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Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1920s
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Fire destroys Ralph Pendergraft's Chevrolet agency on West Franklin Street
The frame building of the Chevrolet dealership Pendergraft had opened at Franklin and Roberson streets burned. A small brick building went up on the site and later housed a grocery and an auto service.
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Gustav Harrer builds a shingled house on Laurel Hill Road
The Harrer house, a two-story, L-shaped Colonial Revival dwelling with shingle siding, is one of the first houses of Rocky Ridge Farm's opening building period, 1928-30.
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John Maddry builds a bungalow on his Airport Road dairy farm
Maddry put up the story-and-a-half bungalow at 1500 Airport Road in place of an older house and milked 25 cows by hand. Eleven log and frame outbuildings, some older than the house, still stood in 1992.
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Latin professor George Howe builds a Tudor Revival house on Buttons Road
George Howe's stuccoed house at 2 Buttons Road in Laurel Hill takes its medieval character from a steep hipped roof, dormers, front wings and casement windows.
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Rupert B. Vance joins the UNC sociology faculty and the Institute for Research in Social Science
After taking his doctorate at UNC in 1928, Vance was appointed to the staff of Howard W. Odum's Institute for Research in Social Science and the Department of Sociology. He was named Kenan Professor in 1945.
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The Lower Quad dormitories are finished and named
By September 1928 the four three-story red brick men's dormitories of the Lower Quad stood in Battle Woods, soon to be named Aycock, Graham, Everett and Lewis. The quad had gone up from 1924; Everett was not a later addition.
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The fraternity slate wins 28 of 30 elected campus offices
In the fall 1928 elections the fraternity political machine carried twenty-eight of thirty posts, making its hand-picked "frame-up" slates impossible to deny; a backlash followed but the machine survived.
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UNC lets fraternities pledge freshmen in their first weeks
Until 1928 students could not join a fraternity before their sophomore year; the new rule let houses pledge freshmen on arrival and strengthened the fraternity grip on campus elections.
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W. C. Coker buys Dr. Jones's Gothic cottage, which becomes the Chi Psi fraternity house
In 1928 W. C. Coker bought the property at 321 West Cameron Avenue, and the 1850s Gothic cottage of Dr. Johnston Blakeley Jones became the Chi Psi fraternity's house.
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Fire destroys the Pickard Hotel on Franklin Street
A fire that started in the attic destroyed the old Pickard Hotel late on Saturday night, January 7, 1928, at a loss of about $20,000. Firemen thought they had put it out, but were called back to find the whole roof burning. The hotel, built by the Pickards, was then owned and run by Colonel Uzzell.
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Chase's memorandum warns faculty against advocacy that embarrasses the university
Under attack from textile editor David Clark, Chase sent Howard Odum, Dudley D. Carroll and Frank Graham a discussion memo on proper activities for social scientists. Faculty whose causes involved colleagues in general embarrassment should leave, he wrote; in North Carolina such causes included certain taxes, labor organizing, racial equality and socialism.
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Fire guts the old Zeta Psi house on Fraternity Row
The old Zeta Psi house by the Mary Ann Smith dormitory caught fire from a chimney at about noon on a Sunday. The Phi Delta Thetas, renting it after losing their own house in 1927, were burned out a second time; damage passed $4,000.
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The trustees name a Lower Quad dormitory Graham Residence Hall for John W. Graham
Meeting shortly after his death, the university trustees named the dormitory finished in 1924 on the Lower Quad for John Washington Graham, class of 1857 and a trustee since 1876. They praised his service at the 1864 Battle of Plymouth, where Confederate troops massacred Black soldiers and people who had fled slavery.
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University trustees give Chapel Hill three more acres for the cemetery
Answering an aldermen's petition of June 11, 1928 about crowding, the trustees granted two acres on the east, laid out as Sections III and IV, and an acre on the south that extended the Black Sections A and B. Lot sales went into a maintenance fund overseen by a joint town and faculty committee.
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A model law office and courtroom are fitted out in Manning Hall
Through the Law School Association, Coates had lawyers around the state pay for a model courtroom and a practice law office stocked with real forms, so students could join theory to practice. Coates had put $2,600 of his own money into the office over four years.
