Chronology

The Mount Zion congregation buys an acre for its first church

The Black congregation then known as Poplar Springs, which had met in a schoolhouse and on members' farms, bought a one-acre lot from S. W. Hughes and Margaret J. Hughes for $10. Its first church there was a small frame building with benches made by members.

People: Samuel Wellwood Hughes

Tenant farmer Jessa Buttler mortgages his horse and crop to landowner C. R. Miller

Orange County tenant Jessa Buttler signed a chattel mortgage pledging his horse and his entire crop of corn, wheat, oats and tobacco to landowner C. R. Miller for a debt of $88.20. By October 1890 the debt stood at $106.04 despite partial payments.

Orange County reports 33 white and 31 Black public schools

In 1884 Orange had 33 white and 31 Black public schools, with 1,369 white and 1,134 Black pupils, a term under ten weeks, and mostly log buildings. School property was valued at $3,500 for white schools and $2,500 for Black schools.

Students and Black residents nearly come to blows on election night in Chapel Hill

While votes were being counted on the night of a Chapel Hill election in 1884, a young Black man from the country tried to trip a student, and students and Black townspeople gathered on both sides before the crowd broke up with little harm. Students afterward whipped Eli, a Black man who waited on the West Building, for cheering the other side.

Chapel Hill's Black residents begin burying their dead in Section A

Section A, beside the old slave section on the west side of the cemetery, came into general use by Chapel Hill's African American community in the mid-1880s. Its later markers include cast concrete headstones common in Black cemeteries of the period.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

The new Board of Education sets aside $50 for an institute for Black teachers

At its first meeting in the Hillsboro courthouse, the board created under the 1885 school law organized with Joseph Harris as chairman and voted fifty dollars to hold a training institute for the county's Black teachers.

People: George Tayloe Winston

Wilson Caldwell is elected to the Chapel Hill board of commissioners

Placed on the Republican ticket without seeking it, Wilson Caldwell, head of the university's labor force, was elected a Chapel Hill commissioner in 1886, defeating Professor Ralph Graves.

People: Wilson Swain Caldwell

Dickerson's Chapel trustees buy the old courthouse from the Philadelphia Friends

Trustees of the Philadelphia Friends' association for the relief of freedmen sold the old Baptist church lot, with the former courthouse on it, to the trustees of Hillsborough's African Methodist Episcopal church for $800. The congregation had worshipped and kept school there for twenty years.

Subject: Dickerson Chapel AME Church

Haywood Craig, a Black man, is received into the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church

The session received Haywood Craig on profession of faith; the book records him under a heading for the church's Black members.

Subject: Hillsborough Presbyterian Church

The school board asks the commissioners for a special tax to keep schools open four months

Superintendent Currie found the schools needed $2,000 beyond their apportionment to run the four months the law required, and the board petitioned the county commissioners to levy it. The board also set a floor of $40 for each white school and $30 for each Black school.

Student Jacob A. Freeze is shot dead during a clash between students and Black residents

After a student quarreled with a Black man, Pat Brewer, a group of students besieged Jack Barbee's house in Chapel Hill, where Brewer and others had gathered, and a shot from inside killed Jacob A. Freeze, a first-year student from Rowan County, about 1 a.m. on Sunday, October 10, 1886. After the state Supreme Court upheld the sentences in December 1887, Brewer went to the penitentiary for ten years and Frank Kirby and Jesse Harris for five each. Battle, writing later, gives Pat seven years and says he escaped.

David S. Payne marries Eliza Mayo

The marriage joined two Black Hillsborough families tied to the Burwell School: Eliza was a granddaughter of the school's laundress Eliza Chavious, and David was the son of Bettie Payne and a grandson of Rev. William Payne, a founder of Dickerson Chapel.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 102 events

Subject: Burwell School

The school board condemns a lot for a school for Black children at Walnut Grove

After two committees were named in March and September 1887 to condemn half an acre in the Walnut Grove district, the board had the deed for the site of a schoolhouse for Black children recorded on October 1.

The superintendent's report shows Black schools running half the term of white schools

Currie's annual report counted 33 white and 25 Black public schools. White schools averaged close to nine weeks of teaching and Black schools under four and a half, and Black women teachers earned $17 a month against $24 for white women.

Piney Grove Baptist Church is organized

W. M. Ray organized Piney Grove Baptist Church, a Black congregation, and served as its first pastor.

Black parents in the Cool Spring district petition for Black school committeemen

Black residents of the Cool Spring district asked the board to replace their school committee with Black members of their own choosing. The board tabled the request.

B. C. Patton's report finds most Orange County schoolhouses still built of logs

Patton's annual report to the state counted 43 white and 41 Black schools with 1,425 white and 1,048 Black pupils. Thirty of the 43 white schoolhouses and 17 of the 24 Black ones were log buildings, and terms ran about twelve weeks.

Jule Gilmer Korner remodels the former Burwell School

In the 1890s the old Burwell School house was remodeled by Jule Gilmer Korner of Kernersville, who gave it a bracketed cornice, a sawnwork porch, a new hall stair and new mantels, including a marble one in the parlor. Several of the older mantels were lost in the work, which was done for an owner thought to be Mrs. Charles M. Parks.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 102 events

Subject: Burwell School

Louis H. Hackney is pastor of Rock Hill Baptist Church on West Franklin Street

Louis H. Hackney, listed as a minister and living in Chapel Hill with his wife Lara Edwards Hackney by 1880, was pastor of Rock Hill Baptist Church on West Franklin Street by 1890. The church, organized in 1865, later moved to Roberson Street as First Baptist Church.

Subject: First Baptist Church, Chapel Hill

Most Orange County farmers are renters, sharecroppers or hired hands

In 1890, 58 percent of the county's farmers did not own their farms. Among Black farmers over half were field hands, a third sharecroppers and a tenth owners; more than a third of white farmers owned no land.

St. Paul AME congregation builds its present church on Merritt Mill Road

St. Paul AME, the first all-Black congregation in Chapel Hill, put up the church that still stands in 1892, across Merritt Mill Road from the site of its first building near the old Quaker school.

Subject: St. Paul AME Church

Black families' homes on Lot 16 are razed and an Alpha Tau Omega cottage goes up

The houses of Jordan Weaver, a Black preacher, and of two other Black families who had built on the old Lot 16 were torn down, and a cottage for the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity was built on the lot facing the Episcopal church.

Lee's Chapel Baptist Church is organized

William H. Standfield organized Lee's Chapel Baptist Church, a Black congregation, and was its first pastor.

