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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1920s
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Chapel Hill's town board orders a brick fire house built in Columbia Street
The town ordered a fire house of about $4,000 built in the middle of Columbia Street just north of Rosemary, and on August 9 let the contract to J. T. Squires for $3,988. It served until the 1938 town hall and fire station went up beside it.
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Charles E. Maddry urges the faculty to add religious instruction
At Harry W. Chase's invitation, Maddry, a university graduate just back from an Austin pastorate to lead the Baptist State Convention, met the faculty and described the University of Texas plan, under which denominations paid Bible teachers whose courses earned university credit. No decision was taken; Chase sent the question to the faculty committee on educational policy.
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Drought shrinks the University's water supply and delays the fall opening
After four hot, dry months Strowd's Creek, the main water source, had dwindled, and plants in the arboretum died. On local health officials' advice Chase asked students not to arrive before October 4, when a temporary six-inch line to Morgan's Creek was due to be ready.
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Fire destroys the main building of the old University Inn
Fire on November 30, 1921 destroyed the main building of the old University Inn, the former Eagle Hotel, and left 42 student roomers without quarters; students on the roof with a hose saved the annex Nancy Hilliard had built for President Polk's 1847 visit. The annex stood until it was razed in January 1924 to clear the site for Graham Memorial.
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Arthur Cleveland Nash comes to Chapel Hill as the university's architect
Nash moved to Chapel Hill in 1922 to serve as architect for the University of North Carolina during its major expansion, working with the builder Thomas C. Atwood and the consulting firm McKim, Mead and White of New York.
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Atwood and Nash rebuild Old East inside a fireproof concrete frame
After Old East was condemned, the firm of Atwood and Nash put a fireproof concrete frame inside the building, restored its eastern porches and left the outside lines unchanged. It was back in use as a dormitory by 1925.
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Chapel Hill hires its first town manager, E. M. Knox
Chapel Hill appoints E. M. Knox as its first town manager. He served until 1928, when J. M. Foushee took the post.
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Courts clear the University's claim to $75,000 a year from the Bingham estate
Five years of litigation over Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham's bequest ended in late 1922, confirming the University's right to an annual income of $75,000 from her estate.
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Edgar Wallace Knight serves on the Chapel Hill School Board
Knight was a member of the Chapel Hill School Board for thirty years.
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Graduate dean James Finch Royster builds a house on East Franklin Street
James Finch Royster, dean of the UNC graduate school in the later 1920s, built the two-story house at 619 East Franklin Street in 1922.
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Howard W. Odum founds the Journal of Social Forces at UNC
Two years after coming to UNC, Odum founded and edited the Journal of Social Forces, the journal now titled Social Forces.
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James Finch Royster becomes dean of the College of Liberal Arts
Royster became dean of the College of Liberal Arts in 1922 and introduced the major-minor system, sectioning of students by ability, and an advisory system that later grew into the General College.
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John Sprunt Hill offers the Graves lot and $10,000 for an alumni hotel
Hill offered the Graves property across from the west entrance plus $10,000 if 1,000 to 1,500 alumni would each give $100 toward a hotel whose profits would go to the University. The investors did not come, so he built the Carolina Inn himself.
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Mangum Dormitory opens, named for three members of the Mangum family
The university opened Mangum Dormitory in 1922, naming it for Senator Willie Person Mangum, his nephew Willie Person Mangum Jr., and Professor Adolphus Williamson Mangum.
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Murphey, Saunders and Manning halls are designed in the university's building office
On the east side of the new south quadrangle, H. P. Alan Montgomery, architect in the university's building office under Thomas C. Atwood, laid out a smaller court of classroom buildings, with McKim, Mead and White as consulting architects: Murphey Hall for languages and literature, Saunders Hall (now Carolina Hall) for history and social science, and Manning Hall, with an Ionic portico and cupola, for the law school.
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Old East is condemned as unsafe
The university's first building was condemned when some of its walls were found to have bowed as much as three inches.
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Robert Ervin Coker becomes professor of zoology at UNC
Coker, who had worked for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, accepted a professorship of zoology at Chapel Hill.
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Robert L. Strowd's two-story brick Strowd Building goes up on East Franklin Street
The Strowd Building was new and already taking tenants in January 1923, when a law fraternity moved in; by March a print shop was planned for its basement. The University Cafeteria had announced in June 1922 that it would open that fall in a larger new building.
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The law school moves to a three-year course with new entrance rules
By the end of 1922 the law curriculum had become a three-year course of study with new admission requirements, part of Dean Lucius McGehee's effort to meet American Bar Association standards.
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Trustees create a School of Engineering
The trustees joined the departments of civil and electrical engineering into a school of engineering, one of several steps Chase took in 1922 toward a full university.
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Trustees put Graham Memorial on the site of the burned University Inn
After other sites were floated, the trustees settled on the University Inn lot, set back from Franklin Street. Alumni pledges then stood near $120,000, only half of it paid.
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UNC is admitted to the Association of American Universities
Membership put the University beside Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Johns Hopkins. Virginia had been a founder, but Chapel Hill was the first Southern university voted in.
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New health rules cover Chapel Hill dairies, restaurants and boardinghouses
To head off food-borne illness as off-campus eateries fed more and more students, new health regulations on dairies, restaurants and boardinghouses took effect in January 1922.
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The Susan Graham memorial fountain replaces the old town well on Franklin Street
Townspeople set up a marble drinking fountain designed by Roger Noble Burnham at the curb of Franklin Street, on the site of the old town well, in memory of Susan Williams Graham.
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Orange County Training School burns
On June 12, 1922, a kitchen fire started by boarders in the neighboring Flanner-Carr House destroyed the Orange County Training School building, the Flanner-Carr House and several outbuildings. Classes met in scattered places until a Rosenwald-funded brick school opened in Northside in 1924.
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The University of North Carolina Press is founded
On June 12, 1922, university librarian Louis Round Wilson, nine other faculty members and three trustees founded the University of North Carolina Press, the first university press in the South. Its first book, William C. Coker's study of water molds, appeared in 1923, and William T. Couch became director in 1932.
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Trustees vote to ask for a 200-bed teaching hospital in Chapel Hill
A June 1 report by Dean Isaac H. Manning, Chase and Dr. Richard H. Lewis found the state 45th in hospital beds and short of doctors. Twelve days later the full board voted to ask the legislature for a 200-bed teaching hospital at Chapel Hill, a memorial to the World War dead, so the two-year medical school could grow to four years.
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University trustees name the new law building for John Manning
At their June 13, 1922 meeting the university trustees approved naming the new law building for John Manning. The School of Law moved into Manning Hall before the fall 1923 semester.