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Chapel Hill adopts its first zoning ordinance
The Board of Aldermen unanimously adopted an ordinance dividing the town into two residence zones and two business zones, with height limits, setbacks, yard rules and a board of adjustment. The published text makes no reference to race.
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Meeting in the unfinished Graham Memorial, trustees add courses in religion
Chase seated the trustees on folding chairs in the empty lounge of Graham Memorial to shame alumni over the unfinished building. There they adopted the faculty's proposal for courses in the history and literature of religion with one dissenting vote, ending nearly ten years of debate.
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A new pipe line to the town plant ends the Battle Park sewage plant
Under an agreement among the university, the town and the Gimghouls, a pipe line to the municipal plant in Strowd's lowgrounds was finished, and the park's disposal plant was abandoned so the woods could be restored.
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The Southland Motor Company opens a Studebaker and Erskine agency on Rosemary Street
The Southland Motor Company, a Raleigh firm headed by J. F. Cooper, opened for business in the building near the fire station lately used by the Burroughs Motor Company, with Herbert Pendergraft in charge. It sold Studebaker and Erskine cars and ran a service station and repair shop.
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George H. Lawrence becomes the county's first full-time welfare superintendent
The commissioners and school board, in joint session, elected Lawrence full time. For years he worked with only a part-time clerk, from an old university-owned house in Chapel Hill.
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The university hosts a national conference on education in the South
More than thirty college and university presidents, a dozen state superintendents, librarians, governors and others met at Chapel Hill. The gathering tied the university to leading educators nationwide and supported its new emphasis on training high school teachers, principals and superintendents.
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Chase's annual report tallies a decade of growth at the university
More than $5 million in state money had built nine dormitories, five classroom buildings and laboratories. State operating funds had risen from $215,000 to $880,000; faculty above instructor from 66 to 158; the Graduate School from 40 to 205 students; and the library from 88,316 to 193,867 volumes. Enrollment had reached 2,825 and the press had issued fifty titles.
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Chi Psi announces a Norman-style house for West Cameron Avenue
Chi Psi announced plans for a $50,000 Norman-style stone house by the university architects Atwood and Nash on the old McCauley place on Cameron Avenue. The design broke with the campus's Colonial theme: steep slate roof, casement windows with stone trim, an arched entrance and a stone terrace. The old McCauley house, the chapter's home, burned on Christmas night 1929, and in November 1930 the chapter was still without a new house.
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Cornelia Spencer Love designs and builds her own house in Laurel Hill
Cornelia Spencer Love, granddaughter of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, planned her own one-story frame house in Laurel Hill; the architect Arthur Nash contributed the flared roof ends and a little porch.
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Drama professor Preston Farrar builds a house with an outdoor stage on Laurel Hill Road
UNC drama professor Preston Farrar built a two-story stucco house in the manner of an English cottage. It had indoor and outdoor stages for rehearsals and small productions, including a stone terrace used as a theatre, and a specimen garden.
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Eben and Ruby Merritt open a gas station on the Pittsboro Road
Eben and Ruby Merritt began running an Esso gas station on the Pittsboro Road south of Chapel Hill in 1929 and kept it for nearly fifty years. It is the business that became Merritt's Store and Grill.
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Elizabeth Janet Gray marries Morgan Vining of the University Extension division
Gray married Morgan Fisher Vining, associate director of the University's Extension division, in Chapel Hill. The couple moved to New York in 1932, and he was killed in an automobile accident in 1933.
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George Livas and James Gust go into partnership at the Carolina Confectionary
George Livas formed a partnership with James Gust in 1929 and began operating the Carolina Confectionary as a restaurant as well; it became the Carolina Coffee Shop.
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Herbert Ledbetter and Clarence Pickard open Ledbetter-Pickard Stationery
Ledbetter, a former clerk at Alfred Williams's stationery, and Clarence "Doc" Pickard, whose grocery had failed, opened the store in part of Foister's photo shop. It did well enough to move to a larger space in 1932.
