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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1920s
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The Daily Tar Heel counts 31 fraternities with over 900 members and $500,000 in property
By the end of the 1920s about a quarter of UNC students belonged to one of thirty-one national fraternities, whose houses and land were valued at around half a million dollars.
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Chase asks alumni to build a private endowment for the university
With state money in doubt, Chase broke with the unwritten rule that state schools left private gifts to the church colleges and asked alumni to build an endowment alongside tax support. The Durham Herald endorsed the appeal, but four weeks later the stock market crashed and little came of it.
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Chase refuses a mill official's demand that Frank Graham be fired
After the Southern Textile Bulletin wrongly placed Graham at a Communist Labor Day rally, an official of the company that owned Gastonia's Loray Mill asked Governor Gardner to have him dismissed. In the reply Gardner passed along, Chase said Graham had been in New York and that faculty had the same right as other citizens to form and voice opinions, and he would resist any censorship of those seeking change by lawful means.
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The new University Library, later Wilson Library, is dedicated
UNC dedicated its new University Library, designed by Arthur Cleveland Nash, on October 19, 1929, weeks after students began using the building that fall. It served as the main campus library for decades, was named for librarian Louis Round Wilson in 1956, and after a 1984 to 1987 renovation became the home of UNC's special collections.
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Will W. Alexander delivers the Weil Lectures at the University
Will W. Alexander, then with the Commission on Cooperation between the Races, gave the three Weil Lectures at the University. His announced topics were "Truth and Fiction about the Old South," "The New Rulers" and "The Older Values and the New Life."
- 1930s
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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.
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A new Memorial Hall with a Doric portico replaces the Victorian auditorium
In January 1930 the university decided to raze Old Memorial Hall and build a larger auditorium to plans by Atwood and Nash. The new Colonial Revival hall, with three entrances under a monumental Doric portico facing Cameron Avenue, stood by early 1931, one of three buildings the university completed in the early Depression under Frank Porter Graham.
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Alexander H. Graham chairs the committee that chooses Frank Porter Graham as UNC president
Alexander H. Graham chaired the committee that hired Frank Porter Graham as president of the University of North Carolina in 1930. His papers hold the committee correspondence from February to May 1930.
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Herman G. Baity serves as dean of UNC's School of Engineering
Baity, head of sanitary engineering since 1928, was dean of the School of Engineering from 1930 until 1936, when the sanitary engineering department moved to the School of Public Health. He chaired it there until 1955.
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Kappa Sigma builds a $35,000 house on the Cameron Avenue fraternity court
Kappa Sigma's new house, designed by Kenneth Ellington to match its neighbors on the Cameron Avenue court, cost about $35,000.
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Nash retires and leaves Chapel Hill, staying on as consulting architect
Nash retired in 1930 and moved to Washington, D.C., but continued as the university's consulting architect until 1953, advising on later campus work.
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The Southern Historical Collection is established
In 1930 Sarah Graham Kenan of Wilmington gave UNC $25,000 to buy books, letters and diaries for the Southern Historical Collection being gathered by history professor J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, who became its first director. Kept in the new library, it grew into a leading repository of manuscripts on the American South.
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The University gives up its Service Plants appliance business to two employees
The UNC Service Plants, which supplied water, power and laundry, had begun selling electrical goods. After the state barred the University from competing with private business, Harvey D. Bennett and Frank C. Blocksidge took over the shop in the same place.
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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.
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Thomas Atwood's new firm, Atwood and Weeks, moves from Chapel Hill to Durham
With campus building stopped by the 1929 crash and Nash retiring, Atwood took H. Raymond Weeks as his partner and moved the practice to Durham. Weeks succeeded Nash as university architect, with Nash advising him until 1953.
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University students plant donated fruit trees and grapevines at the Efland Home
In the spring of 1930 Lindley Nurseries gave the Efland Home 75 fruit trees and 25 grapevines, and University of North Carolina students set them out on the farm.
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Chase resigns to become president of the University of Illinois
The evening before, a full-dress reception at the Carolina Inn marked ten years since Chase's inauguration, with Governor Gardner already holding his resignation. When the Illinois trustees elected Chase the next day, Gardner announced it from Raleigh. The Illinois post reportedly paid $20,000, twice his salary.
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UNC tears down the old Memorial Hall
The first Memorial Hall, closed in the fall of 1929 and declared unsafe in December 1929, was torn down in February 1930 after the trustees voted on January 28, 1930 to replace it with a new auditorium on the same site.
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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.
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Howard Mumford Jones leaves Chapel Hill for the University of Michigan
Howard Mumford Jones, a member of the university's English faculty since coming from the University of Texas in 1925, left for the University of Michigan in 1930 and handed his syndicated book-review column, The Literary Lantern, to Paul Green and his wife.
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The Friendly Cafeteria opens on East Franklin Street in the old University Cafeteria space
The Webber brothers of High Point, who ran Friendly Cafeterias in several North Carolina cities, bought the fixtures of the failed University Cafeteria at auction and reopened the space as a Friendly Cafeteria able to serve about 200 people.
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The university loses 20 percent of its next year's state budget
A month after Chase warned Governor Gardner that the university was at a crisis, $175,000 was cut from its budget for the coming year, a 20 percent reduction deeper than any Chase had seen as president.
