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Civil rights era · 1945–1975
- 1950s
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The Pinetum at Rocky Ridge Farm is deeded to the university's botanical garden
A protected stand of Coker's remaining forest along Meeting of the Waters Creek on the west edge of the development, known as the Pinetum, was deeded in 1954 to the UNC botanical garden for its care.
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The University tears down the Crystal Palace on East Franklin Street for planetarium parking
The University had bought the old building known as the Crystal Palace in 1945. In 1954 it razed it and turned the lot into parking for Morehead Planetarium, with a large sundial in a rose garden at the center.
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The university awards William Picard Jacocks an honorary doctor of laws
The University of North Carolina, where Jacocks had graduated in 1904, gave him an honorary doctor of laws degree while he was living in Chapel Hill in retirement.
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Chapel Hill American Legion post gives an iron lung to N.C. Memorial Hospital
The Chapel Hill post of the American Legion presented an iron lung, bought for about $1,600, to North Carolina Memorial Hospital, with Congressman Carl T. Durham making the presentation. Hospital director Robert R. Cadmus said the hospital had treated 90 polio patients, two from Orange County, in its first 18 months; it was the hospital's second iron lung.
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Sophie Livas is installed as Worthy Matron of the Eastern Star chapter in Chapel Hill
Sophie Livas was installed as Worthy Matron of University Chapter 264, Order of the Eastern Star, succeeding Elizabeth Montgomery.
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Brown v. Board places local school segregation under constitutional challenge
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated public schools unconstitutional, putting Orange County's separate schools for Black and white children under legal challenge. Four days later Chapel Hill Mayor Edwin Lanier urged gradual adjustment, and school board chairman Carl Smith predicted little trouble in complying but expected high schools to be affected most.
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Chapel Hill-Carrboro churches name a committee to help schools desegregate peacefully
Two weeks after the Brown decision, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Ministerial Association set up a steering committee to study how the churches could help bring a peaceful transition to non-segregated schools. Its members were the Rev. Charles Jones, Mrs. Harold Walters, George Esser Jr., the Rev. T. P. Duhart and Mrs. J. Snipes.
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The Pride of Orange Elks lodge clears ground for its hall on South Merritt Mill Road
The Black Elks lodge, Pride of Orange No. 276, cleared the lot and planned to start its $15,000 two-story hall in June, with members doing most of the work. The lodge hall was to be upstairs and the youth group's rooms below; until then the thirty-member lodge rented rooms over the West Franklin Street Grocery.
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Albert Coates and James C. N. Paul prepare the Institute's report on the Brown decision for Governor Umstead
At Governor William B. Umstead's request, Coates wrote a history of the state's separate schools and Paul, who had clerked for Chief Justice Fred Vinson, examined the ruling and the plans for getting around it, concluding that segregated schools could not be kept. When Umstead named Thomas J. Pearsall's advisory committee on August 11, 1954, the report was the first paper its members received, and Coates then ran a shortened version in Popular Government.
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The Marathon Restaurant leaves its East Franklin Street building
The Marathon, a sandwich shop and restaurant in the building later numbered 115 East Franklin Street since the 1930s, gave up the building in the week before June 4, 1954. The College Cafe's owners had bought it from the J. T. Durham estate.
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A windstorm damages the Frozen Kustard drive-in across from Brady's on the Durham road
An evening thunderstorm with winds put at 80 miles an hour struck the Durham road east of Chapel Hill. It tore two signs off the Frozen Kustard drive-in, damaged its roof and knocked down its phone booth; the wind blew Brady McLennan back through his restaurant door.
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The College Cafe moves across Franklin Street into the former Marathon building
Max Yarbrough and Jesse West moved their College Cafe from the Robbins building across Franklin Street into the former Marathon Restaurant, which they had bought and rebuilt. It reopened next door to Rose's store with new equipment and seats for 40.
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The University tears down Archer House to make room for the Ackland Art Museum
Demolition of the 47-year-old Archer House on South Columbia Street began in August 1954 and was still under way in late September. Its lot and the Roberson lot next door became the site of the Ackland museum.
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Two forgotten graves in a Noble Street backyard come to light
A neighbor noticed two weathered, unlettered tombstones under oak trees in the backyard of 108 Noble Street, and the News Leader could not learn whose graves they were. Alice Noble recalled the land as the old Castlebury place and a log cabin that once stood nearby.
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Harry Macklin comes back to Chapel Hill to reopen Harry's Grill in the old Campus Cafe
Harry Macklin, who had run Harry's Grill until 1944, bought the Campus Cafe two doors from the post office and reopened it as a new Harry's Grill and delicatessen. The town board granted him a beer and wine permit.
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Bayard Wootten sells her Chapel Hill studio and returns to New Bern
Bayard Wootten sold the Wootten-Moulton Studio to her longtime manager T. C. Moore, who kept it running, and left Chapel Hill for her old home town of New Bern.
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Howard W. Odum dies in Chapel Hill
Odum died in Chapel Hill on November 8, 1954, while still at work on several books, after 34 years on the UNC faculty.
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Chapel Hill aldermen elect Oliver K. Cornwell mayor
After Mayor Edwin S. Lanier won the Democratic nomination for county commissioner, the Board of Aldermen chose one of its own members, Oliver K. Cornwell, as mayor and elected Rogers Wade to his seat.
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Community Church starts an integrated preschool
The congregation’s preschool admitted children across racial lines.
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Crowell Little and Grady Pritchard move the former Strowd dealership to 1710 East Franklin Street
The partners left the downtown building at 100 West Franklin Street in 1955 for a new site on East Franklin Street toward Durham. The old building was later remodeled for several businesses.
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Daniel Okun chairs UNC's Department of Environmental Sciences and Engineering
Okun, who joined the UNC public health faculty in 1952, headed the department from 1955 to 1973, and it grew from three to 25 faculty members.
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Ed Yoder and Louis Kraar edit the Daily Tar Heel
UNC students Ed Yoder and Louis Kraar were listed together as editors of the Daily Tar Heel in the spring and fall of 1955.
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Edward O. Diggs becomes UNC's first Black medical graduate
Edward O. Diggs graduated from the UNC School of Medicine in 1955, the first African American to earn a Doctor of Medicine degree from the university. James Slade, the school's second Black student, had enrolled in 1953.
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Fumiko Seki lives in Chapel Hill and records the town's color line
Fumiko Seki came to Chapel Hill when her husband received a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study at UNC. As a mother, wife and student she watched how residents kept the color line and met Black students, and she later described the town in her memoir Chaperu hiru monogatari.
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George Esser launches the Institute's course in municipal management
Assistant director George Esser started a ten-week course in municipal management, taught over a series of three-day weekends, that came to be expected of anyone hoping to run a North Carolina city. It was part of a shift at the Institute from teaching the letter of the law toward public administration and policy.