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Kappa Alpha begins a new house on Cameron Avenue
Kappa Alpha, whose old hall stood on Fraternity Row, started a pink granite Colonial house on Cameron Avenue designed by Kenneth Ellington. With Kappa Sigma next door it flanked the Zeta Psi house to form a court.
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Mary Bayley Pratt, namesake of Chapel Hill's public library, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Mary Bayley Pratt (1874-1929), for whom the Chapel Hill public library of the time was named, was buried in the family plot she shares with Joseph Hyde Pratt.
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Odum's institute wins a $240,000 Rockefeller grant
The Institute for Research in Social Science secured $240,000 from a Rockefeller foundation for studies of social and child welfare, crime and justice, taxation, industry and cooperatives.
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Robert Oscar Cate builds a bungalow and dairy barn on his farm near Chapel Hill
In 1929 Robert Oscar Cate finished a large gambrel-roofed dairy barn and milk sheds on his farm near Chapel Hill and built a story-and-a-half bungalow on the rise above them. It is a clear case of a farm turning to dairying in the 1920s.
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Sophia MacNider, who kept a boarding house and preparatory school on Franklin Street, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Sophia MacNider (1846-1929), who ran a boarding house and a preparatory school in her Franklin Street home, was buried in the cemetery.
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The Beta Theta Pi fraternity house is completed on South Columbia Street
The Beta Theta Pi house at 114 South Columbia Street, apart from the fraternity courts, is a brick house laid in Flemish bond with a slate roof and dormers, a Doric portico across the front and wings on each side, set back on a wide lawn.
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The Chapel Hill recorder's court is established
The new court heard all misdemeanors from Chapel Hill Township every Tuesday, with a judge elected by town voters and a clerk and prosecutor named by the aldermen.
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The Gothic cottage serving as the Chi Psi house burns
Dr. Jones's board-and-batten cottage at 321 West Cameron Avenue burned in 1929, a year after it became the Chi Psi fraternity house. The fraternity's Tudor Revival house now stands on the site.
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The University Press publishes Harriet L. Herring's study of mill villages
Herring, a research associate of the Institute for Research in Social Science, had visited 322 of the state's roughly 500 mills after the manufacturers refused formal cooperation. It was the first systematic look at mill communities. Chase mailed copies to leading textile men, including Charles A. Cannon, as a model of social research.
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The university names Bingham Hall for Robert Bingham
In 1929 the university named Bingham Hall on its Chapel Hill campus for Robert Bingham, class of 1857, an alumnus who often spoke at campus events and helped reopen the university in 1875.
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The county board funds a two-room Morris Grove School, with Black families paying part
The school board approved a gable-roofed, two-room frame school at Morris Grove in Chapel Hill Township. Black residents gave $250 toward it and supplied the lumber, and Louis Webb and Labon Hogan built it; the building survives, long vacant.
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The university sets aside land on the Pittsboro highway for fraternity houses
The university set aside a strip on the west side of the Pittsboro highway for a new fraternity colony, taking fraternity lots on old Fraternity Row in exchange. Phi Delta Theta and Pi Kappa Phi began building there first and moved into their brick houses that fall.
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The Tar Heel becomes the Daily Tar Heel
The commencement issue of June 7, 1929, was the first published as The Daily Tar Heel, after a plan to turn the tri-weekly Tar Heel into a daily went to the Student Activities Committee. Regular daily publication began with the new volume on September 20, 1929.
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Trustees approve a library school paid for by a $100,000 Carnegie grant
At commencement Chase won the trustees' permission to set up a school to train librarians in the new library, with its first five years funded by a $100,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation.
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Coates holds a Law School Association conference on criminal justice
About thirty lawyers, judges and state officials, including Attorney General D. G. Brummitt and Justices George W. Connor and Willis J. Brogden, met at the law school and split up sections of the American Law Institute model code to begin a new state code of criminal procedure.
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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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Chase seeks money for a school of public affairs to train state and local officials
Chase asked Governor Gardner to help find about $30,000 a year in private money for a school to train city and county officials, public health and public safety officers and others, saying none existed in the South. Albert Coates's Institute of Government soon took up the same mission.