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William C. Coker's committee is put in charge of the care of the whole campus
After Coker drew his 'Plan A' for siting dormitories on the campus's east side, the grounds and buildings committee in December 1922 gave him and a subcommittee charge of the care and improvement of the entire campus, with its own budget. The nomination calls him in effect the university's first resident planner.
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Trinity's William P. Few proposes a joint medical school with UNC
After the trustees' site committee split on December 16, Few met the committee at the governor's mansion and offered a four-year school with two years at Chapel Hill and two in Durham near Watts Hospital, backed by $1 million from each side and a Trinity endowment. Morrison endorsed it that night, but Baptist protest over church and state killed it within weeks.
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"Judge" Brockwell's cabin at the edge of Battle Park burns
The cabin known as "Judge" Brockwell's, on the edge of Battle Park, burns down. Early in 1924 coach Bill Fetzer bought the plot in the new Gimghoul development and planned a Colonial house there.
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A Durham man named Pollard builds a brick duplex at 738 East Franklin Street
The buff-brick, two-story duplex with a two-level front porch and sleeping-porch ells may have housed the Pollards for a time but served mostly as rental housing. It changed owners several times before the Lacock family bought it in the 1940s.
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A hard-surface road links Chapel Hill and Durham
A new eighteen-foot concrete road ran from the center of Chapel Hill to Durham, credited to trustee John Sprunt Hill as a state highway commissioner. Franklin Street merchants declined to pay for paving its edges, so mud borders remained.
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A two-story brick store block is built at 173-175 East Franklin Street
The two-bay, brick-veneered commercial building with corbelled brickwork is reported to date from 1923. It had been altered by 1992.
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Albert Coates joins the law faculty at Chapel Hill
Coates, a university graduate with a Harvard law degree, joined the law faculty in 1923. The schools he ran for police officers and sheriffs grew into the Institute of Government.
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Albert Ray Newsome joins the UNC history faculty
Newsome, a 1915 UNC graduate, returned to Chapel Hill from graduate study at Michigan as an assistant professor of history and stayed until 1926.
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Chapel Hill Baptists build a Neoclassical church at Franklin and Columbia streets
Leaving their church a few blocks west, the Baptists built a tan brick and stone church with an Ionic portico on a raised basement at the corner of West Franklin and South Columbia streets, facing the campus. Frank Milburn designed it, probably his last Chapel Hill job.
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Delta Kappa Epsilon completes the first of the large new fraternity houses
In the move off the old campus row, DKE finished the first of the big Colonial Revival chapter houses in 1923; Sigma Alpha Epsilon and Sigma Chi soon followed, and the South Columbia Street court had five houses by 1926.
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Fire guts the upper story of Edward Kidder Graham's former house
A 1923 fire burned out the upper floor of the late president's house, then rented to faculty, and destroyed many of Graham's personal papers stored there. The house still stood in the twenty-first century.
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John Sprunt Hill chairs the trustees' buildings committee
As a university trustee, John Sprunt Hill chaired the committee on university buildings during the campus building program of 1923 to 1931.
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John T. Fowler buys the Model Market at auction
After Sam Pickard died, John T. Fowler bought his Model Market at auction. Fowler's sons enlarged it after 1925, and Robert L. Fowler later moved it across the street.
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Lettie Glass serves as acting superintendent of the Chapel Hill schools
Lettie Glass ran the Chapel Hill schools as acting superintendent while Fred W. Morrison was away, and again in 1923-1924. She is the only woman in the book's list of superintendents.
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Louis Graves founds the Orange Printshop in Chapel Hill
Graves set up the Orange Printshop in 1923 alongside his Chapel Hill Weekly and leased it to W. M. Pugh in 1940. It printed books and magazines and set a record for delivering the state Session Laws.
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Robert W. Madry becomes the University's full-time publicity man
Persuaded by Louis Round Wilson that the University had to tell its story better, Chase hired Madry, an alumnus then writing for the New York Herald, as its first full-time publicity man.
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The Order of Gimghouls plats its Chapel Hill subdivision with racial deed restrictions
The Junior Order of Gimghouls subdivided its land east of campus into house lots, with a plat recorded in Orange County Plat Book 1, page 51. The original deed covenants carried the racial restrictions standard for the period, along with setbacks and a requirement that the order review house plans.
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The Pope Mattress Company builds a two-story brick store on East Franklin Street
The Pope Mattress Company, mostly a furniture dealer, left Columbia Street for a large two-story brick building it had just put up on the north side of East Franklin. Berman's department store moved into it in 1926.
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The faculty turns down church-paid Bible teachers at the university
Answering the churches, the faculty committee on educational policy, in a report drafted with Chase, refused to place instructors on campus who owed their posts and pay to a denomination, and warned that such a program would cut into the work of the church colleges. It offered instead Bible courses taught from a literary and historical standpoint by faculty the university chose.
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Thomas C. Atwood and Arthur C. Nash form the firm Atwood and Nash, Architects and Engineers
The firm served as the university's local architects and engineers through the 1920s building campaign, working under McKim, Mead and White's William Kendall. It kept its office in the Alumni Building and another in Durham.
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UNC and the North Carolina College for Women agree to limit women to UNC's upper levels
After a quarrel over Chase's remarks and a meeting with President Julius I. Foust at a Durham hotel, the two schools agreed that women would enter UNC's graduate and professional schools but not its first two years, even if they lived in Chapel Hill, and that transfers from NCCW would need NCCW's consent.
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William C. Coker gives the Chapel Hill Country Club land for a clubhouse and golf course
By early 1923 Coker had given the new Chapel Hill Country Club its grounds south of the campus. The clubhouse went up that spring and the golf course over the next two years. The land later passed to the university and is used for tennis courts and a greenway park; the Laurel Hill subdivision was laid out along the course.
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Trustees ask $350,000 to start a four-year medical college, and the legislature ignores it
With the joint plan dead, the trustees heard delegations from Raleigh, Charlotte, Greensboro and Durham, chose no site, and voted to ask the General Assembly for $350,000 toward a four-year medical college. The legislature did not act; in June 1923 the trustees voted for a four-year program at Chapel Hill.
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The Chapel Hill Weekly publishes its first issue
Louis Graves published the first issue of his newspaper, the Chapel Hill Weekly, on March 2, 1923. He owned and edited it until 1954.
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A Tar Heel special edition attacks coeducation
While Chase sought $224,000 for a women's dormitory, students voted 937 to 173 against it in a Tar Heel poll, and on March 14 a special edition ran editorials headed "Women Students Not Wanted Here." Chase answered in a long statement read at chapel and printed in the paper.