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J. Carlyle Sitterson becomes dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at UNC
Sitterson, who had begun teaching history at UNC in 1935 while completing his doctorate, became dean of the School of Arts and Sciences in 1955. He was appointed vice-chancellor in 1965.
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James A. Taylor builds a shingled Colonial Ranch on Fern Lane from magazine blueprints
The plans were American Home magazine's House No. 33, published in 1954, and the original blueprints still stay with the house. It has a small-paned bay window and an attached garage entered from the side.
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Joe and Peggy Galloway build a Contemporary brick Ranch on Pine Lane
The house sits on a daylight basement with bands of casement windows. Joe Galloway ran placement for the UNC School of Business; Peggy Galloway taught in the public schools.
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WUNC-TV begins broadcasting
WUNC-TV began broadcasting from Chapel Hill on January 8, 1955.
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First Salk polio vaccinations given to Orange County first and second graders
Local physicians working under the county health department gave the first round of Salk polio vaccine to more than 1,150 Orange County first and second graders. The work began on Monday, April 18, 1955 with about 500 Chapel Hill area children and finished on April 21 with the Hillsboro, Efland and Aycock schools.
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A. D. Yates's Yates Motor Company takes over the Caston Motor Company's Dodge-Plymouth business
The Caston Motor Company, Dodge and Plymouth dealer at 419 West Franklin Street since 1946, gave way to the Yates Motor Company at the same address and telephone number in late May 1955. By October A. D. Yates was named as owner of the firm.
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Hilliard Caldwell leads the Chapel Hill chapter of the New Farmers of America
The Lincoln High School paper reported a prosperous 1954 to 1955 year for the chapter under Caldwell, its president, and printed his own account of the chapter's work.
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Orange County first and second graders get their second Salk shots
The district health department gave second Salk vaccine doses to children who had their first shot in the spring: in Chapel Hill on July 21 and 22 for pupils of the Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Glenwood, Northside, White Cross and Little Red Schoolhouse schools, and in Hillsboro on July 27, with school buses sent to county schools. Turnout at Hillsboro was low, with only 65 children by 11 a.m.
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The Chapel Hill Memorial Fund has a bronze tablet made for the town's World War II dead
Trustees of the Chapel Hill Memorial Fund had a bronze tablet cast with the names of 26 men of the Chapel Hill community who died in the armed services in World War II, to stand on a stone base in front of Chapel Hill High School. The fund, raised by public gifts in 1946, also endowed a memorial book collection in the school library.
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Chapel Hill school board pledges to comply with Brown "to the best of our ability"
Under chairman Carl Smith, the Chapel Hill school board unanimously resolved to comply with the Supreme Court's integration ruling to the best of its ability while operating its schools under the state's school laws, keeping existing assignment practices for 1955-56.
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Hilliard Caldwell writes the Negro Community news column for the Chapel Hill News Leader
Caldwell was named as correspondent at the head of the column, which carried news of Black Chapel Hill and asked Lincoln High School graduates to send in their college addresses for the next week's issue.
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First Black undergraduates enter UNC
LeRoy and Ralph Frasier and John Lewis Brandon, all of Durham, became UNC's first Black undergraduates when they began classes on September 19, 1955. A three-judge federal court in Greensboro had ordered the university on September 10 to process their applications, and they registered in the General College.
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Moses C. Burt Jr. is one of the first three Black students admitted to UNC law as first-year students
Moses C. Burt Jr., son of Orange County farm agent Moses Burt and Ridge Road principal Alethea Burt, entered the UNC School of Law in fall 1955 as one of the first three African American students admitted straight into its first-year class. Three other Black students who enrolled that fall transferred from other programs.
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Aldermen rezone part of the Porthole lot so the restaurant can expand
Over the objections of University officials, the Chapel Hill aldermen rezoned 6,400 square feet of the Porthole restaurant's lot from residential to business use so that owner M. M. Timmons could enlarge the restaurant. It had been a nonconforming use on land zoned residential near the campus.
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Don Stewart becomes James Webb's partner in City Planning and Architecture Associates
Don Stewart, an Ohio native, worked for James Webb while studying planning at UNC. Once licensed in 1956 he became Webb's partner, and the practice was renamed City Planning and Architecture Associates; Stewart brought Frank Lloyd Wright's organic ideas to its Chapel Hill houses.
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Don Stewart designs the Kai Jurgenson House on Whitehead Circle
Stewart's 1956 house for Kai Jurgenson at 410 Whitehead Circle, one of his early works, blends Bay area regional modernism with the restrained domestic style of Walter Gropius's Harvard circle. The book notes that it won an award.
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Francis Vandeveer Kughler paints history murals for the Knapp Building auditorium
At Margaret Knapp's wish the Institute's new building received fourteen large murals by New York painter Francis Vandeveer Kughler, a commission put at $100,000, showing scenes from North Carolina history with living North Carolinians painted in period dress. Kughler began early in 1956, working part of the time in Person Hall on the campus, and all the panels were hung in the auditorium by the fall of 1960.
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Jim Tatum returns to Chapel Hill as head football coach
Tatum came back to UNC in 1956 at a substantial cut in salary and reorganized and expanded the university's Educational Foundation, the source of its athletic grants-in-aid. He had the only losing season of his career that year, 2-7-1, and followed it with 6-4 records in 1957 and 1958.
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McGuire's undefeated Tar Heels play their home games at Woollen Gym
McGuire's 1956-57 team won 32 straight games and the national championship, beating Kansas and Wilt Chamberlain in triple overtime as 12-point underdogs. Only eight of those wins came at home in Woollen Gym, where a hole was drilled in the wall for a television camera lens.
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Milton Julian's Matsumoto-designed house on Ledge Lane is finished
The modernist house George Matsumoto designed for clothier Milton Julian and his family, which neighbors had gone to court to stop, stood finished by November 1956, when it was one of ten homes on the School Art Guild's tour of Chapel Hill homes.
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Morehead gives the sundial in front of the planetarium
In 1956 Morehead funded the sundial set in front of the planetarium building in Chapel Hill.
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Poe and Mangum move their DeSoto-Plymouth dealership out of a West Franklin Street filling station
After World War II A. H. Poe and Marvin Mangum sold DeSotos and Plymouths from a 1930s Pure Oil station at 110 West Franklin Street, built in the company's half-timbered cottage design. They added service bays and a showroom before vacating it in 1956.
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The Institute of Government's East Franklin building becomes Consolidated University offices
After William Friday moved into the President's House in 1956, the University moved the Institute of Government out of its Franklin Street building and used it for the Consolidated University's offices. Those offices went back to campus between 1969 and 1973, and the building passed to other University programs.