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Trustees elect Frank Porter Graham president of the university
Meeting in Howell Hall during commencement, the trustees voted without nominations. R. D. W. Connor led the first ballot 26 to 20, but Graham took a majority of 47 on the fourth, and the vote was made unanimous. Found walking by Battle Park and brought in, Graham asked that Connor be chosen instead, then accepted.
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Commencement is held outdoors at the Davie Poplar, and Chase receives an honorary degree
With Memorial Hall torn down, the 339 graduates received diplomas at a stage by the Davie Poplar, seated on the old hall's benches as loudspeakers in the trees carried John H. Finley's address. Honorary degrees went to Ellen Glasgow, Martha Berry, Francis P. Venable and Governor Gardner, and Gardner conferred one on Chase that the trustees had voted without consulting the faculty.
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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.
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The old Carnegie Library is dedicated as the music building
After the library moved to its new building, the Carnegie Library was remodeled for the music department with an auditorium and a Reuter organ, most of the cost given by the Hill family. It was dedicated on November 14, 1930, and named Hill Music Hall by trustee resolution in the summer of 1931.
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Albert Coates establishes the Institute of Government
UNC law professor Albert Coates began building the Institute of Government in 1931, with police schools that September and a Carolina Inn planning meeting in December, and the Institute was formally organized and named in May 1932. Working with his wife, Gladys Hall Coates, he ran it as a private enterprise until it became part of the University in 1942; it is now the UNC School of Government.
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Graham Memorial is completed as the university's student union
The building named for Edward Kidder Graham was completed in 1931 and served as the student union, holding the Horace Williams Library, a barber shop, a bowling alley, a game room and offices for student publications.
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Phillips Russell returns to Chapel Hill to teach creative writing
After years as a newspaperman in New York and London, Russell came back in 1931 and taught writing at the university for twenty-five years, first in the English department and then in the School of Journalism. The Atlantic Monthly called his class, often held outdoors under the trees, one of the four best in the country.
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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).
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UNC establishes its School of Library Science
A School of Library Science was added at Chapel Hill in 1931, early in Frank Porter Graham's presidency.
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University Lodge buys Chapel Hill's old Baptist church for its hall
University Lodge No. 408 bought the old Baptist church building on Franklin Street and made it into its lodge hall.
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Contempo and the Intimate Bookshop begin in Chapel Hill
Milton Abernethy, Anthony Buttitta and three other young men distributed the first issue of Contempo, a four-page review of ideas and personalities, in Chapel Hill on April 27, 1931. They also ran the Intimate Bookshop from a dormitory room; by June it had moved above the Cavalier Cafeteria, and Contempo was later headquartered there.
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The new Memorial Hall is dedicated
Chase had found the money for the replacement auditorium within university accounts, helped by $5,000 from John Sprunt Hill, but none was left to furnish it. Guests at the dedication sat on the scarred heart-pine benches saved from the old hall, along with its marble tablets to the Civil War dead.
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Frank Porter Graham is inaugurated as president in Kenan Stadium
On Armistice Day, delegates from campuses across the country attended a full-dress ceremony in the stadium. In an address of more than an hour and a quarter, Graham restated the university's freedom to teach and to report findings whatever powerful lobbies thought, and praised Chase. It was the last such inauguration for the Chapel Hill campus alone.
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The Morehead-Patterson Bell Tower is dedicated at UNC
The bell tower given by John Motley Morehead III and Rufus Lenoir Patterson II was dedicated to the university on Thanksgiving Day, November 26, 1931, with Governor O. Max Gardner giving the dedication address. Morehead had proposed a tower to President Harry Woodburn Chase in the 1920s and been turned down on three sites.
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Adeline McCall plays piano in a Folk Music Institute laboratory concert
The university's Institute of Folk Music held its second laboratory concert at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, December 9, 1931, in Hill Music Hall, with Lamar Stringfield on flute, Adeline McCall on piano and Thor Johnson on viola. The program included a composition by Herbert Hazelman, an Asheville freshman.
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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.
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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.
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Susan Grey Akers becomes UNC's first woman full professor
When Louis Round Wilson left the new School of Library Science, Akers was made its acting director and promoted to full professor, the first woman at UNC-Chapel Hill to hold that rank.
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The university is consolidated with the Greensboro and Raleigh colleges
In 1932 the university at Chapel Hill, the North Carolina College for Women at Greensboro and State College at Raleigh were joined administratively into one University of North Carolina.
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University Lake begins supplying Chapel Hill
The University of North Carolina dammed Morgan Creek west of Carrboro to form University Lake, which began supplying water to the university and to Chapel Hill. The lake and about 500 acres of surrounding land remain in university ownership, with OWASA entitled to use the lake under contract.
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Graham Memorial is dedicated as the student union
After more than a decade of unmet alumni pledges, L. Ames Brown guaranteed the money to finish and furnish the building, which opened in the fall of 1931. At the January dedication Charles Tillett Jr. quoted a reader's entry in Nell Battle Lewis's News and Observer contest that counted Ed Graham's living spirit among the state's most beautiful things.
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The Rockefeller Foundation grants Odum's Institute for Research in Social Science $30,000 a year
The foundation announced a yearly grant of $30,000 to support the work of the university's Institute for Research in Social Science under Howard Odum. Covington says the announcement came the same day Coates held his first conference of public officials.
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UNC names W. C. Jackson dean of a new School of Public Administration
Graham and Odum announced Jackson, history chair at the Woman's College in Greensboro, as dean of the school Odum had planned for three years with a small state allocation. Graham urged Coates to fold the Institute into it and made him one of its trustees, but Coates kept apart; short of state money, the school was dissolved after Jackson returned to Greensboro as chancellor.