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John Sprunt Hill lets the building contract for the Carolina Inn
John Sprunt Hill, for the incorporators of the Carolina Club, let the contract for the Carolina Inn to H. L. Smith of Durham. The old Graves house on the site, at the west gate of the campus, was to be moved south of the inn and joined to it for use as a student boarding house.
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The 1923 legislature gives UNC $1.7 million for buildings
The University got about 15 percent of a $10.7 million bond issue for state institutions, letting the building program go on, but its operating budget was cut 7 percent below the request and it got $667,300 less than the $2.3 million in construction money sought.
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Church leaders spend a day with Chase and the faculty on teaching religion at the university
Baptist, Presbyterian, Moravian, Episcopal and Methodist leaders met in President Chase's office with the faculty committee on educational policy. All favored nonsectarian Bible courses; after a day of argument over who would choose and pay the teachers, the churchmen agreed on courses taught off campus by teachers the denominations selected, with credit from the university.
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Chapel Hill aldermen order a cemetery survey, burial permits and a deed from the university
After noting in December 1922 that the cemetery needed more room, the town board on May 10, 1923 told the town manager to survey the grounds, begin burial permits and obtain a deed from the university showing that the town owned the cemetery. Nothing is recorded to have come of it.
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The Chapel Hill Country Club opens its new clubhouse
Members gathered with basket suppers for the opening of the club's new house, three years after fire destroyed the first one. By late 1924 the club was clearing the fairways of its golf course.
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Sutton's Drug Store opens on Franklin Street
J. L. Sutton and J. L. Alderman, a UNC pharmacy graduate, opened the Sutton and Alderman drugstore with a soda fountain in the Strowd Building on Franklin Street, in space vacated by Jack Sparrow's shop. As Sutton's Drug Store it marked its centennial in 2023 as a downtown gathering place.
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Bayard Wootten photographs the Playmakers' outdoor Taming of the Shrew
Bayard Wootten of New Bern came to Chapel Hill to photograph the Carolina Playmakers' outdoor production of The Taming of the Shrew, the start of years of Playmakers work. That month she also urged the University to have aerial photographs made of the growing campus.
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Law dean Lucius McGehee dies
McGehee, dean since 1910 and the man who brought the casebook method to Chapel Hill, broke down weeks before the fall term and died in Richmond in early October. Atwell C. McIntosh became acting dean, and the trustees gave his estate $2,000 for burial and debts.
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Governor Morrison offers the law deanship to Justice Walter P. Stacy, who declines
At a trustees' executive committee meeting in early November, Morrison bypassed Chase and offered the deanship to Stacy on the spot. Stacy turned it down, and Chase saw the move as an intrusion on the president's role.
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The Chapel Hill chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy puts up four Jefferson Davis Highway markers
The Chapel Hill UDC chapter, with Mrs. W. S. Bernard in charge, marked the state road from Durham to Pittsboro as the Jefferson Davis Highway. The four signs stood at the one-mile bridge on the Durham road, at Andrews corner, at the new Baptist church and near the west gate of the campus.
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Albert Coates revives the Law School Association
Coates brought back Efird's association and used it to bring state supreme court justices, judges and lawyers to Manning Hall to lecture, to run moot courts across all three classes, and later to equip a model law office.
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Arthur C. Nash renovates Old West
Nash's rebuilding of the 1822 dormitory, done alongside the work on Old East, left the brick walls as about the only original material.
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Commerce dean Dudley D. Carroll and Eleanor Carroll build a house on Ridge Lane in Gimghoul
Dudley DeWitt Carroll, dean of UNC's commerce school, and his wife Eleanor Elliott Carroll had a Chatham County contractor named Barber build a two-story Colonial Revival house with a garage on Ridge Lane, among the first houses in the new Gimghoul subdivision.
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Daniel L. Grant, UNC's first alumni secretary, builds a house on Glandon Drive
Daniel L. Grant, the first secretary of the UNC Alumni Association, builds a two-story Colonial Revival house in the new Gimghoul subdivision, one of the five houses finished there in 1924.
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Eugene Andrews turns his West Franklin Street home into a funeral home
Andrews converted his residence into a funeral home. After his death his widow, Nellie Andrews, kept it running.
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Gerald W. Johnson heads the university's newly independent journalism department
After Louis Graves left in 1924, the university expanded journalism into an independent department with Johnson, an editorial writer, at its head. He left for the Baltimore Evening Sun in 1926.
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Guy B. Johnson begins work at the Institute for Research in Social Science
Guy B. Johnson and his wife Guion Griffis Johnson began working at UNC's new Institute for Research in Social Science in 1924. He was one of its original research assistants.
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J. F. Sturdivant completes a master's thesis on the Carrboro mill village
In 1924 J. F. Sturdivant finished a UNC master's thesis studying Carrboro as a small mill village. It found every house painted and about two-thirds with electric lights, and it counted 197 workers at Mill No. 4 and 81 at Mill No. 7 in the early 1920s.
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Kennon Cheek helps negotiate the land swap that brought Hackney's school to Northside
Cheek's daughter Marian Cheek Jackson said he was instrumental in negotiating the 1924 land swap that moved Hackney's Educational and Industrial School from South Merritt Mill Road into the Northside community.
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Odum's new institute makes county government its first study
The Institute for Research in Social Science chose county government as its first project, with E. C. Branson leading researchers who examined forty-three counties. Odum shared the findings in 1925 with Governor McLean's study commission, and McLean put county finance reforms to the 1927 legislature.
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Orange County Training School opens a Rosenwald campus
The Orange County Training School's new brick building for Black students rose on land given by Henry Strowd at the north end of Church Street in Northside, Chapel Hill. Its cornerstone was laid on Labor Day 1924 and it opened late that year; the Rosenwald Fund gave $1,500 of its $23,112 cost, Black residents $500.
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Public health in rural Orange County
County nurses, clinics, the district health department and sanitation work reached into rural Orange County from 1924: the campaigns against typhoid, diphtheria, tuberculosis and polio through 1955.
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The Carolina Inn is built
John Sprunt Hill built the Carolina Inn in Chapel Hill.
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The Tankersley house on East Franklin Street is torn down
Frances Adele Tankersley, tired of the business district's noise, built a new house east of the Presbyterian church, and her old house was razed. Three stores later went up on the lot.
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UNC and the state welfare board win a Rockefeller grant for Black welfare work
In 1924 the State Board of Charities and Public Welfare and the University of North Carolina received a Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial grant for a demonstration program in Black welfare, which opened on January 1, 1925, as the board's Division of Negro Work under Lawrence A. Oxley. Charlotte Hawkins Brown sat on its advisory commission, and Oxley visited the Efland Home.