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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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Alpha Tau Omega builds a Tudor Gothic house on East Franklin Street
Architect Courtland Curtis designed Alpha Tau Omega's house on East Franklin Street in Tudor Gothic, one of the few big fraternity houses of the era not in the Colonial Revival mode.
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Frank Graham circulates his Industrial Bill of Rights
Answering the 1929 Gastonia strike deaths, Graham gathered more than four hundred signers across the state, among them Odum, Branson, Poteat and Walter Murphy, though not Chase. He made it the theme of his mid-April 1930 address as president of the North Carolina Conference for Social Service, ignoring advice to soften it while the trustees searched for a president.
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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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James M. Pritchard and Thomas P. Lloyd buy the bankrupt Patterson Brothers drugstore
The Patterson Brothers drugstore failed in 1930, and Pritchard and Lloyd bought it from Wallace Durham Patterson. The maps then list it as the Pritchard and Lloyd Rexall store.
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Johnson-Moore Hardware goes bankrupt and Orange Hardware takes its place
The hardware store that had succeeded Chapel Hill Hardware failed in 1930, one of several Franklin Street businesses lost in the Depression, and Orange Hardware took it over.
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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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Postmaster, mayor and state senator William Pritchard is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
William Pritchard (1850-1930), Chapel Hill postmaster and mayor and a state senator, was buried in the cemetery.
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Russell Gruman builds a Dutch Colonial house on Laurel Hill Circle
A gambrel-roofed Dutch Colonial Revival house of rough brick and shingle, with a matching garage, went up for Russell Gruman at the close of the district's first building period.
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Students boycott the Carolina Theatre over ticket prices
University students stayed away from the Carolina Theatre on Franklin Street to push the price of admission down from forty cents to thirty.
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Texaco builds a service station at Franklin and Columbia after the town lets nine elms come down
To put a station on the southeast corner, Texaco needed nine old elms cut. The town agreed, with reluctance, once the company promised a tasteful yellow building with roses in the planting.
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The Black neighborhood on the Chapel Hill line spreads west into Partridge Field
In the late 1930s the African American neighborhood straddling the Chapel Hill and Carrboro line grew west into Partridge Field. Only then, the book says, was it readily counted as part of either town; segregation and the community's own sense of itself had kept it apart, with its churches and schools facing Chapel Hill.
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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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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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The Daily Tar Heel raises a relief fund for Orange County's poor
As hard times reached the county, the student paper asked students and townspeople for gifts. From January 31 through May 12, 1930, it collected $202.73, enough to give food to more than forty families.
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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 and Gladys Coates mail the first issue of Popular Government
The seventy-page first issue, built on Coates's paper The Convict's Question, called for a scientific overhaul of the state's criminal justice system. The Coateses paid about $1,500 to print it and addressed some two thousand copies by hand at the Chapel Hill post office before year's end.
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Addie Williams Totten organizes the Chapel Hill Garden Club
Addie Williams Totten, who had lived in Chapel Hill since her 1923 marriage to botanist H. R. Totten, organized the Chapel Hill Garden Club in 1931. It joined the state federation in 1932, and she was again its president in 1958.
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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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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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Townspeople and faculty form the Battle Park Association at Joseph Hyde Pratt's home
A meeting at Colonel Pratt's home launched a volunteer group to restore Kemp Battle's paths and bridges in Battle Park. By the end of 1931 it had cleared old walks, opened about three miles of trail and rebuilt the bridges.
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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 county board merges nine more rural schools into larger ones
At a special meeting on reorganizing the schools, the board sent Merritts to Chapel Hill, Damascus to Carrboro, Tom's Creek and Rock Hill to Orange Grove, Union and Rehobeth to Efland, and Harmony with others to Aycock, leaving few one-teacher schools for white children.
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Coates opens his first statewide school for law officers in Manning Hall
About fifty police chiefs, sheriffs, prosecutors, clerks and judges, growing to seventy-five or more, met for three days under the police chiefs' association, the first meeting of city, county, state and federal officers under one roof. Governor Gardner called it the most promising movement the university had begun.