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The Joseph Palmer Knapp Building opens for the Institute of Government
The Institute of Government got a new building in Chapel Hill, paid for by the Knapp Foundation and a legislative appropriation and named for Joseph Palmer Knapp, who had died in 1951. His widow, Margaret Rutledge Knapp, saw that the family foundation funded it.
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The Susan Graham memorial fountain is moved from Franklin Street to the edge of Coker Arboretum
The 1922 memorial fountain was taken from the Franklin Street curb near the Methodist church and set up at the edge of Coker Arboretum near Morehead Planetarium.
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The Webb brothers design core-plan houses for the Highland Woods cooperative
Highland Woods, south of Memorial Hospital, was organized as a cooperative subdivision by a group of young faculty families, and in 1956 James and John Webb designed its houses around two cores, one for the living areas and kitchen and one for the bedrooms. The book likens it to Six Moon Hill, a Massachusetts cooperative laid out by Walter Gropius's Architects Collaborative in 1948.
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William Friday becomes acting president of the Consolidated University
Named acting president at 35 while the trustees searched for Gordon Gray's successor, Friday began his duties on March 1, 1956. The board approved him as president on October 26, 1956, and at his first news conference he named moving the administrative offices from South Building on the Chapel Hill campus to the old Institute of Government building on Franklin Street as a first goal.
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The Tempo Room, a basement beer and sandwich lounge, opens on East Franklin Street
The Tempo Room opened at noon in the basement space next to Town and Campus that had held the Baby Shop, selling beer and sandwiches in a room designed by Hank Gifford for about 75 people. J. D. Wright ran it.
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Dr. Sidney and Christine Chipman move into their new house on Dogwood Drive
Dr. Sidney S. Chipman, who headed UNC's Department of Maternal and Child Health, and his wife Christine moved into a new house at 515 Dogwood Drive in May 1956. Archie Davis of Durham drew the plan and Parker and Elliot of Chapel Hill built it.
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Les Petites Musicales stages The Magic Flute in Hill Hall
An abridged English Magic Flute in Hill Hall used the University Glee Club under Joel Carter, who also sang Papageno, with the former Metropolitan Opera bass Norman Cordon as Sarastro.
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Gooch's Café serves its last meal and becomes Green's Cafe
Gooch's Café, a Chapel Hill fixture for more than half a century and owned since the 1940s by Clarence Simmons, served its last meal under that name. The next morning Charles T. Green of Durham took it over as Green's Cafe.
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A Webb-designed house is built for Bob and Josie Stipe in Highland Woods
The Stipe House at 1022 Highland Woods, built in 1957, sets a post-and-beam frame living floor over a masonry lower level on a lot that slopes sideways to the street, with the kitchen at the front open to the living room. The book uses it as its model modernist house and says it cost about $10 a square foot, against $12 to $15 for a traditional house.
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Daniel H. Pollitt joins the UNC law faculty
Pollitt came to the UNC School of Law in 1957 as an associate professor of constitutional and labor law, after resigning from the University of Arkansas rather than sign an oath disavowing membership in the NAACP.
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Dr. Ernest Wood, the first radiologist at UNC's hospital, builds a brick Ranch on Fern Lane
The five-bay Ranch has a recessed garage wing and a front cross-gable.
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Dr. John T. Sessions and his wife build a Webb and Stewart house on Morgan Creek Road
A split-level modern house designed by James Webb and Don Stewart was built for Dr. John T. Sessions and his wife in Morgan Creek Hills. It was on the School Art Guild tour of homes in the fall of 1958.
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Football coach Jim Tatum and his wife Edna build a house on Laurel Hill Road
The house pairs a two-story colonial block with a split-level stone living-room wing and a bowed window, probably from mail-order plans. Tatum had come back to coach UNC the year before.
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James L. Godfrey serves as dean of the faculty
Godfrey held the post of dean of the faculty from 1957 to 1965, one of the titles that preceded the office of provost at Chapel Hill.
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Jim Webb designs a Contemporary Ranch on Pine Lane as a retirement home for Fred and Josephine Weedon
Ellington & Sparrow built the open-plan house on a slope with an exposed basement at the back. The Weedons' daughter Josie and her husband, preservationist Bob Stipe, later lived there for many years.
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Mortgage Insurance Company opens the first section of Lake Forest
On former Coker land north of Coker Hills, the area along the south side of Eastwood Lake was developed in 1957 by the Mortgage Insurance Company. This first section later came to be called Old Lake Forest.
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O. B. Hardison Jr. teaches in the English department
Hardison, a Renaissance specialist with UNC bachelor's and master's degrees, joined the English department in 1957 and edited Studies in Philology. He left in 1969 to direct the Folger Shakespeare Library.
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Pediatrician Judson Van Wyk builds a house in the Highland Woods cooperative
Dr. Judson J. Van Wyk, a pediatrician and a member of the faculty cooperative that bought the Highland Woods tract, planned in December 1956 to start building on his lot there. By September 1957 the town had issued permits for nine Highland Woods houses designed by architect James M. Webb.
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The trustees make the Institute's professional staff professors of public law and government
Chancellor William B. Aycock won trustee approval for the Institute's assistant directors to hold the rank of professor of public law and government. The rank carried academic tenure, which strengthened the Institute's place in the University and made recruiting easier.
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Thomas Philip Lloyd sells the Carolina Pharmacy to Helen Duguid
Duguid kept the East Franklin drugstore going only a short time before Campus Laundry and Cleaners replaced it.
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University Baptist Church acquires the McDade House lot next to its church
University Baptist Church voted to buy John Scott Trotter's properties beside its church at Franklin and Columbia streets for $250,000, among them the Cafe Mouza building, which was the old brick McDade House, and the Hill House. The church's later expansion plans on the lot led to the house's removal in 1997.
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Waverly Branch and his wife build a Williamsburg-style house on Laurel Hill Road
The story-and-a-half house has beaded siding, a slate roof, end chimneys and a pedimented entrance porch in imitation of colonial Williamsburg. Branch was active in UNC affairs, and his wife was for many years the chancellor's secretary.
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Howell's The Kenan Professorships is named one of the best Southern books of
The Kenan Professorships, written by UNC English professor A. C. Howell and published by the University Press with illustrations by William Meade Prince and Adrian Lamb, was chosen for design among 25 best Southern books of 1956.
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Sophie Livas sells the Carolina Coffee Shop to Donald Belton
Sophie Livas, who had run the Carolina Coffee Shop since her husband George's death in 1956, sold it to Donald Belton, who took over on February 1, 1957.
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UNC men’s basketball wins the 1957 NCAA national championship
UNC defeated Kansas, 54–53 in triple overtime, to win the national title.
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Frances Hargraves teaches Chapel Hill's new special education classes at Northside School
The Chapel Hill schools had begun special education classes, one at Chapel Hill Elementary School and one taught by Frances Hargraves at Northside School. The Junior Service League paid a $200 scholarship for her training.
