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Searched the full chronology of 9,006 dated events and 77 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–68.Back to highlights
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Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
- 1860s
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Wilson Caldwell resigns from the university and founds a school for Black children
In 1869 Wilson Caldwell, who had worked at the university as an enslaved servant and janitor, resigned and started a school for children of color in Chapel Hill.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1920s
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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.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
- 1950s
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Robert Seymour becomes the first pastor of Binkley Memorial Baptist Church
Robert Seymour came to Chapel Hill in 1959 as the first minister of the Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, organized the year before. He led it until 1988.
- 1970s
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Fred Battle directs the Hargraves Center
Fred Battle, a Lincoln High graduate of 1962, directed Chapel Hill's Hargraves Center, the former Negro Community Center on Roberson Street, from 1970 to 1987.
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The Woods family takes over the King Street hardware store that becomes Dual Supply
Wesley Woods, who had worked in the West King Street store when it was a Western Auto, bought the business and renamed it Dual Supply. His family ran it from 1973.
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Residents campaign to save Carrboro's former textile mill from demolition
In spring 1975 an Atlanta firm took an option to buy the vacant former Alberta mill, tear it down and build a shopping center. Frances Shetley and other Carrboro residents circulated a petition against its demolition, the firm let its option go, and the owner turned to a reuse plan that made it Carr Mill. The mill, the depot and the brick grist mill were nominated together to the National Register of Historic Places in June 1975.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
- 1990s
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Robin and Bob Britt buy Merritt's store from the Merritt family
Robin and Bob Britt bought the South Columbia Street store from the Merritts in 1991. Robin Britt's BLT for her husband's lunch grew into the sandwich trade that made Merritt's Store and Grill a Chapel Hill landmark.
- 2000s
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Carrboro formed the New Horizons task force for the Rogers Road area
Carrboro created the New Horizons task force to serve residents of the Rogers Road area it was annexing. The town's Rogers Road sidewalk and bus stop project, begun in 2018, grew out of the task force's work.
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Tom Stevens becomes mayor of Hillsborough
Tom Stevens became Hillsborough's mayor in 2005 and held the office for seven terms.
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Cal Horton retires after sixteen years as Chapel Hill's town manager
Horton retired in 2006 after the longest tenure of any Chapel Hill town manager. At his request, money raised in his honor went to a town award for employees who have given at least ten years of exceptional service, now the Cal Horton Service Award.
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Hannah Gill founds the Latino Migration Project at UNC
Gill started the Latino Migration Project at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to improve public understanding of Latin American migration to North Carolina. The project describes itself as an initiative of INSITE Latin America and the Caribbean.
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The Robert and Pearl Seymour Center opens on Homestead Road
The Chapel Hill senior center that Robert Seymour founded opened in a new building on Homestead Road in 2007 and was named for him and his wife, Pearl.
- 2010s
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Radius Pizzeria opens in the old savings and loan building on North Churton Street
Mick and Kate Carroll opened Radius Pizzeria, later Radius Pizzeria & Pub, at 112 North Churton Street in downtown Hillsborough.
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Damon Seils joins Carrboro's governing board after a special election
Seils won a seat on Carrboro's board in a special election in April 2013. He was re-elected and served on the board until he became mayor in December 2021.
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Lydia Lavelle takes office as Carrboro mayor, the first openly lesbian mayor in North Carolina
Lydia Lavelle, who ran unopposed for mayor in the fall 2013 election, was sworn in on December 3, 2013 as North Carolina's first openly lesbian mayor. Aldermen Randee Haven-O'Donnell, Sammy Slade and Jacquelyn Gist were sworn in for new terms at the same meeting.
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Carrboro aldermen declare the town a welcoming community for immigrant children
The Board of Aldermen unanimously passed a resolution declaring Carrboro a welcoming community for minors fleeing violence and affirming immigrant children's right to attend public school regardless of immigration status. The Southern Coalition for Social Justice and the ACLU of North Carolina helped develop it.