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UNC national championships beyond women’s soccer
National titles won by Carolina teams other than women's soccer: the 1924 basketball team's later Helms recognition, men's basketball's six NCAA championships from 1957, women's basketball in 1994, and the field hockey, lacrosse, men's soccer and women's tennis titles since 1981.
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UNC opens a residence hall named for Charles B. Aycock
The university occupied Aycock Residence Hall on the Lower Quad in 1924. The name stood until the trustees removed it in July 2020, citing his racist views and actions.
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UNC’s 1924 basketball team earns later Helms recognition
UNC’s unbeaten 1923–24 team was retrospectively named national champion by the Helms Athletic Foundation in 1943.
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Union Chapel is taken down and its materials go into McDuffie Baptist Church
Once the brick Carrboro Baptist Church was finished, the old frame chapel was dismantled and its materials used to build a church on N.C. 86 north of Chapel Hill, named for early Carrboro Baptist minister McDuffie.
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University architect Thomas C. Atwood builds a duplex on Ridge Lane for his firm's workers
Thomas C. Atwood, supervising architect for the 1920s campus building program, built a one-story frame duplex in the Gimghoul subdivision to house employees of Atwood and Nash. It stayed a duplex until the 1970s, when it became a single-family house.
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W. E. Atkins of the Atwood and Nash firm builds a Craftsman cottage on Gimghoul Road
W. E. Atkins, who worked for the university architects Atwood and Nash, has a Chatham County contractor named Barber build a one-and-a-half-story Craftsman cottage, said to be the first house on Gimghoul Road. He soon sold it to economics professor Earl Peacock.
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Work begins on Graham Memorial on the site of the burned University Inn
Construction of Graham Memorial started where the University Inn had stood until the 1921 fire. By 1928 only its social room was in use.
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Community Club hires a nurse to serve Chapel Hill's Black community
The health department of the Chapel Hill Community Club engaged a Black nurse, known as Nurse Compton and formerly of Lincoln Hospital, who began on January 1, 1924, visiting homes, examining children at the Black schools and organizing clean-up campaigns. By May 1926 the town had taken over part of her salary and she worked under Health Officer Nathan.
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Trustees adopt higher law school standards over Governor Morrison's objection
At a four-hour meeting in the governor's office, attended by about half the trustees, 45 of them lawyers, Morrison argued against stiffer entrance rules, but a voice vote approved Chase's plans. The board put off naming a dean rather than accept Chase's out-of-state choice.
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Fire destroys the Pickwick Theatre on Franklin Street
An early-morning fire burned the Pickwick movie theatre and the O'Kelly pressing club next door, and sparks threatened the fraternity houses nearby. Until it was rebuilt, films were shown in Gerrard Hall.
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Chase and Coates rally students to revive the Graham Memorial drive
President Chase, Albert Coates and student body president Julian Allsbrook held a special chapel meeting in Memorial Hall to restart the stalled fund drive, with plans cut back to a smaller building whose exterior was under way. In March Coates set out a University Life Unification Plan centered on the building.
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General Albert J. Bowley warns of campus radicals in a Memorial Hall address
Two weeks after he had berated extension director Chester D. Snell at a Raleigh luncheon, the commander of Fort Bragg spoke for nearly an hour in Memorial Hall on the occasion of Washington's birthday before a crowd of about 3,000. He repeated his charges that Soviet-backed agitators were working through colleges and welfare groups, and his closing call for an ROTC unit at the university drew long applause.
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The rebuilt Pickwick Theatre opens on Franklin Street
S. J. Brockwell's new fireproof Pickwick, built on the site of the burned one, opened with seats for 750, and crowds were turned away from the first show. W. S. Roberson ran it under lease.
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Trustees elect Merton L. Ferson dean of the law school
Ferson, an Iowan who had been law dean at Washington University in St. Louis, won with three times the votes of his nearest rival, ending months of resistance from trustees who wanted a North Carolinian.
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Odum's Institute for Research in Social Science is organized at UNC
The Institute for Research in Social Science was organized at Chapel Hill on June 30, 1924, for the cooperative study of social problems arising from state and regional conditions. Odum founded it with help from the Rockefeller Fund, and it is now the Odum Institute.
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Trustees overrule the faculty and give a diploma to a senior who took a drink
The faculty, bound by a trustee rule against any drinking, had denied a diploma to a senior who celebrated the end of exams with a drink or two. His class petitioned the trustees, who reversed the faculty, leaving professors feeling their disciplinary role undercut.
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The Standard, a movie theatre owned by and for Black residents, opens on West Franklin Street
Chapel Hill's new movie house, owned by and run for Black residents, opened with two crowded shows. Its owners were tailor Durward O'Kelly, builder Charlie Brooks and brick mason Jesse Kirkland.
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Henry and Matilda Guthrie's Franklin Street lot, with its moving-picture house, is advertised for foreclosure
A trustee advertised for public sale on August 16, 1924 the Franklin Street land of Henry and Matilda Guthrie, which held two houses, a building used as a moving-picture house, two stores and a garage. The Guthries had bought it from Mary McCauley Lindsay and D. McCauley and fallen behind on the note.
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Engineering professor Ralph Trimble and his wife Hazel move into their new Gimghoul house
Ralph M. Trimble, the UNC engineering professor who surveyed the lots of the Gimghoul subdivision, and his wife Hazel move into one of its first houses, built by contractor Charlie Martindale on Glandon Drive.
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The Orange Printshop moves into a new brick building off Rosemary Street
The Orange Printshop, which printed Louis Graves's Chapel Hill Weekly, moved into a new brick building made for it on the lot behind Patterson Brothers drug store. It added new presses and machinery with the move.
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Chase opens the year with his address on the university's intellectual responsibility
Speaking to more than 2,200 students in Memorial Hall at the start of the fall term, Chase answered the university's critics without naming them: the attack on intellectual freedom fell on biology and the social sciences, and suppressing debate led to sterility. He offered a test for responsible free speech and defended the building program ahead of the legislature. The talk was printed more widely than any of his others.
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Rameses, the live ram mascot, makes his debut for Carolina
Head cheerleader Vic Huggins won athletic department approval and $25 to buy a ram as a mascot. Rameses first appeared at the football game against the Virginia Military Institute, which Carolina won 3-0.
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Christmas seal money pays for tuberculosis care and a free clinic in Chapel Hill
The Community Club's seal sale committee reported that seal money had sent an Orange County man to a sanatorium and paid $450 toward the nurse working among Black residents, who inoculated 68 people for typhoid and brought 36 patients to a free tuberculosis clinic.
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The Gimghouls sell their old lodge lot on Rosemary Lane
W. S. Roberson bought the Gimghouls' lot at Rosemary Lane and Boundary Street, with the old lodge to stand until the order finished its new building at Piney Prospect. The old lodge had been torn down by July 1926, and John Lasley's family had moved into a new house on the lot by that September.