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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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Langston Hughes reads in Gerrard Hall after Contempo prints "Christ in Alabama"
Milton Abernethy of Contempo invited Langston Hughes to Chapel Hill and printed his Scottsboro poem "Christ in Alabama" in the issue dated December 1, timed to appear days before the visit. Hughes spoke and read to students and townspeople in Gerrard Hall on the night of November 19, 1931.
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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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Officials at the Carolina Inn back Coates's plan for schools of public officers
Forty-five judges, lawyers and lawmen invited by Judge W. A. Devin heard Coates propose an association of government officers served by a staff that would write guidebooks and train officials. They told him to go ahead, and Coates later called this the first meeting of the Institute of Government.
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Dr. Edwin Caldwell is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Dr. Edwin Caldwell, a Black physician and son of Wilson Caldwell, died in 1932 and was buried in the Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, near his father. He had taken his medical degree at Shaw University and practiced for many years in Chapel Hill.
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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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Robert L. Fowler moves the Model Market across Franklin Street into a new building
Fowler carried his stock to a new building on the south side over one weekend and opened there the next Monday.
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St. Joseph CME built its first church on West Rosemary Street
Henry Baldwin, Margaret Burnette and Kennon Cheek mortgaged their homes for the down payment on the Rosemary Street lot, which Black leaders had judged too small for a new high school. A frame church went up under Rev. Joseph S. Miller and was dedicated as St. Joseph Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.
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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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Water for the towns: University Lake, the 1976–77 drought, and OWASA
The University dammed Morgan Creek in 1932 to create University Lake. Droughts in 1968 and 1976–77 forced rationing and purchases from Durham, and on February 16, 1977 the Orange Water and Sewer Authority, organized by the county and both towns, took over the university and town systems. A long fight over a Cane Creek reservoir followed.
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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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About two hundred officials organize and name the Institute of Government
Mayors, legislators, judges and county commissioners met at the new Graham Memorial, endorsed Coates's plan for an association of government officials and formally adopted the name Institute of Government. Junius G. Adams chaired, with Coates as secretary, and a larger meeting was set for September.
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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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Hundreds take typhoid vaccine at Chapel Hill clinic after new cases
After several new typhoid cases were reported in late June 1932, about 600 people received typhoid vaccine at the Chapel Hill public clinic in a single day, and the Infirmary gave the treatment on any day. Town health authorities said the water supply was not the source.
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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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Albert Coates convenes the Institute of Government's first statewide school for public officials
About six hundred officials and citizens from nearly every county came to Chapel Hill for a two-day meeting Coates had promoted all summer. Frank Graham opened the Friday evening session in Gerrard Hall and Harvard law dean Roscoe Pound gave the closing address on Saturday, when the organizing committee approved hiring Coates as director with a staff.
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The Institute of Government stages a statewide radio swearing-in of new county officers
Working with Raleigh station WPTF, Coates had a five-station network carry the oath-taking of incoming sheriffs, commissioners and other county officers, with speeches by governor-elect J. C. B. Ehringhaus and his Republican opponent Clifford Frazier. People gathered in courthouses across the state to watch and listen, and Coates billed the night as the Institute's formal launch.
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A three-mile rural power line from Chapel Hill to Calvander is built with federal money
Built in 1933 as a Civil Works Administration project, the line ran three miles from Chapel Hill to Calvander, and the Hogan brothers supplied cedar poles when funds ran short. The book says it was the first rural electric line in the United States built with federal funds.
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Ben Cone pledges $5,000 a year for three years to the Institute of Government
After a $1,500 gift at the end of 1932, the Greensboro textile executive pledged $5,000 a year for three years and his brother Ceasar Cone II promised $5,000 more. The Cone money paid for the first staff, and by late 1933 it was more than three-quarters of all the Institute had deposited at the Bank of Chapel Hill.
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Beppie Branson moves The Little Shop to 142 East Franklin Street as sole owner
Elizabeth Lanier Branson and Mary Henderson had started a women's specialty shop near Henderson Street in the early 1930s. Branson took it across the street and ran it alone, and the old shop went on as Henderson's millinery.