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Frank Heath tells the Carrboro Board of Aldermen that the Cat's Cradle has outgrown its building
At the second public hearing on a proposed arts and innovation center and hotel at East Main Street, Heath said the Cat's Cradle and the ArtsCenter were both too big for their buildings and that expansion had become urgent. He called it a dilemma for a small town with two successful arts organizations.
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Cedar Grove Community Center opens with a self-service library station
Orange County dedicated the renovated Cedar Grove Community Center, once home to the Cedar Grove Negro School, in June 2016, with a self-serve library station beside the building. The $180,000 kiosk offered automated borrowing in northern Orange County without a staffed branch; the county's FY 2021–22 budget ended support for it, citing poor performance and low patron use.
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Chapel Hill is selected for a Building Integrated Communities partnership
The Latino Migration Project chose Chapel Hill, along with Siler City, for two years of community planning support to help the town work with foreign-born residents. Town manager Roger Stancil said the town already had policies meant to make the community inclusive.
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Quintana Stewart becomes Orange County's health director
After a nationwide search, the Orange County Board of Health chose Stewart, then assistant health director at the Forsyth County Department of Public Health. She started on December 18, 2017, succeeding Colleen Bridger, who had left in February 2017 for a post in San Antonio.
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Carrboro broke ground on the Rogers Road sidewalk and bus stop project
A $1.37 million project put a five-foot sidewalk from the west side of Rogers Road to Meadow Run Court, together with a new bus pad and shelter. Ground was broken in late June 2018 and construction began that fall. The project traced back to a New Horizons task force created in 2005.
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Danita Mason-Hogans presents Chapel Hill's civil rights timeline to the town council
The Historic Civil Rights Commemorations Task Force, created by Mayor Pam Hemminger in the fall of 2017, gave the council a timeline of people, places and events in the town's civil rights struggle. Mason-Hogans, one of its leaders, told the council that who tells the history matters as much as the history itself.
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Carrboro created a zoning overlay district to protect the Lloyd-Broad neighborhood
At residents' request the Board of Aldermen set square-footage and parking limits and a cap of four unrelated occupants per household for the historically African American neighborhood, which had seen more student rentals and larger replacement houses. New building had to comply at once and existing houses were given three years.
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Chapel Hill's council accepts the task force plan for a Chapel Hill Nine marker
The council voted unanimously to accept the recommendations for a marker in front of 450 West Franklin Street, where Colonial Drug stood, and sent the plans to the town manager. Mason-Hogans, a task force member, said the marker and the learning around it mattered for young people.
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Chapel Hill adopts a Building Integrated Communities action plan
Following the 2018 community assessment, the town produced a 34-point plan covering public transportation, relations with law enforcement, resident leadership, housing access and communication in other languages. The town went on to translate documents into Spanish, Mandarin, Karen and Burmese and to add interpretation at meetings.
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Chapel Hill adopts a Language Access Plan covering Karen and Burmese
The Chapel Hill Town Council unanimously adopted a Language Access Plan in November 2019, following the 2018 Building Integrated Communities process in which immigrant and refugee residents named language access as a key need. The plan covered the town's leading non-English languages, Burmese, Karen, Mandarin Chinese and Spanish.
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The Chapel Hill Nine marker site is dedicated on the 59th anniversary of the sit-in
The town dedicated the marker site at 5 p.m. in front of the West End Wine Bar, where Colonial Drug had stood, and a march to First Baptist Church followed for a community celebration. Mason-Hogans, a main proponent of the marker, spoke about the task force's work.
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Joal Broun is elected chair of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board
The board elected Broun chair by unanimous vote after chair Margaret Samuels resigned during a recall push over the Glenwood Elementary dual language magnet decision. Mary Ann Wolf took the vice chair seat Broun had held.