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A state pay commission created at Governor McLean's request questions university faculty about their work
At McLean's request the 1925 legislature set up a commission on state pay. Its questionnaires asked faculty to account for their working hours and leave, and the attorney general ruled that its work covered university positions.
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A. C. Howell serves as the university's first secretary of the faculty
Almonte Charles Howell, an English professor at the University of North Carolina, was the first secretary of the faculty, holding the post for twenty years.
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Alfred Lawrence helps found the Chapel Hill School of Religion
Lawrence took part in organizing the Chapel Hill School of Religion in 1925-26; funded by the town's churches, it opened its first non-credit courses in the fall of 1926. His papers hold material on it from 1925 and 1926.
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Arthur C. Nash renovates New East and New West
The two 1858-61 buildings were reworked under Nash, part of a series of renovations that left only the brick shells of the early campus buildings.
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Brodie Thompson builds a house for historian Henry McGilbert Wagstaff
For Henry and Mary Wagstaff, Thompson built a two-story frame house at 206 North Boundary Street with a fanlit entrance, a porch with turned balusters, a high hipped roof and a long side porch toward Rosemary Street.
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Brodie Thompson builds a house on East Rosemary Street for George and Sarah Pickard
Contractor Brodie Thompson builds a two-story, five-bay Colonial Revival house for George and Sarah Pickard at the southeast corner of East Rosemary and North Boundary streets.
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Cameron MacRae builds the MacRae building at Franklin and Henderson streets
Cameron F. MacRae, son of Robert Strange MacRae, put up the MacRae building on the northeast corner. By 1928 it held Clarence Pickard's grocery, the Jefferson-Standard insurance office and a basement barbershop.
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Charles Martindale builds a bungalow in the Gimghoul colony for attorney L. J. Phipps
Contractor Charles Martindale nears completion of a Craftsman bungalow in the Gimghoul colony for Chapel Hill attorney L. J. Phipps and his wife Vivian. Its floor-length windows and front terrace are noted in later surveys.
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Dean James F. Royster refuses Shaw University debaters seats in the gallery
When the debate team of Shaw University, a Black college in Raleigh, asked only to sit in the gallery and watch Carolina's debaters meet Washington and Lee, Royster, dean of the College of Liberal Arts, said no, fearing it would reflect poorly on the university.
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Fire destroys the building that housed Foister's Camera Shop
The building burned, and Robert W. Foister moved across Franklin Street, with a photo laboratory upstairs and a student supply and soda shop below. A new building on the site later held the University Cafeteria.
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George Washington Carver speaks in Gerrard Hall
The Tuskegee scientist visited the campus, speaking from the platform of Gerrard Hall and showing a display at the YMCA, without the outcry that met James Weldon Johnson's classroom visits two years later.
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Nash designs Spencer Hall, the university's first dormitory for women
Spencer Hall, designed by Nash and under construction in 1924, opened in 1925 as the first dormitory for women at the University of North Carolina; the trustees gave it Cornelia Phillips Spencer's name in 1927. It was one of a series of dormitories he designed on the campus through the 1920s.
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The Bank of Chapel Hill buys the Peoples Bank
Chapel Hill's second bank, the Peoples Bank, ran from about 1912 under presidents Vernon Howell and J. D. Webb. The Bank of Chapel Hill bought its assets in 1925.
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The Dialectic Society condemns the Glee Club for singing to a mixed audience at Hampton
The Dialectic Literary Society censured the university Glee Club for performing before Black and white listeners together at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a Black college in Virginia.
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The Order of Gimghouls begins building its castle
Work on the Gimghouls' castle off the end of Gimghoul Road began in 1925: some 1,300 tons of stone were hauled to the site, stonemasons came from the Waldensian settlement at Valdese, and Chapel Hill builder Charlie Lee Martindale was general contractor. The order held its first gathering there in May 1926.
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The legislature puts university spending under the governor's budget control
Governor Angus W. McLean's plan, passed by the 1925 General Assembly, made the governor director of the budget and chair of a stronger Advisory Budget Commission. Moving money between accounts in an institution's budget now needed approval in Raleigh, and the university's budget stayed under review through the biennium. As both budget director and chair of the trustees, the governor gained far more say over the university.
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The new chemistry building, Venable Hall, is dedicated
The university dedicated its new chemistry building in 1925 and named it Venable Hall while Venable was still teaching there.
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Manning Hall is dedicated as the law school's new home
Supreme court justices, superior court judges, lawyers and alumni, 200 or more, came for the dedication and lunched at the new Carolina Inn with John Sprunt Hill as host.
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Bruce Strowd opens his new Ford dealership at Franklin and Columbia streets
Strowd Motor Company formally opened its new Ford sales and service building at 100 West Franklin Street, on the corner of Columbia, with a dance and contests. Chapel Hill's first automobile dealer had outgrown his quarters; the two-story brick building, one of the largest downtown, went up in 1924 on the old Carr place, with the showroom and service area below and a paint and body shop above.
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Chase speaks against the Poole antievolution resolution at a legislative hearing
At an evening hearing of the House education committee, moved to the packed House chamber, Chase was the only college president to speak. He argued for freedom of teaching under the state constitution and asked why evolution could be preached on Sunday but not taught on weekdays. The committee split 11 to 11, and chairman Henry G. Connor Jr. broke the tie for an unfavorable report.
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E. A. Brown sells his Chapel Hill furniture and hardware business to Pendergraft and McCauley
E. A. Brown sold his furniture and hardware business to Joseph W. Pendergraft, his assistant of seven years, and Thomas H. McCauley, who ran it as Pendergraft & McCauley.
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The University buys the Chapel Hill Telephone Company
The University bought the Chapel Hill Telephone Company, reportedly for $25,000 to $30,000, to keep it from outside buyers. The exchange stayed for the time being on Henderson Street near the post office, with a later move planned to the old Strowd garage.
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The new Chapel of the Cross church is consecrated
The Upjohn building, from then on called the Church, was consecrated during Alfred Lawrence's rectorship. The parish timeline notes that male students in the campus ministry resisted including women students.
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George Pickard's heirs sell their Columbia Street house and lot to Beta Theta Pi
The fraternity paid $25,000 for the late George Pickard's house and large lot, a private parcel off the university courts that later let it build a bigger house with a deep lawn.
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Governor McLean cuts the university's appropriation by 5 percent
Facing a projected deficit, McLean as budget director cut all state appropriations for the coming year by 5 percent in mid-May. The cut erased the $25,000 increase the legislature had voted, and for the first time in the century the university faced a smaller state appropriation than the year before.
