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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1910s
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UNC gives James Sprunt an honorary doctor of laws
The university, where Sprunt served as a trustee, awarded him an honorary LL.D.
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William Howard Taft gives the first Weil lectures on American citizenship
Former president William Howard Taft spent three days in Chapel Hill as Graham's guest, giving a series of lectures on politics and the presidency. A photograph caption identifies the visit as the inaugural Weil Lecture on American citizenship.
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Edward Kidder Graham is inaugurated president in Memorial Hall
A procession of about 1,400 marched to Memorial Hall, where Chief Justice Walter Clark gave Graham the oath and Governor Locke Craig presided. Graham's address cast the state university as the instrument of democracy. Three former presidents walked with him in the procession.
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Emilie Holmes starts Mayfair War Relief work in Chapel Hill
Emilie R. Holmes (Mrs. J. S. Holmes) organized Chapel Hill war relief work for the Mayfair War Relief of New York in October 1915 and directed it until September 1917. About a dozen workers sent 13 boxes holding 1,183 surgical dressings, 300 rolled bandages, 160 pads and 36 hospital shirts.
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A brass plate from the Old East cornerstone is returned on University Day
University Day 1916 brought back a brass plate that had once been part of the Old East cornerstone. A Tennessee foundry owner had found it in a pile of scrap metal, and how it got there was unknown.
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Adam Kluttz sells his Franklin Street store to the Solomon Brothers, who keep his name on it
After a heart attack, merchant Adam Alexander Kluttz sold his original store to the Solomon Brothers of New York on the condition that it go on carrying his name. B. Y. C. Buice became manager.
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Bank cashier Milton E. Hogan buys the Thomas Hume house on West Franklin Street
Milton E. Hogan, cashier of the Bank of Chapel Hill, bought the West Franklin Street residence of Dr. Thomas Hume. The house later passed to Caesar Cone, a fraternity and the University, and in 1943 held the high school.
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Chapel Hill's white graded school and high school move into a new West Franklin Street building
Paid for by a $35,000 bond, a new Chapel Hill Graded School building designed by Hook and Rogers was finished on West Franklin Street in spring 1916. It housed white elementary and high school students, and Chapel Hill High School counts 1916 as its founding year, though its classes predate the building.
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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.
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Julian S. Carr endows a scholarship on his class's fiftieth anniversary
At the 1916 commencement, fifty years after his class was due to graduate, Durham industrialist Julian S. Carr gave $4,000 to endow a scholarship fund. Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo gave the address.
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Professor W. S. Bernard rents the old Sam Phillips law office from the Kluttz family
Professor William Stanley "Bully" Bernard rented the old Sam Phillips law office on East Franklin Street from the Kluttzes, remodeled the inside and made it his home.
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Segregated schooling and the rise of Lincoln and Central High schools
In 1916 the Chapel Hill school district bought Louis Hackney's school and renamed it Orange County Training School, later Lincoln High. Hillsborough's Black high school opened in 1936 and became Central High in 1948. Desegregation closed Lincoln as a high school in 1966, discarding its name and colors, and after 1968 walkouts Central's students moved to Orange High.
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The Tar Heel Theatre opens on Franklin Street beside Strowd's garage
A new movie house run by Lindsey and Strowd opened in one of the new buildings on Franklin Street, with a balcony and modern fittings. S. J. Brockwell's new Pickwick went up in the same row.
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Walter W. Pickard sells the Pickard Hotel to William and Louisa Uzzel
Walter W. Pickard sold his Franklin Street hotel to Major William Uzzel and his wife, Louisa. The maps carry the hotel under Uzzel's ownership until it burned.
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William Jennings Bryan argues against entering the war in Memorial Hall
Former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, campaigning for peace, spoke in Memorial Hall to students and townspeople, a crowd that spilled into the street, and urged Americans to keep out of Europe's war.
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Wilson Odell Lacock opens a shoe store and repair shop on Franklin Street
Lacock, who had clerked at Herndon's hardware, set up his own shoe store and repair shop in a small frame building west of R. A. Eubanks's general store that the express office had used. The family kept a shoe shop on the street into the 1940s.
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Thomas J. Campbell arrives as the university's first athletic director
After coach T. G. Trenchard's contract ran out with the 1915 season, Graham and a faculty committee ended alumni control of athletics and put a director in charge. Thomas Joseph Campbell, a former Harvard football star, took the post by early March 1916 and coached under a new rule that made athletes wait a year before playing.
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The Chapel Hill to Durham road is turned over to the federal engineer
The commissioners placed the road under the U.S. government engineer, as the central highway through Hillsborough already was, and set $40 a mile a year for upkeep. On May 1 they did the same for the road from Carrboro to the Alamance line by way of White Cross.
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Emerson Field's concrete stadium is ready for the 1916 baseball season
The stadium paid for by Isaac Emerson, with white concrete stands behind Bynum Gymnasium seating up to 3,200, was ready for a baseball game with Virginia set for April 3, 1916. Its plans were the first at the university to allow parking for automobiles.
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Susan Moses Graham, the president's wife, dies at Chapel Hill
Susan Moses Graham, 34, died on the last day of the fall session after six weeks of infection. Remaining classes were called off, and she was buried in the Chapel Hill cemetery on December 23 after a service at the Chapel of the Cross. She had helped found the Chapel Hill Community Club.
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A Department of Military Science opens with more than half the students enrolled
For 1917-18 the university added a Department of Military Science with three faculty, as large as the Greek department, and more than half the student body took its courses.
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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.
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Bud Perry and Moody Lloyd open the Carolina Barbershop
The Carolina Barbershop started in a small frame building beside the new post office. It moved west in 1920 and was still on the street in the late 1930s.
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Capt. J. Stuart Allen organizes the volunteer UNC Reserve Corps
Graham brought Captain J. Stuart Allen, a wounded Canadian veteran of Ypres and the Somme, to run military training, paying him $4,000 from the budget. Volunteers bought their own uniforms and earned five credit hours for twelve or more hours a week of drill and trench digging east of the campus.
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Chapel Hill's Rally Day of 1917 becomes a "Win the War Day" with a Red Cross booth
Rally Day in 1917 was given over to the war effort: Red Cross members ran booths on conservation and service, a farm exhibit showed county produce, and cooks displayed war breads and canned goods for prizes judged by the state Department of Agriculture. Women in uniform made surgical dressings in the Red Cross booth and signed up many new members.