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Carrboro's Board of Aldermen votes to rename itself the Town Council
After 50 years as the Board of Aldermen, a name the General Assembly approved in 1969, Carrboro's governing board passed a resolution changing its title to Town Council as part of making the town code gender neutral. It had tentatively approved the change after a public hearing on November 12. Randee Haven-O'Donnell said members who had sat on the board had felt the pinch of being called aldermen.
- 2020s
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Cat's Cradle plays its last shows before the pandemic shutdown
Destroyer played the main room at 300 East Main Street on March 11, 2020, and Songs From the Road Band played the Back Room on March 13, the club's last shows before COVID-19 closed it. Heath said he began rescheduling on the night of March 11, when the NBA suspended its season, and the March 14 shows were cancelled.
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COVID-19 transforms Orange County
Orange County, Chapel Hill and Carrboro declared states of emergency on March 13, 2020, and the county and its three towns ordered residents to stay home from March 27. UNC moved undergraduate classes online in August 2020 after campus clusters. The county emergency, extended more than a dozen times, expired on May 1, 2022.
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Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools launches Food for Students meal distribution
CHCCS, the Town of Chapel Hill, PORCH and volunteers began handing out free meals to students as schools closed, starting from about 20 sites. By December 21, 2020 the program had distributed more than 900,000 meals from 37 sites.
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Orange County, Chapel Hill and Carrboro declare a COVID-19 state of emergency
Orange County government and the Towns of Chapel Hill and Carrboro declared states of emergency to prepare for COVID-19, allowing emergency procedures and funding. The county declaration, extended more than a dozen times, stayed in force until May 1, 2022.
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COVID-19 in Orange County
From the first cases in March 2020 to the last emergency measures in 2022: closures, remote school, the health department's response, mutual aid, and the pandemic's unequal weight.
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Orange County requires face coverings
Orange County and its towns extended the local state of emergency through August 31, 2020 and required face coverings from 5 p.m. on June 12 when people could not keep six feet apart.
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Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools extends online-only classes into
The CHCCS board unanimously accepted interim Superintendent Jim Causby's recommendation to keep classes virtual through at least January 15, 2021. On December 18, 2020 the board kept remote learning in place through at least February.
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Family and community march to remember James Cates on the 50th anniversary
A candlelit march went from Hargraves Community Center to St. Joseph CME Church and down Franklin Street to Peace and Justice Plaza, where the Town of Chapel Hill invited residents to leave flowers and messages for the Cates family. Mayor Pam Hemminger pledged to work with the family and UNC to investigate the killing.
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Stewart receives the Chapel Hill-Carrboro chamber's citizenship and service award
The Greater Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce gave Stewart its Duke Energy Citizenship and Service Award in 2021, during the county's COVID-19 vaccination campaign. She later received the Ron Levine Public Health Legacy Award in 2022 and a National Association of Counties award in 2025.
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Orange County Schools students return to classrooms
Kindergarten and first-grade students returned for hybrid in-person classes on January 25, 2021. Students in grades 2-12 followed in two rotating cohorts on March 8 and March 15, a month earlier than planned, after Senate Bill 37 required districts to offer in-person instruction.
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Carrboro proclaims Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett Day
Carrboro Mayor Lydia Lavelle proclaimed January 26, 2021 Dr. Kizzmekia Corbett Day, after Hillsborough and Orange County had honored the Orange High graduate for her COVID-19 vaccine work.
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Health department vaccinates its first recipients at drive-through clinics
By early January 2021 the Orange County Health Department had vaccinated about 1,000 Phase 1a personnel at drive-through clinics in Hillsborough and Chapel Hill and opened sign-ups for residents 75 and older, more than 4,200 of whom registered.
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Hillsborough renames Thomas Ruffin Street as Lydia Lane
The Board of Commissioners voted unanimously to rename the street for Lydia, the enslaved woman shot by John Mann in the case Thomas Ruffin decided. All twelve households on the street had petitioned for a new name and had first proposed Hope Lane; Commissioner Mark Bell suggested using Lydia's name, and Commissioner Kathleen Ferguson made the motion to approve.