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Wake Forest president William Louis Poteat gives the McNair lectures
Poteat lectured on 'Can a Man Be a Christian Today?' and stayed with the Chases in the president's house; Chase introduced him as a defender of the faith. Days before, Chase had sought $6,000 a year for five years from H. Smith Richardson of Vick Chemical to bring Poteat to Chapel Hill as professor of moral philosophy, an offer Poteat declined.
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Edwin Greenlaw leaves the Graduate School deanship for Johns Hopkins
Greenlaw left after five years as dean, during which graduate enrollment had tripled to 346 students in eighteen departments. The Alumni Review said he was being driven from the state by tight budgets. James F. Royster followed him as dean.
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Trustees raise tuition 20 percent after the governor insists on a balanced budget
At their commencement-week meeting the trustees split over what they read as a legislative order to raise tuition. Governor McLean told them they could keep tuition only by cutting the operating budget, and after three hours they voted 38 to 23 for a 20 percent increase.
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Beta Theta Pi sells its Fraternity Row house to Delta Sigma Pi and moves into the Pickard house
The chapter sold its old house to Delta Sigma Pi and put twenty members in the Pickard house on Columbia Street while it planned a new building.
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Chase tries a week of orientation for entering freshmen
At Chase's initiative, new students came to campus early for a full week of physical and academic testing, campus tours and preparation for the year. The book calls it an experiment that went well.
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The university paves Cameron Avenue through the campus
Ziegler Brothers laid Kentucky asphalt on a six-inch concrete base along Cameron Avenue from the west gate to the east gate and up the Raleigh road to Franklin Street, part of a 1925 paving program with the town and the state highway commission.
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University Day marks fifty years since the 1875 reopening
More than ninety representatives of American colleges joined a procession from the Alumni Building to Memorial Hall, where former commissioner of education Philander P. Claxton spoke. In his first address to the university, Governor McLean called it the head of the state's school system and asked it to help smooth religious and social divisions.
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Playmakers Theatre opens
The Carolina Playmakers dedicated their theatre in the remodeled Smith Hall, the 1850s building later used as a library and law school, on Monday, November 23, 1925, with talks by Frederick Koch and President Harry W. Chase and three new folk plays.
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Chase cancels all campus dances after reports of drinking at a Durham dance
After newspapers described liquor and broken fixtures at a German Club dance at Durham's Washington Duke Hotel following the 1925 Thanksgiving game, the club disciplined twenty-five students and alumni, and Chase called off all campus dances until Easter or later. He followed with a chapel talk urging students not to drink.
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Dewey Merritt opens a filling station at Rosemary Lane and Columbia Street
Dewey Merritt, a mechanic at Strowd Motor Company, went into business for himself at the end of 1925 with a filling station at the corner of Rosemary Lane and Columbia Street, built with a roof extension to shelter cars. He also offered battery, generator and starter service.
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Alfred Lawrence publicly opposes fundamentalist attacks on teaching evolution
The Chapel of the Cross rector took a public stand against fundamentalist efforts to bar the teaching of evolution in public schools, introducing a diocesan resolution against limits on freedom of thought, teaching and research.
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Chase keeps Albert Coates with a raise and tenure
After Coates collapsed from exhaustion in June 1926 and sent Chase a private resignation, Chase gave him a pay raise and tenure as professor of law, and Coates was teaching again that fall.
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Chase keeps the University Press from publishing Collier Cobb's book on evolution
Geologist Collier Cobb had a manuscript on evolution in hand at the University of North Carolina Press. Chase wrote him that the book was good but that putting it out under the university's imprint would read to enemies as a challenge while the antievolution fight was still on. It was never published by the press.
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Durham resident Southgate Jones builds a two-story log summer house on Windhover Place
Jones patterned the 25-by-30-foot house at 108 Windhover Place on log houses owned by his relatives. An amateur geologist, he gathered the ironstone and petrified wood for its fireplace surround on the site; a stone pumphouse was added in the mid-1930s.
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Elizabeth Janet Gray joins the UNC library staff
Elizabeth Janet Gray, later Elizabeth Gray Vining, came to Chapel Hill in 1926 as an assistant cataloger at the University library, after library school at Drexel. Friends in town knew her as Betty Gray.
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Five fraternity houses by Brodie Thompson form the Big Fraternity Court
Alumni gifts paid for the Big Fraternity Court on the first block of South Columbia Street: five Colonial Revival houses built by Brodie Thompson and set around a shared court, in the manner of the new campus quadrangles. A smaller court stands around the corner on Cameron Avenue.
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Hope Summerell Chamberlain's Old Days in Chapel Hill is published
Chamberlain's life and letters of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, illustrated with her own drawings, was published in 1926. The University of North Carolina Press was still advertising it in the Chapel Hill Weekly in 1927 and 1930.
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Kay Kyser takes over the UNC campus band from Hal Kemp
Kay Kyser, a UNC student and cheerleader who could not read music, took over leadership of the campus dance band in 1926 when Hal Kemp graduated. The new band held its first rehearsal in Gerrard Hall.
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Merchant Adam Kluttz dies, and a deathbed remark is later linked to the phrase "southern part of heaven"
Kluttz died in 1926. The book tells of a parson at his bedside likening heaven to Chapel Hill in spring and suggests this may be where the town's nickname began.
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Nash builds his own house in Chapel Hill
Nash designed and built a Colonial Revival house in Chapel Hill as his personal residence, at the address now numbered 124 South Boundary Street. The state listed it on the National Register on October 26, 2017 as the property most closely associated with his career.
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Nash renovates South Building and adds its portico
Nash carried out the renovation of South Building and added the portico in 1926 and 1927, part of his remodelling of older campus buildings that also took in Old East, Old West and Gerrard Hall.
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Pi Kappa Alpha builds a $35,000 chapter house designed by Atwood and Nash
Pi Kappa Alpha put up a new house in 1926 for about $35,000, one of the fraternity houses drawn by the university's architects Atwood and Nash.
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Robert B. House becomes the university's first executive secretary
The trustees created the post of executive secretary to carry part of the president's load, and House, class of 1916, came from the North Carolina Historical Commission to fill it. His first major task was a plan for better teacher training; he ran the office while Chase was abroad in 1927.
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Sam Berman moves his department store into the old Pope Mattress building
Mr. Pope sold out to his partner John P. Crowder, who held a liquidation sale and sold the building to Berman. Berman then moved his store across Franklin Street into the much larger space.
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T. Felix Hickerson publishes Highway Curves and Earthworks
UNC civil engineering professor Thomas Felix Hickerson, who laid out the curving roads of Rocky Ridge Farm, first published his road design text in 1926. Later issued as Route Location and Design, it was used in engineering programs at some 83 colleges.
