Search and filters
Search and filters · 1 active
3,090 dated events and 37 storylines match your filters.
Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1,601–1,800 of 3,127, 200 to a page.Back to highlights
Entries
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1930s
-
The university names its new gymnasium for Charles T. Woollen
The university named its new gymnasium for Charles T. Woollen, its longtime registrar, business manager and comptroller, who had advocated for the building and helped oversee its construction. He died the following year.
-
Walker's Funeral Home opens in the enlarged Bill Lloyd house on West Franklin Street
The old "Bill Lloyd" house was enlarged and made over as Walker's Funeral Home, near the Columbia Street end of West Franklin.
-
William Van Sprinkle designs a brick Colonial Revival house on Pine Lane for Richmond and Marjorie Bond
Contractors Ellington & Sparrow built the five-part brick house, a story-and-a-half main block with lower wings joined by hyphens. It is the oldest house in the Laurel Hill boundary increase, and the nomination ranks it the best of the neighborhood's later Colonial Revival houses.
-
William de Berniere MacNider serves as dean of the UNC School of Medicine
MacNider succeeded Charles Staples Mangum as dean of the medical school in 1937 and resigned the deanship in 1940 to return to research.
-
The Institute of Government opens its first ten-day school for police officers
Sixty-one lawmen, about a quarter of them police chiefs, attended, taught in part by instructors lent by the FBI's new National Police Academy. J. Edgar Hoover then gave agent Edward Scheidt, a former Coates student, a year's paid leave to write Institute guidebooks on arrest, search and seizure, and crime detection.
-
The Lost Colony premieres
Paul Green's pageant-drama The Lost Colony opened on Roanoke Island on Sunday evening, July 4, 1937, and the Chapel Hill Weekly reported that it scored a hit. The production had Chapel Hill roots: Frederick Koch's Carolina Playmakers were involved, and at least one actor came to Chapel Hill in June to rehearse.
-
Racial violence erupts in western Chapel Hill and Carrboro
Late on Saturday, August 21, 1937, a white filling-station attendant struck Tom Atwater, a Black man, with a bottle near West Franklin Street. An angry crowd gathered, some throwing stones and firing guns, and armed white men from Carrboro fired on them from a barricaded truck. Four men were shot before Durham police with tear gas restored calm.
-
The first of the new women's dormitories, later Alderman Residence Hall, opens
Built in 1937 with Public Works Administration money, the university's new women's dormitory, later named for Edwin Alderman for his support of women's education, was occupied by September 1937. Two more women's dormitories, later Kenan and McIver, opened in September 1939.
-
Lloyd descendants dedicate a memorial stone to Thomas Lloyd north of Chapel Hill
The Thomas Lloyd Memorial Association set up a granite marker to Thomas Lloyd near Old Highway 86 at Stony Hill Road, northwest of Calvander. Its inscription mixes in details from the life of a different Thomas Lloyd of New Hanover County.
-
Second Baptist Church is organized in Chapel Hill
A second Black Baptist congregation was organized in Chapel Hill and put up its building in April 1938.
-
The first air mail leaves Chapel Hill by plane
Mayor Foushee, Postmaster Robert A. Eubanks, Assistant Postmaster William S. Hogan and other residents went to the airport to see off the first mail to leave Chapel Hill by plane.
-
Louis H. Hackney dies in Chapel Hill
Louis H. Hackney, pastor, principal of the Quaker school from 1898 to 1912 and founder of Hackney's Educational and Industrial School, died in Chapel Hill on December 19, 1937. He was buried in the segregated Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
-
Chapel Hill builds a new town hall with WPA help
The Works Progress Administration paid about half the cost of the town hall at 100 West Rosemary Street, on the site of the town's first town hall; it went into use in late March 1939. University architects Atwood and Weeks designed the two-story brick building in a Williamsburg-inspired Colonial style with a hipped slate roof, cupola and swan's-neck pediment.
-
Chapel Hill voters approve bonds for the new town hall
The bond issue for the town's share of the town hall went to the voters in July 1938 and passed 211 to 27. The campaign drew the Weekly's first calls for more citizen part in town affairs.
-
Daphne Athas's family moves to Chapel Hill
Athas came to Chapel Hill as a teenager in 1938 with her Greek family, who during the Depression traded a large Massachusetts home for a small house on Merritt Mill Road. She spent most of the rest of her life in Orange County.
-
Durham architects Hackney and Knott design Carl Pegg's house on Laurel Hill Road
A three-bay brick Colonial Revival house for Carl Pegg was designed by the Durham firm of Hackney and Knott in the district's second building period.
-
Professor Urban T. Holmes builds a painted-brick Colonial Revival house on Pine Lane
The deck-on-hip house, with a basement garage set into the slope, was one of two Pine Lane houses built before the war. The nomination takes the two late-1930s houses as proof that Pine Lane was part of Coker's original plat.
-
Robert Varley opens a men's clothing store on East Franklin Street
Varley's store took the space of Alfred Williams's stationery on the south side of the street.
-
Stacy Residence Hall is completed and named for Marvin H. Stacy
Stacy Residence Hall was finished in 1938 and named for Marvin Hendrix Stacy, the dean and acting president who died of influenza in 1919.
-
The Chapel Hill post office opens on Franklin Street
A new federal post office was built in two stages on the site of the old one at Franklin and Henderson streets, begun in July 1937. Postal workers moved into its rear section early in 1938 while the old building was torn down and the front half built, and the finished post office began full operation on July 5, 1938.
-
With its money gone, the Institute's first staff leave for state jobs
By 1938 the Cone gifts were spent and the staff had gone weeks without pay. Brandis became research director of the State Tax Commission, Dillard Gardner joined the state supreme court staff and Grice the state auditor's office, while two young assistants stayed on at reduced pay; the last regular monthly Popular Government went out in January 1938.
-
Chapel Hill rededicates its Daniel Boone Trail marker opposite the post office
At a town ceremony Ella Boone Dixon, a Boone descendant, placed a flag over the Boone Trail plaque and J. Hampton Rich explained its legend. Mayor John M. Foushee led the program.