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Dean Isaac Hall Manning resigns after President Graham overrules his Jewish quota
Manning limited the admission of Jewish medical students. When Morris Krasny, a rejected Jewish applicant, appealed, President Frank Porter Graham ordered him admitted, and Manning resigned rather than change his decision.
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S. H. Hobbs Jr. heads UNC's Department of Rural Social Economics
Hobbs, who had taught in the department since 1916, headed it from 1933 until it merged with the Department of Sociology in 1939.
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The Carolina Playmakers stage a Shaw-Henderson Festival
The Carolina Playmakers held a Shaw-Henderson Festival in Chapel Hill honoring Archibald Henderson, George Bernard Shaw's authorized biographer. It featured Shaw's You Never Can Tell, the play whose 1903 amateur performance had first drawn Henderson to Shaw.
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University physician Eric Abernethy is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Eric Abernethy (1876-1933), the university physician for whom Abernethy Hall is named, was buried in the cemetery.
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Dr. Eric A. Abernethy resigns as university physician
Abernethy, appointed university physician in charge of the infirmary after he came home wounded from the First World War, resigned because of poor health and went into private practice in Chapel Hill with his son. Dr. Foy Roberson of Durham took temporary charge of the infirmary.
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Kay Kyser's band closes the May Frolics dances in the Tin Can
Kay Kyser and his orchestra, made up of former UNC students, played the formal dance that closed the fourth annual May Frolics in the Tin Can. The band also gave a benefit concert in Memorial Hall the next afternoon.
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Coates and law dean Van Hecke withdraw their resignations after meeting with President Graham
That spring law dean Maurice T. Van Hecke had recommended that Coates stop teaching and work only for the Institute, and first Coates and then Van Hecke offered to resign. At a June 6 meeting in Graham's South Building office both stayed on: Coates got a fall leave and a second chance in the law school, and he agreed to stop presenting the law school or the university as the Institute's sponsor.
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Elizabeth Janet Gray publishes Jane Hope, a novel set in Chapel Hill
Viking Press issued Jane Hope, a novel for young readers set in Chapel Hill, whose heroine comes from Philadelphia to live with her grandparents. The Chapel Hill Weekly noted that the author had absorbed the village's history, with a chapter on the Buchanan commencement.
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Albert Ray Newsome heads the UNC history department
When R. D. W. Connor left to become the first Archivist of the United States, Newsome returned to Chapel Hill to head the history department and teach American history. He ran the department until poor health made him give up administrative duties in 1950.
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Edgar Wallace Knight is named a Kenan professor
The university recognized Knight's teaching and scholarship with a Kenan professorship in 1934.
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Former university president Francis Preston Venable is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Francis Preston Venable (1856-1934), the chemist and university president under whom UNC gained national standing, was buried in the cemetery.
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Geologist Collier Cobb is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Collier Cobb Sr. (1862-1934), professor of geology at the university for forty-two years, was buried in the cemetery.
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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.
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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.
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Jim Tatum is named an All-Southern tackle at UNC
Tatum enrolled at UNC with the persuasion and financial aid of his uncle William Donald Carmichael Jr. He played tackle under Chuck Collins and Carl Snavely, was named All-Southern in 1934, also caught for the baseball team, and graduated in 1935.
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Robert B. House becomes Dean of Administration at Chapel Hill
As part of consolidation, President Frank Graham chose Robert Burton House, confirmed by the trustees in 1934, as Dean of Administration for the Chapel Hill campus. His title became chancellor in 1945.
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A federal plan to replace the campus rock walls with concrete is dropped after protests
Among the Public Works Administration projects approved in the state was one to replace the stone walls on the Chapel Hill campus with new concrete. Town and campus objected to tearing out Elisha Mitchell's walls, and the approval was withdrawn.
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Benjamin Swalin joins the UNC music faculty
Benjamin F. Swalin, a violinist with a Vienna doctorate, took a position in the University of North Carolina's Music Department in 1935. He went on to direct the North Carolina Symphony from 1939 to 1972, and by 1946 was on indefinite leave from the department for the symphony.
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Caesar Cone sells the former Hume house, a Zeta Beta Tau home, to the University
Cone had bought the house from Milton Hogan between 1929 and 1933 and rented it to the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity. He sold it to the University in 1935; the high school used it after the 1942 fire.
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Federal Public Works money pays for thirteen new university buildings
Once the state supreme court settled the legal questions in the fall of 1935, the university could apply to the Public Works Administration. Between 1935 and 1941 it added thirteen buildings with nearly $3 million in federal aid, among them a swimming pool, dormitories for men and for women, and a dining hall to replace Swain Hall.
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Graham refuses to move Albert Coates out of the law school
In May 1935 Dean Van Hecke reported that Coates's teaching had failed again and, with the whole law faculty behind him, asked that Coates be freed from law school duties to run the Institute. Coates threatened to demand an academic trial; Graham declined the transfer and again refused Van Hecke's offer to resign, and Coates rejoined the law faculty in February 1936 and taught there for thirty years.
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Kenneth Tanner builds West House on the campus's old Fraternity Row
Textile manufacturer Kenneth S. Tanner, a 1911 alumnus, put up the one-story brick West House near Swain Hall to lodge his son and other relatives at the university, with room for five students.
