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6 dated events match your filters.
Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–6.Back to highlights
- Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
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Isaac Collier builds an I-house on East Rosemary Street
Isaac Collier is thought to have built the two-story I-house at 315 East Rosemary Street between 1853 and 1858. The novelist Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, later lived there.
People: Betty Smith
- Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
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Betty Smith comes to Chapel Hill with the Federal Theatre Project
The Federal Theater sent Smith to Chapel Hill in 1936 to work with Frederick H. Koch of the Carolina Playmakers. She stayed when the federal project expired, helped Koch compile American Folk Plays and took his classes for him in his absence.
People: Frederick H. Koch
Subject: Carolina Playmakers
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Betty Smith edits a collection of plays with Frederick Koch and Robert Finch
Smith coedited Plays for Schools and Little Theatres with Koch and Finch in 1937 and wrote a catalog of one-act plays.
Part of The Carolina Playmakers and the founding of UNC Press · 20 events
People: Frederick H. Koch
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Daphne Athas graduates from UNC
Athas graduated from the university in 1943 after studying writing with Betty Smith and Phillips Russell.
People: Betty Smith · Phillips Russell
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, written in Chapel Hill, is published
Smith wrote the novel in a one-room house on North Street in Chapel Hill, rising about half past five and working against the chimney wall to keep warm. Harper published it on 17 August 1943 and it sold more than 150,000 copies within two weeks.
- Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Betty Smith is buried in the Chapel Hill Memorial Cemetery
Smith died in January 1972 after being moved to a convalescent home in Shelton, Connecticut. A funeral mass was said at St. Thomas More Church in Chapel Hill and she was buried in the Chapel Hill Memorial 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.