Dilsey Craig, enslaved in the household of professor James Phillips, dies

Dilsey Craig (1802-1894) and Ben Craig were enslaved by the family of mathematics professor James Phillips and lived in the brick kitchen behind 501 East Franklin Street. Dilsey remained with the family long after freedom, and a memorial marks her in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Dr. John S. Spurgeon buys the former Burwell School

The dentist paid Charles Parks $2,500 for lots 152 and 153. The Spurgeons, whose household included Carrie Waitt Spurgeon, daughter of a Burwell student, lived there for about seventy years and added electricity and plumbing.

Part of Orange County’s nineteenth-century academies · 102 events

Subject: Burwell School

Albert Long, a Black man, joins the Hillsborough Presbyterian Church by letter from New Hope

Albert Long transferred his membership by certificate from New Hope Presbyterian Church, one of two Black members the book names as received after the Civil War.

Subject: Hillsborough Presbyterian Church

Cotton Chapel CME Church, the forerunner of St. Joseph CME, was organized

Chapel Hill members of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church, who had worshipped at Hamlet Chapel in Pittsboro, formed their own congregation named for founder Henry Cotton. Its first building later burned and was rebuilt as a frame church.

Wilson Caldwell dies and is buried in the Chapel Hill town cemetery

Wilson Caldwell, head of the university's campus workforce, died on July 8, 1898 and was buried the next day in the Chapel Hill town cemetery, now the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery; Kemp Battle gave the funeral address.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Manly McCauley and Maggie Brewer leave the Brewer farm west of Chapel Hill

On a Wednesday afternoon Maggie Brewer, wife of the farmer Milton Brewer, left the family farm four miles west of Chapel Hill with Manly McCauley, an eighteen-year-old Black farmhand who had worked there about a year. A posse of eighteen men led by her husband set out after them on Friday and overtook the pair beyond Jonesboro.

Part of Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County · 17 events

People: Manly McCauley

Manly McCauley's body is found hanging from a tree three miles west of Chapel Hill

A farmer, Thomas Myrick, found McCauley's body hanging from a bent dogwood beside the public road some three miles west of Chapel Hill, a week after masked men had taken him from the officer bringing him back. Coroner Jordan was telegraphed to hold an inquest.

Part of Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County · 17 events

People: Manly McCauley

W. A. Guthrie urges Chapel Hill voters to the polls for the white supremacy ticket the day after McCauley's body is found

With McCauley's body found the previous afternoon, Major W. A. Guthrie spoke at Chapel Hill on election eve, appealing to white voters to cast their ballots for the party of white supremacy; A. L. Brooks, the Democratic candidate for solicitor, followed him. The state election was held the next day.

Part of Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County · 17 events

Jesse King, the officer who held McCauley, is tried and acquitted at Hillsborough

King, returning alone to Chapel Hill with his prisoner, was met by masked men who overpowered him and hanged McCauley from a dogwood. Tried at Hillsboro for permitting the prisoner to be taken from him by the mob, he was acquitted; the News and Observer used the trial to confirm that the lynching had in fact happened.

Part of Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County · 17 events

People: Manly McCauley

The 1899 school report shows two and a half times as much spent on white schools as Black

Supervisor John Thompson's report for 1899 counted 50 white and 25 Black schools and $4,391.51 spent on white schools against $1,688.09 on Black schools. Almost half the schoolhouses of each race were still log.

A Black congregation builds Neville's Chapel outside Chapel Hill

An African American congregation outside Chapel Hill built the small frame sanctuary now called Neville's Chapel (United Church of Christ) in the early twentieth century. A cornerstone on the site names an earlier Strowd Grace Church and its pastor, H. B. Baldwin.

A one-room school for Black children is built at Hickory Grove

Hickory Grove, near White Cross, gets a one-room front-gable schoolhouse for African American children early in the twentieth century.

Nearly four in ten Orange farmers are sharecroppers, and cotton covers 5,000 acres

At the turn of the century close to 40 percent of the county's farmers were sharecroppers working 20 to 60 acres, and about 5,000 acres went to cotton, mostly in the southern townships.

Orange County replaces log schoolhouses and opens forty rural libraries

Between 1900 and 1910 the county went from no rural libraries to forty. Log schoolhouses for white children fell from twenty-two to none, while those for Black children fell only from twenty to eight. School terms grew from seventy to eighty-nine days for white pupils and from sixty-five to eighty-two for Black pupils.

Tobacco farmer Ira Rogers builds tenant housing in upper Orange County

In the early 1900s Ira Rogers built many frame and log houses for the tenants who worked his tobacco land. One that survives has two stories, a chimney in the middle and two front doors, which suggests it housed two families.

Lincoln Hospital opens in Durham for Black patients

Dr. Aaron Moore and John Merrick won Duke family funding for a separate hospital where Black physicians and nurses treated Black patients, after Watts Hospital had excluded them. It opened in 1901 as a 50-bed frame building.

People: Benjamin N. (Benjamin Newton) Duke

Jesse Ruffin, coachman and stagecoach driver, dies

Jesse Ruffin died in his nineties at his grandson Lindsey Faucette's house, out between Hillsborough and Durham. The Durham Sun remembered him as Judge Ruffin's servant and later Paul Cameron's, and a stagecoach driver before the railroad came; he was carried to Hillsborough by train for burial.

Mount Bright Baptist Church's first building burns

Fire destroyed Mount Bright Baptist Church's original building, on the lot Susan Graham had given the congregation. The 2014 Hillsborough Historic District documentation places that first church on South Churton Street near the Eno, before the congregation moved to West Union Street early in the twentieth century.

Subject: Mount Bright Baptist Church

The old Joseph Caldwell obelisk is taken down, later to stand for four college servants

In July 1904 the remains of President Joseph Caldwell and his wife were moved to the base of the 1858 marble monument, and the original sandstone obelisk was taken down, to be set up again in the Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. It was later raised over Wilson Caldwell's grave, and a marble tablet placed in its base by the Class of 1891 names Wilson Swain Caldwell, November Caldwell, David Barham and Henry Smith, who served the university.

People: Wilson Swain Caldwell

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

The county counts 17 rural school libraries for white children and one for Black children

The 1905 annual statistical report found 18 rural school libraries in the county, holding 1,581 volumes in white schools and 92 in the single Black school library.

Mount Bright Baptist Church is rebuilt

Three years after the fire, Mount Bright's members raised a new church; the Rev. Alvis Whitted was then the pastor. The congregation's present church on West Union Street dates from 1979.