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Oliver K. Cornwell leads UNC's new Department of Physical Education
When the university created a Department of Physical Education in 1935, Oliver K. Cornwell directed its academic program. He chaired the department, in its various forms, until Richard E. Jamerson replaced him in 1967.
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R. E. Coker chairs UNC's zoology department
Coker chaired the zoology department from 1935 to 1944 and at the same time chaired the Division of Natural Sciences.
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Shelby Foote arrives in Chapel Hill to enroll at UNC
Shelby Foote came to Chapel Hill in fall 1935 to register at UNC despite having been turned down, following his Greenville friends Walker and LeRoy Percy. He stayed two years and contributed nine stories to Carolina Magazine.
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The University again makes Archer House a residence for women students
Archer House, the old boardinghouse also called the Battle house or Russell Inn, had housed the University's women students from about 1921 until fire gutted it in January 1925. From 1926 Mrs. Victor Humphreys ran it as lodging and a dining room for men students; in 1935 the University made it a women's residence again, with Mrs. Humphreys in charge until 1937.
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UNC creates the General College
The university added a new division, the General College, at Chapel Hill in 1935.
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Walter Spearman joins the UNC journalism faculty
Spearman, a 1929 UNC graduate and former Daily Tar Heel editor, returned to Chapel Hill after five years at the Charlotte News to teach journalism at the university.
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Popular Government launches a campaign for an Institute of Government building
The April 1935 issue spread across its center pages a drawing of a three-story 'governmental laboratory building' by the university's architects, Atwood and Weeks, and opened a public drive for funds. Coates told Roscoe Pound that building-supply dealers would donate the materials.
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The Hill family gives the Carolina Inn to the university
John Sprunt Hill and his family gave the Carolina Inn, which he had built in 1924, to the university on the condition that its income support the North Carolina Collection.
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Dr. Charles Mangum outlines a proposed federally aided health district tied to UNC training
Dr. Charles S. Mangum described a proposed public health district of Orange, Person and Caswell counties, largely paid for by the U.S. Public Health Service. It would also train health officers, sanitary inspectors, public health nurses and secretaries, building on UNC's 1934 to 1935 public health administration courses.
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Trustees offer land and the PWA approves a grant for an Institute of Government building
University trustees agreed to give the Institute a site valued at $15,000 on the western edge of the campus south of the Carolina Inn, the building to go to the university if the Institute ended. The Public Works Administration approved $55,498 for labor, one of 52 grants from 300 applications in the state, toward a building then estimated at $123,000.
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Betty Smith comes to Chapel Hill with the Federal Theatre Project
The Federal Theater sent Smith to Chapel Hill in 1936 to work with Frederick H. Koch of the Carolina Playmakers. She stayed when the federal project expired, helped Koch compile American Folk Plays and took his classes for him in his absence.
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Former summer school and education dean N. W. Walker dies
Walker had headed the university's summer school and its school of education until he retired with a heart ailment in the summer of 1934. After his death his house at 517 East Rosemary Street was sold to education professor Guy B. Phillips, and Albert and Gladys Coates stayed on in the cottage behind it.
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S. H. Hobbs Jr. buys an Orange County farm for agricultural experiments
The rural sociologist acquired a farm in Orange County in 1936 to use for agricultural experimentation.
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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.
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William Meade Prince moves back to Chapel Hill to teach art
The illustrator William Meade Prince and his wife, Lillian Hughes Prince, moved from Westport, Connecticut, to Chapel Hill, where he became a lecturer in the university's art department.
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A new Chapel Hill High School opens on Columbia Street
Chapel Hill's new high school for white students, beside the Pittsboro road on what is now South Columbia Street, opened to classes on October 5, 1936, three weeks late. Built for $106,000 with Public Works Administration aid to plans by Atwood and Weeks, it came in the same federal program that built an addition at the Orange County Training School.
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A puppet Hansel and Gretel is staged in Adeline McCall's music series for children
The Music Club and the Parent-Teacher Association presented Hansel and Gretel, a puppet show with music, at 3:30 p.m. on Wednesday, December 9, 1936, in Hill Music Hall. It was the fifth in a series of music events for children under Adeline McCall's direction, and elementary school children sang songs from Humperdinck's opera.
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Betty Smith edits a collection of plays with Frederick Koch and Robert Finch
Smith coedited Plays for Schools and Little Theatres with Koch and Finch in 1937 and wrote a catalog of one-act plays.
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Dudley D. Carroll chairs the Orange County Building and Loan Association
Carroll was a director of the Orange County Building and Loan Association from 1920 to 1950 and chaired its board from 1937. He also chaired the county draft board and the county ABC board.
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Guion Griffis Johnson serves as president of the Chapel Hill PTA
Guion Griffis Johnson was president of the Chapel Hill PTA in 1937–1938 and a district PTA officer the following year.
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The university names its new gymnasium for Charles T. Woollen
The university named its new gymnasium for Charles T. Woollen, its longtime registrar, business manager and comptroller, who had advocated for the building and helped oversee its construction. He died the following year.
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William de Berniere MacNider serves as dean of the UNC School of Medicine
MacNider succeeded Charles Staples Mangum as dean of the medical school in 1937 and resigned the deanship in 1940 to return to research.
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The Lost Colony premieres
Paul Green's pageant-drama The Lost Colony opened on Roanoke Island on Sunday evening, July 4, 1937, and the Chapel Hill Weekly reported that it scored a hit. The production had Chapel Hill roots: Frederick Koch's Carolina Playmakers were involved, and at least one actor came to Chapel Hill in June to rehearse.