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Clara S. Lingle becomes the university's first advisor to women
Graham hired Clara S. Lingle as advisor to women, the first woman given administrative duties at the university. Formally on the extension staff working with women's clubs, she was meant to speak for the two dozen women students within the administration.
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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.
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Dr. C. S. Mangum teaches a daily first aid class at the 1917 UNC Summer School
Dr. C. S. Mangum taught first aid every day through the six weeks of the 1917 Summer School to a large class of Chapel Hill people and summer visitors, with two local Red Cross members helping with bandaging. The course closed with practical and written examinations sent from Washington.
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Lewis J. Johnson builds a two-story house on Shadylawn Road
Johnson built the I-house at 930 Shadylawn Road Extension, with rubble-stone chimneys and a Craftsman porch and dormer, and raised a garden and a handful of hogs, cows and chickens without farming for a living. Lilly B. Williams later owned it until her death, and it was remodeled in 1985.
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Mary Lindsay Thornton becomes librarian of the North Carolina Collection
Fresh out of library school, Mary Lindsay Thornton took charge of the university's North Carolina Collection, then about 1,500 items kept in a small upstairs corner room of the library building that later became Hill Music Hall. She led it for forty years.
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Orange County mobilizes for World War I
Orange County organized a Council of Defense, Red Cross chapters in Chapel Hill (May 28, 1917) and Hillsborough (June 1, 1917), Liberty Loan and War Savings drives, and food conservation committees. On October 1, 1918, 650 UNC students were inducted into the Student Army Training Corps, and volunteers nursed the sick during the influenza epidemic.
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President Edward K. Graham engages planner John Nolen to study the campus
Urged by a faculty grounds committee of W. C. Coker, George Howe and Collier Cobb, formed in 1913, and after the trustees endorsed a full campus plan in spring 1916, Graham brought in the national planner John Nolen. Between 1917 and 1919 Nolen studied the campus and recommended building out the land south of South Building, the direction the 1920s expansion took.
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Students form volunteer companies and drill on Emerson Field
Before the university had a Reserve Officers' Training Corps unit, about five hundred students formed volunteer companies and drilled on Emerson Field with old Civil War rifles, some 250 of them lent by Julius Cone of Greensboro. In January Graham told the secretary of war that four hundred men were asking for a unit.
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Sturgis E. Leavitt teaches Spanish at the university
Leavitt came to the university in fall 1917 as assistant professor of Spanish, was named Kenan Professor in 1945, and retired in 1960.
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The Chapel Hill Community Club offers its women to the government for war work
Early in the summer of 1917 the Community Club offered itself to the federal government, through the county Council of Defense, as an organized body of women for war service. Over the next year it handed out Food Administration pledge cards across Chapel Hill Township, pushed gardening and canning, and canvassed for Liberty Loans.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross gathers country women into auxiliaries across southern Orange County
Auxiliaries of the Chapel Hill chapter formed at Bethel Church, Calvander, Antioch, Williams Chapel, Smith Level, Mount Moriah, Union Grove, Damascus, Carrboro and Orange Church, and among Chapel Hill women who could not come to the workroom. They sewed hospital shirts and refugee garments, paid for supplies by selling eggs, jelly and apples, and passed magazines and papers to families who could not buy them; Mrs. H. C. Hogan of the Calvander circle made 100 hospital bed shirts in 100 days.
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The extension bureau offers war courses and Greenlaw starts the Lafayette Association
University extension centers offered free month-long courses on the war and on European history, taught by faculty without extra pay, and mailed pamphlets explaining why the country was at war. Edwin Greenlaw's Lafayette Association sought to rally high schools around patriotic essays and pageants; Winston-Salem's center took its name.
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The university cancels its 1917 football season as students drill
With more than half the students in a new four-company training program under Captain J. Stuart Allen, a twice-wounded Canadian veteran, the Athletic Association called off intercollegiate football for the duration. Albert Coates, its president, took part in the decision.
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The university suspends intercollegiate football for the war
Intercollegiate football was dropped in the fall of 1917 as drilling men took over Emerson Field in the afternoons. Captain Allen took on the coach's duties, conditioning students with trench digging and mock attacks.
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Students petition President Graham for military training
In January 1917, 344 of the 1,137 students registered that fall signed a petition asking that a military training course be set up on the campus. The Tar Heel under editor William Polk backed the drive.
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The faculty approves summer banking jobs for credit with National City Bank
The faculty approved a plan Graham arranged with New York's National City Bank to hire rising juniors for summer jobs that taught banking, with university credit for the work. Graham meant it as a first step toward a school of commerce and began recruiting Dudley DeWitt Carroll at about the same time.
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A graduate nurse starts a first aid class for the Chapel Hill Community Club
Early in February 1917 Mrs. K. J. Brown, a graduate nurse, began a class in first aid and surgical dressings at the request of the Chapel Hill Community Club. It met twice a week through the spring, and when the United States declared war its members moved to form a Red Cross chapter.
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The legislature passes a $3 million bond issue that funds university buildings
In the last hours of the 1917 session the house passed a $3 million bond issue, with only 14 of 120 votes against, for state institutions and public schools, giving the university $100,000 a year for five years for new buildings and repairs. Baptist leaders denounced the haste and the aid to state colleges.
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Graham tells a Memorial Hall gathering how the university will serve in the war
Two weeks after the United States entered the war, more than a thousand people heard Graham in Memorial Hall urge students to stay in school until called. He promised military training on campus and a faculty program of instruction to aid the war effort.
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Laura Hutchins Benson of Chapel Hill joins the Army Nurse Corps
Laura Hutchins Benson enlisted in the Army Nurse Corps on May 2, 1917, and served first at Walter Reed hospital. During the pneumonia epidemic in the camps in the winter of 1918 she went to Base Hospital No. 1 at Fort Sam Houston, where she became head nurse.
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Chapel Hill and Carrboro residents vote to form a Red Cross chapter at the Graded School
Dr. Louis H. Webb, charged with organizing chapters in his medical district, called a Monday night meeting of Chapel Hill and Carrboro people at the Graded School building on May 28, 1917, which voted almost unanimously for a full chapter rather than an auxiliary. Seventy-one people enrolled at the chapter's first meeting, which elected George Howe chairman and Alice Noble vice-chairman.