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Roland Giduz and Adelaide Walters are elected to the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen
In a heavy turnout that also re-elected Mayor Oliver K. Cornwell and approved a $500,000 bond issue, voters re-elected aldermen Hubert Robinson and Paul Wager and chose two new members, Adelaide Walters and Roland Giduz. As low man among the winners, Giduz drew a two-year term.
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Hubert Robinson is named Man of the Year
After Robinson was re-elected alderman with the highest vote on the ticket, a group of Black citizens representing churches, fraternal organizations and civic clubs named him Man of the Year and gave a reception in his honor at the Lincoln High School gymtorium on June 11.
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Jerrold Orne is appointed University Librarian
Chancellor Robert B. House announced Orne's appointment as university librarian, effective August 1, with the approval of President William C. Friday and the trustees. Orne came from the Air University library at Maxwell Air Force Base and succeeded Andrew H. Horn.
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William B. Aycock serves as chancellor of UNC at Chapel Hill
Aycock, on the law faculty at Chapel Hill since 1948, was chief administrator of the university there from July 1, 1957 until August 1964. His records cover desegregation, the state's speaker ban law and the Dixie Classic betting scandal.
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Lincoln High prepares to open with sixteen teachers and about four hundred pupils
In the Chapel Hill News Leader's back to school report, Principal C. A. McDougle said Lincoln High School would have sixteen teachers and that enrollment would probably reach 400, against 381 on the first day of the previous year. Two of the teachers were new that year.
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Watts Restaurant holds its grand opening on the Pittsboro highway south of Chapel Hill
The new Watts Restaurant, a concrete-block building a mile south of town on the Pittsboro highway with counter, booths and private dining rooms, advertised its gala opening in mid-August 1957 after first advertising as Chapel Hill's newest restaurant in early July.
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Wes and Nancy Thompson hold a grand opening of the South 501 Restaurant under their ownership
Under the new ownership and management of Wes and Nancy Thompson, the South 501 Restaurant on the Durham highway bypass, across from the Valley Drive-In, announced its grand opening, with steaks, curb service and a tap room.
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J. K. Ellis reopens his East Franklin Street grill as the Village Cafeteria
After a summer of renovation, J. K. Ellis reopened his Village Grill as the Village Cafeteria, the last step in turning the old four-lane bowling alley he had bought in the mid-1940s into a full restaurant.
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The first televised ACC regular season game is played at Woollen Gym
Television producer C. D. Chesley brought his cameras into Woollen Gym for Carolina's fourteenth meeting with Clemson, the first regular season ACC game ever televised. McGuire's team won 79-55.
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Chapel Hill Elementary pupils play carols with professional musicians at the school Christmas program
At the Chapel Hill Elementary School Christmas programs on December 17, 1957, directed musically by Adeline McCall, supervisor of music in the Chapel Hill schools, children playing psalteries, violins and bells accompanied the carols with two harpists, violinist Dorothy Alden and flutist Dorothy Hickok. The programs also staged the play Alias Santa Claus.
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Anne Firor Scott moves to Chapel Hill and takes a temporary history post at UNC
Anne Firor Scott and her husband Andrew Scott moved to Chapel Hill in 1958, when he joined UNC's political science department and she took a temporary position in history. They lived in the Highland Woods neighborhood for 47 years.
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Cornelia Spencer Love serves as a founding trustee of the Chapel Hill Public Library
Love was a trustee of the public library from its start in 1958 until 1970 and secretary of its board of directors. The library began in a small house in downtown Chapel Hill.
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Engineer Bob Anderson joins City Planning and Architecture Associates
Engineer Bob Anderson joined the Webb and Stewart firm in 1958 and later became Stewart's partner.
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Fire destroys the Presbyterian church on East Franklin Street
The University Presbyterian Church burned in 1958. The congregation built a larger church on the same site three years later.
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George Brown Tindall joins the UNC history faculty
Tindall, who took his graduate degrees at UNC, returned in 1958 as an associate professor of history and taught until he retired as Kenan professor emeritus in 1990.
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Joe Page becomes sole owner of Ledbetter-Pickard Stationery
Page, a clerk in the East Franklin stationery store before the war, bought Herbert Ledbetter's share in 1947 and the rest of the business when Pickard died in 1958.
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Kemp Nye opens Kemp's Phonograph Records on East Franklin Street
Nye, who had worked for Milton Abernethy, opened a record shop in the store the Smiths' bookshop had just left.
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The Intimate Bookshop moves into the old Berman Department Store on East Franklin Street
After Sam Berman's death, Paul and Isabel Smith moved their bookshop into the store his department store had used, the 119 East Franklin building it kept for forty years.
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William S. Powell becomes curator of the North Carolina Collection
Powell, who had joined the university library's North Carolina Collection in 1951, was named its curator after Mary Lindsay Thornton retired.
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The University's telephone system plans to double its East Rosemary Street exchange
The University-owned Chapel Hill telephone system announced a $300,000 addition that would double the size of its exchange building on East Rosemary Street, along with better party-line service. Bids for the addition were opened in March.
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Doris and James Field begin plans for the Timbercrest subdivision
Doris Gates Field and James MacDonald Field started planning Timbercrest, a subdivision on a thirty-seven-acre tract northeast of Chapel Hill, in February 1958, and kept five and a half acres of it for their own Modernist house.
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Carrboro voters approve merging their school district with the Chapel Hill unit
On August 5, 1958 the Carrboro school district voted 713 to 303 to merge with the Chapel Hill city school unit and levy a 15-cent school tax, after a spring vote had failed. The county board sold the old Carrboro School to R. B. Todd for $30,000 in September 1959.
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The Ackland Art Museum opens
UNC dedicated the William Hayes Ackland Memorial Art Center on September 20, 1958, the morning after a preview for faculty. Ackland had left his bequest to Duke, which refused it, and nine years of litigation sent it to Chapel Hill; the Georgian building held galleries, an art library, classrooms, studios and offices.
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Binkley Baptist Church organizes
Fifty-six charter members established the congregation, initially worshiping on campus.
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Ruth Faison Shaw brings her finger-painting case histories to the University
The Chapel Hill News Leader reported that Shaw, recently of Chapel Hill, was giving the University more than a thousand case histories on personality diagnosis through finger painting and was working as its consultant in therapy.
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Chapel Hill Public Library opens
Chapel Hill's first public library held its formal opening on December 15, 1958 in the east wing of the Hill House on West Franklin Street, with about 4,500 books, 2,000 of them lent by state and regional libraries. It moved to its own building at 523 East Franklin Street in 1967 and to Pritchard Park in 1994.
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The Chapel Hill Choral Club sings Bach's Christmas Oratorio
The Chapel Hill Choral Club, directed by Joel Carter, performed the first three parts of Bach's Christmas Oratorio in Hill Hall as part of the Tuesday Evening Series.