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The first of the new women's dormitories, later Alderman Residence Hall, opens
Built in 1937 with Public Works Administration money, the university's new women's dormitory, later named for Edwin Alderman for his support of women's education, was occupied by September 1937. Two more women's dormitories, later Kenan and McIver, opened in September 1939.
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Stacy Residence Hall is completed and named for Marvin H. Stacy
Stacy Residence Hall was finished in 1938 and named for Marvin Hendrix Stacy, the dean and acting president who died of influenza in 1919.
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UNC field work director George H. Lawrence reports the Efland Home's conditions as appalling
After a visit in April 1938, George H. Lawrence, field work director at the University of North Carolina, wrote to the state welfare director that the home was doing more harm than good and that the girls would be better fed in a county jail. Gifts from churches and neighbors had not kept up with the girls' needs.
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UNC rejects Pauli Murray's graduate application
Pauli Murray, who grew up in Durham and lived in New York, applied to UNC's graduate school in 1938 to study with Howard Odum and Guy B. Johnson. On December 14, two days after the Supreme Court's Gaines ruling, Dean W. W. Pierson rejected her because of her race, and her appeals to President Frank Porter Graham became national news.
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Alexander Residence Hall is built and named for Eben Alexander
A men's dormitory built at the university in 1939 with funds from the New Deal's Public Works Administration was named for Eben Alexander, the former professor of Greek and first dean of the faculty.
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Alpha Delta Pi moves into Blanche Patterson's former home on East Franklin Street
The sorority moved into the house Mrs. Fred Patterson had built in the late 1910s.
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Alpha Gamma Delta moves into the old "Crystal Palace" on East Franklin Street
The sorority took over the house known as the Crystal Palace, once Algernon Barbee's home.
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Jim Tatum returns to UNC as director of freshman athletics
After following Carl Snavely to Cornell as an assistant football coach and head baseball coach, Tatum came back to Chapel Hill in 1939 as UNC's director of freshman athletics.
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Lenoir Hall is built as the new campus dining hall
Atwood and Weeks designed Lenoir Hall, a red brick dining hall with large windows near Wilson Library, completed in 1939.
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MacNider Hall is completed as the first building of the medical school complex
The first building constructed in UNC's medical school complex was completed in 1939 and named for MacNider, then dean.
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R. E. Coker is named a Kenan professor
The university gave Coker a Kenan professorship in 1939.
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The Alumni Building's interior is renovated
The building had held the Atwood and Nash office during the 1920s campus campaign. A second renovation followed in 1973, and the two left little of that interior.
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UNC Press editor William Couch builds a brick and stone house on Laurel Hill Road
William Couch, editor of the University of North Carolina Press and brother of botanist John N. Couch, built a two-story brick and stone Colonial Revival house with a two-story gallery, designed by William Sprinkle.
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UNC Press publishes These Are Our Lives
The University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill published These Are Our Lives in 1939, life histories gathered by Federal Writers' Project workers in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, with a preface by W. T. Couch.
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UNC tennis coach John Kenfield opens the Carolina Sports Shop
Kenfield started a sporting goods store on the north side of East Franklin. New owners bought him out in 1942 and made Henry Sawtelle McGinty manager.
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North Carolina's first Boys State meets on the UNC campus
The Institute ran the week-long civics program for the state American Legion, modeled on one begun in Illinois in 1935. About 135 high school boys spent up to three hours a day in class on government besides sports, heard Governor Hoey and other officials, and elected Douglass Hunt their governor.
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A memorial tablet for Robert Bingham is installed in Memorial Hall
A memorial tablet in Robert Bingham's name was installed in the university's Memorial Hall in Chapel Hill on October 12, 1939.
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Albert Coates completes the Institute of Government's Franklin Street building
Albert Coates built the Institute's Franklin Street headquarters with private gifts and a Jefferson Standard Life loan, and it opened in November 1939. The University took title only on June 30, 1945, after the legislature paid off the mortgage. The building later carried the Coates name.
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Ralph H. Graves is buried in Chapel Hill
Ralph H. Graves, a New York editor and newspaper syndicate agent born in Chapel Hill, died at his home in Garden City, Long Island, on December 1, 1939. After a funeral there, a burial service was held at the Chapel Hill cemetery on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 5.
- 1940s
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Alice Noble becomes first adviser to the pharmacy school's Kappa Epsilon chapter
When the Lambda chapter of the Kappa Epsilon fraternity was set up at the School of Pharmacy in 1940, the school's librarian Alice Noble became its first adviser.
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Archie Royal Davis becomes architect for the University of North Carolina
The Durham architect Archie Royal Davis took the post of university architect at Chapel Hill in 1940. He then helped give Franklin Street's business district its Colonial Revival look, designing several store buildings and painting watercolor views to persuade owners to rebuild in that style, with backing from George Watts Hill and town leaders.
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Henry P. Brandis Jr. joins the UNC law faculty
After two state tax posts, Brandis, the Institute of Government's first full-time staff member, joined the university's law school faculty in 1940. He became its dean in 1949 and a Graham Kenan Professor of Law in 1965, and retired in 1972.
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Isaac Hall Manning retires from the medical faculty
After leaving the deanship Manning stayed on as a professor until he retired in 1940.
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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.
