholic upbringing and suspected his politics, and after he left French was dropped from the curriculum.
People: Caroline Lee Hentz
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John DeBerniere Hooper teaches at the university as tutor and professor
After graduating in 1831 Hooper stayed in Chapel Hill as a tutor in languages, became professor of modern languages in July 1836 and professor of Latin in 1838. He and his wife left Chapel Hill in 1848 to teach and farm near Littleton.
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Trustees offer the university's Chapel Hill lands for sale
Pressed by debt, the trustees named William Polk, James Mebane and James Webb to offer the unimproved university lands around Chapel Hill for sale. Only a small sum came in, from the sale of the Preparatory School acre; that school had been closed for more than ten years.
People: William Polk · James Webb
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Friends of education organize the North Carolina Institute of Education at Chapel Hill
During commencement week a meeting adopted a constitution on Benjamin M. Smith's motion, elected Simmons J. Baker president and made professors Elisha Mitchell, William Hooper and James Phillips its executive committee. The Institute met at the next few commencements and enrolled about 130 members before it lapsed.
People: Benjamin Smith · Elisha Mitchell · James Phillips
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William Mercer Green delivers the literary societies' oration before commencement
On June 22, 1831, the day before commencement, William Mercer Green delivered an oration at Chapel Hill on the influence of Christianity upon the welfare of nations, under the annual appointment of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies. Dennis Heartt printed it in Hillsborough the same year.
People: Dennis Heartt
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A small nondenominational Union Church goes up on the Grand Avenue ground
After the university sold the old Grammar School property, a small church open to all denominations, called the Union Church or the Village Chapel, was built on the Grand Avenue plot facing Franklin Street.
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Benton Utley buys the Hogg house and opens a dry goods store
Gavin Hogg sold the family house to Benton Utley, who shared it with James Hogg and built a dry goods store beside it. The store failed, and Utley sold house and stock to Zachariah Trice in 1837.
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Cadwallader Jones graduates from the University of North Carolina
Jones, the son of Cadwallader and Rebecca Edwards Long Jones of West Hill near Hillsborough, took his degree at Chapel Hill in 1832.
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Judge William Gaston predicts the end of slavery in a UNC commencement address
Gaston told the university's graduates and guests that slavery would be overthrown. The book says the audience applauded the speech but rejected its antislavery message.
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The university sells the old Grammar School house and grounds
Thirteen years after the Grammar School closed, the university sold its empty schoolhouse and lot. In the meantime the house had been left vacant and then lived in by a hunter's family.
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The Institute of Education names Gaston to a committee to petition the legislature on popular education
At its second meeting, held during the 1832 commencement, the North Carolina Institute of Education voted to memorialize the General Assembly on popular education and named William Gaston, Frederick Nash and David L. Swain to the committee.
People: Frederick Nash · David L. Swain
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English Record Commission sends its publications to the university library
Between 1833 and 1841 the British government's Record Commission gave the university 83 folio and 24 octavo volumes, among them a printing of the Domesday Book, with twelve books and many pamphlets by its secretary, Charles Parton Cooper.
Subject: UNC Libraries
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Isaac J. Collier and Jones Watson open a cabinetmaking business
The two men started making furniture on Franklin Street in 1833. After the partnership dissolved in the later 1830s, Collier kept the business going.
People: Jones Watson
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Peter Dromgoole disappears from Chapel Hill
Peter Pelham Dromgoole came to Chapel Hill in January 1833, failed the university's entrance examination and studied under a tutor. That spring, after bitter letters with his father, he vanished from his lodgings, leaving most of his belongings and a debt to a Chapel Hill merchant.
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Pleasant Henderson leaves Chapel Hill for Tennessee
Still deep in debt, the former steward and storekeeper moved west. His son Dr. Alexander Martin Henderson secured the family home on Franklin Street, and the store on the property was advertised that year as Norfleet and Henderson's.
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Trustees name the new chapel Gerrard Hall
The trustees sold Major Charles Gerrard's 2,560-acre service tract in Tennessee for $6,400, voted $2,000 of it toward finishing the new chapel that had stood unfinished since about 1824, and resolved that the building be known forever as Gerrard Hall in his memory.
People: George E. Badger · William Polk · William Gaston
Subject: Gerrard Hall
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William D. Kirksey advertises as the village blacksmith
After Christopher Barbee's death, his corner blacksmith shop passed through his son William, and by 1833 William D. Kirksey was advertising as Chapel Hill's blacksmith. Maps show Kirksey's shop on the corner through 1843.