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Carrboro's schools join the Chapel Hill city unit
The merger Carrboro voters approved in August 1958 took effect with the 1959-60 school year, taking 462 pupils out of the Orange County system; in 1958-59 Carrboro Elementary had stayed under the county board while high school pupils and Black elementary pupils could attend Chapel Hill schools free.
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Chapel Hill's city directory lists sixteen bricklayers, twelve in Black neighborhoods
The 1959 Hill's Chapel Hill directory named sixteen bricklayers, twelve of them living in Northside and other historically Black neighborhoods. By 1962 the list had grown to eighteen, including John, Handy and Leo Campbell.
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Charlie Mason's motor court on West Rosemary Street was lodging Black travelers
Mason's Motor Court at 603 West Rosemary Street, with the Starlite Supper Club, gave Black travelers and touring musicians a place to stay when other Chapel Hill hotels turned them away. The building is gone and the Greenbridge condominiums now stand on the site.
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Community Church dedicates its first building
The building housed worship, classes, and offices.
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English professor Hugh Holman and his wife Verna build a Cape Cod house on Pine Lane
The story-and-a-half side-gabled house has two dormers and a small side wing.
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Institute of Government staff draft a new state law on municipal annexation
Assistant directors Philip Green Jr., George Esser and Jake Wicker wrote a new North Carolina annexation law for a state study commission. The law, which stayed unchanged for more than forty years and became a model elsewhere, let the state's cities grow without being ringed by small incorporated suburbs.
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Research Triangle Park and Orange County's growth
The Research Triangle Foundation, formed in 1959, ran the research park planned between Durham and Raleigh around UNC, N.C. State and Duke. That November Orange County commissioners said the park would bring the county mainly new residents and school costs rather than taxable industry, and began discussing county-wide zoning.
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Robert Rosenbacher opens The Hub, a men's clothing store, on East Franklin Street
The Hub took the store Charles Shields had just closed after 36 years of running his Home Owned Grocery there. It stayed 37 years, closing in 1996.
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Robert Seymour becomes the first pastor of Binkley Memorial Baptist Church
Robert Seymour came to Chapel Hill in 1959 as the first minister of the Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, organized the year before. He led it until 1988.
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Samuel Selden leaves the Playmakers and Harry E. Davis takes over the Department of Dramatic Art
Selden left Chapel Hill in 1959 to chair the Department of Theatre Arts at UCLA, and Harry E. Davis became chairman of the Department of Dramatic Art.
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The Institute's dormitory lodges sixteen thousand overnight guests in a year
Sixteen thousand people stayed overnight in the Knapp Building's dormitory during the 1959-60 academic year, and attendance at Institute events and instruction had grown about tenfold since the building opened in 1956.
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The Masonic Hall on West Franklin Street is torn down for a department store parking lot
The Masonic Hall at Church Street was razed and its ground paved as a parking lot for the Belk-Leggett store next door.
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The Oh Boy Drive-In opens at West Rosemary and Church streets
The Oh Boy Drive-In, run by the Boy family of Durham, was nearing completion at the corner of West Rosemary and Church streets in early July 1959. It was hiring in early August and serving cars by late August.
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The law faculty and the Institute staff vote against merging the Institute into the law school
When Albert Coates pressed again to fold the Institute of Government into the UNC law school, both the law faculty and the Institute's own staff voted the idea down. Assistant director John Sanders warned that the Institute's service work would be subordinated to the law school and its identity lost.
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University Methodist Church adds a Sunday school wing
The congregation built an education wing on the east side of its brick church at 150 East Franklin Street in 1959.
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A state audit reports irregularities in the Institute of Government's accounts
State Auditor Henry Bridges reported a gap of $5,064.32 in the Institute's books, caused by careless record keeping and slow deposit of room fees and book sales, not by missing money. Coates took the blame and paid $5,100 at once; he was repaid once he documented the spending, but staff who had not been warned in advance were angry.
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The University tears down the Abernethy house on South Columbia Street for Ackland grounds and parking
UNC bought the house from the widow of Dr. Eric A. Abernethy, long the director of the University Infirmary, and tore it down to extend the Ackland Art Center grounds and make a gravel lot of about 60 faculty parking spaces. The house dated from 1905 and had housed many students.
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Chapel Hill Public Library shows Bayard Wootten photographs after her death
Weeks after Bayard Wootten died in New Bern, the Chapel Hill Public Library displayed her 1930s photographs of western North Carolina, made to illustrate two UNC Press books, Backwoods America and Cabins in the Laurel.
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Sandy McClamroch is elected to the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen
McClamroch, one of five candidates for three seats, was elected on May 5, 1959 with F. E. Strowd and Roland Giduz, and was sworn in with Mayor Oliver K. Cornwell the following Monday night. Campaigning, he had called for coordinating town and university planning and for bringing the university's payments for town services above the table.
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Mayor Cornwell presses the state to widen the highways into Chapel Hill
Sworn in for a new term with aldermen F. E. Strowd and Sandy McClamroch, Mayor Cornwell wrote to the state's director of highways urging four-lane roads toward Durham and Raleigh and calling U.S. 15-501 and N.C. 54 major entrances to the university.
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Chapel Hill's ABC liquor store opens in Eastgate Shopping Center
The county ABC system's Chapel Hill store opened in Eastgate Shopping Center and sold between $2,000 and $3,000 of liquor a day in its first two days, about half again the daily average at the Hillsboro store, which had opened April 10.
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Stanley Vickers's parents apply for his transfer from Northside Elementary to Carrboro Elementary
After ten-year-old Stanley Boya Vickers finished fifth grade at Northside Elementary School in June 1959, his parents, Thomas Lee and Lattice Vickers, filed a written application to have him reassigned to Carrboro Elementary School, which was much nearer their home. The school board denied it on August 3, 1959.
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Jim Tatum dies at Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill
Tatum apparently contracted an overwhelming viral infection while visiting Canada with the coaches Peahead Walker and Frank Howard, and died one week after entering Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. He was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Chapel Hill school board refuses Stanley Vickers a transfer to all-white Carrboro Elementary and adopts a first-grade proximity policy
The Chapel Hill City Board of Education denied ten-year-old Stanley Vickers a transfer from all-Black Northside Elementary to the nearer all-white Carrboro Elementary School, and at the same meeting adopted a policy of limited integration at the first-grade level starting with the 1960-61 year. UNC law dean Henry Brandis, who had twice moved to approve the transfer, resigned from the board in protest and called the action both morally and legally indefensible.
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White Cross voters turn down a merger with the Chapel Hill schools a second time
White Cross voters defeated a merger of their school into the Chapel Hill city district, 116 to 110, a year after Carrboro had joined it; a first vote had failed in May 1958. A third vote failed in the spring of 1960, and the county closed the school in 1961. The county board sold the White Cross property to Edmiston Realty Company for $14,900 in 1967.