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The Carolina Inn completes the first of its rear additions
The Carolina Inn, which Arthur Nash designed for John Sprunt Hill, gained a rear addition in 1940, the first of three (later ones in 1970 and 1995) that tracked the university's growth.
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The University Laundry is built on West Cameron Avenue
The university laundry at 609 West Cameron Avenue was built in 1940 of brick over a steel frame, with an Art Moderne front block and a long industrial rear wing. An addition came after 1960.
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The university builds a heating and power plant on West Cameron Avenue
In 1940 the university put up a large steel-frame heating and power plant with brick walls at 503 West Cameron Avenue, two to four stories high. Its stepped facade and rounded corners are in the Art Moderne manner.
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The university founds the Inter-American Institute, with Leavitt as director
President Frank Porter Graham founded the Inter-American Institute in 1940, growing out of Leavitt's work building Latin American research collections. Leavitt directed it until 1959; it took the name Institute of Latin American Studies in 1947.
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UNC School of Public Health runs a Rockefeller-funded syphilis study in Orange and neighboring counties
The School of Public Health's first research project, a field epidemiological study of syphilis funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, ran from 1940 to 1950 with the state venereal disease control program in Orange, Chatham, Person and Durham counties. Project staff held clinics, lectured and traced contacts in the health departments.
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UNC establishes a School of Public Health
UNC's Division of Public Health, created within the School of Medicine in 1936 under Dr. Milton Rosenau, separated from the medical school in 1940 and became the School of Public Health, with Rosenau as its first dean. The school is now the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.
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UNC expansion and neighborhood change
The university’s growth pressed on the streets around it, from Victory Village for veterans in 1946 to the main-campus development plan of 2001, the Carolina North agreement of 2009 and the campus extension announced in 2026. Northside and Pine Knolls answered with conservation districts, a building freeze in 2011 and a community plan, while a 2025 state law removed the town’s zoning control over university projects.
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UNC purchases Chapel Hill's airfield
In 1940 the university bought the Chapel Hill airport that Charlie Martindale had opened in 1928 on land bought from Professor Horace Williams. By August the trustees had set aside $15,000 for land, the university had agreed terms with Martindale and neighbor Fred Sparrow, Williams had given over 200 acres, and the field was to bear his name.
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UNC receives the Horace Williams tract by bequest
The core of what became the Carolina North tract, north of Estes Drive and west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, came to the university as a bequest from Professor Horace Williams. The university later bought adjoining land, and parts of the site were used as an airport, landfill, town operations center and animal shelter.
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University controller William D. Carmichael Jr. builds a large brick house in Laurel Hill
William Carmichael and his wife had one of the biggest Colonial Revival houses in town built at 106 Laurel Hill Circle, a red brick house with a classical entrance and flanking wings.
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William D. Carmichael Jr. returns to Chapel Hill as the university's finance officer
Carmichael left a New York Stock Exchange partnership and came back in 1940 to serve the consolidated University of North Carolina as finance officer. As finance officer, comptroller and then vice-president he raised money from the legislature, foundations, corporations and individuals.
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UNC offers its faculty and laboratories to the national defense
Twenty months before Pearl Harbor, the university president telegraphed Washington putting UNC faculty, laboratories and equipment at the government's service; the trustees confirmed the step at their August meeting.
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UNC makes physical training compulsory for every student
As part of its defense program the university began requiring physical training of students in all classes from September 1940.
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Horace Williams dies and is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Williams died at eighty-two and was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. He left all of his property to the university in trust, the income to pay for fellowships in philosophy.
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Connor returns to the UNC faculty as Craige professor
After resigning as Archivist of the United States in 1941, Connor came back to Chapel Hill to hold the newly established Craige Professorship of Jurisprudence and History until he retired in 1949.
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Robert H. Wettach serves as dean of the UNC School of Law
Wettach, who also served as an assistant state attorney general, lived with his wife Alpha in the rented Nash house on South Boundary Street.
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The university hosts 108 South American students in its Winter-Summer School
In 1941 the university received 108 students from seven South American countries for English courses and regular classes in a program Leavitt directed. The General Assembly met in special joint session in Chapel Hill in their honor.
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W. Reece Berryhill becomes dean of the UNC School of Medicine
Berryhill, who had been physician-in-chief at the University infirmary and director of the student health service in Chapel Hill since 1933, became professor of medicine and dean of the School of Medicine in 1941. He led the school's expansion from a two-year to a four-year program.
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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.
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UNC forms the Carolina Volunteer Training Corps and opens a War Information Center
In the month of Pearl Harbor the university organized a volunteer military training corps for students and set up a War Information Center.
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Akers is named dean of the School of Library Science, UNC's first woman dean
Akers, director of the school since 1935, was named dean, the first woman dean at UNC-Chapel Hill. She held the post until 1954.
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Guion Griffis Johnson leads home-front work in Chapel Hill and Orange County
During World War II Johnson chaired the Community Service Committee of the Chapel Hill War Price and Rationing Board, was public relations officer for the Orange County Office of Civil Defense, and collected war records for Orange County.
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Jim Tatum coaches UNC football for a single season
Tatum was UNC's head football coach for one year in 1942. He then joined the navy and learned the split-T formation as an assistant to its founder, Don Faurot, at Iowa Pre-Flight.
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The Institute of Government becomes part of the university
The Institute of Government, begun as a separate body, was made part of the university in 1942.
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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.
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UNC starts a pre-induction curriculum for students bound for the service
The university set up a course of study for all students entering military service; it later grew into the College for War Training.
