Skip to content

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.

Search and filters

Search and filters · 1 active

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. Civil rights era · 1945–1975

  2. Protest or organizing · Chapel Hill Gloria Williams asks the school board to readmit boycotting Lincoln High students

    At the Chapel Hill school board meeting, Mrs. Gloria Williams, speaking for parents of students who had joined the Chapel Hill Freedom Committee's boycott of Lincoln High School, asked that all of them be readmitted. The board upheld the expulsion of two senior leaders, Henry Sanford and James Brittain, after Superintendent Howard Thompson said he would resign if they returned.

  3. Appointment, election or service · Chapel Hill Gloria Williams directs the Chapel Hill Housing Authority

    Gloria Williams was director of the Chapel Hill Housing Authority from 1968 until it merged with the town's Redevelopment Commission in September 1973, when she became assistant director. In 1969 she was the contact for placing families in the town's first public housing.

  4. Recent decades · 1976–2026

  5. Appointment, election or service · Orange County Gloria Williams leads Joint Orange Chatham Community Action

    As director of Joint Orange Chatham Community Action (JOCCA), the county anti-poverty agency, Gloria Williams gave poor families emergency food, spoke for tenants at the 1984 Orange County hearings on a minimum housing code and ran a summer youth work program.

  6. Naming or commemoration · Peace and Justice Plaza, Chapel Hill Chapel Hill dedicates the Peace and Justice Plaza marker

    The town unveiled a granite marker at Peace and Justice Plaza, in front of the old post office on Franklin Street, naming nine local activists: Charlotte Adams, Hank Anderson, James Brittian, Joe Herzenberg, Mildred Ringwalt, Hubert Robinson, Joe Straley, Lucy Straley and Gloria Williams. The Town Council had named the plaza in 2006 and set criteria for later honorees.

Suggest a correction to an entry →

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 1, 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