-
State offers the three-county district $5,900 for venereal disease control
At a meeting of county commissioners in Chapel Hill, State Board of Health executive officer Dr. Carl V. Reynolds offered the Chatham-Orange-Person district $5,900 from the Smith Reynolds Foundation fund for venereal disease control, if the district matched it. The program called for examinations and clinics to bring every infected person in the district under treatment.
-
John M. Booker offers to buy a Franklin Street lot for the new town hall
In a letter to the Chapel Hill Weekly, professor John M. Booker objected to the hurried choice of the old site and offered to buy and give a lot on Franklin Street, hoping it would start a civic center. Editor Louis Graves backed the idea and called for town planning.
-
Chapel Hill auctions off its old town hall to clear the site for a new one
With WPA money available for 45 percent of a new building, the town decided to rebuild on its own lot at Rosemary and Columbia streets. The old town hall, whose courtroom the Weekly called filthy, was sold at auction and hauled away.
-
Coates clears the old Pickard Hotel and Ledbetter lots on Franklin Street for the Institute building
With the campus site no longer available, Coates arranged to buy two lots on the north side of Franklin Street facing Graham Memorial, the university-controlled Ledbetter property and the privately owned old Pickard Hotel property, for $8,700. In late September he borrowed to clear them; the old buildings came down, and the excavation filled with water through a wet winter until town officials called it a nuisance.
-
Bowling Carolina opens a four-lane alley in the former Lyon Hardware store
John McCauley and J. B. Johns opened four regulation bowling alleys in the old Lyon Hardware store on East Franklin Street, selling sandwiches and soft drinks and inviting women bowlers in particular.
-
The old Pickwick reopens as the Pick, a second movie house under the Carolina's management
After standing empty for several years, the remodeled Pickwick reopened as the Pick under the Carolina Theatre's management, planned for second-run, foreign-language and Western films.
-
Chapel Hill pharmacist Carl T. Durham is elected to Congress from the Sixth District
Durham, who had been named the Sixth District nominee, won the general election over write-in candidate Oscar G. Barker, and Chapel Hill voters gave him 703 votes to Barker's 57. He went on to serve 22 years in the House and retired in 1961.
-
UNC rejects Pauli Murray's graduate application
Pauli Murray, who grew up in Durham and lived in New York, applied to UNC's graduate school in 1938 to study with Howard Odum and Guy B. Johnson. On December 14, two days after the Supreme Court's Gaines ruling, Dean W. W. Pierson rejected her because of her race, and her appeals to President Frank Porter Graham became national news.
-
A Cape Cod house is built at 698 Gimghoul Road
The story-and-a-half house with gabled dormers and a stone end chimney, dated to about 1939, sits at the head of the south side of Gimghoul Road.
-
Alexander Residence Hall is built and named for Eben Alexander
A men's dormitory built at the university in 1939 with funds from the New Deal's Public Works Administration was named for Eben Alexander, the former professor of Greek and first dean of the faculty.
-
Alpha Delta Pi moves into Blanche Patterson's former home on East Franklin Street
The sorority moved into the house Mrs. Fred Patterson had built in the late 1910s.
-
Alpha Gamma Delta moves into the old "Crystal Palace" on East Franklin Street
The sorority took over the house known as the Crystal Palace, once Algernon Barbee's home.
-
Architect Bradford Eddy designs James Clarence Andrews's house on Buttons Road
A two-story shingled Colonial Revival house for James Clarence Andrews was designed by Bradford Eddy, an architect who practiced outside North Carolina.
-
Architect William Van Sprinkle designs a brick house on Gimghoul Road for Benjamin Edkins
The two-story brick Colonial Revival house with a one-story side wing at 739 Gimghoul Road was built for salesman Benjamin Edkins and his wife to a design by Durham architect William Van Sprinkle.
-
Construction begins on the Institute of Government building on Franklin Street
A $10,000 gift from Will Reynolds, given after Congressman William Umstead won an IRS ruling that the Institute was a charity, paid for the land. Gifts from Gordon and Bowman Gray covered half of the $50,000 cost and Julian Price's Jefferson Standard Life lent the rest on Coates's signature, against more than half his salary, for a scaled-down Federal-style building of three floors over a raised basement.
-
Edward Danziger opens Danziger's Old World Candy Shop on East Franklin Street
Edward Danziger, a Viennese confectioner who had left Austria, opened a candy shop at 153 East Franklin Street in the Sutton Building, selling homemade confections, pastries, coffee and sodas. It later grew into Danziger's Old World Restaurant and a gift shop.
-
Jim Tatum returns to UNC as director of freshman athletics
After following Carl Snavely to Cornell as an assistant football coach and head baseball coach, Tatum came back to Chapel Hill in 1939 as UNC's director of freshman athletics.
-
Law students Terry Sanford and William Cochrane join the Institute's legislative team
Elmer Oettinger led the Institute's daily coverage of the 1939 General Assembly, mailing bulletins to a list that had grown to 7,000 names. Late in the session Cochrane recruited first-year law student Sanford, later governor, who came back to the Institute as an assistant director after the war.
-
Lenoir Hall is built as the new campus dining hall
Atwood and Weeks designed Lenoir Hall, a red brick dining hall with large windows near Wilson Library, completed in 1939.
-
MacNider Hall is completed as the first building of the medical school complex
The first building constructed in UNC's medical school complex was completed in 1939 and named for MacNider, then dean.
-
Maurice Julian opens a shoe store on East Franklin Street
Julian started out selling shoes at 167 East Franklin, in the space James R. Ellis's dress shop had left.
-
Music department chair Glen Haydon builds a brick house on Laurel Hill Road
Glen Haydon, chair of the UNC music department, built a two-story brick and weatherboard Colonial Revival house with a stone retaining wall.
-
Public health dean Earl Brown builds a red brick house on Laurel Hill Road
The house of Earl Brown, described as dean of the UNC School of Public Health, is a two-story red brick house that mixes Colonial Revival and Cotswold features.