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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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Milton Abernethy moves the Intimate Bookshop across Henderson Street
Abernethy, who began selling books from his dormitory and had moved over the Carolina Cafeteria in 1931, took the shop into the west end of Hoot Patterson's old store.
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Robert A. Eubanks closes his general store when he becomes postmaster
Eubanks shut his long-running general store on the south side of East Franklin when he took over the Chapel Hill post office. The building was razed in 1934.
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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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State senator John Umstead buys the Royster house on East Franklin Street
In 1933 state senator John Umstead bought the house at 619 East Franklin Street, and it has carried his name since.
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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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The Pickwick Theatre closes in the Depression
Hard times forced the Pickwick to shut. For some years the building served as a town courtroom before it reopened as the Pick in 1938.
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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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Henry P. Brandis Jr. becomes the Institute of Government's first associate director
Paid from the Cone pledges at $50 a week, Brandis, a Salisbury native with a Columbia law degree, left a New York firm and went straight to Raleigh to follow the General Assembly and digest its new laws. He was later dean of the UNC law school.
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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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The Bank of Chapel Hill closes its Bank of Carrboro branch
With the Carrboro mills idle and other business falling off, the Bank of Chapel Hill closed its Carrboro branch and moved its accounts to the parent bank. The branch cashier, W. E. Thompson, went with them.
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Free health examination clinic for children entering school in Chapel Hill
The Parent Teachers' Association arranged a free clinic at the school building to examine all children due to enter school that fall, with physicians from Duke Hospital and Chapel Hill dentists, and urged vaccination against smallpox, diphtheria and typhoid.
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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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More than a thousand people attend the Institute of Government's second statewide conference
Officials and citizens met in Chapel Hill to hear the state's congressional delegation, led by Senator Josiah Bailey, explain the first New Deal recovery laws, and President Roosevelt sent a letter urging other states to copy the Institute. The organizing committee then gave Coates new work, among it a report on proposed constitutional amendments and a guidebook for election officials.
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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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George and Mabel Bason open Whitehall in the old MacRae house
Leaving the Widow Puckett house after George Bason resigned from the University, the couple bought the MacRae house across from the Episcopal church, which had been a fraternity house. They named it Whitehall and took boarders, sold crafts and later antiques.
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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 A. Eubanks's old general store is torn down
The store on the south side of East Franklin was razed. The new Carolina Theatre went up on the site in 1942.
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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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The Institute of Government publishes its digest of the 1933 laws and its first guidebook, for clerks of court
Henry Brandis's summary of the laws passed by the 1933 General Assembly came out as an issue of Popular Government, followed by a guidebook written for clerks of court. Covington treats them as the Institute's first substantial publications that local officials could use in their daily work.
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Architect H. D. Carter becomes supervisor of Orange County relief projects
Chapel Hill architect H. D. Carter replaced J. A. Page as supervisor of Orange County's Federal Emergency Relief Administration projects, which included painting and repairing schools. The next year he designed Public Works Administration buildings and additions for nine county schools.
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Catholics organize a congregation in Chapel Hill
The Catholic Church of Chapel Hill was organized under its first priest, Francis J. Morrissey. With no building of its own, it held services in Gerrard Hall on the university campus.
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Popular Government becomes a monthly magazine
With new gifts from Winston-Salem backers and Ceasar Cone and some subscription income, Coates moved the Institute's journal from quarterly to monthly, with advertising to help pay for it. Each monthly issue sold for ten cents and carried a courthouse or other government building on its cover.
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A Chapel Hill branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom is founded
Charlotte Adams founded a Chapel Hill branch of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. The branch is now called WILPF Triangle.
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A Colonial Revival cottage with an attached garage is built on Country Club Road for Robert B. Voitle
The story-and-a-half weatherboarded cottage has an original garage on one side. The 2008 documentation redates it to about 1935 and makes it contributing; the 1989 district nomination had dated it 1955.