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William Picard Jacocks retires to Chapel Hill
After about thirty years of public health work for the Rockefeller Foundation, much of it against hookworm in India and Ceylon, Jacocks retired and moved back to Chapel Hill, where he was active in alumni affairs.
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Eleanor Roosevelt speaks at Memorial Hall to close a post-war planning conference
Eleanor Roosevelt spoke in Memorial Hall at UNC to a capacity audience of about 2,000 people, closing a two-day conference on post-war planning sponsored by the Carolina Political Union and the International Student Service. She warned the audience that there was no going back to normalcy.
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Daphne Athas graduates from UNC
Athas graduated from the university in 1943 after studying writing with Betty Smith and Phillips Russell.
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Elizabeth Janet Gray wins the Newbery Medal
Gray received the 1943 John Newbery Medal for Adam of the Road, a story of 13th-century England, a decade after she left Chapel Hill. She was then living in the Germantown section of Philadelphia.
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Engineer Thomas C. Atwood dies, ending the firm of Atwood and Weeks
Atwood's death in 1943 closed the partnership that had carried out much of the university's building since the 1920s.
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Pre-meteorology and aviation training units arrive at UNC
In the first half of 1943 the university took in pre-meteorology and aviation training units, adding to the Navy programs already on campus.
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William Meade Prince becomes head of the university's art department
William Meade Prince took charge of the University of North Carolina's art department during World War II, while also making posters and drawings for wartime causes.
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Governor Broughton speaks at a Pre-Flight School graduation in Kenan Stadium
Broughton and UNC president Frank Porter Graham both spoke at Navy Pre-Flight School graduation exercises in Kenan Stadium on June 2, 1943.
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A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, written in Chapel Hill, is published
Smith wrote the novel in a one-room house on North Street in Chapel Hill, rising about half past five and working against the chimney wall to keep warm. Harper published it on 17 August 1943 and it sold more than 150,000 copies within two weeks.
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Vic and Rebecca Huggins run Huggins Hardware on East Franklin Street
The Hugginses bought the University Hardware Company and opened Huggins Hardware on March 22, 1944, adding kitchenware and general merchandise to the keys, paint and tools. They sold the store in 1968.
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Hillsborough well-baby clinics are held separately for Black and white babies
The Junior Service League and the district health department held two well-baby clinics each month in Hillsborough, one for Black babies and one for white babies, focused on preventive care.
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Frederick Koch dies and is buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Koch, who taught dramatic literature and playwriting at UNC for twenty-six years and organized the Carolina Playmakers, died on August 16, 1944 and was buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery. Samuel Selden succeeded him as chair of the Department of Dramatic Art and director of the Playmakers.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Andy Griffith plays his first role, in The Gondoliers at Memorial Hall
Andy Griffith, who had arrived at Carolina in July 1944, auditioned on a whim and made his stage debut in a Carolina Playmakers production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers at Memorial Hall.
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Morehead creates the foundation behind his Chapel Hill gifts
In 1945 Morehead created the Morehead Foundation to pay for the Morehead Building on the campus at Chapel Hill and to establish the scholarship that carries his name.
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R. B. House becomes the first chancellor at Chapel Hill
North Carolina created chancellorships for its three campuses in 1945, and President Frank Porter Graham turned to House, who had been executive secretary from 1926 and dean of administration from 1934. House held the post until 1957, the longest chancellorship at Chapel Hill.
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The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen runs its headquarters from Chapel Hill
The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, an interracial group of Southern church people founded in 1934, kept its headquarters in Chapel Hill while Nelle Morton was general secretary from 1945 to 1949, working on race relations, labor conditions and the rural South.
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UNC begins marking Hinton James Day each February 12
The university started Hinton James Day in 1945, during the sesquicentennial of its first student's arrival. It falls on February 12 and now also honors other Carolina firsts, including Sallie Walker Stockard and Henry Owl.
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UNC establishes its Communication Center
The university set up a Communication Center at Chapel Hill in 1945. Departments of radio and religion followed in 1947.
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Coates deeds the Institute of Government building to the university
After the legislature appropriated $44,000 to pay off the rest of the mortgage, Coates transferred title to the Institute property to the University of North Carolina. This completed the 1941 merger plan, under which the university would take the building once it was clear of debt.
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William T. Couch leaves the University of North Carolina Press
Couch resigned in August 1945, after thirteen years as director, to lead the University of Chicago Press.
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Charlie Justice chooses Carolina and begins four seasons at Chapel Hill
Justice was one of the most sought after players in the country after playing for the Bainbridge Navy team, and he chose Chapel Hill over South Carolina and Duke. He played tailback for Carl Snavely from 1946 to 1949, gaining 170 yards on 17 carries against Virginia in his freshman season.
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Henry W. Lewis joins the Institute of Government faculty
After his discharge from the Army, Lewis joined the small faculty of the Institute of Government at Chapel Hill, where he worked mainly on election law and the property tax.
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Katherine Kennedy Carmichael succeeds Inez Koonce Stacy as dean of women
Carmichael, who held a Vanderbilt doctorate in British literature, became dean of women at Chapel Hill in 1946, succeeding Inez Koonce Stacy, adviser to women from 1919 and dean of women from 1942. She also taught an introductory literature course for the English department.