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The Order of Gimghoul completes its castle at Piney Prospect
The Order of Gimghoul completed a gothic castle at Piney Prospect, the spot where legend placed Dromgoole's fatal duel and burial.
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The store bearing A. A. Kluttz's name closes
The Kluttz store shut, and Stetson D, a men's clothier, took its space. Its manager, B. Y. C. Buice, blamed too many like stores, cars and better roads drawing customers away, and credit buyers slow to pay.
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William R. Kenan Jr. gives $275,000 for a football stadium
Kenan announced a gift of 275,000 dollars to build Kenan Memorial Stadium in honor of his parents, William Rand and Mary Hargrave Kenan. Construction began in November 1926.
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William T. Couch joins the University of North Carolina Press as assistant director
Couch, who had moved to the Chapel Hill area in 1917, began at the press in 1926 as assistant director under Louis Round Wilson and took over as director in 1932.
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Frank Graham leads a faculty resolution urging Chase to stay
While Chase was in Oregon being offered that university's presidency, Frank Porter Graham took the floor at a specially called faculty meeting and won adoption, without a word of dissent, of a resolution praising Chase and tying his staying to the cause of freedom and tolerance. It was wired to Chase in Portland.
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Chase turns down the University of Oregon and stays at Chapel Hill
Oregon's regents had unanimously offered Chase their presidency at $10,000 a year. Back from a three-week trip west, he received a unanimous trustee resolution in Raleigh urging him to stay and said he would remain. He told Oregon that his staying had become tied in the public mind to liberal thought and teaching. In June the trustees raised his pay to $10,000.
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Mount Sinai Baptist Church raises money for the new church it is building
The Black congregation on Mount Sinai Road held a rally for the benefit of its new church, then under construction, asking men for $2.50 and women for $1.50.
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Chapel Hill Methodists complete a Georgian Revival church by James Gamble Rogers
Replacing their older sanctuary at 150 East Franklin Street, the Methodists finished a red brick church with white trim designed by New York architect James Gamble Rogers. Its tall steeple rises above the nearby campus and business district.
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Commencement moves from midweek to a weekend
To draw more alumni, the 1926 exercises were shifted to the weekend for the first time, with a president's reception and an alumni ball added. The 366 graduates heard Richmond editor Douglas Southall Freeman, and Governor McLean received an honorary doctor of laws with a faculty citation that gently mocked his economies.
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The old Methodist church on Rosemary Street becomes a garage run by Montrose Tull
The long-closed 1853 Methodist church at Rosemary and Henderson streets was converted into an automobile repair station, the Club Service Motor Co., run by Montrose Tull. A platform was built from the rear door to Henderson Street for cars.
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Bayard Wootten opens a Chapel Hill studio over Foister's store
Bayard Wootten arranged with R. W. Foister to use the upper floor of his store as a studio, making portraits there every Saturday and taking photographs in homes and outdoors. By 1928 the Wootten-Moulton Studio over Foister's was her Chapel Hill base.
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Susie Sharp enters the law school as the only woman in her class
Sharp was the only woman among sixty first-year law students and met harassment in her early weeks. She later became the first woman superior court judge in North Carolina and chief justice of the state supreme court.
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The Student Council removes the Carolina Magazine editors over the story 'Slaves'
Just as classes began, the council voted to remove the editor and assistant editor for printing a story with a hint of interracial sex. On appeal, a faculty committee Chase appointed called publication bad taste and poor judgment but not misconduct, and set the council's action aside. Durham textile executive Kemp Lewis protested; Chase defended the committee.
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Damascus School burns over the Christmas holidays
A committee from the Damascus community told the board in January 1927 that their school had burned during the holidays and asked for a one-teacher school to replace it. The board voted to build and equip a new building for no more than $800.
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A two-story brick building goes up at 121-125 East Franklin Street
The building, called the Strowd Building in the survey text, was put up in 1927. After later damage it was rebuilt in its present form in the 1960s, with a balustraded roofline and hooded windows, and in 1992 it housed the Varsity Theatre.
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Annual benefit football games fund Chapel Hill's Black public health nurse
From 1927 a yearly football game played by Black teams on Fetzer Field, sponsored by the University YMCA, raised money for the public health nurse serving Chapel Hill's Black community, a project run by the Community Club. The 1941 game involved the Orange County Training School and raised $275 net.
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Brodie Thompson builds a brick Colonial Revival house for banker Milton Hogan
At 104 North Boundary Street, Thompson built a two-story brick house for Milton and Carrie Hogan with a Doric-columned entrance, modillion cornice and one-story side porches.
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Charles T. McCormick becomes dean of the law school
Merton L. Ferson had left in 1926 for the Cincinnati deanship, and the man Chase hired to replace him backed out months before the fall term. Chase then named McCormick, on the faculty only a year. The trustees consented but not unanimously, and James A. Gray Jr. moved that they be consulted before the next dean was chosen.
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Chase has an institute researcher's study of Winston-Salem Black businesses destroyed
Robinson E. Newcomb, a Brookings graduate student working with the Institute for Research in Social Science, had pieced together Black wage data from pay stubs outside R. J. Reynolds plants. After trustee James A. Gray Jr., a Reynolds vice president, complained, Chase and Odum gathered every copy, and Chase assured Gray he had seen to the destruction of the draft and notes. One copy survived at Brookings.
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Guy B. Johnson joins the UNC faculty
After earning his doctorate at UNC in 1927, Johnson joined the university faculty, where he taught sociology and anthropology until 1969.
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Hamilton announces plans for a manuscript collection at UNC
Hamilton announced plans for what he first called the National Southern Collection of manuscripts at the university. It became the Southern Historical Collection after Sarah Graham Kenan's gift in 1930.
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Paul Green wins the Pulitzer Prize for In Abraham’s Bosom
Paul Green received the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for In Abraham’s Bosom.
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Phi Kappa Sigma builds a $45,000 chapter house
Phi Kappa Sigma spent about $45,000 on a new house in 1927 during the fraternity building boom that also eased campus housing.
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Samuel Selden joins the Carolina Playmakers as technical director
After five years in New York theater, including the Provincetown Playhouse, Selden came to the University of North Carolina in 1927 as technical director of the Carolina Playmakers.
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The Carolina Theatre and Jeff's Campus Confectionery open in the new Sorrell building
When W. B. Sorrell's building was finished, its first tenants were his optometry shop on the west, the Carolina Theatre in the middle and Jeff's Campus Confectionery on the east.