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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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Attorney and three-time mayor William Roberson is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
William Roberson (1869-1935), a lawyer who served three times as mayor of Chapel Hill, was buried in the cemetery.
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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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Botanist William C. Coker marries Louise Venable
William Chambers Coker married Louise Venable, daughter of former UNC president Francis P. Venable, in 1935. After her death in 1983 part of the grounds of The Rocks, the Coker home on North Street, became a public garden in her memory.
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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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Dr. I. H. Manning leads the founding of the Hospital Saving Association
After a 1933-1934 study of hospital care for people of small means, the Hospital Saving Association of North Carolina, known as the Chapel Hill Blue Cross plan, was founded in 1935. Dr. Isaac H. Manning, longtime medical dean, was its leading figure and first president.
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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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Mr. Brooks and J. I. Chandler open the NC Cafeteria in the later Porthole building
Mr. Brooks, a former manager of Gooch's cafe and the Carolina Coffee Shop, and J. I. Chandler opened the NC Cafeteria in 1935 in the building later home to the Porthole restaurant. The cafeteria moved to a new location in 1944.
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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 Methodist parsonage is moved to face Rosemary Street to make way for a Pure Oil station
The parsonage built on the old John Wesley Carr homesite was shifted and turned toward Rosemary Street, clearing the Franklin Street frontage for Ben Strowd's Pure Oil service station.
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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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The Williams family buys a 38-acre farm on Mount Carmel Church Road
In 1935 the Williams family acquired a farm whose buildings were already old: an antebellum frame hall-and-parlor house, two log outbuildings of the same age and two log tenant houses.
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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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Institute of Government staff begin daily bulletins on the General Assembly
From rented offices in the Raleigh Building, Brandis, Dillard Gardner and T. N. Grice followed every bill of the 1935 session from the gallery and put a bulletin of the day's action on each member's desk by the next morning. A weekly digest of statewide bills went to every newspaper in the state, so local officials learned of bills before they became law.
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Paul Green finishes a small writing retreat on his land east of Chapel Hill
Playwright Paul Green finishes a small building for study and writing on the tract he had bought about two years earlier beyond the Strowd farm, between the Durham and Raleigh roads. He meant to build a family house near it later.
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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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Orange-Person District Health Department organized with Dr. Malcolm Rourk as health officer
Full-time public health service began in Orange County on July 1, 1935, when a temporary unit under Dr. G. H. Sumner of the State Board of Health answered a typhoid outbreak. By August the district health department for Orange and Person counties was organized as a model unit linked to UNC's public health teaching, with Dr. Malcolm Henderson Rourk as district health officer, sanitary inspector E. B. Caruthers, and a public health nurse and clerk in each county. The district officer also took over Chapel Hill's municipal health authority.
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The Institute prints 250,000 copies of a highway safety issue of Popular Government
The September 1935 issue was given over to traffic safety, using fatality figures gathered by law student Harry McGalliard at a time when North Carolina had the most deaths per mile driven. Standard Oil helped pay for a pocket-size 32-page edition sent to high schools, police departments and civic groups.
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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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A federal WPA grant pays for ten Orange County school building projects
A federal grant of $155,454 to the county school board in 1936 paid for new buildings at West Hillsboro School, Hillsboro Negro School and Chapel Hill High School, and for additions and updated equipment at Murphey, Carrboro, Aycock, St. Mary's, Orange Grove, Chapel Hill Negro School and Hillsboro schools.
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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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Dillard Gardner sells Institute of Government memberships to cities and counties
Taking a city manager's suggestion, Coates offered local governments yearly 'unit memberships' priced by population, from $413 for Charlotte to $7.50 for the smallest towns, covering guidebooks, the magazine, legislative bulletins and staff help. Gardner set out in the winter of 1936 and enrolled more than a hundred cities, towns and counties; memberships brought in over $10,000 in 1937.
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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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James M. Pritchard buys out Thomas Lloyd and becomes sole owner of the drugstore
Pritchard took sole charge of the former Patterson Brothers store, now Pritchard's Drugstore. Lloyd opened his own Carolina Pharmacy in 1940.