-
R. E. Coker is named a Kenan professor
The university gave Coker a Kenan professorship in 1939.
-
Sample and Ina Forbus make the old Morrow's Mill on Cane Creek their home
Sample B. Forbus, later director of Watts Hospital, and the writer Ina B. Forbus bought the 1878 grist mill on Cane Creek in 1938 and converted it into their permanent home in 1939, keeping its hand-hewn beams and setting millstones in the garden. The mill had run until 1930.
-
The Alumni Building's interior is renovated
The building had held the Atwood and Nash office during the 1920s campus campaign. A second renovation followed in 1973, and the two left little of that interior.
-
The Bryan Building goes up on South Columbia Street as an apartment house
The two-and-a-half-story brick Colonial Revival building at 230 South Columbia Street, known as the Bryan Building, was built in 1939 as apartments.
-
The Hargraves Center and Chapel Hill’s Negro Community Center
Chapel Hill’s Black residents bought land for a Negro Community Center in 1939; the Navy finished the building as quarters for the B-1 Band during the war, and it opened for community use in 1945. It gained the A.D. Clark Pool in 1961, was renamed for William M. Hargraves in 1973 and added the Northside Gymnasium in 1998, and its gym was named for Nate Davis in 2022.
-
UNC Press editor William Couch builds a brick and stone house on Laurel Hill Road
William Couch, editor of the University of North Carolina Press and brother of botanist John N. Couch, built a two-story brick and stone Colonial Revival house with a two-story gallery, designed by William Sprinkle.
-
UNC Press publishes These Are Our Lives
The University of North Carolina Press at Chapel Hill published These Are Our Lives in 1939, life histories gathered by Federal Writers' Project workers in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia, with a preface by W. T. Couch.
-
UNC tennis coach John Kenfield opens the Carolina Sports Shop
Kenfield started a sporting goods store on the north side of East Franklin. New owners bought him out in 1942 and made Henry Sawtelle McGinty manager.
-
Chapel Hill Methodists sell their parsonage and buy the Frink house
The Methodist church sold its parsonage to Marguerite M. Judson, mother of a university student, and bought the Frink house on Pittsboro Street as its new parsonage. By that September Mrs. Judson owned and lived in the old parsonage on Rosemary Lane near the Town Hall.
-
North Carolina's first Boys State meets on the UNC campus
The Institute ran the week-long civics program for the state American Legion, modeled on one begun in Illinois in 1935. About 135 high school boys spent up to three hours a day in class on government besides sports, heard Governor Hoey and other officials, and elected Douglass Hunt their governor.
-
William S. Hogan is appointed Chapel Hill postmaster
President Roosevelt appointed Hogan, assistant postmaster, to succeed Robert A. Eubanks on the nomination of Congressman Carl Durham, and the Senate confirmed him. Durham waived an examination because Hogan had served in the office about twenty years.
-
Citizens buy land for a Negro Community Center
Ten Chapel Hill men, among them Louis Graves, R. B. House and Paul Wager, signed a $1,500 note at the Bank of Chapel Hill to buy about five acres of the old Craig place at the west end of Rosemary Lane for a Black community center. The project grew out of concerns raised by the Negro Civic Club.
-
A memorial tablet for Robert Bingham is installed in Memorial Hall
A memorial tablet in Robert Bingham's name was installed in the university's Memorial Hall in Chapel Hill on October 12, 1939.
-
House Speaker William Bankhead dedicates the Institute of Government building
On the eve of Thanksgiving a standing-room crowd in Hill Music Hall heard Bankhead, Governor Clyde Hoey and President Frank Graham praise Coates, with eight of the state's eleven congressmen and former governor O. Max Gardner on hand. A reception followed in Graham Memorial, and guests stayed for the Virginia football game the next day.
-
Albert Coates completes the Institute of Government's Franklin Street building
Albert Coates built the Institute's Franklin Street headquarters with private gifts and a Jefferson Standard Life loan, and it opened in November 1939. The University took title only on June 30, 1945, after the legislature paid off the mortgage. The building later carried the Coates name.
-
Ralph H. Graves is buried in Chapel Hill
Ralph H. Graves, a New York editor and newspaper syndicate agent born in Chapel Hill, died at his home in Garden City, Long Island, on December 1, 1939. After a funeral there, a burial service was held at the Chapel Hill cemetery on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 5.
- 1940s
-
A Chapel Hill chapter of the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies is organized
Frank Graham and Durham banker George Watts Hill were among the first North Carolinians to sign on with the national committee formed in 1940, and chapters were organized in Chapel Hill and Asheville. Covington describes Chapel Hill as a center of support for the Allies while both of the state's senators opposed involvement.
-
Alice Noble becomes first adviser to the pharmacy school's Kappa Epsilon chapter
When the Lambda chapter of the Kappa Epsilon fraternity was set up at the School of Pharmacy in 1940, the school's librarian Alice Noble became its first adviser.
-
Archie Royal Davis becomes architect for the University of North Carolina
The Durham architect Archie Royal Davis took the post of university architect at Chapel Hill in 1940. He then helped give Franklin Street's business district its Colonial Revival look, designing several store buildings and painting watercolor views to persuade owners to rebuild in that style, with backing from George Watts Hill and town leaders.
-
Architect Eugene Stroud designs physician John J. Wright's house on Laurel Hill Circle
A two-story, three-bay shingled Colonial Revival house was built for physician John J. Wright to a design by Eugene Stroud.
-
Dudley Cowden builds a galleried house with a specimen garden on Country Club Road
The Cowden house is a two-story frame Colonial Revival dwelling with a two-story stone west wing, a front gallery, a stone terrace, a stone garage and a formal specimen garden.
-
Good-roads advocate Harriet Morehead Berry is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Harriet Morehead Berry (1877-1940), who campaigned for North Carolina road improvements in the 1920s, was buried in the cemetery.