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Isaac C. Partridge publishes The Harbinger
Isaac C. Partridge's weekly The Harbinger, one of the county's first literary periodicals, began at Chapel Hill on August 27, 1833, after a prospectus that January, and ran for about a year. It covered the sciences and arts and leaned on professors Elisha Mitchell and William Hooper for its contents.
People: Elisha Mitchell · William Hooper
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Students win the use of Steward's Hall for the commencement ball
A committee chosen by a mass meeting of students, with Christopher C. Battle as its writer, petitioned the trustees on November 6, 1833 for a room in Steward's Hall for the commencement ball, and the trustees agreed. The ball managers then invited leading men of the state, among them Governor Swain.
People: David L. Swain
Subject: Steward’s Hall
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Trustee committee advises against moving the university to Raleigh
On James Iredell's motion, Governor Swain named fifteen trustees, none from Orange County, to consider moving the university to the capital. In December 1833 they reported removal inexpedient, and the question never came before the board again.
People: David L. Swain
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Trustees make the senior professor Caldwell's deputy and add an adjunct professor
When Caldwell's illness first forced him to ask for help, the trustees gave the professor of longest standing, Elisha Mitchell, power to act in the president's place and created an adjunct professorship of natural philosophy and astronomy, filled by Walker Anderson. Mitchell served as acting president until Swain arrived.
People: Elisha Mitchell
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Dr. Walter A. Norwood closes his medicine shop and moves to Hillsborough
Norwood gave up his Franklin Street shop and left for Hillsborough. Elisha Mitchell owned the land and building by the end of the year and soon sold them on credit to Isaac Partridge for a hotel.
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Former sheriff Thomas D. Watts takes over Alsobrook's hotel
Thomas D. Watts, once sheriff of Orange County, took charge of the hotel on Lot #13, which became known as Watts's hotel. His widow Lucy bought the property in 1839 and ran it until 1846.
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A notice offers Christopher Barbee's livestock and household goods for sale at his late home
Two years after Christopher Barbee died, a public notice offered his horses, cattle, corn, farm tools and household and kitchen furniture for sale at his late residence on The Mountain. His son William, the executor, had his own plantation and a house in the village, and no Barbee seems to have lived there afterward.
Subject: The Mountain (Christopher Barbee plantation, now Meadowmont)
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I. C. Patridge opens the University Hotel in Chapel Hill
Patridge advertised in December 1834 that he had opened a public house at Chapel Hill across from Watts' Hotel, with new stables and an ostler.
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Dialectic Society prints a catalogue of its library
The Dialectic Society's printed catalogue of 1835 listed 2,954 bound volumes and ten maps, the largest groups being novels and romances, periodicals and history. With the Philanthropic library about the same size, the two societies held some 6,000 books.
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Thomas H. Taylor trades his Franklin Street house to the university
Taylor exchanged Lot #17 and his house for university land in Tennessee and left Chapel Hill. The university gave the Tom Taylor house to its new president, David L. Swain, whose wife disliked the old Caldwell house.
People: David L. Swain
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University trustees pay for a stone wall around the Chapel Hill graveyard
By 1835 about six more marked graves had joined George Clarke's, among them society members James Neal and James Smith, and the trustees set aside $64.41 to enclose the burying ground with a stone wall.
Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
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Trustees create an executive committee to run the university
At Duncan Cameron's instance the board placed management in a seven-member executive committee including the governor, with the powers of the land, appointments and building committees and the right to change studies and dismiss faculty. The first members were Cameron, George E. Badger, William McPheeters, Charles Manly, Frederick Nash, William A. Graham and Governor Swain.
People: Duncan Cameron · David L. Swain · George E. Badger · William McPheeters · Frederick Nash · William A. Graham
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President Joseph Caldwell dies
The university's first president died after years of a painful illness and was buried in the Chapel Hill village cemetery. The trustees' executive committee adopted a tribute on February 6, 1835, and the students resolved to wear badges of mourning.
People: Haywood Williams Guion
Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
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A dated event is a fact, filed on the page of the subject it belongs to: a person, a place, a theme, or a named event or history. Pages are subjects, with their own works and sources; the Place, community, or institution filter also gathers the institutions that recur in the entries without a page of their own. The page opens on the highlights; a search or any filter looks through every dated event and storyline, and each filter’s counts say how many entries choosing it would show alongside the others. A storyline is a longer history that gathers related dated events, and each storyline’s page lists its own. Counts give dated events and storylines separately. Dates come from the sources named on the cards and from the index’s event pages; where sources disagree, the card follows the county records. Entries marked approximate or needing research say so on the card; the rest were checked against the source named on it. The correction link under the entries opens the contact form; name the entry and its date and the Friends will check the source. Suggest an event →
Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated October 2, 2026.