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Gaps in vaccination among Black and Hispanic residents reported
Chapelboro reported that Black residents were 12.4 percent of Orange County's population but 9 percent of those vaccinated, and Hispanic residents 8.6 percent and 5.5 percent. The county was working with church leaders and advocates in a Human Services Consulting Group and had held clinics at the Hargraves Community Center and in Cedar Grove.
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Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools students return for hybrid classes
The CHCCS board voted unanimously on March 4, 2021 to begin hybrid in-person instruction on March 22, nearly a month before the April 19 start it had approved in February. Students attended in cohorts two days a week, and roughly half could remain fully remote.
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Crook's Corner announces its closure
On June 9, 2021, the owners of Crook's Corner told customers the West Franklin Street restaurant was closing, saying the COVID-19 crisis had made their position untenable. Gene Hamer and chef Bill Neal opened it in 1982, Bill Smith later led the kitchen, and the James Beard Foundation named it an America's Classic in 2011.
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Orange County Public Library reopens its Main Library building
After more than a year of closure and appointment-only curbside pickup, the Main Library reopened with distancing measures under the county's plan to reopen facilities through July 2021. In Carrboro the branch at McDougle School closed on June 13 and the Cybrary opened for browsing on August 6.
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Carrboro unveils a truth plaque naming Green Cordal and Benjamin Craig
The Town of Carrboro unveiled its second truth plaque at the former freedmen's school site on North Merritt Mill Road, next to St. Paul AME Church. The text reads that Green Cordal and Benjamin Craig, freed from bondage, purchased this land for a Freedman School and church, and that with funds from the Society of Friends they built a schoolhouse that served hundreds of free Black children and adults.
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Orange County reinstates an indoor mask mandate
As the delta variant spread, Orange County and the Towns of Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsborough required masks inside buildings and businesses from 5 p.m. on August 11, 2021.
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Orange County Public Library ends overdue fines
Orange County commissioners approved a fine-free model for the county library, and overdue fines ended the next day. Library staff had found that fines fell hardest on residents facing economic hardship; charges for lost or damaged items continued. The recommendation came out of a strategic planning team organized by assistant library director Erin Sapienza.
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Chapel Hill Public Library webinar marks the 51st anniversary of the Cates killing
The Chapel Hill Public Library hosted a webinar in which family and friends, including state Senator Valerie Foushee, a first cousin of Cates, reflected on his life and on the failures that followed his death.
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Carrboro honors Jacquelyn Gist after 32 years on its governing board
Gist, who lost her seat in the 2021 municipal election, was honored by the council for more than three decades of service. Kept away by COVID-19 concerns, she sent a recorded statement saying she had spent 32 years working so that everyone who came to Carrboro would feel the same sense of place and home she had found there.
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Carrboro honors Lydia Lavelle as Damon Seils is sworn in as mayor
At the council's meeting the town honored Lavelle for her four terms as mayor, and state senator Valerie Foushee administered the oath of office to her successor, Damon Seils. Randee Haven-O'Donnell, Barbara Foushee and Danny Nowell began council terms at the same meeting.
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Orange County lifts its indoor mask mandate
Orange County and its three towns ended the indoor mask requirement on March 7, 2022. UNC-Chapel Hill lifted its campus mandate the same day, and Orange County Schools planned to make masks optional on March 10.
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Orange County's COVID-19 state of emergency expires
The county's COVID-19 emergency declaration, in force since March 13, 2020 and extended more than a dozen times, expired at 5 p.m. on May 1, 2022, making it the longest-running state of emergency in county history.
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Chapel Hill names the Hargraves Center gym for Nate Davis
The Town Council unanimously approved naming the Northside Gym at the Hargraves Community Center for Davis, the center's director for more than three decades, and its indoor court for Fred Battle, director from 1970 to 1987.