-
Henry P. Brandis Jr. joins the UNC law faculty
After two state tax posts, Brandis, the Institute of Government's first full-time staff member, joined the university's law school faculty in 1940. He became its dean in 1949 and a Graham Kenan Professor of Law in 1965, and retired in 1972.
-
Isaac Hall Manning retires from the medical faculty
After leaving the deanship Manning stayed on as a professor until he retired in 1940.
-
John Scott Trotter turns the old Bryan boarding house into The Hill House
Mrs. Green Bryan's heirs sold her West Franklin Street boarding house to Trotter, who renovated it and named it The Hill House, with hotel rooms and rental apartments.
-
Kennon Cheek dies at his home in Northside
Cheek, born in Chapel Hill about 1890, lived out his life in the house he built on land in Northside bought from the university's holdings, and died there in 1940 after diabetes and overwork wore him down in the late 1930s.
-
Louis Graves starts a newspaper campaign to give Franklin Street a Williamsburg look
Feeling the business district looked shabby beside the new campus, Chapel Hill Weekly editor Louis Graves began praising Colonial Williamsburg's shops in editorials. Joseph Hyde Pratt, John M. Booker, W. D. Carmichael Jr., Collier Cobb and George Watts Hill backed the plan, and architect Archie Davis gave the planning commission watercolors showing owners how to remodel.
-
St. Paul's A.M.E. builds a bungalow parsonage beside the church
The congregation put up a one-story bungalow next to the sanctuary as its parsonage.
-
The Carolina Inn completes the first of its rear additions
The Carolina Inn, which Arthur Nash designed for John Sprunt Hill, gained a rear addition in 1940, the first of three (later ones in 1970 and 1995) that tracked the university's growth.
-
The University Laundry is built on West Cameron Avenue
The university laundry at 609 West Cameron Avenue was built in 1940 of brick over a steel frame, with an Art Moderne front block and a long industrial rear wing. An addition came after 1960.
-
The WPA rebuilds the Forest Theatre in stone
Works Progress Administration crews remade the amphitheatre in local stone: a screen wall along Country Club Road, curved seating following the hillside, towers for lights and sound, and a rough stone stage. The present structure dates from this rebuilding.
-
The university builds a heating and power plant on West Cameron Avenue
In 1940 the university put up a large steel-frame heating and power plant with brick walls at 503 West Cameron Avenue, two to four stories high. Its stepped facade and rounded corners are in the Art Moderne manner.
-
The university founds the Inter-American Institute, with Leavitt as director
President Frank Porter Graham founded the Inter-American Institute in 1940, growing out of Leavitt's work building Latin American research collections. Leavitt directed it until 1959; it took the name Institute of Latin American Studies in 1947.
-
Thomas P. Lloyd opens the Carolina Pharmacy
Lloyd, once James Pritchard's partner, opened his own drugstore in the space Ledbetter-Pickard Stationery left when it moved a door east.
-
UNC School of Public Health runs a Rockefeller-funded syphilis study in Orange and neighboring counties
The School of Public Health's first research project, a field epidemiological study of syphilis funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, ran from 1940 to 1950 with the state venereal disease control program in Orange, Chatham, Person and Durham counties. Project staff held clinics, lectured and traced contacts in the health departments.
-
UNC establishes a School of Public Health
UNC's Division of Public Health, created within the School of Medicine in 1936 under Dr. Milton Rosenau, separated from the medical school in 1940 and became the School of Public Health, with Rosenau as its first dean. The school is now the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health.
-
UNC expansion and neighborhood change
The university’s growth pressed on the streets around it, from Victory Village for veterans in 1946 to the main-campus development plan of 2001, the Carolina North agreement of 2009 and the campus extension announced in 2026. Northside and Pine Knolls answered with conservation districts, a building freeze in 2011 and a community plan, while a 2025 state law removed the town’s zoning control over university projects.
-
UNC purchases Chapel Hill's airfield
In 1940 the university bought the Chapel Hill airport that Charlie Martindale had opened in 1928 on land bought from Professor Horace Williams. By August the trustees had set aside $15,000 for land, the university had agreed terms with Martindale and neighbor Fred Sparrow, Williams had given over 200 acres, and the field was to bear his name.
-
UNC receives the Horace Williams tract by bequest
The core of what became the Carolina North tract, north of Estes Drive and west of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, came to the university as a bequest from Professor Horace Williams. The university later bought adjoining land, and parts of the site were used as an airport, landfill, town operations center and animal shelter.
-
University controller William D. Carmichael Jr. builds a large brick house in Laurel Hill
William Carmichael and his wife had one of the biggest Colonial Revival houses in town built at 106 Laurel Hill Circle, a red brick house with a classical entrance and flanking wings.
-
William D. Carmichael Jr. returns to Chapel Hill as the university's finance officer
Carmichael left a New York Stock Exchange partnership and came back in 1940 to serve the consolidated University of North Carolina as finance officer. As finance officer, comptroller and then vice-president he raised money from the legislature, foundations, corporations and individuals.
-
William Sprinkle designs Frances Gardham's house on Country Club Road
Frances Gardham's Colonial Revival house with vernacular details is one of three Rocky Ridge Farm houses the nomination credits to architect William Sprinkle.
-
William Van Sprinkle designs a Colonial Revival house for Horace Crockford on Country Club Road
For professor Horace D. Crockford and his wife, William Van Sprinkle designed a modest two-story Colonial Revival house of brick and weatherboard at 305 Country Club Road, with a garage wing and a cupola, as building in Laurel Hill picked up again at the end of the 1930s.
-
UNC offers its faculty and laboratories to the national defense
Twenty months before Pearl Harbor, the university president telegraphed Washington putting UNC faculty, laboratories and equipment at the government's service; the trustees confirmed the step at their August meeting.
-
Community Center land is deeded to Chapel Hill
The trustees holding the five-acre community-center site deeded it to the Town of Chapel Hill, whose aldermen had voted in May to accept the title and sponsor the project, since the WPA required government ownership. The deed limited the land to a community center and recreation for Black residents.