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The legislature allows $625,000 for a new university library
Plans had called for a library costing as much as $862,000. After Chase's pleading, the 1927 General Assembly provided $625,000, just over half of all the capital money for the campus. Robert B. House kept the project on schedule with the Advisory Budget Commission while Chase was abroad.
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William C. Coker plats the Laurel Hill subdivision
On his land southeast of the campus, Coker had T. Felix Hickerson lay out Laurel Hill Road along a ridge beside the golf course, with short cul-de-sacs and large lots. Coker approved every house plan and seems to have sent builders to Atwood and Nash; seven houses were built before the 1929 crash.
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William C. Coker's Rocky Ridge lot deeds restrict the race of residents
In selling the lots of his Rocky Ridge Farm development, Coker wrote covenants into the deeds that set the number of buildings, the cost of houses and, in the early deeds, the race of the residents. These private restrictions governed the neighborhood before Chapel Hill had residential zoning.
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Zeta Psi moves into a new brick house on Cameron Avenue
The Zeta Psi chapter left its old hall on Fraternity Row for a new Colonial-style brick house on Cameron Avenue designed by Arthur Nash. Kappa Sigma and Kappa Alpha later built on either side of it to form a court.
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Zeta Psi, Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sigma jointly buy the Patterson property on Cameron Avenue
The three fraternities bought the Patterson land together to lay out a second fraternity court; Kenneth Ellington later designed the Kappa Alpha and Kappa Sigma houses there with Arthur Nash's advice so they matched Zeta Psi.
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Fire destroys the Phi Delta Theta fraternity house
A midnight fire destroyed the Phi Delta Theta house at the northwest corner of the campus, behind the library. Students on the upper floor jumped from windows, and firemen kept the flames from the Kappa Sigma and Sigma Delta Phi houses next door.
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First-year law students protest Coates's failing grades
Coates failed fifteen of fifty-two students in personal property and gave seven more Es. Class leaders including Dan K. Moore pressed him to grade on a curve and talked of a boycott; he kept the grades but gave a new examination.
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Howard Mumford Jones opens the Bull's Head Bookshop in Murphey Hall
English professor Howard Mumford Jones announced the Bull's Head Book Store, a non-profit shop for modern novels and short stories in his office at 214 Murphey Hall. It later moved to the YMCA building, the ground floor of the university library and, in 1968, the Daniels Building.
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UNC library worker Elizabeth Janet Gray sells her first book
Gray, a member of the University library staff, signed a contract with Doubleday, Page & Co. for Meredith's Ann, a story for girls set in the New Hampshire mountains. She went on to write several more books while living in Chapel Hill.
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James Weldon Johnson speaks at the YMCA's Institute of Human Relations
Harry F. Comer's weeklong institute, approved by Chase, brought speakers on race, labor and world affairs. Johnson, NAACP executive secretary, spoke in Memorial Hall and met classes. History chair J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton walked out when Howard Odum introduced him as 'Mister Johnson' and protested to Chase, while a Tar Heel editorial by David Donald Carroll welcomed the visit.
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Chapel Hill Community Club women question local legislators on the women's bills
The Community Club's legislative committee asked the state women's lobby how Orange County's legislators had voted on measures backed by women's organizations, including the Australian ballot, child labor and the Efland school for Black girls, and then voted to write each legislator for a statement of his position.
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W. B. Sorrell begins building a moving-picture theatre on Franklin Street
Contractor Charles Martindale began preparing the ground for the theatre on the north side of Franklin Street next to Berman's store. It was leased to Publix-Saenger Theatres and was expected to open in September 1927, with Sorrell's jewelry and optical shop in one of its two storefronts.
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Press governors object to Paul Green's introduction to Congaree Sketches
Called before Chase and the press's board, assistant editor William T. Couch heard Royster and the others condemn Green's introduction, which said neither race could leave the ditch until whites gave Blacks a hand. Couch pointed out that some 150 advance copies were already out, and the book went out as printed. Six months later, at Chase's order, unsold copies went to a commercial publisher, which reprinted it without Green's introduction.
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The Carolina Magazine prints an issue of work by Black writers, including Langston Hughes's 'Mulatto'
The student magazine's 'Negro Number' carried only work by African American writers. Hughes's 'Mulatto' drew none of the reaction that the story 'Slaves' had caused the fall before, though both dealt with the same subject.
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Trustees appoint Sallie Belle Marks and Cecilia Hatrick Bason, the first women on the faculty
With little discussion, the June trustees made both women assistant professors as part of a push to improve teacher training. Marks became supervising principal of the elementary grades at the university's training school in Chapel Hill; Bason worked for the Extension Division from Asheville. Once women were on the faculty, women graduates could join the American Association of University Women.
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Trustees name the women's dormitory for Cornelia Phillips Spencer
At the same meeting that appointed the first women faculty, the trustees named the campus's one women's dormitory, in use for two years, Spencer Hall.
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A temporary radio station, WKBG, begins a week of broadcasts from the Pickwick Theatre
A traveling station set up on a stage in front of the Pickwick screen to broadcast music and talks by students and townspeople for a week, opening with the village ministers on a Sunday evening.
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Professor Ernest R. Groves buys the Marshall house in the Gimghoul colony
Ernest R. Groves, newly come to UNC's school of public welfare, buys the Marshall house in the Gimghoul colony. He and his wife Gladys Groves, both writers on marriage and the family, lived there into the 1930s and added a small stone library.
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Kenan Memorial Stadium opens
Kenan Memorial Stadium, the gift of William Rand Kenan Jr., hosted its first event on November 12, 1927, when Carolina beat Davidson 27 to 0. It was formally dedicated before the Thanksgiving Day game against Virginia on November 24, when Governor Angus McLean accepted it for the state and the University.
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Black stonemasons build the stone walls of Rocky Ridge Farm
The curving walls of random-coursed stone that line Country Club Road, Laurel Hill Road and Laurel Hill Circle were built alongside the houses by local Black masons, among them James Blackwell and Jesse Jones.
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Botanist Henry Roland Totten builds a Tudor Revival house on Laurel Hill Road
Botanist Henry Roland Totten, a protege of W. C. Coker, and his wife built a stuccoed Tudor Revival house at 110 Laurel Hill Road, with one wing in stone. Plans were drawn in June 1928, the excavation was finished by early August, and the house was finished about 1929.
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Botanist John Couch builds an Elizabethan Revival house on Ridge Road
Botanist John Couch, a colleague of Coker, built a dormered two-story frame house at 5 Ridge Road in Laurel Hill, its front wing lit by a broad bay window. The 1989 nomination credits the design to the Durham architect George Watts Carr.
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Chapel Hill homes and businesses get street numbers for mail delivery
Numbers were given to residences and places of business on the street so the post office could deliver to them.
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