Subject: Mount Bright Baptist Church

Maplewood Cemetery is started as a burial ground for Black Hillsborough

The cemetery on Corbin Street, west of the Town Cemetery, seems to have begun as a burial ground for Black residents about 1900 and may sit on an older Faucette family burying ground. The state cemetery census counts 207 graves, many marked only with fieldstones or not at all.

The county board builds the first room of Carr School for $300

Carr School in northwest Orange County, a gable-roofed weatherboarded schoolhouse, went up in 1908 with one room costing $300. The nomination names it among the few surviving frame schools the county built for Black children; it stands long vacant.

UNC trustees approve the United Daughters of the Confederacy's request to build a Confederate monument on the campus

The board of trustees approved a request from the North Carolina Division of the UDC for a monument on the campus. President Francis P. Venable took part in the planning and fund-raising and later committed university money when UDC and alumni contributions fell short.

Part of Silent Sam · 15 events

People: Francis Preston Venable

Subject: Silent Sam (UNC Confederate monument)

About one in four Black farmers in Orange County own their land

State labor figures for 1910 counted 144 landowners among the county's 576 Black farmers. Most of the rest worked as laborers or sharecroppers.

Black-owned town lots in Chapel Hill nearly double in ten years

The African American community's real estate grew from 98 lots in 1910 to 170 in 1920. The same passage names Black-owned barber, shoe repair, restaurant, grocery and pressing businesses of the late 1800s and early 1900s.

Charlie and Sophie Minor, Black farm owners, build a pyramidal cottage on NC 54

About 1910 Charlie and Sophie Minor had a hip-roofed frame cottage with tall inside chimneys built on their farm west of Carrboro. The report uses it to show the better-off farmhouse types that appear around that year; four frame outbuildings of different dates remain.

Six Orange County districts levy special taxes for graded schools for white children

In 1910 six school districts taxed themselves to build and run larger graded schools, all of them for white children only, while Black schools stayed in one-room buildings.

The Strayhorn log cabin on Jones Ferry Road reaches its two-story form

Toney Strayhorn, born enslaved in Orange County, became a farmer and brick mason and in the late 1800s built a one-room log cabin on his tract. He and later his son William enlarged it until, by about 1910, it stood two stories high with a rear ell and big brick end chimneys that show the family's skill.

Subject: Toney and Nellie Strayhorn House and William Strayhorn House

The county counts 25 rural primary schools for Black children, eight of them log

The school board recorded 25 rural primary schools for Black children in 1910, all but one run by a single teacher; eight were log buildings and the rest frame. White children had high schools in Hillsboro and Chapel Hill and 42 rural primary schools.

A county report finds no factory-made desks in any school for Black children

In the 1911-12 term seven of the 23 Orange County schools for Black children were log buildings. Eleven had homemade desks and the rest only benches; none had factory desks, while 28 of the 47 frame white schools did.

Eight new rural schoolhouses go up in Orange County in one school year

Lockhart's report for 1911-12 counted four new schoolhouses for white children and four for Black children, built for $4,515 in all. Seven Black schools still met in log houses, while no white school did.

Students start night classes for the Black men who served the dormitories

Asked for help by the young Black workers who cut firewood and carried water in the dormitories, students began teaching them reading and arithmetic in what were called moonlight schools. Under Frank Porter Graham at the campus YMCA the classes grew to take in history, English, writing, debating, home sanitation and the Bible.

People: Frank Porter Graham

Subject: University YMCA

Bettie Jackson London publishes the design for the campus monument and appeals for the $7,500

Writing from Pittsboro as chairman of the UDC monument committee, Mrs. Henry A. London described the monument designed by the sculptor John Wilson, a soldier above a bronze tablet of the State calling a student from his books, and warned that the chapters had not met their pledges and the unveiling at the semicentennial commencement was in doubt.

Part of Silent Sam · 15 events

Subject: Silent Sam (UNC Confederate monument)

The Tar Heel reports the monument's unveiling put off from the 1911 commencement for want of funds

The paper reported that the UDC chapters had been unable to fulfill their pledges toward the $7,500, so the monument could not be unveiled at the June 1911 commencement, the fiftieth anniversary of the war's beginning, and would certainly be unveiled in 1912. It was in fact dedicated in June 1913.

Part of Silent Sam · 15 events

Subject: The Daily Tar Heel · Silent Sam (UNC Confederate monument)

Abe and Annie B. Mebane sell a lot in west Hillsborough to the trustees of Mebane Chapel

For $25 the Mebanes sold a 30-by-40-foot lot at the corner of Union Street, opposite the later Central High School, to trustees Elisha Williams and Arthur Hood. The chapel was named in their memory.

A YMCA lecture series on Black life in the South is held for students

Frank Graham and the campus YMCA organized lectures on 'Negro life in the South.' Professor Harry W. Chase told students that Black citizens were a third of the population but received a sixteenth of school spending, and that what they did not pay in property taxes they made up in fines. A second series was held five years later.

People: Frank Porter Graham · Harry Woodburn Chase

Subject: University YMCA

The Chapel Hill Community Club runs an improvement contest in a Black neighborhood

Susan Moses Graham and the Community Club, with YMCA students under Frank Porter Graham, organized a project in an African American neighborhood at the edge of town, giving prizes for the cleanest house, the cleanest yard and the best fence.

People: Frank Porter Graham

Subject: University YMCA

Mebane Chapel builds its church in Hillsborough under its first pastor, B. F. Alston

A year after the United Holy Church congregation organized, it put up its chapel, seating about 200, with thirty-five members and Rev. B. F. Alston as first pastor.

White Oak Grove Baptist Church is organized

Charles Wells and William Thompson were leaders of White Oak Grove Baptist Church, a Black congregation organized about 1914.

Contractor Charles Craige builds a gambrel-roofed bungalow for mason William Strayhorn

The house at 107 Jones Ferry Road was built for William and Margie Strayhorn beside the home of his father Toney, head of a family of brick masons. William died young in 1933; his daughter Laura and her husband Albert Reaves kept the house in 1983.

Subject: Toney and Nellie Strayhorn House and William Strayhorn House

George Trice, who ran an oyster restaurant and shoe shop on Franklin Street, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

George Trice (1838-1915), an African American businessman who kept an oyster restaurant and a shoe repair shop on Franklin Street, was buried in the cemetery's Black section.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

The old Cedar Grove one-teacher schoolhouse is moved to serve Black children

When Cedar Grove's white pupils moved to the new high school, the one-teacher schoolhouse was hauled to Baxter Thompson's land and used as a school for Black children.

Subject: Cedar Grove schools

Hackney's school on Merritt Mill Road is bought for a public training school

Louis Hackney had opened his school for Black students on Merritt Mill Road in 1912. In 1916 the property was bought for a public training school for Black students, after Black residents raised $3,000 toward the purchase.