-
UNC makes physical training compulsory for every student
As part of its defense program the university began requiring physical training of students in all classes from September 1940.
-
Horace Williams dies and is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Williams died at eighty-two and was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. He left all of his property to the university in trust, the income to pay for fellowships in philosophy.
-
Connor returns to the UNC faculty as Craige professor
After resigning as Archivist of the United States in 1941, Connor came back to Chapel Hill to hold the newly established Craige Professorship of Jurisprudence and History until he retired in 1949.
-
Illustrator William Meade Prince and his wife Lillian build a house in Greenwood
William Meade Prince, the illustrator who taught art at the university, and his wife Lillian were building a home in the Greenwood neighborhood at the end of 1941. He lived and worked there until his death in 1951.
-
Robert H. Wettach serves as dean of the UNC School of Law
Wettach, who also served as an assistant state attorney general, lived with his wife Alpha in the rented Nash house on South Boundary Street.
-
The university hosts 108 South American students in its Winter-Summer School
In 1941 the university received 108 students from seven South American countries for English courses and regular classes in a program Leavitt directed. The General Assembly met in special joint session in Chapel Hill in their honor.
-
W. Reece Berryhill becomes dean of the UNC School of Medicine
Berryhill, who had been physician-in-chief at the University infirmary and director of the student health service in Chapel Hill since 1933, became professor of medicine and dean of the School of Medicine in 1941. He led the school's expansion from a two-year to a four-year program.
-
Construction begins on the Negro Community Center
Work on the Negro Community Center began on January 9, 1941, with Clarence Webb directing a crew of 20 and Charles Craig, the Black architect and contractor who drew the plans, helping supervise. A WPA grant paid most of the cost, and Black masons, carpenters and other workers donated their labor.
-
Eben G. Merritt opens a new filling station on the Pittsboro Road
E. G. Merritt opened a new filling station on the Pittsboro Road, just above his old stand, with a tiled roof and a large parking lot. It later ran as Merritt's Service Station and store.
-
UNC junior Joe Felmet is elected executive secretary of the campus American Student Union
The Daily Tar Heel reported that Felmet, a junior from Asheville who had been active in the American Student Union for two years, was elected unanimously as executive secretary of the Carolina chapter after representing it at the group's national convention in New York. He took his A.B. at UNC in 1942.
-
Chapel Hill appoints its first town planning commission
After more than a year of urging by the Chapel Hill Weekly, the town named a five-member planning commission to review the design of new and remodeled buildings. It set the Colonial Revival look of downtown for the next decade.
-
Chapel Hill's British war relief committee raises money for a mobile canteen in London
The local committee raised $1,160 to buy a mobile tea kitchen and a large stock of food for Londoners under German bombing.
-
Chapel Hill organizes civilian defense after Pearl Harbor
Within days of Pearl Harbor, Mayor John Foushee called for hundreds of civilian-defense volunteers, and armed sentries guarded the airport, the University Lake dam and the power plant. A control center opened at the Carolina Inn, with a branch volunteer office for Black residents at Perry's barber shop, and UNC students formed a volunteer training corps.
-
UNC forms the Carolina Volunteer Training Corps and opens a War Information Center
In the month of Pearl Harbor the university organized a volunteer military training corps for students and set up a War Information Center.
-
Akers is named dean of the School of Library Science, UNC's first woman dean
Akers, director of the school since 1935, was named dean, the first woman dean at UNC-Chapel Hill. She held the post until 1954.
-
Coates trains as a civil defense instructor and Popular Government issues a defense number
Called to a War Department school in Texas in the summer of 1942, Coates returned to run civil defense training through the Institute, and that fall Popular Government published a 'Defense Issue' on espionage, water system protection, gas attacks and air raid warnings. In 1945 an Army Service Forces colonel credited the Institute with the plan for joining local and state forces with federal ones to defend the state.
-
Geologist Joseph Hyde Pratt, first chairman of the Chapel Hill Planning Board, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Joseph Hyde Pratt (1870-1942), professor of geology and the first chairman of the Chapel Hill Planning Board, was buried in the cemetery.
-
Guion Griffis Johnson leads home-front work in Chapel Hill and Orange County
During World War II Johnson chaired the Community Service Committee of the Chapel Hill War Price and Rationing Board, was public relations officer for the Orange County Office of Civil Defense, and collected war records for Orange County.
-
James C. McFarling gives up dairying on the Bennett-McFarling farm on Erwin Road
McFarling, given the farm by an uncle, raised cotton on 170 acres and ran an 80-cow dairy with his wife Alice at the Triple-A farmhouse at 101 Erwin Road until he quit the dairy business in 1942. A milk house and cotton house were still standing in 1992.
-
Jim Tatum coaches UNC football for a single season
Tatum was UNC's head football coach for one year in 1942. He then joined the navy and learned the split-T formation as an assistant to its founder, Don Faurot, at Iowa Pre-Flight.
-
Maurice Julian opens The College Shop, a men's clothing store
Julian moved into the space Durham Dairy Products had left at 140 East Franklin and opened a men's clothing store he called The College Shop.
-
The Carolina Theatre is built on East Franklin Street to a Williamsburg design by Archie Davis
The new two-story brick theatre at 108 East Franklin Street, with a steep roof, dormers and brick pediments and arches, was the one building in the 100 block of East Franklin to follow the Williamsburg plan.
-
The Institute of Government becomes part of the university
The Institute of Government, begun as a separate body, was made part of the university in 1942.
-
The Janitors' Association reorganizes as a CIO union local
The Janitors' Association became Local 403-P of the State, County and Municipal Workers of America, a CIO union. Minutes of July 2, 1942 name pay as the most important matter, and laundry worker Rebecca Clark became a shop steward.
-
The Methodist church annex on Franklin Street becomes a recreation center
The former Methodist church, kept as an annex when the new church went up in 1926, was converted into a recreation center.
-
The old Carolina Theatre is renamed The Village
With the new Carolina Theatre open on the south side of the street, the 1927 house on the north side took the name The Village.