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Horace Williams's war remarks bring a trustee inquiry that clears the faculty
After the Charlotte Observer quoted philosophy professor Horace Williams in May 1917 calling the war a clash of national interests, critics questioned his loyalty, and trustee John Sprunt Hill pressed the matter. The trustees' visiting committee investigated and in June 1918 cleared Williams and the faculty of disloyalty.
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Orange County men register on the first draft registration day
On June 5, 1917, 1,503 Orange County men registered for the draft. In Chapel Hill a Red Cross committee decorated the town with flags, pinned khaki bands on the registrants, and led a parade of the new registrants through the main streets afterward.
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Secretary of War Newton D. Baker gives the wartime commencement address
Baker spoke to an overflowing Memorial Hall hung with flags, the day after draft registration, warning that the war would be long and urging those who stayed to keep learning. Of the 161 graduates in the class of 1917, 65 were already in training camps, and all dances were canceled.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross chapter receives its papers and works from a Main Street store
By June 18, 1917 the Chapel Hill chapter had all its organization papers, with jurisdiction over the part of Orange County on its side of the railroad, and was making surgical dressings in a large store on Main Street lent by Mayor W. S. Roberson. The store served as its headquarters and workroom for six months.
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Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham dies, leaving the university a fund for professors
Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham, the South's richest widow, died at Louisville, and her will gave the university an endowment expected to pay $75,000 a year to be known as the Kenan Professors Fund. Litigation over her estate delayed the money for years.
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J. Cheshire Webb is named Orange County's food administrator
On September 20, 1917, State Food Administrator Henry A. Page appointed J. Cheshire Webb of Hillsborough food administrator for Orange County, with R. A. Eubanks as administrator for Chapel Hill. The record says no mill in the county broke a Food Administration rule.
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Wartime enrollment reaches 1,034
Graham had expected fewer than 800 students, but by October 1, 1917, 1,034 had registered, more than five hundred of them in the military courses. Entering freshmen averaged seventeen, two years younger than in 1915, and about two hundred students left during the term.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross re-elects its officers and names delegates to the state Red Cross congress
At the chapter's second meeting, held under its constitution on October 17, 1917, members re-elected the officers except treasurer Mrs. J. H. Pratt, who resigned, and chose Dr. J. M. Bullitt in her place. George Howe, Bullitt and Mrs. K. J. Brown were named delegates to the state Red Cross congress in Raleigh on November 1 and 2.
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Governor Bickett gives a wartime University Day address
A month after the term opened, Governor Thomas W. Bickett spoke at University Day in a chilly Memorial Hall, denouncing slackers. Marshals led the academic procession through ranks of uniformed men.
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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.
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The Carolina battalion begins digging practice trenches east of the campus
Under Capt. Allen, the student battalion began a system of front-line, support and communication trenches, dugouts and barbed wire on a field behind Judge Brockwell's place, to train for the war in France. By late November the Tar Heel reported the works nearly complete.
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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.
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Chapel Hill Red Cross treasurer Dr. J. M. Bullitt resigns to enlist in the Army Medical Corps
In the spring of 1918 Dr. J. M. Bullitt, who had set up the chapter's monthly subscription plan, resigned as treasurer to enlist in the Medical Corps of the United States Army. Dr. J. M. Bell succeeded him, and after about a month Dr. W. M. Dey took over when Bell went to Washington for government work.
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Former mayor Algernon Barbee is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Algernon Barbee (1840-1918), once mayor of Chapel Hill, was buried in the cemetery.
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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.
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John Nolen recommends a site for the engineering building
As plans took shape for the School of Applied Science building paid for by the 1917 bonds, planner John Nolen advised placing it between Memorial Hall and the Peabody Building and chose a spot for a flagpole. He promised broader campus plans by the June 1918 commencement.
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Old Commons Hall is taken down
The 1885 building that had served the university as ballroom, gymnasium, dining hall and basketball court was still in use in March 1918 but was gone by January 1919, when the Tar Heel wrote that 'Old Commons is no more'.
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Orange County women's committees sell $59,600 in Third Liberty Loan bonds
With Harriet M. Berry of Chapel Hill as county chairman, women organized in every township made $59,600 of the county's $99,150 in Third Liberty Loan sales, more than two-thirds of the allotment. Mrs. T. J. Wilson's Chapel Hill committee took 85 subscriptions for $18,500 and the Hillsborough committee raised $36,000.
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The Carolina Playmakers and the founding of UNC Press
Frederick Koch's Carolina Playmakers, organized in 1918, and the University of North Carolina Press, founded in 1922, made Chapel Hill a place where plays and books were made as well as read.
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The Carolina Playmakers are organized
Frederick H. Koch organized the Carolina Playmakers at UNC.
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The trustees approve a three-year wartime engineering degree
Before the SATC arrived, the trustees approved an accelerated engineering course leading to a bachelor's degree in three years, with military training and military French. Students were deferred while enrolled and then went on to army or navy service.
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Trustees name the first five Kenan professors
The trustees adopted President Edward Kidder Graham's recommendations for the new Kenan professorships, funded under the will of Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham. Venable was named Kenan Professor of Chemistry, with H. V. Wilson, Edwin Greenlaw, William MacNider and William Cain.
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University Day is canceled because of the influenza epidemic
Fear of the influenza epidemic led the university to cancel its University Day observance in the fall of 1918. The literary societies also failed to meet that fall.
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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.
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W. S. Roberson builds a two-store brick building west of the Bank of Chapel Hill
Roberson's building, nearly finished in 1918, held two stores. In the early 1920s the Peoples Bank took the western half and the Lowe brothers' Chapel Hill Hardware the eastern.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross moves its workrooms into the Zeta Psi fraternity hall
After its first home, a Main Street store lent by Mayor W. S. Roberson, was sold to the People's Bank, the chapter moved on January 1, 1918, into the lower floor of the Zeta Psi fraternity hall, offered by the university's Upsilon chapter.
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Chapel Hill school children organize a Junior Red Cross auxiliary
The Chapel Hill School Auxiliary to the Red Cross was organized in January 1918 with 132 members. The girls sewed refugee garments and hospital supplies, 130 children planted home gardens, and the boys built shipping boxes for the Red Cross in the school basement.
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The trustees give the faculty a second $250 raise
Following a $250 raise in September 1917, the trustees added another $250 in January 1918, bringing a full professor's top pay to $3,000. Graham turned down the increase in his own salary, from $4,000 to $6,000, that the board had voted at the 1917 commencement.