People: Louis H. Hackney

Subject: Orange County Training School / Lincoln High School

Black congregations in Chapel Hill form Red Cross auxiliaries

Among the auxiliaries of the Chapel Hill Red Cross chapter were groups at the Black Methodist church and the Black Baptist church of Chapel Hill, and one at Zion Church. Like the country circles they made hospital and refugee garments and comfort kits for the chapter.

Claytor's first report counts 42 one-teacher schools in Orange County

Claytor's 1917 report to the state listed 42 one-teacher schools, 19 white and 23 Black, with 2,569 white and 1,259 Black pupils. Nineteen Black schools had only benches and no desks.

Cornelia Spencer Love works as a librarian at the University of North Carolina

Love came to Chapel Hill and worked in the university library from 1917 to 1948. She later wrote When Chapel Hill Was a Village, published in 1976.

Subject: UNC Libraries

The county board pays for a school for Black children at Jordan's Grove

On July 9, 1917 the county board agreed to pay J. L. Wilson $119 to build a school for Black children "at Jordan's Grove and Grover," near Caldwell. The frame field school ran until 1951; the 1993 survey found it the only Black field school left in the county, badly deteriorated.

Subject: Jordan’s Grove School

Black residents of Hillsborough organize a Red Cross auxiliary

The Orange County Red Cross heard at its August 1, 1917 meeting that Hillsborough's Black residents had organized an auxiliary, which was ready for instruction in surgical dressings and already knitting in cotton. J. Cheshire Webb lent separate Red Cross rooms for white and Black workers.

People: J. Cheshire Webb

Hillsborough gives a Labor Day dinner for Orange County's first drafted men

On Labor Day, September 3, 1917, the county honored its drafted men with a dinner for white men at the warehouse and a separate dinner for Black men at the Black school house. Lily Hamilton's Comfort Bag Committee gave bags to the first seven men called from the county.

R. H. Claytor becomes superintendent of the Orange County schools

R. H. Claytor took office as county school superintendent in September 1917 and served until July 1947. Merging the small rural schools was one of his first goals.

The Orange County Red Cross reports 455 members at its first annual meeting

At a public meeting in the Hillsborough court house, chairman John W. Graham reported 455 members since June 4, branches at Cedar Grove and New Hope, an auxiliary for Black residents, a case of 1,453 surgical dressings shipped to Atlanta, about 150 knitters, and $1,535.43 given. The officers were re-elected, and Capt. Stuart Allen of Canada's Princess Patricia regiment spoke on the fighting in France.

People: John W. Graham · Henrietta P. Collins

Subject: Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough

Robert and Mollie Malone open Orange County Training School on the old Hackney campus

Principal Robert E. Malone, his wife Mollie Holmes Malone as domestic science teacher, and two other teachers began classes in academic, industrial and farm subjects at the county's new training school for Black students. Black residents had raised $3,000 toward the board's 1916 purchase of the Hackney campus on Merritt Mill Road.

Subject: Orange County Training School / Lincoln High School

A Black county committee raises $525 for the United War Work drive

In the United War Work drive, a county committee of Black residents led by Prof. R. W. Malcom, with Rev. A. E. W. Wilson for Hillsborough and Rev. J. M. Hackney as secretary in Chapel Hill, raised $525 of the county's $7,485.

Henry Guthrie opens a movie theatre on West Franklin Street

Henry "Buddy" Guthrie opened a picture house just west of Graham Street, in the blocks where Black families were settling. Under Davie O'Kelly it became the Standard Theatre.

University janitors organize with the Industrial Workers of the World

Black janitors at the university formed an affiliate of the IWW and weighed a strike for higher wages as the spring term closed. Business manager Charles T. Woollen answered that he would hire a new crew from Durham, and the effort faded. That fall all the campus help lost their jobs when the SATC took over the buildings.

People: Charles T. Woollen

A Black committee of the women's Liberty Loan organization raises $1,350 in Hillsborough Township

In the Fourth Liberty Loan the Hillsborough Township women's committee included a committee of Black residents, among them Annie Renshaw, Fannie Benton and Christianna Ferribow, who raised $1,350 from 27 Black subscribers.

Black residents keep an influenza soup kitchen at the Black school

During the 1918 epidemic in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, Black residents ran a soup kitchen at the Black school and looked after the sick in their settlement, work the Chapel Hill Red Cross history singled out.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown starts the clubwomen's drive for a home for delinquent Black girls

As president of the North Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, Charlotte Hawkins Brown of Palmer Memorial Institute began a public campaign in late 1919 for a reformatory for Black girls, the same year the legislature set up juvenile courts. The drive led to the Efland Home in western Orange County.

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

Orange County Training School enrolls 215 students

Two years after it opened on the former Hackney campus in Chapel Hill, the county's training school for Black students had 215 enrolled.

Subject: Orange County Training School / Lincoln High School

Orange County raises $2,075.84 for Armenian relief

An Armenian Relief campaign led by Dr. E. C. Branson ran from February 21 to March 6, 1919, and raised $2,075.84. Much of it came through the county's white and Black schools; Nellie Russell led Hillsborough Township.

People: J. Cheshire Webb · Eugene Cunningham Branson

Black women of Hillsborough serve the homecoming dinner for Black soldiers and sailors

For the July 16, 1919 homecoming, a committee of Black residents planned a separate welcome, with Minnie Berry Martin chairing the dinner and Annie Berry the serving. Black soldiers and sailors marched in the parade with Black Red Cross workers and were served dinner at the Black school house.

Billy Strayhorn stays with his grandparents in Hillsborough and starts school

From about age five Strayhorn came from Ohio with his mother and siblings to his grandparents' house at the corner of Margaret Lane and Hillsborough Avenue, attended his first year of school in the town, and took to the piano his grandparents kept. He returned for breaks and summers into his early teens.

Black families west of Hillsborough build the Gravely Hill Rosenwald School

Black families west of Hillsborough helped pay for and build Gravely Hill School, a two-teacher Rosenwald school, in the Rosenwald Fund's 1920-21 budget year. It cost $3,200: $700 from Black residents, $2,000 in public money and $500 from the Fund.

Carpenter Luther Hargrave builds a bungalow on Lindsay Street for his daughter's family

In the African American section of Northside west of Church Street, carpenter Luther Hargrave built a side-gabled bungalow with a large front dormer at 308 Lindsay Street in 1920 for his daughter and her husband.