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Brandis returns for the Vickers hearing, then leaves the Chapel Hill school board
Brandis withdrew his August 3 resignation so he could sit at the board's hearing on Stanley Vickers's transfer request on August 31. He resigned again after that meeting, and the board named a committee to find his successor.
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Chapel Hill opens its Glen Lennox fire station
The town's second fire station, on South Hamilton Road in Glen Lennox, opened without ceremony when two pumper trucks moved in from the main station on Columbia Street. The aldermen had let contracts in February for the building, designed by Archie Davis of Durham and paid for from 1957 bonds.
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Orange County commissioners give a cool reception to a Research Triangle planning request
At a special meeting, Orange County commissioners gave only a lukewarm reception to a request to help fund a land development survey for the Research Triangle area and took no action pending firm figures. The Chapel Hill Weekly reported that the county expected to gain mostly new residents and school costs from the park rather than industry, and commissioners discussed zoning the area northeast of Chapel Hill toward the Durham County line.
- 1960s
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Architect Arthur Cogswell designs his own house on Marilyn Lane
Cogswell's 1960 house at 5 Marilyn Lane sits on two levels in a slope, planned on George Matsumoto's four-foot grid and sided in vertical pine, with a short bridge from the drive to the door and a living room under a row of small glass-ended gables. It won an award from the North Carolina chapter of the AIA.
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Architect Wade Williams builds a Wright-influenced house for himself on Whitfield Road
Durham architect R. Wade Williams designed a flat-roofed Modernist house with exposed-aggregate block walls and dark-red board siding for himself and his wife, kitchen designer Mary Louise Gunter Williams, on an eighteen-acre wooded tract northeast of Chapel Hill. Her parents helped pay for it.
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Census counts Orange County, Chapel Hill and Carrboro in
The 1960 census counted 42,970 people in Orange County, 12,573 in Chapel Hill and 1,997 in Carrboro. Chapel Hill township had 25,030, up from 18,222 in 1950.
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Cornelia Spencer Love gives private funds toward a new library on East Franklin Street
Love donated private money during the 1960s to help build the town's new public library on East Franklin Street.
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Don Stewart designs a Japanese-influenced house for Robert and Ruth Mace
Around 1960 Stewart's work turned toward Asian models, as in the one-level house he drew for physicist Robert Mace and his wife Ruth at 222 Hillcrest Circle, off East Franklin Street. Its wide roof overhang and the screen beside the entrance have a Japanese cast, and a tall porch shades the south side.
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Don Stewart designs the Bowers-Nelson House in Morgan Creek Hills
Built about 1960 at 903 Coker Drive, this small house on a sloping lot is Stewart's most direct borrowing from Japanese houses. Its post-and-beam frame is exposed outside and was first painted in bright colors, and paper shoji screens slide on tracks to divide the rooms.
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Edward and Elizabeth Waugh publish The South Builds
Architect Edward Waugh and his wife Elizabeth published The South Builds with the University of North Carolina Press in 1960, a survey of new Southern architecture that favored modern buildings suited to the region's climate.
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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.
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Manly Wade Wellman teaches creative writing at the university
Wellman taught creative writing classes in the Evening College of the University of North Carolina and was known for helping new writers.
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North Carolina Memorial Hospital admits its 100,000th patient
UNC A to Z records that the hospital welcomed its 100,000th patient in 1960, eight years after it opened.
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Political scientist Gordon Cleveland designs his own Colonial Revival house on Pine Lane
Ellington & Sparrow built the side-hall house for Gordon and Martha Cleveland on a sloping lot with a full basement.
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The Chapel Hill Friends Meeting opens its meetinghouse
Mildred Ringwalt, who joined the Chapel Hill Friends in 1959, was influential in building the Quaker meetinghouse that opened in 1960 and later raised money to enlarge it. A Carolina Friends School tribute says she sold most of her Oriental art to finance the building and anonymously gave the money to finish it.
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The Glendale subdivision is developed north of Battle Park
During the 1960s the Glendale subdivision was built on the hilly ground north of Battle Park, with houses by Cogswell/Hausler and other modernist firms.
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UNC football coach Jim Hickey builds a two-story Colonial Revival house on Iris Lane
The weatherboarded house has a pedimented entrance porch and a garage wing topped by a small cupola. Hickey lived there until 1977.
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UNC gives John Lindsay Morehead an honorary doctor of laws
The university honored Morehead, principal officer of the Morehead Foundation, as the architect of the Morehead scholarship plan.
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William Van Sprinkle designs a long Contemporary Ranch on Buttons Road for Charles and Kay Bream
The six-bay house for the radiology professor mixes vertical wood and brick, with sliding windows and a carport set on the diagonal. Sprinkle, known for Colonial Revival work, here turned to a modern design.
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Ted Danziger opens the Zoom-Zoom, a carryout restaurant on West Franklin Street
Ted Danziger opened Zigger's Zoom-Zoom, a carryout and home delivery restaurant managed by Hal Sieber, a block from his Rathskeller. Its menu ran from rotisserie chicken to lasagna in casseroles.
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The Vickers family files its federal suit against the Chapel Hill City Board of Education
Suing through his parents, Stanley Vickers asked the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina to declare his right to attend the public schools without racial discrimination. After the board turned down his June 1960 application to Chapel Hill Junior High, the complaint was amended to seek that school, and the case was tried on October 5, 1960.
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Chapel Hill freedom movement
Nine Lincoln High students began Chapel Hill's sit-ins at Colonial Drug on February 28, 1960. Through 1963 and 1964 Black residents and UNC students picketed, marched and sat in, and held a Holy Week fast at the post office, but the aldermen narrowly rejected a public accommodations ordinance and many businesses stayed segregated until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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The Chapel Hill Nine sit-in
Nine Black young men held Chapel Hill’s first sit-in at Colonial Drug.
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Lincoln High students picket Colonial Drug and sit in at the Bus Station Cafe
The day after the sit-in, nearly 100 Black high school students picketed Colonial Drug after manager John Carswell roped off its booths, while others filled the counter at the Bus Station Cafe until proprietor Leo Eliadis closed it and were served standing at the Long Meadow Dairy Bar.
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The Chapel Hill sit-in movement forms an executive committee and retains counsel
At a Tuesday night meeting the Lincoln High demonstrators and their adult supporters organized, set up an executive committee to coordinate the lunch-counter protests and acquired legal counsel.
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The Chapel Hill CORE Committee rejects a second truce and resumes picketing as 27 ministers back the protests
After a week-long pause the students' 12-member executive committee, led by Harold Foster, declined the Human Relations Committee's request for a second truce and resumed afternoon picketing at Colonial Drug and Long Meadow Dairy. Twenty-seven Chapel Hill ministers issued a statement commending the peaceful, non-violent picketing.
