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University of North Carolina, Memorial Hall Inaugural Proceedings, Wednesday.Open the sourceAll sources
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Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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The state supplies prison-made brick for Memorial Hall
Governor Jarvis offered the building committee convict labor to make brick at Chapel Hill, or brick from the State Prison delivered at its gate with the university paying the freight. After inspecting the penitentiary brick the committee chose it, and Jarvis had it shipped by rail shortly before the cornerstone was laid on September 25, 1883. In June 1885 the state's bill for the brick was the one building debt still unpaid.
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Trustees vote to raise a monument to David L. Swain beside Caldwell's
At the June 1883 commencement a well-attended board of trustees adopted a resolution asking for an alumni committee to collect money for a monument to the late president David L. Swain, to stand near the Caldwell monument on the campus. Governor Thomas J. Jarvis, then board president, named the committee, and within weeks the plan turned into Memorial Hall.
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Governor Jarvis has the trustees build a hall in place of a Swain obelisk
At a trustees' meeting in Raleigh in July 1883, Governor Thomas J. Jarvis proposed that the board and the alumni pool their efforts on a large hall at Chapel Hill instead of an obelisk to Swain. The board agreed, on condition that the alumni not be bound to any fixed sum, and Jarvis wrote the ordinance ordering what was first called Swain Memorial Hall.
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Battle and Winston canvass the state for Memorial Hall tablets
With work on Memorial Hall stopped over the winter of 1883-84 because money from the trustees and alumni had dried up, the building committee decided to ask families of distinguished men tied to the university to pay for white marble memorial tablets on the hall's walls. President Kemp P. Battle and Professor George T. Winston canvassed the state in person and by letter and signed up ninety-eight tablets.
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Carpenter John Daugherty finishes Memorial Hall after architect Samuel Sloan dies
Samuel Sloan, the hall's architect, fell ill from exposure in the great heat of summer 1884 and died at a critical stage of the work. His chief carpenter, John Daugherty of Philadelphia, carried the building to completion, and a local mason, Captain Richards, set every memorial tablet himself without metal fastenings.
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A Memorial Hall tablet names the eleven donors of the university's land
The trustees placed a tablet in Memorial Hall naming the eleven Orange County landowners whose gifts of land settled the university and the village at Chapel Hill. Cameron called them the sturdy Orange farmers who fixed the seat of the institution.
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A woman with no family tie to Davie pays for his Memorial Hall tablet
William R. Davie's tablet in Memorial Hall was given by a woman unrelated to him, out of admiration for his work as the university's leading founding trustee. Cameron added that Davie's portrait then hung in the Dialectic Society's hall.
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Memorial Hall tablets list the university's Confederate dead
The trustees set aside a place in Memorial Hall, at their own expense, for four tablets ten feet long listing about 260 alumni who died in Confederate service. The roll was headed by Leonidas Polk, Episcopal bishop of Louisiana and Confederate lieutenant general, the oldest alumnus killed in the war.
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Trustees pay for Memorial Hall tablets to Caldwell, Swain, Mitchell and Phillips
Besides the subscribed tablets, the trustees put up tablets at their own cost to presidents Joseph Caldwell and David L. Swain and professors Elisha Mitchell and James Phillips, in tribute to the long-serving officers. Governor Scales told the dedication crowd that the hall, first meant as Swain's memorial alone, had been redesigned so these names stood beside his.
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Cornelia Phillips Spencer's University Ode is sung at the Memorial Hall dedication
The dedication proceedings closed with an ode Cornelia Phillips Spencer wrote for the university, whose verses look back to the laying of the first cornerstone in October 1793. The trustees then adjourned to the next morning.
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Trustees adopt resolutions thanking Thomas J. Jarvis for Memorial Hall
As Thomas J. Jarvis left the governorship and with it the board presidency, the trustees unanimously thanked him for his yearly appeals to the legislature, his steady attendance and, above all, for Memorial Hall, built at his suggestion. They ordered an engrossed copy hung in the university library and another sent to him.
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Trustees thank Paul C. Cameron for the loan that finished Memorial Hall
When the money ran out and appeals brought no answer, trustee Paul C. Cameron, chairman of the building committee, advanced the funds to finish Memorial Hall from his own pocket without security. At the dedication Governor Alfred M. Scales thanked him publicly, and the board unanimously adopted Fabius H. Busbee's resolutions thanking Cameron for the loan and for overseeing the work from the start.
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