Part of Historic Black neighborhoods of Chapel Hill and Carrboro · 55 events

Floyd Council and two brothers play Chapel Hill's streets as the Chapel Hillbillies

Chapel Hill-born blues guitarist and singer Floyd Council began performing in the 1920s with two brothers on the streets of the town, under the name the Chapel Hillbillies.

Henry and Lora Trice, a Black couple, build a farmhouse on their 36 acres

About 1920 a story-and-a-half frame farmhouse was built for Henry and Lora Trice on the farm they owned off Mount Sinai Road. It stood empty and decaying in 1992.

Howard W. Odum comes to Chapel Hill to lead UNC's School of Public Welfare and sociology department

Odum, a Georgia-born sociologist who had been dean of liberal arts at Emory, arrived in Chapel Hill in 1920 to direct the School of Public Welfare and the Department of Sociology. He taught at UNC for the rest of his life.

Kennon Cheek joins the janitorial staff of Venable Hall

Cheek began working for the university as a boy, helping his father Rubin Cheek, a stonemason born in slavery in Warren County, lay the stone walls around the campus. Around 1920 he joined the janitorial staff of Venable Hall.

Part of Black workers and campus labor · 31 events

Subject: Venable Hall

Luther R. Hargraves built the tin-roofed houses that gave Tin Top its name

Luther R. Hargraves, a carpenter and Chapel Hill's first African American mortician, built a row of houses with tin roofs on Hargraves Street near the railroad tracks behind St. Paul AME, and the cluster became known as Tin Top or Tin Top Alley.

Cool Springs gets a two-teacher Rosenwald school for Black children

Cool Springs got a two-teacher Rosenwald school for Black children in the Rosenwald Fund's 1921-22 budget year, one of four Orange County schools the Fund helped build. It cost $3,200: $1,800 raised by the Black community, $600 in public money and $800 from the Fund.

The campus contractor builds separate quarters for white and Black workers

The trustees made T. C. Thompson and Brothers of Charlotte sole contractor for the $1.1 million building program, a first in the state. Its first job was housing the initial 200 workers, in one dormitory for white men and another for African American men.

Tuskegee principal Robert Russa Moton speaks in Gerrard Hall

Moton, Booker T. Washington's successor at Tuskegee Institute, told his campus audience that he accepted social separation of the races and promised good relations so long as whites gave Black people education and industrial fairness.

Subject: Gerrard Hall

Black clubwomen buy the Forrest farm at Efland for their home for girls

The North Carolina federation of Black women's clubs, led by Charlotte Hawkins Brown, bought the 143-acre farm of S. C. and Carrie Forrest at Efland as the site of its industrial home for Black girls. Plans for the first building were drawn that September, and the federation deeded the land to the home's trustees on August 3, 1922.

People: Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

Howard W. Odum founds the Journal of Social Forces at UNC

Two years after coming to UNC, Odum founded and edited the Journal of Social Forces, the journal now titled Social Forces.

Black clubwomen sell two-cent stamps across the state to build the first cottage at Efland

The state federation of Black women's clubs, led by Charlotte Hawkins Brown, sold two-cent stamps across the state in November 1922 to raise $5,000 for the first cottage of the North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls at Efland, on land it had bought the year before.

People: Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

The Order of Gimghouls plats its Chapel Hill subdivision with racial deed restrictions

The Junior Order of Gimghouls subdivided its land east of campus into house lots, with a plat recorded in Orange County Plat Book 1, page 51. The original deed covenants carried the racial restrictions standard for the period, along with setbacks and a requirement that the order review house plans.

People: Thomas F. (Thomas Felix) Hickerson

Subject: Gimghoul Castle and neighborhood

Efland gets a three-teacher Rosenwald school for Black children

Efland's three-teacher Rosenwald school for Black children went up in 1924-25 (Rosenwald budget year 1924-25) at a cost of $4,810: $900 from the Rosenwald Fund, $200 from Black residents and $3,710 in public money. The county board put the $501 from its August 4, 1924 sale of the old Efland school toward it and inspected the building while it was under way that October.

Subject: Efland schools

Kennon Cheek helps negotiate the land swap that brought Hackney's school to Northside

Cheek's daughter Marian Cheek Jackson said he was instrumental in negotiating the 1924 land swap that moved Hackney's Educational and Industrial School from South Merritt Mill Road into the Northside community.

Part of Northside, Pine Knolls, and Tin Top · 43 events

Subject: Orange County Training School / Lincoln High School

The 1924 Sanborn map shows a school for Black children on West Orange Street

The 1924 Sanborn map records a 'colored school' on the West Orange Street lot where a Prince Hall Masonic lodge was later built.

UNC and the state welfare board win a Rockefeller grant for Black welfare work

In 1924 the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare and the University of North Carolina received a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial grant for a demonstration program in Black welfare, which opened on January 1, 1925, as the board's Division of Negro Work under Lawrence A. Oxley. Charlotte Hawkins Brown sat on its advisory commission, and Oxley visited the Efland Home.

People: Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Community Club hires a nurse to serve Chapel Hill's Black community

The health department of the Chapel Hill Community Club engaged a Black nurse, known as Nurse Compton and formerly of Lincoln Hospital, who began on January 1, 1924, visiting homes, examining children at the Black schools and organizing clean-up campaigns. By May 1926 the town had taken over part of her salary and she worked under Health Officer Nathan.

Odum's Institute for Research in Social Science is organized at UNC

The Institute for Research in Social Science was organized at Chapel Hill on June 30, 1924, for the cooperative study of social problems arising from state and regional conditions. Odum founded it with help from the Rockefeller Fund, and it is now the Odum Institute.

The Standard, a movie theatre owned by and for Black residents, opens on West Franklin Street

Chapel Hill's new movie house, owned by and run for Black residents, opened with two crowded shows. Its owners were tailor Durward O'Kelly, builder Charlie Brooks and brick mason Jesse Kirkland.

Christmas seal money pays for tuberculosis care and a free clinic in Chapel Hill

The Community Club's seal sale committee reported that seal money had sent an Orange County man to a sanatorium and paid $450 toward the nurse working among Black residents, who inoculated 68 people for typhoid and brought 36 patients to a free tuberculosis clinic.

Black clubwomen open the North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls at Efland

After years of fundraising, the North Carolina federation of Black women's clubs led by Charlotte Hawkins Brown opened a home and school for Black girls on a 143-acre farm on US 70 at Efland. The state gave only occasional small grants; the federation's board voted in October 1938 to close within five months, and the home closed on March 15, 1939. The state later opened a training school for Black girls, first at Rocky Mount and then at Dobbs Farm near Kinston.