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Chapel Hill more than doubles its Red Cross War Fund quota
Assessed $500 in the Red Cross War Fund drive of May 1918, the Chapel Hill chapter raised it within a few days and turned in $1,156.60 by the drive's close, under Dr. J. M. Bell with J. S. Holmes.
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Frederick H. Koch is hired as professor of dramatic literature
Recruited by Edwin Greenlaw from the University of North Dakota, where he had founded the Dakota Playmakers, Frederick Henry Koch signed in late May 1918 at $2,500 a year to teach dramatic literature, a title he chose. He arrived that summer meaning to build a folk drama program in North Carolina.
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A subdued wartime commencement honors the governor, Senator Overman and the Rev. W. D. Moss
With about a third of the class of 1918 already in camps, the university gave honorary degrees to Governor Bickett, Senator Lee S. Overman, Edwin Mims and the Presbyterian pastor W. D. Moss. Frederic C. Howe, immigration commissioner at New York, gave the address.
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Kameichi Kato becomes the first Asian student to finish a four-year degree
Kato, from Hiroshima, Japan, graduated with the Class of 1918, the first Asian student to earn a four-year degree at the university. He had organized Epsilon Phi Delta, a society for the study of Japanese-American relations.
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The Class of 1918 plants a shoot of the Davie Poplar
Worried that the lightning-struck Davie Poplar might die, the seniors planted a rooted shoot of it that William Long of Chapel Hill had raised. Both trees were still standing a century later.
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The university gets an ROTC unit under Lt. Col. Gustave W. S. Stevens
With the university's ROTC application finally approved, the army called Lieutenant Colonel Gustave W. S. Stevens out of retirement in New Orleans and sent him to Chapel Hill in June 1918 to run the program. He stayed on to command the campus when the SATC replaced it.
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Orange County holds a Fourth of July war rally on the UNC campus
At the Governor's request the UNC Summer School invited the county to its July 4, 1918 celebration, and at least 3,000 people came for a parade, a flag raising and S. M. Gattis's address in Memorial Hall. The county Council of Defense met in Gerrard Hall, and Adolph Vermont's pageant on French-American friendship played in Battle's Park.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross starts a conservation committee that ships nut shells for gas masks
The chapter appointed a Committee on Conservation under Mrs. M. H. Stacy on September 1, 1918. On November 20 it shipped four barrels of nut shells for gas masks and seventeen pounds of tin foil.
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The Students' Army Training Corps takes over the campus
Registration, put off to September 24 and 25, opened a year run by the army: dormitories became Barracks 1 through 8, Swain Hall the Mess Hall, and the year was cut into twelve-week quarters with classes grouped by age. About seven hundred enrolled, nearly all of them required to take a course on the issues of the war, and the commander worked from the Sigma Chi house.
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750 University students are inducted into the Students' Army Training Corps
At noon on October 1, 1918, about 750 University students took the oath at the campus flag pole from Lt. Col. Stevens, the commandant, and became members of the Students' Army Training Corps, at the same moment as students at about 500 colleges across the country. President Edward Kidder Graham gave the address, and the corps was reviewed from the steps of the Alumni Building.
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Chapel Hill Red Cross membership grows to 687
The Chapel Hill chapter, which had enrolled 71 members at its first meeting in 1917, counted 687 members on October 1, 1918.
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Lt. Joseph Henry Johnston of Chapel Hill is killed in France
Joseph Henry Johnston of Chapel Hill Route 2 volunteered in May 1917, trained at Fort Oglethorpe and became a first lieutenant in the 322nd Infantry, 81st Division. He was killed in France on October 15, 1918.
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The Tar Heel counts some 300 student cases and three deaths as the three-week campus quarantine eases
Confined to the campus for three weeks, the Student Army Training Corps men had their first leave on Saturday, October 19, under orders not to leave town. The paper counted about 300 cases among the students, three deaths and 35 still in the college infirmary, credited the second-year medical students with keeping the toll low, and noted that both of the university's physicians, Dr. Mangum and Dr. MacNider, had fallen ill.
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President Edward Kidder Graham dies of influenza and pneumonia at his home in Chapel Hill
Graham, 42, president since 1914 and regional director of the Student Army Training Corps for the South Atlantic states, died on Saturday night after five days' illness. The SATC battalion escorted the funeral, conducted at the grave by W. D. Moss of the Presbyterian church; Josephus Daniels and Newton D. Baker sent tributes.
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The trustees make Marvin H. Stacy chairman of the faculty with a president's powers
Five days after Graham's death the trustees named his dean, Marvin Hendrix Stacy, chairman of the faculty with the full powers of the presidency. Stacy named Harry W. Chase acting dean of the College of Liberal Arts, and the trustees agreed.
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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.
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Chapel Hill women nurse influenza patients as volunteers in the University hospital
When influenza broke out after the University opened in the fall of 1918, the Red Cross offered its help to the physicians, and for weeks Helen Shell, Katherine Bourne and Mrs. K. J. Brown nursed as volunteers in the University hospital while other women helped stricken families in the village.
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Chase takes charge of the college and then the faculty after two deaths
Chase was appointed acting dean of the College of Liberal Arts after President Edward Kidder Graham died in October 1918, and chairman of the faculty after Marvin H. Stacy died in January 1919.
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Influenza epidemic strikes Chapel Hill
Spanish influenza swept the University in early October 1918, putting the campus and its student soldiers under a three-week quarantine. By October 23 about 300 students had been ill and three had died, and President Edward Kidder Graham died of influenza and pneumonia on October 26.
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Members of the Woman's Association make 120 gauze masks for the campus Hospital Corps
Meeting in small groups during the epidemic, women of the university's Woman's Association sewed 120 gauze masks and sent them to the infirmary for the Hospital Corps. The county's 1919 war record, summing up the association's work that fall, counts 150 influenza masks.
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Nurse Bessie Roper dies after nursing UNC students through influenza
Miss Roper left a paid nursing job to care for university students with influenza and stayed at her post while ill herself until doctors made her stop. She developed pneumonia and died within days.
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The university publishes the North Carolina Club's study of county life
The extension program issued a 188-page report on the counties built on the North Carolina Club's research, in which E. C. Branson called county government the least creditable institution in the country. The study later fed the 1920s county government reforms.
