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Orange County Indexed

Chronology

Key events from Orange County history: 100 highlights to start, then the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, each connected to the index. A storyline gathers many dated events into one history, such as the Regulator crisis.

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4 dated events match your filters.

Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–4.Back to highlights

Entries

  1. Early twentieth century · 1900–1944

  2. Construction or physical change · 110 Laurel Hill Road, Chapel Hill Botanist Henry Roland Totten builds a Tudor Revival house on Laurel Hill Road

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

  3. Civil rights era · 1945–1975

  4. Founding or opening · Mason Farm, Chapel Hill UNC trustees set aside Mason Farm land for a botanical garden

    The university's Board of Trustees allocated about 72 acres of its Mason Farm property for the North Carolina Botanical Garden, officially establishing it. Botanist H. R. Totten's efforts helped procure the site.

  5. Founding or opening · Coker Hills, Elliott Road and Clayton Road, Chapel Hill Henry Roland Totten develops the first sections of Coker Hills

    Coker College hired UNC botanist Henry Roland Totten, a colleague of the late W. C. Coker, to develop its Estes Drive land, and the first sections of Coker Hills went up along Elliott and Clayton roads in 1960 and 1961. The rest of the neighborhood was built out through 1972.

  6. Recent decades · 1976–2026

  7. Founding or opening · North Carolina Botanical Garden, Chapel Hill The Totten Center opens at the North Carolina Botanical Garden

    The garden's administrative and interpretive building, its first permanent building, opened in 1976. A bequest from the estate of Henry Roland and Adelaide Totten made it possible, and it was named for them.

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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.

Two mice reading back to back against a leaf, with the hand-lettered words Friends of the Orange County Public Library
Illustration by Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell, gifted to the Friends 2026