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Chapel Hill aldermen refuse Chief Blake's picketing-control ordinance
The Board of Aldermen unanimously declined to pass an ordinance against blocking sidewalks that Police Chief William W. Blake had requested as a safety measure, saying its passage would be misread as interference with the peaceful picketing at Colonial Drug.
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W. C. George and Lucius Cheshire are named Orange County managers of I. Beverly Lake's campaign
I. Beverly Lake named W. C. George of Chapel Hill and Lucius M. Cheshire of Hillsborough, both directors of the pro-segregation North Carolina Defenders of States Rights, co-managers of his campaign for governor in Orange County.
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Martin Luther King Jr. speaks in Chapel Hill
Invited by campus religious groups and the Carolina Forum, King spoke at University Baptist Church on May 8, 1960, visited two UNC sociology classes, and addressed an overflow crowd in Hill Hall on May 9 on the struggle for racial justice.
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Chapel Hill school board admits its first Black pupils to a white school, three first graders at Estes Hills Elementary
Acting under its new proximity policy, the board voted unanimously to grant three of twelve Black reassignment applications for the 1960-61 first grade at previously all-white Estes Hills Elementary School. Applications to transfer to the white junior high school, including Stanley Vickers's, were refused.
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Chapel Hill aldermen pay the town's share of the Research Triangle planning commission budget
The Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen appropriated $1,545, six percent of the $25,750 budget of the Research Triangle Regional Planning Commission for 1960-61. The commission also asked the Orange County commissioners for four percent, or $1,030.
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Roland and Clara McClamroch deed the Nash house to their daughter Anna McClamroch McFall
English professor Roland McClamroch and his wife had bought the house from the Nashes and rented it to Robert and Alpha Wettach, who moved out around 1960. The house stayed in the McClamroch family until 1983.
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Young and Wilkins open the Better Homes and Gardens Idea Home on Christopher Road
The 1960 Better Homes and Gardens Idea Home, built by David Curl for the Chapel Hill realtors Young and Wilkins, opened for public tours at 808 Christopher Road, across the bypass from Glen Lennox. It was the only Idea Home shown in North Carolina that year and stayed open through October 2.
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The university's attorney finds the trustees never deeded the cemetery to the town
In a letter of November 11, 1960 to J. A. Branch of the university business office, university attorney J. A. Williams reported no sign that the trustees had ever conveyed title to the cemetery land to Chapel Hill.
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Governor Luther Hodges accepts the Knapp Building for the state at its dedication
A four-day dedication of the Institute of Government's headquarters, for which officials were invited by congressional district and the Kughler murals were unveiled, closed with Governor Hodges accepting the million-dollar building on behalf of the state. Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr. stayed for the whole program.
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Aycock suspends a basketball player in the betting scandal and makes Dean Smith head coach
After the player Doug Moe accepted $75 from a gambler in 1961, Chancellor Aycock suspended him and said the integrity of the institution was involved. Aycock then raised assistant coach Dean Smith to head coach.
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Chapel Hill assigns first graders by residence zone and becomes the first North Carolina district with no all-white school
A school board elected on a desegregation platform took office on July 1, 1961 and adopted a single first-grade attendance map, assigning 24 Black children to Glenwood, 10 to Estes Hills and 8 to Carrboro Elementary after the zones were redrawn to reduce Carrboro's share. When school opened, every school in the district had at least one Black pupil for the first time in the state's history, and no incidents were reported.
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Church and student groups picket Chapel Hill's Varsity Theatre
Local church groups and student organizations picketed the Varsity Theatre after Black patrons were refused entry. Later that year the management agreed to admit Black UNC students with ID, and the town's theaters were fully desegregated by early 1962.
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Desegregating the Chapel Hill and Carrboro schools
After the school board refused in 1959 to admit ten-year-old Stanley Vickers to Carrboro Elementary, his parents sued, and their 1961 win in federal court set the Chapel Hill-Carrboro schools on the course to desegregation. In 1966 all-Black Lincoln High merged into Chapel Hill High, and Lincoln's name, colors and mascot were left behind.
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Frank McGuire leaves UNC and Dean Smith succeeds him
McGuire left Chapel Hill in 1961 to coach the Philadelphia Warriors of the NBA. Dean Smith, who had joined his staff as an assistant in 1958, became head coach of the Tar Heels.
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Historian J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton (1878-1961), the historian who built the Southern Historical Collection in the university library, was buried in the cemetery.
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Leo Eliadis closes his bus station grill and opens Leo's Restaurant on West Franklin Street
After a Duke student sat in the Black section of the Chapel Hill bus station grill in June 1961 and was arrested at Leo Eliadis's request, Eliadis shut the grill. By early September he had opened Leo's Restaurant on West Franklin Street.
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The Field-Robbins House goes up on Timberly Drive
Doris and James Field built a Modernist house of contrasting materials and varied roof levels on their Timbercrest land in 1961 but lost it after defaulting on the mortgage. Dermatologist Jack Robbins and nurse Catherine Robbins bought it in August 1962, finished the interior and lived there the rest of their lives.
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The Presbyterians build a larger church where the burned one stood
Three years after the 1958 fire, a new and bigger Presbyterian church went up on the old site on East Franklin Street.
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The first Black students enter the formerly white Chapel Hill junior-senior high school on Franklin Street
For 1961-62 the board granted two of three Black applications to the white junior high school and later reassigned a fourth child who had moved into the district, while the federal court ordered Stanley Vickers admitted to the eighth grade there. Sheila Florence, who described herself as one of the first four Black students and who graduated from Chapel Hill High School on Franklin Street in 1965, was one of them, and Eugene Hines was another Black student in the school.
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Troy and Robin Andrews return to the farm and enlarge the old Lloyd log house
After Troy Andrews retired in 1961 and inherited the farm with his sister Nita, he and Robin moved back and renovated and enlarged the early nineteenth-century hewn log house built for the Lloyd family, living there while they planned their new house.
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UNC considers the Jordan Reservoir for its water and Okun argues for Cane Creek
While Okun was on sabbatical in 1961 the university began considering the Jordan Reservoir as a water source; on his return he persuaded the board that Cane Creek, which his students had studied in the 1950s, was the better site.
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William Lanier Hunt gives 103 acres of the Morgan Creek gorge to UNC
Hunt gave UNC and the state about 103 acres of creek gorge and Catawba rhododendron bluffs along Morgan Creek, which became the William Lanier Hunt Arboretum, part of the North Carolina Botanical Garden lands.
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L. J. Phipps and Stanley Peele form a law partnership in Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill attorney L. J. Phipps took Stanley Peele, associated with him since he was admitted to the bar in 1959, into partnership.