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UNC's women students make masks and arm bands for the emergency hospitals
In the first days of the epidemic the Red Cross called on the co-eds to make face masks for doctors and nurses in the emergency hospitals. They made 286 masks and 170 arm bands for hospital attendants.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross elects A. H. Patterson chairman at its annual meeting
At its annual meeting on Thursday, November 21, 1918, the chapter elected Dr. A. H. Patterson chairman, with Alice Noble vice-chairman, Nellie Roberson secretary and Dudley Carroll treasurer. Earlier that fall George Howe had resigned for his duties on the University's Student Army Training Corps committee, and J. M. Bell had taken his place.
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About 2,240 university men are in uniform when the war ends
At the armistice about 2,240 university men, counting alumni and faculty, were in service. The Alumni Review's October to December issues listed 33 dead, and the only faculty member killed was Lt. Joseph Henry Johnston of the School of Education.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross moves its workroom to the University Inn
After the armistice of November 11, 1918, the chapter left the Zeta Psi fraternity hall for roomy quarters in the University Inn that the University provided.
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The university Woman's Association holds a Thanksgiving peace festival
To pay for layettes and other war relief, the Woman's Association planned a Thanksgiving Peace Celebration: a Gypsy Festival moved by rain into the Y.M.C.A., ending with a pageant in Gerrard Hall. It raised $350, $150 of it for the United War Fund.
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A memorial service for President Graham fills Gerrard Hall
Every seat in Gerrard Hall was taken for the formal memorial service for Edward Kidder Graham, held after the epidemic had eased. Horace Williams and R. D. W. Connor spoke, and J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton read a tribute from C. Alphonso Smith.
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The SATC is demobilized and half its men leave Chapel Hill
Demobilization of the Students' Army Training Corps was completed on December 10, 1918, ending military control of the campus, and half of the SATC men left on the next train. Faculty judged the arrangement a failure because the university had answered to two masters.
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Sgt. Charles Battle Wills of Chapel Hill dies of pneumonia overseas
Charles Battle Wills of Chapel Hill enlisted June 19, 1917, and served as a sergeant in Battery C, 113th Field Artillery, 30th Division. He died of pneumonia overseas on Christmas Day 1918, and L. P. McLendon paid him tribute at the Chapel Hill homecoming.
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Edwin Greenlaw becomes dean of the Graduate School
Greenlaw became the third dean of UNC's Graduate School and led it until he left for Johns Hopkins in 1925.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross signs 550 members in its 1918 Christmas Roll Call
J. S. Holmes chaired the chapter's Christmas Roll Call of 1918, which secured 550 members. The school's Junior Red Cross auxiliary enrolled 310 in the same roll call, with every grade of the graded school at full membership.
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Trustees and faculty back a $150,000 student building as Edward Kidder Graham's memorial
A joint committee of trustees and faculty, meeting in the governor's office in mid-December, agreed to raise $150,000 privately for the student activities building Graham had hoped for, to stand where Person Hall was. Albert Coates ran the drive and by the end of January 1919 announced $20,000 pledged by students, $14,500 of it in one night.
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Acting dean of students A. H. Patterson reports on drinking at the spring dances
When complaints about drinking at the revived spring dances reached President Chase, Patterson, whom Chase had made acting dean of students, blamed most of it on visiting alumni and said there was little he could do about the newer dances.
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Alice Noble writes the history of the Chapel Hill Red Cross chapter
As chapter historian, Alice Noble signed the Chapel Hill chapter's account of its war work, from the 1917 first aid class through the 1919 welcome home for soldiers and sailors in Memorial Hall.
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Chase keeps E. C. Branson at Chapel Hill with a Kenan professorship
When the University of Virginia tried to hire the rural sociologist to rebuild his program in Charlottesville, Chase made Branson a Kenan professor with $1,000 more in pay, and he stayed.
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Dudley D. Carroll leads UNC's School of Commerce
Carroll came to UNC as professor of economics in 1918 and became dean of the School of Commerce, which he helped plan, holding the post for thirty-one years.
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Edgar Wallace Knight joins the UNC faculty
Knight, who had taught education at Trinity College, joined the University of North Carolina faculty in 1919, and Chapel Hill remained his home from then on.
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Eugene C. Branson proposes calling the planned social science school the School of Public Welfare
Branson had urged a school of social science on Graham in 1916. In 1919, worried that "social science" sounded like socialism to North Carolinians, he proposed the name School of Public Welfare, which John Sprunt Hill endorsed, and suggested Hill endow it.
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Frank Porter Graham becomes dean of students
Chase brought Graham back from the Marines over the summer to fill the new post of dean of students, in charge of discipline and of reviving student government after the SATC, while also teaching history. He agreed to try it for a year.
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Frederick Koch reads A Christmas Carol in Gerrard Hall
Koch brought his annual reading of Dickens's A Christmas Carol to UNC when he arrived in 1918. The Raleigh News and Observer described a 1919 reading in Gerrard Hall, with carols by university singing groups in the two intermissions, and he gave the reading 39 times on the UNC campus.
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George Howe becomes dean of the College of Liberal Arts
Howe, professor of Latin since 1903, took over the College of Liberal Arts in 1919 to handle academic affairs while the new dean of students handled discipline.
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Gus Paviakis opens the Carolina Confectionery, later the Carolina Coffee Shop
Paviakis opened the Carolina Confectionery in the space the University Athletic Shop had used. George Livas and James Gust later bought it and renamed it the Carolina Coffee Shop.
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Inez Koonce Stacy becomes the University's adviser to women
After Clara Lingle left, the post went to Inez Koonce Stacy, widow of acting president Marvin Stacy. For years she was the only woman on the regular University payroll apart from stenographers and library aides.
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Lenoir Chambers is hired to teach journalism and run the University news service
Chase recruited Chambers, a newspaperman then still in France, to teach a journalism course and manage the University's news service, arranging the job through his father while Chambers was crossing the Atlantic.
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Luther Hodges leads the UNC student council and his senior class
Hodges worked his way through the University of North Carolina, where he was president of the student council and of his senior class. He graduated in 1919.
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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.
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Oscar Efird organizes the Law School Association
Law teacher Oscar Ogburn Efird turned the school's loose moot courts into appellate-style law clubs under a Law School Association. It faded after he left the next year.
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Paul John Weaver is hired as the University's first director of music
Chase completed the hiring, begun by Graham, of Weaver of St. Louis as the first director of music, a full professor at $2,750. Chase asked him to take music education out to the state's schools, as Frederick Koch was doing with drama.