People: Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

Dean James F. Royster refuses Shaw University debaters seats in the gallery

When the debate team of Shaw University, a Black college in Raleigh, asked only to sit in the gallery and watch Carolina's debaters meet Washington and Lee, Royster, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, said no, fearing it would reflect poorly on the university.

George Washington Carver speaks in Gerrard Hall

The Tuskegee scientist visited the campus, speaking from the platform of Gerrard Hall and showing a display at the YMCA, without the outcry that met James Weldon Johnson's classroom visits two years later.

Subject: Gerrard Hall

Orange County still runs twenty-one one-teacher white schools

Although buses and cars were making consolidation possible, Orange County still had twenty-one one-teacher schools for white children in 1925, and several for Black children.

The Dialectic Society condemns the Glee Club for singing to a mixed audience at Hampton

The Dialectic Literary Society censured the university Glee Club for performing before Black and white listeners together at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a Black college in Virginia.

Subject: Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies

The Mayo family's quarry land near Hillsborough is sold to Duke's land agent for $500

A deed at the Orange County courthouse records that Duke land agent Murray Jones paid the Mayo family $500 in March 1925 for land with a working stone quarry, the source of the stone for Duke's new campus. According to family accounts, George Mayo refused to sell until he was jailed and signed so his family would not go hungry.

Subject: Duke land purchases in Orange County · Orange County Courthouse, Hillsborough

Orange County joins neighboring counties in summer schools for its Black and white teachers

The board agreed to pay a share of a summer session for Black teachers held jointly with Durham and Person counties, and to send its white teachers to a session shared with Person. Pender, then a young teacher, attended the white teachers' session.

Black farmers Joe B. Brooks and John W. Jones organize Jones Grove Missionary Baptist Church

African American farmers Joe Bethel Brooks and John William Jones founded the Jones Grove congregation north of Hillsboro. Its members were close to Lea's (now Lee's) Chapel Baptist Church at Cedar Grove, where the Brooks family lived.

Subject: Jones Grove Missionary Baptist Church

Mount Sinai Baptist Church raises money for the new church it is building

The Black congregation on Mount Sinai Road held a rally for the benefit of its new church, then under construction, asking men for $2.50 and women for $1.50.

Annual benefit football games fund Chapel Hill's Black public health nurse

From 1927 a yearly football game played by Black teams on Fetzer Field, sponsored by the University YMCA, raised money for the public health nurse serving Chapel Hill's Black community, a project run by the Community Club. The 1941 game involved the Orange County Training School and raised $275 net.

Subject: Orange County Training School / Lincoln High School · University YMCA

Chase has an institute researcher's study of Winston-Salem Black businesses destroyed

Robinson E. Newcomb, a Brookings graduate student working with the Institute for Research in Social Science, had pieced together Black wage data from pay stubs outside R. J. Reynolds plants. After trustee James A. Gray Jr., a Reynolds vice president, complained, Chase and Odum gathered every copy, and Chase assured Gray he had seen to the destruction of the draft and notes. One copy survived at Brookings.

People: Howard W. Odum

The General Assembly votes $2,000 for the Efland home for Black girls

The 1927 legislature added $2,000 for the Efland school for delinquent Black girls to its appropriations bill on the House floor. The clubwomen had asked the state to take the home over entirely, which it did not do.

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

William C. Coker's Rocky Ridge lot deeds restrict the race of residents

In selling the lots of his Rocky Ridge Farm development, Coker wrote covenants into the deeds that set the number of buildings, the cost of houses and, in the early deeds, the race of the residents. These private restrictions governed the neighborhood before Chapel Hill had residential zoning.

People: William Chambers Coker

Subject: Rocky Ridge Farm Historic District (Laurel Hill)

James Weldon Johnson speaks at the YMCA's Institute of Human Relations

Harry F. Comer's weeklong institute, approved by Chase, brought speakers on race, labor and world affairs. Johnson, NAACP executive secretary, spoke in Memorial Hall and met classes. History chair J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton walked out when Howard Odum introduced him as 'Mister Johnson' and protested to Chase, while a Tar Heel editorial by David Donald Carroll welcomed the visit.

People: Howard W. Odum · J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton

Subject: Memorial Hall · University YMCA

The Carolina Magazine prints an issue of work by Black writers, including Langston Hughes's 'Mulatto'

The student magazine's 'Negro Number' carried only work by African American writers. Hughes's 'Mulatto' drew none of the reaction that the story 'Slaves' had caused the fall before, though both dealt with the same subject.

Black stonemasons build the stone walls of Rocky Ridge Farm

The curving walls of random-coursed stone that line Country Club Road, Laurel Hill Road and Laurel Hill Circle were built alongside the houses by local Black masons, among them James Blackwell and Jesse Jones.

Subject: Rocky Ridge Farm Historic District (Laurel Hill)

Hillsborough's Black Presbyterian church closes

The small congregation had never been strong in numbers or money, and as its older members died there were too few younger ones to carry on. It closed about 1928.

Mason Toney Strayhorn and his grandson Alfred Barbee finish a stone dam across Morgan Creek

Toney Strayhorn, a formerly enslaved Carrboro mason and preacher, completed a thirty-foot-wide stone dam spanning Morgan Creek near University Lake with his grandson Alfred Barbee, whose first masonry job it was. Alfred and his brother Willis Barbee went on to build walls, dams and chimneys around Chapel Hill and Carrboro for sixty years.

Chapel Hill adopts its first zoning ordinance

The Board of Aldermen unanimously adopted an ordinance dividing the town into two residence zones and two business zones, with height limits, setbacks, yard rules and a board of adjustment. The published text makes no reference to race.

George Lawrence describes the county home near Efland in the Chapel Hill Weekly

George Lawrence described the county home two and a half miles north of Efland: two narrow brick buildings, probably of 1824, heated by fireplaces and lit by kerosene, with no plumbing. It held 19 residents and two prisoners, and white and Black residents ate in separate rooms.

Subject: Orange County poorhouse (County Home)

Gaines AME Chapel builds its church at Efland

The Black congregation of Gaines AME Chapel at Efland builds its church in 1929. It was covered in brick veneer in 1964.

The county board funds a two-room Morris Grove School, with Black families paying part

The school board approved a gable-roofed, two-room frame school at Morris Grove in Chapel Hill Township. Black residents gave $250 toward it and supplied the lumber, and Louis Webb and Labon Hogan built it; the building survives, long vacant.