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Hillsborough tribute remembers John Blackfeather Jeffries
The Occaneechi Band, the arts group Spirit Freedom and the Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau held a tribute to Jeffries at the Passmore Center in Hillsborough. Speakers included former mayor Tom Stevens and tribal chair Tony Hayes.
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Soil collection ceremony at the Orange County courthouse honors Cyrus Guy and four other 1869 lynching victims
The Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition held a soil collection ceremony for Washington Morrow, Wright Malone, Daniel Morrow, Thomas Jefferson Morrow and Cyrus Guy, all lynched in 1869. One jar for each man was to go to the Equal Justice Initiative's memorial collection in Montgomery, Alabama, and a second jar was to stay in Orange County.
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Sammy Slade announces he will not seek reelection to the Carrboro Town Council
As candidate filing opened, Slade said he would step back after fourteen years, writing that he had believed local action was where representation could happen most authentically but that local government, operating within the same system, was no longer where he could help mitigate climate change.
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The ArtsCenter moves to Roberson Street
The ArtsCenter opened its new home at 400 Roberson Street in downtown Carrboro with a parade and ribbon-cutting on August 26, 2023, after moving from 300 East Main Street. The renovated former office building, nearly 18,000 square feet, added a larger ceramics studio, maker spaces, a black-box theater and a youth education center.
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EMPOWERment broke ground on PEACH apartments at the former Pine Knolls Community Center
The nonprofit began building 10 debt-free apartments for households earning 30 percent or less of area median income at 107 Johnson Street, where Ted Parrish had run the independent Pine Knolls Community Center. It had raised $3.5 million for the project.
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Barbara Foushee is sworn in as Carrboro's first Black woman mayor
Barbara Foushee, a council member since 2017, won the November 2023 mayoral election unopposed and took office as the first Black woman mayor of Carrboro and its second Black mayor after Robert Drakeford. She was re-elected in November 2025.
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Carrboro unveils a marker honoring Manly McCauley
On February 18, 2024, the Town of Carrboro, the Orange County Community Remembrance Coalition and the Equal Justice Initiative unveiled a historical marker beside Carrboro Town Hall for Manly McCauley. McCauley, an 18-year-old Black farmhand, was lynched by a white mob in 1898 near Hatch Road and Old Greensboro Road, west of Carrboro.
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Carrboro backs a study of turning the old University Railroad line into a greenway
The Town Council unanimously approved an agreement to study converting the 11-mile rail corridor, which still carries coal to UNC's cogeneration plant, into a multi-use trail once the plant stops using coal.
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Buckhorn Flea Market closes on Buckhorn Road
The Buckhorn Flea Market on Buckhorn Road in western Orange County, known to many Spanish speakers as La Pulga de Mebane, closed after about four decades when a trucking company bought the land. Its 300 to 500 weekend vendors were largely Latino immigrants, and the Mebane City Council voted on July 1 to annex and rezone the property for a truck terminal.
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Radius Pizzeria & Pub closes after more than eleven years
Owners Kate and Mick Carroll closed Radius Pizzeria & Pub at 112 North Churton Street on December 29, 2024, saying they wanted more time with their family.
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Randee Haven-O'Donnell announces she will not seek reelection to the Carrboro Town Council
Ending twenty years on the town's governing board, Haven-O'Donnell said she was encouraging new voices and would turn to organizing and advocacy on reproductive rights, tenants' rights, stormwater, water quality and PFAS pollution. Chapelboro noted that during her service the council approved the South Green development, a community safety task force and greenway projects.
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Dual Supply puts up a going-out-of-business sign
Dual Supply, the downtown hardware store at 115 West King Street, began a closing sale set to run until the shop closed at the end of September 2026.
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The Burwell School is renamed the Elizabeth Keckly Center at the Burwell School
The Burwell School Historic Site in Hillsborough took the name the Elizabeth Keckly Center at the Burwell School in late August 2026, honoring the woman the Burwells held in slavery in the house from 1835. Site director Elizabeth Hays said the aim was to hold the site's histories together.
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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 4, 2026.