-
UNC starts a pre-induction curriculum for students bound for the service
The university set up a course of study for all students entering military service; it later grew into the College for War Training.
-
Wilbur Kutz opens The Varsity, a clothing store with a basement soda fountain
Kutz's clothing store on the north side of East Franklin had a soda fountain downstairs that drew a crowd.
-
William Picard Jacocks retires to Chapel Hill
After about thirty years of public health work for the Rockefeller Foundation, much of it against hookworm in India and Ceylon, Jacocks retired and moved back to Chapel Hill, where he was active in alumni affairs.
-
Eleanor Roosevelt speaks at Memorial Hall to close a post-war planning conference
Eleanor Roosevelt spoke in Memorial Hall at UNC to a capacity audience of about 2,000 people, closing a two-day conference on post-war planning sponsored by the Carolina Political Union and the International Student Service. She warned the audience that there was no going back to normalcy.
-
German, Italian and Japanese aliens re-register at the Chapel Hill post office
All German, Italian and Japanese aliens over 14 living in Chapel Hill had to re-register, with three photographs, at the post office. Postmaster William S. Hogan and Assistant Postmaster Strowd ran the registration, following the procedure of one held there in 1940.
-
The Orange County Public Library bookmobile makes stops in Chapel Hill
In late February 1942 the Chapel Hill Weekly announced that the county bookmobile, with librarian Ernestine Grafton in charge, would park in front of the Texaco station from noon to 2 p.m. for browsers and borrowers. That spring the bookmobile offered a $5 prize to the school collecting the most waste paper, with the proceeds buying children's books, and a state aid increase let the library order books on readers' requests.
-
Chapel Hill High School burns
Fire destroyed the Chapel Hill high school building on South Columbia Street, then the Pittsboro highway, early on Saturday, August 8, 1942. The school board arranged to hold grades 10 to 12 in rooms at the Baptist church and the ninth grade at the elementary school, and wartime material shortages delayed a new building for years.
-
Kenneth Tanner lends West House to the Carolina Volunteer Training Corps
Tanner gave the student officer-training corps the use of West House as its headquarters for the rest of the war. The corps then had 125 students in eight companies under Lt. Col. W. A. Raborg.
-
Daphne Athas graduates from UNC
Athas graduated from the university in 1943 after studying writing with Betty Smith and Phillips Russell.
-
Engineer Thomas C. Atwood dies, ending the firm of Atwood and Weeks
Atwood's death in 1943 closed the partnership that had carried out much of the university's building since the 1920s.
-
Pre-meteorology and aviation training units arrive at UNC
In the first half of 1943 the university took in pre-meteorology and aviation training units, adding to the Navy programs already on campus.
-
Rachel Crook opens a fish and produce market on West Franklin Street
Crook made an old service station, lately a chicken house, into a fish and produce market.
-
Robert Rhinehart buys the Hill Bakery from Mrs. William Neal
Rhinehart bought the bakery that William Brumfield Neal's widow had run since his death in 1935.
-
The General Assembly passes a resolution commending the Institute of Government
Peyton Abbott, a Winston-Salem lawyer who moved into the Institute building on December 1, 1942, led its coverage of the 1943 session, winning a seat at the press table and a copy of every bill. Before adjourning, the legislature passed a joint resolution praising the Institute's service to it.
-
William Meade Prince becomes head of the university's art department
William Meade Prince took charge of the University of North Carolina's art department during World War II, while also making posters and drawings for wartime causes.
-
The NROTC holds its annual dance to open the new armory
The Naval ROTC dedicated its armory with its annual Navy dance on the drill deck, with the Navy B-1 Band, the Black enlisted musicians stationed with the Pre-Flight School, named as the band. The drill deck stayed a favorite dance floor through the war.
-
Governor Broughton speaks at a Pre-Flight School graduation in Kenan Stadium
Broughton and UNC president Frank Porter Graham both spoke at Navy Pre-Flight School graduation exercises in Kenan Stadium on June 2, 1943.
-
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, written in Chapel Hill, is published
Smith wrote the novel in a one-room house on North Street in Chapel Hill, rising about half past five and working against the chimney wall to keep warm. Harper published it on 17 August 1943 and it sold more than 150,000 copies within two weeks.
-
Chapel Hill High School moves into the old Hume house on West Franklin Street
After fourteen months of classes in the Baptist church following the 1942 fire, the high school moved into the former Hume house, once the Hogan house and the Zeta Beta Tau house, owned by Caesar Cone. It held the principal's office, the library and four classrooms, with larger classes in the elementary school basement.
-
Reader's Digest profiles Albert Coates and the Institute of Government
Roving editor J. P. McEvoy visited Chapel Hill that summer, and his article, titled 'Don't Shoot Your Sheriff: Teach Him,' ran in the October issue. It brought Coates speaking invitations from several states and an offer from founder DeWitt Wallace to pay him to tour the country, which Coates declined.
-
Coates publishes his first history of the Institute of Government, paid for by DeWitt Wallace
In place of a speaking tour, Coates wrote a 76-page account of how the Institute grew out of his law classroom, issued under the Popular Government name in the National University Extension Association's studies series. Wallace paid for 30,000 copies for national distribution, and on the advice of Louis R. Wilson and W. T. Couch, Coates took out the profanity before it went to press.
-
Governor Broughton asks the Institute of Government to help towns plan for after the war
As Allied armies advanced across Europe, Broughton called on the short-staffed Institute to help plan for life in North Carolina's towns and cities once the war ended. State payments for this work and for civil defense training steadied the Institute's budget.
-
Pritchard's drugstore on East Franklin Street closes after its owner dies
James Manning Pritchard died and his drugstore shut. Rachel Crook sold pecans in the empty store for a short while before the North Carolina Cafeteria, formerly on Fraternity Row, bought the building and moved in.
-
The B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation buys a lot on Cameron Avenue
The North Carolina B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation bought a lot on Cameron Avenue in Chapel Hill and later built a house there where a rabbi held services for students and townspeople.