A Phillips grandchild sets a headstone for Dilsey Craig

A small granite headstone was placed over the grave of Dilsey Craig, who died in 1894 after sixty years enslaved, mostly in the household of Professor James Phillips. Its inscription says a Phillips grandchild erected it, and its style suggests the 1930s.

People: James Phillips

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Orange County consolidates most of its small white schools

After a county survey by the Board of Education and Superintendent Claytor, most small white schools were merged by 1930, with buses provided. As late as 1925 the county still had 21 one-teacher white schools and several one-teacher Black schools.

The Black neighborhood on the Chapel Hill line spreads west into Partridge Field

In the late 1930s the African American neighborhood straddling the Chapel Hill and Carrboro line grew west into Partridge Field. Only then, the book says, was it readily counted as part of either town; segregation and the community's own sense of itself had kept it apart, with its churches and schools facing Chapel Hill.

The Dubose estate builds Colonial Revival tenant houses near the Durham County line

In the 1930s the Dubose estate put up several Colonial Revival tenant houses along NC 54 Business just inside Orange County, joining older tenant dwellings from about 1910 and the late 1800s.

The university's Black janitors back John J. Parker's Supreme Court nomination

The Negro Janitors Association of the University of North Carolina, forty-six members, supported President Hoover's nomination of Parker, a UNC alumnus and federal appeals judge, which the Senate rejected amid opposition over his segregationist statements as a 1920 candidate for governor.

Black janitors organize the UNC Janitors' Association

Facing a threatened 10 percent pay cut, janitors Kennon Cheek, Frank Hairston, Elliot Washington and Melvin Rich organized the Janitors' Association, with Cheek as its first president. Its early gains included a week's paid vacation and showers in the janitors' bathrooms.

People: Kennon Cheek

Chapel Hill charity circle reports taking a patient to Lincoln Hospital in Durham

The Burden Bearers' Circle of the King's Daughters and Sons of Chapel Hill reported that it had taken a man to Lincoln Hospital in Durham for an operation and driven him back weekly for two months of treatment. The circle also made gowns for the hospital.

The last known burials are made at Margaret Lane Cemetery

Margaret Lane Cemetery, begun as a burial ground for enslaved people before 1852, was used until 1931, according to the plaques placed in 1987. The oldest legible stone is for George W. Hill (1844-1900).

Subject: Margaret Lane Cemetery

Dr. Edwin Caldwell is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Dr. Edwin Caldwell, a Black physician and son of Wilson Caldwell, died in 1932 and was buried in the Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, near his father. He had taken his medical degree at Shaw University and practiced for many years in Chapel Hill.

People: Wilson Swain Caldwell

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Kennon Cheek moves that the Janitors' Association give to the student loan fund

Frank Porter Graham came to an association meeting to tell the janitors that the Depression would cut their wages but that everyone would come through together. Cheek then moved that the Janitors' Association give five dollars to the fund set up to keep students in school, the first campus organization to contribute to it.

Part of Black workers and campus labor · 31 events

People: Frank Porter Graham

Rebecca Clark moves to Chapel Hill and goes to work in a faculty home

Clark, born around 1915 in Chatham County, moved to Chapel Hill in 1932 to live with a relative on Church Street. She went to work in the home of professor Vernon Howell while enrolled at the Orange County Training School.

Ridge Road School is built for Black children north of Hillsborough

In 1932 the county board had a two-room frame school for Black children built on Walter and Maggie Torian's land off Ridge Road (now Coleman Loop Road), just west of NC 86 north of Hillsborough. R. J. Forrest built it with lumber from the community. It replaced an earlier Ridge Road school and was not a Rosenwald school, though the 1993 survey had taken it for one.

Subject: Ridge Road School

St. Joseph CME built its first church on West Rosemary Street

Henry Baldwin, Margaret Burnette and Kennon Cheek mortgaged their homes for the down payment on the Rosemary Street lot, which Black leaders had judged too small for a new high school. A frame church went up under Rev. Joseph S. Miller and was dedicated as St. Joseph Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.

People: Kennon Cheek

The county board agrees to pay for five new or enlarged schools for Black children

Despite the Depression, the Orange County board agreed to fund buildings or additions at Merritts, Ridge Road, Sunnyside, White Oak Grove and Sartin, schools of one to three rooms for Black children. Each community had to supply its own lumber; Ridge Road was first allotted $500.

Subject: Ridge Road School · White Oak Grove School

Black children attend 27 schools while white children are gathered into 12

By 1933 consolidation had brought Orange County's white children into twelve schools, while Black children still attended twenty-seven, most of them one- and two-room buildings.

Girls from the Efland Home receive free care at Durham's Lincoln Hospital

In 1934 the Efland Home's residents were treated without charge at Lincoln Hospital, the Black hospital in Durham, where Dr. Stanford Lee Warren, husband of home trustee Julia Warren, had been a founding trustee.

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

Janitors' Association president Elliot Washington asks for help joining a union

In 1934 Dean Robert House wrote to President Frank Porter Graham about a request from association president Elliot Washington for help with union membership, since the janitors could not afford local union dues.

People: Frank Porter Graham · R. B. House

Ridge Road School counts 80 pupils enrolled and 51 attending

In the 1934-35 term Ridge Road School, a two-room school for Black children north of Hillsboro, had 80 pupils on its roll, 51 of whom attended regularly.

Subject: Ridge Road School

M. C. Burt begins work as the county's agent for Black farmers

From 1935 Burt served Orange County's Black farmers as extension agent, for a time shared with Chatham County. Edwin P. Barnes became assistant county agent the same year.

Black families from five northern Orange schools ask for a brick consolidated school

Parents from five schools for Black children, Cedar Grove, Carr, Harmony, Sartins and White Oak, asked the board for a new brick building to replace them. The board promised to look into it; a site near Vincent's Store for a Cedar Grove school for Black children was bought in 1946.

Subject: Cedar Grove schools

The county board hires builders for White Oak Grove, Sartin, Piney Mountain and New Branch schools

After architect H. D. Carter ran the bidding, the board chose the contractors Forrest and Roberts to build a two-room White Oak Grove School and add second rooms to Sartin and Piney Mountain schools, all for Black children, and W. H. Woods to build a one-room New Branch School.

Subject: Piney Mountain School · White Oak Grove School

A state survey finds only one brick building among Orange County's 28 schools for Black children

The state's administrative survey of Orange County school units, compiled from 1934-35 figures, counted 28 schools for Black pupils, all but one of them frame, and rated 19 in bad condition. White pupils by then attended ten consolidated schools, and all but one of their twelve buildings were brick.