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Kenneth M. Brinkhous chairs the UNC Department of Pathology
Brinkhous succeeded James B. Bullitt as chair of pathology at the UNC School of Medicine in 1946 and held the post until 1973, building a research program in thrombosis and hemostasis. His department invented the partial thromboplastin time (PTT) test used in clinical laboratories.
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Morehead gives the university a million dollars for a planetarium
In 1946 Morehead presented the university with one million dollars to build a planetarium and put the proposal to the Board of Trustees. The building opened in 1949.
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Terry Sanford serves as assistant director of UNC's Institute of Government
After the Second World War Sanford returned to Chapel Hill, completed a law degree in 1946 and served two years as assistant director of the Institute of Government before opening a law practice in Fayetteville.
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Victory Village is built to house married veterans at UNC
As returning veterans pushed enrollment to about 6,800, the federal government put up the prefabricated metal houses of Victory Village on 65 acres of UNC's south campus in 1946. About 350 student families lived there, and the last units were torn down in the early 1970s for the expansion of UNC Hospitals.
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Swalin's newly professional North Carolina Symphony plays Memorial Hall
Benjamin Swalin brought the North Carolina Symphony to Memorial Hall after an expansion campaign that let him hire a professional orchestra for the first time. The Daily Tar Heel's critic, a longtime skeptic, wrote that it had become the most capable musical organization then playing in the state.
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The old Pre-Flight Armory reopens as a Scuttlebutt snack bar and bookstore
Instead of razing it for a dormitory, the university turned the Pre-Flight School's armory into a second Scuttlebutt, a soda fountain, bookstore and student hangout in the lower quadrangle.
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Bayard Wootten shows her Mobile photographs at Person Hall
Bayard Wootten gave a talk, A Photographer Discusses Mobile in the Spring, in the small gallery at Person Hall, where a collection of the pictures she had made in Mobile that spring was on exhibit.
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Architect James Webb moves to Chapel Hill to help start UNC's planning program
James Webb, an architect and planner trained at Berkeley and MIT who had worked for William Wurster, came to Chapel Hill in 1947 to help John Parker set up the university's program in city and regional planning. He taught there until 1975 and kept a private practice that brought San Francisco Bay area modernism to the town.
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Brinkhous begins research on dogs that carry hemophilia
Brinkhous began studying canine carriers of hemophilia in 1947. The work led to the laboratory now called the Francis Owen Blood Research Laboratory and to UNC's hemophilia research and treatment center.
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General Assembly funds the Good Health Plan's four-year medical school and teaching hospital
The General Assembly appropriated money in 1947 to expand the UNC medical school at Chapel Hill to four years, enlarge the medical sciences building, and build a 400-bed hospital, a School of Nursing and staff residence halls. The plan grew out of a study commission Governor J. Melville Broughton created in 1944.
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Local 403 petitions for student support in a campaign over university wages
After the legislature approved a 20 percent raise for state employees and the university dropped a wartime bonus, Local 403 workers circulated petitions and flyers asking students for support. Under shop steward Rebecca Clark laundry workers won wage increases, safer workspaces and better schedules.
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North Carolina Memorial Hospital and the medical center, from
The Good Health Plan of 1947 funded a four-year medical school and teaching hospital at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina Memorial Hospital admitted its first patients in September 1952. It ended racial segregation in 1965, became UNC Hospitals in 1989 and the UNC Health Care System in 1998, and with the cancer and neurosciences hospitals made the town a medical center employing about 7,000 people by 2010.
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Carl Boettcher carves the Circus Parade for the Circus Room
University woodcarver Carl Boettcher carved the Circus Parade, a redwood frieze nearly 25 feet long based on William Meade Prince's drawings, for the Circus Room snack bar in the Monogram Club building (now Jackson Hall).
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James Welch Patton becomes director of the Southern Historical Collection
Patton succeeded J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton as director of the Southern Historical Collection at the UNC library and taught a North Carolina history course each year while he held the post.
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UNC re-establishes its School of Education
The university, which had discontinued its School of Education in 1933, set it up again at Chapel Hill in 1948.
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William Friday serves as assistant dean of students at UNC in Chapel Hill
After receiving his law degree from UNC in 1948, William Friday was assistant dean of students and later acting dean of students on the Chapel Hill campus until 1951, when he became assistant to Consolidated University president Gordon Gray.
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The university tears down the old Pre-Flight Armory on the day it was to meet student defenders
University officials bulldozed the former Pre-Flight Armory, then the Emerson Scuttlebutt, on the same day they were due to meet students petitioning to keep it, and did not come to the meeting. The administration said refreshments would move to the Monogram Club.
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Kay Kyser leads a rained-out pep rally in Memorial Hall
When rain cancelled the outdoor rally and torchlight parade before the Texas game, Kay Kyser, his wife Georgia Carroll and coach Carl Snavely entertained more than 1,800 students in a packed Memorial Hall.
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Carmichael serves as acting president of the consolidated university
Carmichael was acting president in 1949 and 1950, after Frank Porter Graham resigned to take a seat in the United States Senate.
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Henry Brandis becomes dean of the UNC law school
Brandis, the Institute's first associate director, was promoted from professor of law to dean in 1949. Under him the law school and the Institute drew closer, with Institute staff teaching Coates's classes when he was away.
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Joel Carter directs the Chapel Hill Choral Club
Joel Carter of the university's Music Department was musical director of the Chapel Hill Choral Club, a town choir founded in 1921, for fourteen years. The club's records he kept are now at Wilson Library.
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