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Rose's 5-10-25 cent store opens on East Franklin Street
When John P. Crowder closed his variety store and left town, Rose's took his space and shared the building with the A&P.
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The PWA withdraws its grant for the Institute of Government building
Coates won two thirty-day extensions, the first from President Roosevelt at Senator Josiah Bailey's request, and in February 1936 was allowed to let a contract on his word that the money was in hand. The promised materials and cash never fully came through, and in the summer of 1936 PWA administrator H. G. Baity rescinded the grant; a brief revival by Interior Secretary Harold Ickes in 1937 also failed.
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The Village Apartments are built on East Franklin Street
An apartment house went up just east of the University Presbyterian Church, among the street's houses.
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The old West Franklin Street high school becomes Chapel Hill's elementary school
When the new high school on South Columbia Street was finished, the 1916 building on West Franklin was turned over to the elementary grades.
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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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Grace Beatty appointed supervising nurse of the district health unit
Acting district health officer Dr. William P. Richardson appointed Grace Beatty, who held a master's degree in public health nursing from Columbia, as supervising nurse under an enlarged program funded by Social Security money. By July 1936 the Orange-Person staff of 11 included staff nurses Agnes Tolbert in Chapel Hill and Ruth O'Briant and Lieotta Hall in Roxboro.
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Carolina Coach Company opens a new bus station at Rosemary and Columbia streets
Carolina Coach Company moved Chapel Hill's bus station from East Franklin Street to new quarters at the corner of Rosemary Lane and Columbia Street, opened the week of April 24, 1936. It ran ten round trips a day to Durham and four between Raleigh and Greensboro through Chapel Hill.
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Health officer reports on the preschool clinics in Chapel Hill and Carrboro
The health department finished its round of preschool clinics, with 25 children at the Chapel Hill clinic and 34 at Carrboro. Health officer W. P. Richardson credited a committee of women with much of the success and reported that 56 correctible defects were found among 38 of the 59 children examined.
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Paul and Elizabeth Green sell their village home and lay out a new house east of town
Paul and Elizabeth Green sell their home in the Glen to Mr. and Mrs. J. Manson Valentine and, with advice from a landscape architect, site a family house, gardens and outbuildings on their tract east of the village, hoping to move in by September.
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First field training course for North Carolina public health workers held in the Orange-Person District
A month-long field training course for 29 new public health workers (14 nurses, 6 sanitary officers, 4 sanitary engineers and 5 health officers), described as the first in North Carolina, ended in Chapel Hill in early July 1936 under Dr. William P. Richardson. The Orange-Person and Durham health departments then ran as a joint field training center, and by July 1937 it had trained 109 workers.
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District health department holds midwife classes across Orange County
Classes for midwives were held at Efland and Hillsboro and began for those in and near Chapel Hill at the health department offices, with attendance required before a permit to practice would be issued. Health officer W. P. Richardson said 17 percent of births in the county were attended by midwives, against 31 percent statewide.
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Harry Stern moves his Carolina Grill into a new building on East Franklin Street
Harry Stern moved his Carolina Grill, a restaurant and delicatessen, into a larger new building that T. C. Atwood put up on the lot next to the Model Market. The Weekly counted it among the year's new business buildings.
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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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Hope Summerell Chamberlain talks about Old Days in Chapel Hill at the Bull's Head Bookshop
The Bull's Head Bookshop on the ground floor of the University Library announced a Tuesday afternoon talk by Chamberlain about her book, with autographed copies on sale for $1.35.
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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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Daniel Huston Buchanan builds a two-story house with a gallery on Laurel Hill Road
The Buchanan house, of stone and weatherboard with a two-story pedimented gallery, is one of the Colonial Revival houses of Rocky Ridge Farm's second building period, 1936-40.
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Dudley Carroll builds a red brick house on Country Club Road
A red brick Colonial Revival house with an asymmetrical front and a fanlighted entry went up for Dudley Carroll in Rocky Ridge Farm's second building period.
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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 Standard Theatre building becomes a funeral home and a grocery store
The West Franklin Street movie house that had served the Black community was given over to a funeral home and a grocery.
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