Orange County builds a brick school for Black students in Hillsboro

Under a PWA-aided building program the county built an eight-room brick school for Black children in Hillsboro in 1935-36, with an auditorium, steam heat and plumbing. High school grades are first reported there for 1938-39, as the Hillsborough High School for Negroes; it became Central High School.

Subject: Central High and Central Elementary, Hillsborough

UNC Press publishes Odum's Southern Regions of the United States

The University of North Carolina Press in Chapel Hill published Odum's Southern Regions of the United States, a 664-page study of social conditions across the South prepared for the Social Science Research Council's Southern Regional Committee.

Part of The Carolina Playmakers and the founding of UNC Press · 20 events

The county school board buys land for a new Black school in Hillsboro

The Orange County Board of Education bought the Hillsboro colored school site from Louis Wilson and George Mayo, paying $1,100 to each. The new school for Black students went up there that year.

Subject: Central High and Central Elementary, Hillsborough

The school library at Hillsborough High School for Negroes also served as the public library for Black residents

Hillsborough's new school for Black students, a Public Works Administration building of eight classrooms and an auditorium, was put up in 1936 and ready in July on land bought from Louis Wilson and George Mayo, and its library served the local Black community as a public library. Albert L. Stanback became principal in 1942 and had the school renamed Central High School in 1943.

Part of Segregated schooling and the rise of Lincoln and Central High Schools · 45 events

Subject: Central High and Central Elementary, Hillsborough

Brickmason Roosevelt Warner builds his own house on West Corbin Street

Roosevelt Warner, a Black brickmason, built himself a two-story brick Colonial Revival house at 117 West Corbin Street, with a garage apartment of brick and glazed tile behind it. He also laid brick for other Hillsborough houses and in 1963 became the first Black town commissioner.

The Standard Theatre building becomes a funeral home and a grocery store

The West Franklin Street movie house that had served the Black community was given over to a funeral home and a grocery.

Ben Johnson, born enslaved near Hillsborough, recalls the Klan lynching of Cyrus Guy for a WPA interviewer

Interviewed at 85 in Hecktown, Durham, by Federal Writers' Project worker Mary A. Hicks, Johnson said the Ku Klux came for Cy Guy a hundred strong, tried him in the woods and hanged him over the road. He said nobody would touch the body for four days, until the sheriff took it down.

Second Baptist Church is organized in Chapel Hill

A second Black Baptist congregation was organized in Chapel Hill and put up its building in April 1938.

Louis H. Hackney dies in Chapel Hill

Louis H. Hackney, pastor, principal of the Quaker school from 1898 to 1912 and founder of Hackney's Educational and Industrial School, died in Chapel Hill on December 19, 1937. He was buried in the segregated Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

John Parker becomes the first Black Orange County farmer to get a Farm Security Administration purchase loan

Under the Bankhead-Jones Farm Tenant Act, John Parker borrowed $3,915 through the Farm Security Administration to buy a 145-acre farm, the first such loan to a Black farmer in Orange County. He paid it off in about six years on a 40-year note.

Nunn's Chapel Baptist Church is organized

W. N. Nunn and other ministers organized Nunn's Chapel Baptist Church, a Black congregation, which built a church in 1946.

A new movie theater for Black audiences, the Hollywood, opens on Main Street in Carrboro

In May 1939 an auction notice pointed buyers to a business lot on Main Street in Carrboro near 'the new colored theatre.' By 1940 the Weekly called it the Hollywood theatre, at the west end of Franklin Street.

Census finds nearly half of Orange County's Black-owned farms in Cedar Grove Township

The 1940 census counted 1,753 Black and 1,671 white residents in Cedar Grove Township, the county's only township with a near-even racial balance, and about three-fourths of the township lived on farms. Nearly half of Orange County's 503 Black-owned farms were in the township, which also had the county's highest share of Black tenant farmers.

Part of Farm labor in rural Orange County · 16 events

Kennon Cheek dies at his home in Northside

Cheek, born in Chapel Hill about 1890, lived out his life in the house he built on land in Northside bought from the university's holdings, and died there in 1940 after diabetes and overwork wore him down in the late 1930s.

Ruby Crews becomes the county's first home demonstration agent for Black women

An assistant agent was added in 1941 to work only with Black farm women, and Crews, later Mrs. Ruby Carraway, was the first to hold the job.

Subject: Home demonstration clubs

UNC junior Joe Felmet is elected executive secretary of the campus American Student Union

The Daily Tar Heel reported that Felmet, a junior from Asheville who had been active in the American Student Union for two years, was elected unanimously as executive secretary of the Carolina chapter after representing it at the group's national convention in New York. He took his A.B. at UNC in 1942.

A. L. Stanback succeeds E. C. Hester as principal of Hillsborough's high school for Black students

Albert Leon Stanback, a teacher at the Hillsboro High School for Negroes, replaced its first principal, E. C. Hester, in 1942. The school took the name Central High School the next year, and Stanback later pushed for the Cedar Grove consolidated school to take the lower grades.

Subject: Central High and Central Elementary, Hillsborough

James Collins buys the closed Black Presbyterian church and its lot

About fourteen years after the congregation disbanded, James Collins bought the church building and land on Orange Street.

The Janitors' Association reorganizes as a CIO union local

The Janitors' Association became Local 403-P of the State, County and Municipal Workers of America, a CIO union. Minutes of July 2, 1942 name pay as the most important matter, and laundry worker Rebecca Clark became a shop steward.

People: Rebecca Clark

Black shank disease first strikes tobacco in Orange County

A new tobacco disease, black shank, appeared first in 1943 and spread quickly through the tobacco belt. The book ranks it with wilt for damage and notes a partly resistant seed.

Fairview is platted as a neighborhood for Black families north of US 70

The first of Hillsborough's mid-century African American subdivisions was laid out in 1943 along roads that were already there, with twenty-five-foot lots meant to be bought in combination. Local builder James J. Freeland, who owned land in Fairview, built many of its houses.

People: James John Freeland

St. Mary's School closes as its pupils are merged into the Hillsborough schools

Consolidation with the Hillsborough schools closed St. Mary's School in 1943.

Subject: St. Mary's School

The Black women's clubs pay off the last of the Efland Home's debt

Four years after the home closed, the North Carolina Federation of Colored Women's Clubs cleared its remaining debt on the Efland reformatory in 1943, the year the legislature voted $25,000 for a state-run training school for Black girls.

Subject: North Carolina Industrial Home for Colored Girls (Efland Home)

The Hillsborough High School for Negroes takes the name Central High School

Under principal A. L. Stanback, the school for Black students in Hillsborough changed its name to Central High School in 1943.

Subject: Central High and Central Elementary, Hillsborough