-
Vic and Rebecca Huggins run Huggins Hardware on East Franklin Street
The Hugginses bought the University Hardware Company and opened Huggins Hardware on March 22, 1944, adding kitchenware and general merchandise to the keys, paint and tools. They sold the store in 1968.
-
Quakers organize the Chapel Hill Monthly Meeting of Friends
The Chapel Hill Monthly Meeting was organized, the first Friends meeting in Orange County since the old Eno Meeting was laid down about a century earlier. It had no building and had bought a lot on Highway 54.
-
Mrs. E. G. Danziger buys Henrietta Smedes's house on Hillsborough Street
The Danzigers, Austrian refugees whose candy and pastry shop was on Franklin Street, bought the 1919 house at 211 Hillsborough Street from Henrietta Smedes, who had retired from the university staff. That September they advertised their Forest Hills house for sale.
-
Wartime day nursery opens for the children of Black working mothers in Chapel Hill and Carrboro
A federally funded day nursery for Black children opened at the Orange County Training School, caring for thirty children aged two to six from 7:15 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. while their mothers worked. Parents paid for food, and by October 1944 two nursery schools were running, one in the Masonic building on the edge of Carrboro and one on Brooks Street.
-
Frederick Koch dies and is buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Koch, who taught dramatic literature and playwriting at UNC for twenty-six years and organized the Carolina Playmakers, died on August 16, 1944 and was buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery. Samuel Selden succeeded him as chair of the Department of Dramatic Art and director of the Playmakers.
-
Nelson Callahan and Morris Timmons open the Village Printshop next to the Porthole
The Village Printshop opened at 7 Fraternity Row, next door to the Porthole, run by Nelson Callahan, who had worked at the Orange Printshop since 1928, and Morris Timmons, operator of the Porthole. It did job printing by letterpress and offset.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
-
A row of Colonial-style stores fills the 300 and 400 blocks of West Franklin Street
As downtown pushed west after the war, an unbroken row of Williamsburg-inspired shops went up along West Franklin Street, many designed by Archie Davis.
-
A. H. Poe buys Ben Strowd's Pure Oil station on West Franklin Street for his DeSoto dealership
Poe bought the Pure Oil service station from Ben Strowd and moved his DeSoto car agency into it.
-
Andy Griffith plays his first role, in The Gondoliers at Memorial Hall
Andy Griffith, who had arrived at Carolina in July 1944, auditioned on a whim and made his stage debut in a Carolina Playmakers production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers at Memorial Hall.
-
Classics professor J. P. Harland builds the first postwar house in Laurel Hill
His shingled Colonial Revival cottage on Laurel Hill Road has an attached garage wing turned to face the street. Earlier Laurel Hill houses kept their garages at the far end of the driveway, so the nomination reads the wing as a sign of the car's new place in the suburb.
-
George Livas becomes sole owner of the Carolina Coffee Shop
George Livas's partnership with James Gust ended and Livas became sole owner of the Carolina Coffee Shop, which he ran until his death in 1956.
-
John Scott Trotter sells the Hill House on West Franklin Street to the Baptist church
Trotter sold the Hill House, next to the Baptist church, to the congregation, which went on renting out its apartments. In 1958 the town's first public library opened in one of its rooms.
-
John Wesley Campbell builds a fieldstone house for a pastor on North Graham Street
John Wesley Campbell designed and built a large fieldstone house at 214 North Graham Street in Northside for a local pastor, finished in 1945 and one of the first houses on the street. It is the largest of his four stone houses in the neighborhood, with a broad arched corner porch and a stone end chimney.
-
Laurel Hill Road is extended south beyond the 1927 plat
On the 1927 plat the road stopped at the south edge of 603 Laurel Hill Road. The extension carried it south toward the line later taken by the 15-501 Bypass and opened lots for postwar houses.
-
Morehead creates the foundation behind his Chapel Hill gifts
In 1945 Morehead created the Morehead Foundation to pay for the Morehead Building on the campus at Chapel Hill and to establish the scholarship that carries his name.
-
R. B. House becomes the first chancellor at Chapel Hill
North Carolina created chancellorships for its three campuses in 1945, and President Frank Porter Graham turned to House, who had been executive secretary from 1926 and dean of administration from 1934. House held the post until 1957, the longest chancellorship at Chapel Hill.
-
The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen runs its headquarters from Chapel Hill
The Fellowship of Southern Churchmen, an interracial group of Southern church people founded in 1934, kept its headquarters in Chapel Hill while Nelle Morton was general secretary from 1945 to 1949, working on race relations, labor conditions and the rural South.
-
UNC begins marking Hinton James Day each February 12
The university started Hinton James Day in 1945, during the sesquicentennial of its first student's arrival. It falls on February 12 and now also honors other Carolina firsts, including Sallie Walker Stockard and Henry Owl.
-
UNC establishes its Communication Center
The university set up a Communication Center at Chapel Hill in 1945. Departments of radio and religion followed in 1947.
-
The Saturday Evening Post profiles Coates as 'The Ugly Duckling at Chapel Hill'
Warner Olivier's article cast Coates as the law school's misfit who had overcome objections to build an Institute admired around the country. It opened with a photograph of Albert and Gladys Coates in front of the Institute building.
-
The Terrace View supper club opens on the Greensboro road west of Chapel Hill
The Terrace View, a dining and dancing club about five miles out the Greensboro road, was "christened" on Saturday, May 26, 1945 with a private ATO fraternity party held partly on its roof garden. By December it was open to the public every night, for couples only.
-
Coates deeds the Institute of Government building to the university
After the legislature appropriated $44,000 to pay off the rest of the mortgage, Coates transferred title to the Institute property to the University of North Carolina. This completed the 1941 merger plan, under which the university would take the building once it was clear of debt.
-
Chapel Hill celebrates the end of the war with Japan on Franklin Street
As the news spread that evening, townspeople, students and Pre-Flight School cadets filled Franklin Street while the campus bells rang and the fire siren sounded. Revelers draped the trees with toilet paper and lit a bonfire in the central block, and a policeman who tried to put it out was pushed aside.