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UNC moves the Mitchell family graves from the campus to the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Four graves of Elisha Mitchell's infant sons and grandsons, in the old Mitchell garden near the center of campus, were exhumed under archaeologist Joffre Coe to make room for the expansion of the university's television and communications work. They were reburied in the Horace Williams plot in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery with the Rev. Vance Barron officiating.
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McClamroch is sworn in as mayor and Joe Page is named to his aldermen seat
McClamroch and three re-elected aldermen, Adelaide Walters, Paul Wager and Hubert Robinson, were sworn in at the Monday night meeting of the Board of Aldermen by Recorder's Court Judge William Stewart. The board named businessman Joe Page to the unexpired two year aldermen's term McClamroch left on becoming mayor, and elected Mrs. Walters mayor pro tem.
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Sandy McClamroch is elected mayor of Chapel Hill without opposition
McClamroch ran unopposed for mayor in the May 1961 town election. Before the vote he took questions from residents at a public meeting at the Negro Community Center sponsored by the Chapel Hill Fellowship for School Integration and the Civic Club, and on a WUNC radio panel, saying he wanted to improve the town's public relations and would discuss merging Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
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A.D. Clark Pool opens
Chapel Hill's swimming pool for Black residents, at the Roberson Street community center and now the A.D. Clark Pool, was dedicated on June 15, 1961. Cornelia Spencer Love gave $40,000 to build it, Black residents supplied labor and raised money for the bath house, and Adolphus D. Clark led the pool association.
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Chapel Hill church women ask the county for a welfare office in Chapel Hill
A group from the Chapel Hill Council of United Church Women, including Mildred Ringwalt, asked the Orange County commissioners for a branch welfare office in the Chapel Hill area with a caseworker at least two days a week, and offered volunteers. The acting welfare superintendent replied that lay volunteers could not do casework.
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Federal court rules Chapel Hill denied Stanley Vickers a junior high transfer because of his race
Chief Judge Edwin M. Stanley of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of North Carolina held that the Chapel Hill City Board of Education had refused Vickers reassignment to all-white Chapel Hill Junior High School on account of race and that he was entitled to be admitted there for the 1961-62 school year. The suit had been filed on February 2, 1960 and tried on October 5, 1960.
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University National Bank of Chapel Hill becomes part of Central Carolina Bank
The University National Bank of Chapel Hill merged into the Durham Bank and Trust Company, which took the new name Central Carolina Bank and Trust Company. Both Chapel Hill offices reopened under the new name, with O. Gordon Perry as manager for Chapel Hill.
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President John F. Kennedy speaks at UNC
President John F. Kennedy received an honorary degree at UNC's University Day ceremony, held on the University's 168th birthday, and spoke to an estimated 32,000 people in Kenan Stadium. He pledged that Americans would be neither Red nor dead, and announced a $1 million federal materials research contract for UNC.
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Lincoln High's football team wins an undefeated state championship
Coach William D. Peerman's Lincoln High Tigers won the state 2-A football championship for Black high schools on November 22, 1961, beating previously unbeaten Ridgeview High of Hickory 22-0 to finish 12-0. The season was unbeaten but not unscored upon: Harnett High scored six points in the eastern title game.
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Ruth Faison Shaw holds a finger-painting show in Chapel Hill
The Chapel Hill Weekly ran a page of photographs of a finger-painting show by Shaw, showing her at work and a display in a garden.
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Student Peace Union symbols are painted on UNC's military buildings and the armory gun
In one of the first antiwar acts on campus, someone painted the Student Peace Union insignia on several military buildings and on the antiaircraft gun in front of the Naval Armory.
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Albert Coates gives Chancellor Aycock a 158-page account of the Institute's past and needs
Using staff tallies of thirty years of Institute publications, training and finances, Coates wrote Chancellor William B. Aycock a long report on how the Institute began and grew and what it would need. It also argued for waiving the retirement rule in his case, and it became the core of his later published history of the Institute.
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Arthur Cogswell opens his own architecture firm in Chapel Hill
Arthur Cogswell, a UNC graduate of 1952 who trained in architecture at State College and spent the late 1950s in Don Stewart's office, opened his own Chapel Hill practice in 1962, designing flat-roofed, cantilevered houses in the spare manner he learned from George Matsumoto.
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Beta Theta Pi builds a social hall annex and remodels its house
In 1962 the chapter put up a frame social hall behind the house, enclosed the porte cochere, raised the south wing to match the north wing, and replaced the main stair.
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Binkley Baptist Church takes James Forbes as a student intern
Under Robert Seymour, Binkley Memorial Baptist Church accepted James A. Forbes Jr., a Black divinity student, as its intern in 1962.
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Four high-rise dormitories go up on UNC's south campus
Between 1962 and 1967 the firm of Graves and Toy built Craig, Ehringhaus, Morrison and Hinton James, steel-framed residence towers faced in brick and grouped around Chase Hall at the south edge of campus. Open metal balconies on the back serve as hallways to the student suites.
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Frederick Brooks gives a guest lecture at UNC
While working on IBM's System/360, Brooks visited UNC for an interview and a guest lecture, Ten Research Problems in Computer Science, which impressed the administration and led to the new department.
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Julius Chambers graduates first in his class from the UNC School of Law
Chambers graduated first in his class from the University's School of Law in Chapel Hill in 1962. He went on to practice civil rights law in Charlotte.
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Lillian Hughes Prince leaves funds to the Carolina Playmakers
Lillian Hughes Prince, who had acted in thirty or more Playmakers productions, left considerable funds to the Carolina Playmakers in her will. She died in New York and was buried in Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Nate Davis moves from Northside Elementary to Chapel Hill Junior High
In 1962, after sixth grade at Northside Elementary, Davis went to Chapel Hill Junior High School on Franklin Street as one of the first Black students in the town's formerly white schools. Harassment kept him out of school for two or three months, and he later attended the new Chapel Hill High School when it opened.
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Quakers from the Chapel Hill and Durham meetings found Carolina Friends School
Members of the Chapel Hill and Durham Friends meetings founded Carolina Friends School as a purposely integrated school, beginning with early education programs in the two meeting houses. Mildred Ringwalt was one of the seven founders and the first clerk of its board of trustees.
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Robert Burns and Brian Shawcroft design a house for Robert Work on Hillcrest Circle
Robert Burns and Brian Shawcroft designed the 1962 house at 214 Hillcrest Circle for the chemist Robert Work and his wife: two levels stepped into the hillside, a glazed rear wall, an elevated deck and a central open stair. It won a national Homes for Better Living award and a state AIA award.
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Law dean Henry Brandis Jr. turns down Albert Coates's last appeal for a merger
Coates sent Dean Henry Brandis Jr. a pleading letter with thirty-nine pages of enclosures urging that the Institute become part of the law school. Brandis refused to reopen the question and said that once Coates returned to full-time teaching, Institute staff would no longer teach his courses, since their part had weakened the school's instruction.
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