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Phillips Hall opens, named for three Phillips family teachers
Phillips Hall opened on the Chapel Hill campus in 1919, honoring three members of the Phillips family who taught at the university in the nineteenth century: James Phillips, his son Charles Phillips and his grandson William Battle Phillips.
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Sallie Hemphill, later Sallie Markham Michie, buys the house at 121 South Columbia Street
Sallie Michie bought the two-story house next to what became the Ackland Art Museum in 1919 and kept it for 73 years, refusing for decades to sell it to the University.
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The Bank of Chapel Hill opens a branch, the Bank of Carrboro
The Bank of Chapel Hill raised its capital in the summer of 1919 so it could open a bank in the mill town, and the Bank of Carrboro opened for business on a Saturday late that fall. Deposits on the first day came to more than $30,000.
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The Forest Theatre, an outdoor amphitheatre, is built at the edge of Battle Park
The university's open-air theatre on the western edge of Battle Park dates from 1919. It now carries the name of drama professor Frederick Koch.
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The University carries out a building program under President Chase
William M. Kendal of McKim, Mead and White planned an expansion for 3,000 students, proposing twenty-one new buildings. By December 1928 the University had built nine dormitories (eight for men, one for women) and Saunders, Murphey, Manning and Venable halls, with Bingham Hall and the library nearly done, and had remodeled the old campus buildings. Faculty above the rank of instructor grew from 66 to 158 over the decade.
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The county war record lists 23 Orange County servicemen who died in the war
Annie Sutton Cameron's record for the Council of Defense lists 23 Orange County soldiers killed in action or dead of wounds or disease, four of them Black. The list includes men from Chapel Hill, Carrboro, Hillsborough, Blackwood and Rougemont.
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The university hires Aberthaw and McKim, Mead and White for its expansion
For the postwar building program the university engaged the Aberthaw firm in 1919 to survey the campus and rework its plan, and by May 1920 it had retained the New York firm of McKim, Mead and White, led by William Kendall, as consulting architects for red brick Colonial Revival buildings. Local supervision came later, under Thomas C. Atwood from 1921, with H. P. Alan Montgomery and, from 1922, Arthur C. Nash.
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Fire destroys three fraternity houses on Fraternity Row and nearly takes the Carnegie Library
Fire broke out about 2 a.m. and destroyed the Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Pi Kappa Phi and Sigma Nu houses at the lower end of Fraternity Row, a private lane behind the Carnegie Library. The library, about thirty feet from the Sigma Nu house, lost only some window panes and had water damage. The university then bought land across South Columbia Street and swapped it with the fraternities for their old lots, which led to the fraternity courts of the 1920s.
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Acting president Marvin Hendrix Stacy dies of influenza
Stacy, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and chairman of the faculty with a president's powers since Graham's death, died on Tuesday morning after several days' serious illness, the second university head lost to the pandemic in three months. The pandemic led the university to appoint its first university physician, Eric Alonzo Abernethy.
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Enrollment drops to 759 for the postwar winter quarter
When the winter quarter opened after the SATC left, 759 students registered, the lowest count in more than a decade. Officials hoped returning soldiers would add about 150 in March.
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Former president Kemp Plummer Battle dies at Senlac
Kemp Plummer Battle, who helped reopen the university in 1875, served as its president from 1876 and wrote its history, died in his sleep at Senlac, his home at the edge of campus. He had turned 87 in December, and his death came two weeks after Stacy's.
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Students open the Graham Memorial fund drive in Gerrard Hall
At a student rally led by Albert Coates, with William H. Bobbitt and Luther Hodges also speaking, students and faculty pledged $20,000 toward a building now budgeted at $150,000. The drive reached about $70,000 by its June deadline and $120,000 by the end of 1919.
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Planner John Nolen delivers a campus plan for the university
Hired by the university's new buildings committees, John Nolen produced a campus plan in February 1919 that laid out fourteen new buildings, among them classrooms, a gymnasium and three dormitories. The university then engaged McKim, Mead and White and local architects to carry it out.
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Richard H. Lewis chairs the trustees' search for a new university president
After Edward Kidder Graham's death, the trustees named a search committee chaired by Dr. Richard H. Lewis of Raleigh, which met students and faculty on the campus in mid-February. In mid-May it put forward Frank L. McVey, Robert J. Aley and Harry W. Chase, with McVey its favorite.
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UNC faculty adopt a three-quarter academic year
Under Chase's guidance the faculty dropped the old two-term year for three quarters at its February 1919 meeting, keeping a lesson of the wartime SATC schedule. Students back in January could finish two-thirds of a year's work in six months.
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Gerrard Hall memorial service for Marvin H. Stacy
Students, faculty and friends met in Gerrard Hall to remember Stacy, who had died of influenza on January 21. Former president Francis P. Venable, a childhood friend, and Albert Coates for the students spoke.
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Carolina Playmakers present their first bill
The first bill included Thomas Wolfe’s The Return of Buck Gavin, with Wolfe in the title role.
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The General Assembly grants the University's full $215,000 request
The 1919 legislature approved all $215,000 a year that Chase sought, up from $165,000, and added $20,000 toward a deficit of about $47,000. With the raises that took effect in September 1919, University pay stood about a quarter above 1914.
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The Chapel Hill Red Cross reports 66 cases of supplies shipped since its founding
The chapter's report of woman's work to April 12, 1919 counted 66 cases shipped from its workroom and auxiliaries: 200 comfort kits, 306 oakum pads, 8,155 dressings, 1,004 hospital garments, 20 cases of refugee clothing weighing 2,500 pounds, 235 Christmas packages and about 725 knitted articles.
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Chapel Hill welcomes home its World War soldiers alongside Confederate veterans
On Saturday, May 10, 1919, a parade of Confederate veterans, returned soldiers and sailors, former student soldiers and town groups filled Franklin and Columbia Streets. Over 2,000 people crowded Memorial Hall to hear Archibald Henderson, L. P. McLendon and Joseph Hyde Pratt, with William Cain presiding.
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Orange County towns and townships win honor flags in the Victory Loan
For meeting their Victory Loan quotas, Cedar Grove, Chapel Hill, Cheeks, Eno and Hillsborough townships and the towns of Chapel Hill and Hillsborough were awarded honor flags, the Chapel Hill News reported on May 29, 1919, crediting Mayor W. S. Roberson as Victory Loan chairman. The paper said county residents had put more than a million dollars into government securities since the first Liberty Loan.