-
William T. Couch leaves the University of North Carolina Press
Couch resigned in August 1945, after thirteen years as director, to lead the University of Chicago Press.
-
The Negro Community Center opens for community use
After the Navy Pre-Flight School wound down, the community center returned to town control on October 24, 1945 and opened to Black residents of Chapel Hill and Carrboro. By December a nursery school filled the basement, and an all-Black board chaired by Hubert Roberson ran the building under the Town Recreation Commission.
-
An old house said to contain part of the Nunn Tavern is moved across Kenan Street for the bus station
To clear the lot for the new bus station, a large two-story house was hauled across Kenan Street to 405 West Franklin, where W. W. McCauley later lived. Bryant traces the house to a section of the Nunn Tavern of about 1776, which had already been moved to this lot in 1923 when the Baptist church was built at Franklin and Columbia.
-
Carolina Coach Company builds a Williamsburg-style bus station on West Franklin Street
The bus station at 311 West Franklin Street had a pedimented portico, a cupola with a weathervane and other Colonial details.
-
Charlie Justice chooses Carolina and begins four seasons at Chapel Hill
Justice was one of the most sought after players in the country after playing for the Bainbridge Navy team, and he chose Chapel Hill over South Carolina and Duke. He played tailback for Carl Snavely from 1946 to 1949, gaining 170 yards on 17 carries against Virginia in his freshman season.
-
Commerce dean Dudley D. Carroll builds a small brick house on Laurel Hill Road for an in-law
The one-story side-gabled house has a traditional form with a large transom and sidelights at the door. English professor Blyden Jackson later owned it.
-
Henry W. Lewis joins the Institute of Government faculty
After his discharge from the Army, Lewis joined the small faculty of the Institute of Government at Chapel Hill, where he worked mainly on election law and the property tax.
-
Johnson-Strowd-Ward opens a furniture store on West Franklin Street
The furniture firm began in one of A. H. Poe's car showrooms and in 1947 moved further west on West Franklin into a building put up for it.
-
Katherine Kennedy Carmichael succeeds Inez Koonce Stacy as dean of women
Carmichael, who held a Vanderbilt doctorate in British literature, became dean of women at Chapel Hill in 1946, succeeding Inez Koonce Stacy, adviser to women from 1919 and dean of women from 1942. She also taught an introductory literature course for the English department.
-
Kenneth M. Brinkhous chairs the UNC Department of Pathology
Brinkhous succeeded James B. Bullitt as chair of pathology at the UNC School of Medicine in 1946 and held the post until 1973, building a research program in thrombosis and hemostasis. His department invented the partial thromboplastin time (PTT) test used in clinical laboratories.
-
Medical dean Isaac Hall Manning is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Isaac Hall Manning (1866-1946), the physician and medical school administrator who started Hospital Savings of North Carolina, the state's first medical insurance plan, was buried in the cemetery.
-
Morehead gives the university a million dollars for a planetarium
In 1946 Morehead presented the university with one million dollars to build a planetarium and put the proposal to the Board of Trustees. The building opened in 1949.
-
Terry Sanford revives Boys State, with William Friday among its counselors
After finishing his law courses, Sanford organized the first postwar Boys State session, staffed mostly by law students as counselors. Among them were William Friday, later president of the Consolidated University, whose first university paycheck came from the job, and William Aycock, a future chancellor.
-
Terry Sanford serves as assistant director of UNC's Institute of Government
After the Second World War Sanford returned to Chapel Hill, completed a law degree in 1946 and served two years as assistant director of the Institute of Government before opening a law practice in Fayetteville.
-
The Farmers Cooperative Dairy opens its plant in Chapel Hill
A larger cooperative of Orange, Chatham and Durham dairymen let the contract in June 1945 for a modern plant at West Franklin and Roberson streets; it was nearly finished in February 1946 and held a public open house at the end of May 1946. It handled fluid milk and made butter, ice cream and condensed milk.
-
The Institute builds a Highway Patrol training camp on Raleigh Road
Coates won approval to put a training camp on the eastern edge of the campus, on the south side of Raleigh Road at Country Club Road. State Highway Department crews brought seven wooden barracks built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from Camp Mackall near Fort Bragg and set them in a U around a drill yard, with water and sewer lines run from the university gym.
-
The Pick Theatre on East Franklin Street closes
The Pick Theatre shut its doors in 1946. Its building was later remodeled for J. B. Robbins's House of Fashion, a clothing store that ran until 1969.
-
Victory Village is built to house married veterans at UNC
As returning veterans pushed enrollment to about 6,800, the federal government put up the prefabricated metal houses of Victory Village on 65 acres of UNC's south campus in 1946. About 350 student families lived there, and the last units were torn down in the early 1970s for the expansion of UNC Hospitals.
-
Popular Government resumes regular publication under William Cochrane
After a three-year gap and a single issue in 1945, the Institute's magazine came out nine times a year from January 1946, edited by Cochrane. He also managed the Institute's daily business until he left in 1955 for Senator Kerr Scott's staff.
Suggest a correction to an entry →
A dated event is a fact, filed on the page of the subject it belongs to: a person, a place, a theme, or a named event or history. Pages are subjects, with their own works and sources; the Place, community, or institution filter also gathers the institutions that recur in the entries without a page of their own. The page opens on the highlights; a search or any filter looks through every dated event and storyline, and each filter’s counts say how many entries choosing it would show alongside the others. A storyline is a longer history that gathers related dated events, and each storyline’s page lists its own. Counts give dated events and storylines separately. Dates come from the sources named on the cards and from the index’s event pages; where sources disagree, the card follows the county records. Entries marked approximate or needing research say so on the card; the rest were checked against the source named on it. The correction link under the entries opens the contact form; name the entry and its date and the Friends will check the source. Suggest an event →
Compiled and maintained by the Friends of the Orange County Public Library from county records, the sources named on each card, and the index’s event pages. Last updated October 2, 2026.