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Harry W. Chase is elected president of the university
The trustees elected Chase president of the University of North Carolina in June 1919. He had taught at Chapel Hill since September 1910 and had been chairman of the faculty since that January.
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Some 300 county officials meet at the University as the State and County Council
Two weeks before classes, about 300 school board members, county commissioners, superintendents, health and welfare officers and juvenile judges from 76 counties met on campus to compare work under the new state welfare and school laws. Governor Thomas W. Bickett gave the welcome.
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The University opens its first postwar year with a record 1,350 students
On opening day almost 400 freshmen filled Memorial Hall to hear Chase. Enrollment reached 1,350, about 500 more than the spring before; three or four men shared rooms built for two, some 600 boarded in the village, and 80 veterans of the AEF formed a club.
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Carolina plays Virginia in Chapel Hill for the first time
The Thanksgiving Day game with Virginia, the high point of the season, was held in Chapel Hill for the first time, and more than 8,000 people crowded Emerson Field.
- 1920s
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A Red Cross-funded summer institute trains social workers at the University
Before he left Emory, Howard Odum persuaded the American Red Cross to pay the summer faculty of a training institute on campus for social workers, teachers, nurses, ministers, probation officers and Red Cross, YMCA and YWCA staff. Chase let a woman instructor assist but not lead a course.
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Anatomy professor Wesley George builds a Colonial Revival cottage in Gimghoul
George Watts Carr of Durham designed Wesley George's small front-gabled, shingled house with an entrance portico at 208 Glandon Drive, a sign of the Colonial Revival taking over the Gimghoul neighborhood after its first Craftsman houses.
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Archibald Henderson heads UNC's mathematics department
Henderson succeeded his uncle, William Cain, as head of the mathematics department in 1920 and led it until he retired in 1948. He built up its graduate program and departmental library.
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Biologist Edwin Grant Conklin gives the McNair lectures on evolution
Over three evenings in Memorial Hall, the Princeton biologist dismissed the clay-molding account of creation and said scientific doctrines stood or fell on evidence alone. His lectures were printed as part of the McNair series, and Presbyterians later cited them in charging that the university ignored the terms of John Calvin McNair's bequest.
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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.
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Contractor Brodie Thompson builds his own house on Henderson Street
Brodie Thompson, the town's leading builder of the 1920s and 1930s and contractor for many fraternity houses and village homes, built a Colonial Revival house for himself at 214 Henderson Street.
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Contractor Charlie Lee Martindale builds his own bungalow on East Franklin Street
Martindale, credited with many of the brick stores on Franklin Street and with the Gimghoul Castle, built the house at 1518 East Franklin Street on about two acres then outside town and did its interior woodwork himself. The Durham road first ran behind the house.
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Delta Tau Delta buys Alice Jones's West Franklin Street property
The Delta Tau Delta fraternity bought the West Franklin Street house and lot of Miss Alice Jones. In 1936, remodeled, the house became Dr. W. Reece Berryhill's home.
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Dr. John Booker remodels Senlac on Battle Lane
In the 1920s Dr. John Booker, whose wife was Kemp Battle's granddaughter, reworked Senlac: he added matching one-story side wings, removed the Italianate trim and gave the house a full-width porch with Doric columns.
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Fire destroys Gooch's Café and a row of frame stores in Chapel Hill
An early-morning fire, thought to have started in Gooch's Café, burned five frame buildings in the business district, among them Pendergraft's grocery, Peace's barber shop and Foister's book store. Summer school students carried out the bookstore's stock, and the loss was put at $35,000.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Old Oxford Road schoolhouse closes as children are bused to town
Around 1920 pupils from the area began riding buses to the elementary school in Chapel Hill, and the two-room school John Edward Clark had built was made into a house.
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The Sparrow family takes over a Blackwood farm near Mount Carmel Church Road
A farm first held by the Blackwood family passed to the Sparrows in the 1920s. It keeps a much-changed two-story house and a good group of log outbuildings.
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The University builds ten faculty houses
In the summer of 1920 the Tar Heel reported ten new faculty houses under construction, with more promised. These were most likely the Park Place houses, of which one survives at 620 Park Place Lane.
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UNC separates the student council presidency from the senior class presidency
Other fraternities, angry that Beta Theta Pi held the top campus offices, won the creation of new posts, among them a student council president separate from the class president.
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William C. Coker directs a university bureau for school grounds
Coker set up and ran the UNC Extension Division's Bureau of Design and Improvement of School Grounds, which sent plans and a field assistant to schools around the state; 33 towns were helped in 1920-21. In 1921 the bureau began advising on home and factory grounds as well.
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Chapel Hill's new federal post office opens on Franklin Street
Postmaster R. S. MacRae moved into the new government post office across Franklin Street from the Battle dormitory before the building was quite finished, leaving the crowded one-room office. Haymes Brothers had begun the one-story building with columns in April 1918 under a contract signed the December before.
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Fire destroys the Chapel Hill Country Club clubhouse
The club's one-story clubhouse, partly of log, burned to the ground on a Saturday afternoon after a leaking oil stove soaked the floor. The faculty used the Gimghoul lodge as a clubhouse for a time, and that fall the club moved into the Gorgon's Head lodge.
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Harry W. Chase is inaugurated as president in Memorial Hall
The new ROTC unit led a procession of students, faculty, alumni and delegates from over a hundred institutions to Memorial Hall, where Chief Justice Walter Clark gave Chase the oath. Chase asked the state to see its University as the university of the South; the day ended with a banquet at Swain Hall and a reception in Bynum Gymnasium.
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Horace Williams holds the Kenan professorship of philosophy
Williams was named a Kenan professor at the June 1920 commencement, announced by President Chase together with W. C. Coker and Louis R. Wilson. He held the Kenan chair of philosophy until 1935 and taught as professor emeritus afterwards.
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Louis R. Wilson and W. C. Coker are raised to Kenan professorships
At the 1920 commencement meeting the trustees made librarian Louis Round Wilson and botanist William C. Coker Kenan professors, in the same action that recognized Horace Williams.
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Trustees order a building plan for 3,000 students
At commencement Chase told the trustees the University had hit its limit, with laboratories running three shifts and 500 teachers turned away from summer school, and the visiting committee called the dormitories unsafe and unsanitary. The board told Chase to list what an enrollment of 3,000 would need.
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Forty-three alumni meet at the Coop and start the campaign for the state's colleges
Telegrams sent in Chase's name by Frank Porter Graham and alumni secretary Edgar R. Rankin brought 43 alumni to the Coop, an off-campus boardinghouse, where talk of the crowding went on past midnight. The book counts the meeting as the start of the citizens' movement that won the 1921 building appropriation.
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The University receives a life-size 1800 portrait of founder William R. Davie
Chase built the 1920 University Day program around the portrait, which had survived the Civil War buried at the Davie estate in South Carolina. He used Davie's example to argue the state should meet the University's needs now.
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Orange County women vote in a presidential election after the Nineteenth Amendment
Orange County women could vote for president for the first time on November 2, 1920, after registering by October 23 without paying a poll tax. In an October 15 speech at the Chapel Hill high school auditorium, Governor Thomas Bickett said women should cast their votes. Literacy tests and hostile registrars kept many Black women off the rolls.
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Trustees let Chase ask for a six-year building program
On November 5 Governor Bickett and the trustees' executive committee reversed an earlier two-year limit and let Chase plan every building needed for six years. Near the end of November he gave the State Budget Commission a $5.6 million list: dormitories for about 1,275 men, a law building, classroom buildings, a gymnasium, a women's building and faculty houses.
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The rebuilt Presbyterian church on Franklin Street is dedicated as Sprunt Memorial
The Presbyterian church at 209 East Franklin Street, remodeled in 1919-1920 mostly at the expense of James Sprunt as a memorial to his wife, Luola Murchison Sprunt, was dedicated as the Sprunt Memorial Presbyterian Church. William D. Moss was its pastor.
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A General Education Board grant pays for 25 percent faculty raises
In late November the University learned it would get up to $50,000 from the Rockefeller-funded General Education Board, one of only two tax-supported schools helped. Chase used it for raises of 25 percent backdated to July 1.
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A rail spur from Carrboro brings building materials to the campus
With the nearest railhead in Carrboro, convict labor built a $73,000 spur that ran south of Franklin Street, crossed Pittsboro Street and ended near Raleigh Road at the new dormitory sites; it was later moved toward the new mall. Neighbors blamed the Chapel Hill Limited for cracked plaster, cinders and smoke.
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Alice Noble joins the UNC School of Pharmacy staff
Alice Noble was hired as assistant secretary of the School of Pharmacy in 1921, the start of a decades-long tenure in which she was later librarian and secretary to Dean Edward Brecht.
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Carl Durham serves on the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen
While working as a pharmacist, Durham sat on the Chapel Hill Board of Aldermen from 1921 to 1930 and on the Chapel Hill school board from 1924 to 1938.
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Connor returns to Chapel Hill as Kenan professor of history and government
Connor left his state archival work for the university in 1921 and taught at Chapel Hill until 1934, when he was named the first Archivist of the United States.
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James Finch Royster returns as Kenan Professor of English Philology
After seven years in Texas, Royster accepted the Kenan Professorship of English Philology, which he held until his death. Covington says President Chase recruited him back from Austin.
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Louis Graves becomes the university's first journalism professor
Louis Graves came back to Chapel Hill in 1921 as the University of North Carolina's first professor of journalism. He resigned in 1924 to give his time to his newspaper.
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Louis Round Wilson's survey finds thin library collections in Orange County's white schools
A questionnaire of Orange County's 48 white schools for 1921–22, including the Chapel Hill and Hillsboro graded schools, found seven with no library and 3,692 volumes for 1,586 pupils, slightly more than two books per pupil. Ten of the 25 teachers who answered said the books were used "not very much"; Wilson published the results in January 1923.
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Masons lay the cornerstone of Grimes Dormitory
Masons from Hillsborough's Eagle Lodge and Chapel Hill's University Lodge laid the cornerstone of Grimes Dormitory. Past Grand Master Samuel M. Gattis of Eagle Lodge ran the ceremony and gave the address.
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Memorial Hall is renovated with heat, electric light and sound padding
Builders laid cork on the floors and padded the vaulted ceiling with felt and burlap to fix the acoustics, and added electric lights and heat so the hall could be used year-round. It reopened for the fall 1921 term.
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Steele Dormitory, the first building of the new south quadrangle, goes up
Designed by Raleigh architect J. A. Salter and built just south of Smith Hall, Steele was the first building on what became Polk Place and the best-equipped dormitory the campus had yet seen.
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The General Assembly grants almost $1.5 million for new university buildings
After a 1920 campaign by the university to expand its crowded plant, where about 1,000 students packed old dormitories and classrooms, the legislature voted close to $1.5 million for buildings in 1921 and 1922.
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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.
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The center of East Franklin Street is paved
With the town's cars numbering 95 in 1921, an 18-foot strip down the middle of East Franklin Street was paved. About ten feet of packed dirt was left on each side.
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The trustees' building committee names Durham engineer Thomas C. Atwood its executive agent
Atwood ran the campus expansion on the ground, hiring engineers, draftsmen, an inspector, the architect H. P. Alan Montgomery and the Charlotte contractor T. C. Thompson. Nash replaced Montgomery the next year.
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The university drops its postwar ROTC unit for lack of students
An ROTC program organized at the university after World War I was ended in 1921 because too few students took part. It was 1924 before a visiting general's call for a new unit drew applause in Memorial Hall.
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UNC completes a sewage disposal plant in Battle Park for the Park Place faculty houses
Built with convict labor under T. C. Atwood, the plant on Battle Branch treated waste from the new Park Place faculty houses and nearby homes the town mains did not reach. It was reported complete and in service by October 12, 1921.
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Under rector Alfred Lawrence, the Chapel of the Cross asks Hobart Upjohn to design a new church
The vestry, led by its new rector Alfred Lawrence, asked church architect Hobart B. Upjohn to design a larger building linked to the old chapel by a cloister, after a 1920 diocesan resolution called for enlarging the church to serve the university.
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William B. Neal opens the Hill Bakery in Chapel Hill
Neal started the bakery in 1921 on the lot later taken by Strowd Motor Company. After his death Mrs. Neal ran it until 1945, and it supplied most of the town's bread for over thirty years.
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Women students at UNC organize a basketball team
Women, then a small group mostly in upper classes and graduate study, formed a basketball team in 1921, and men on campus wondered whether a woman would have to be given a letter.
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The legislature abolishes the State Building Commission
The commission whose delays had raised the cost of Steele Dormitory was ended in the closing hours of the 1921 session, leaving Chase answerable only to the trustees' building committee for the new campus.
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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.
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