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1. Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865

2. 1820s
3. 1822 to May 1823
   Chapel Hill Trustee William Polk hires out five enslaved men to build Old West

   Jourdan, Jim, Stephen, Charles and Joe, men enslaved by William Polk, worked on the construction of Old West, then called New College. By a settlement of May 22, 1823, the university had paid Polk $600 for their labor.

4. 1830s
5. 1834
   Hillsborough James Strudwick Smith buys Harriet, aged fifteen, as Mary Ruffin Smith's maid

   James Strudwick Smith bought Harriet, fifteen years old by the deed, from William Kell of Orange County to be his daughter Mary Ruffin Smith's maid. The family then lived in Hillsborough and enslaved about thirty people at a time.

6. 1840s
7. 1843
   Life event · Chapel Hill William Horn Battle moves his family to Chapel Hill and buys a house beside the campus

   Judge William H. Battle moved his family from Raleigh to Chapel Hill in 1843 so his sons could attend the university. He bought a house near the campus and enlarged it, adding quarters for the people the family enslaved.

8. 1844
   Hillsborough Harriet, enslaved by the Smith family in Hillsborough, gives birth to Cornelia after Sidney Smith rapes her

   Harriet, bought by James Strudwick Smith in 1834 as a maid for his daughter Mary Ruffin Smith, was raped by his son Sidney and gave birth to Cornelia in 1844, while the family's home was in Hillsborough. Cornelia's granddaughter Pauli Murray told the story in Proud Shoes.

9. 1845
   Hillsborough James Strudwick Smith sells Harriet, Julius and Cornelia to Mary Ruffin Smith

   Shielding his property from creditors, James Strudwick Smith passed most of the family's holdings to his daughter Mary Ruffin Smith, including Harriet and her children Julius and Cornelia, whom he sold to her in 1845. Cornelia had been born in 1844 after Sidney Smith raped Harriet.

10. 1845-1847
    Price Creek Plantation The Smiths leave Hillsborough for Price Creek Plantation near Chapel Hill

    After Cornelia's birth the Smiths sold their Hillsborough house and moved to the more remote Price Creek Plantation, about 1,500 acres southwest of Chapel Hill, where building of the main house, Oakland, began in 1845. Harriet and her children moved with them.

11. March 1845
    Slavery and freedom · Chapel Hill Enslaved workers build and tend the Battle household in Chapel Hill

    Letters between Lucy and William H. Battle in March 1845 describe enslaved men at their Chapel Hill house: Ben planted shrubs and flowers, Harry worked on the outbuildings and was hired out, and Billy was also at work. The well-house, servants' houses, barn and bath house were built almost entirely by enslaved labor.

12. May 11, 1846
    Slavery and freedom · University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Albert joins his brother Osborne to plaster the halls at the university

    Cosby sent Albert from Smithfield in Virginia to Chapel Hill, where Osborne was already at work on the additions to Old East and Old West. Albert carried a letter to university president David L. Swain saying he came to help his brother plaster the halls and would judge the sand to be used together with Osborne.

13. Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899

14. 1870s
15. 1876
    Property or economic transaction · Chapel Hill Kemp Plummer Battle buys his father's Chapel Hill house and names it Senlac

    Returning to Chapel Hill in 1876 to become university president, Battle bought the family house from his father, added a one-story wing on each side and named it Senlac. The house stands on Battle Lane.

16. 1880s
17. 1889
    Chapel Hill The university offers Mary Ruffin Smith's Jones Grove tract for sale in lots

    A committee of Kemp P. Battle, John Manning and A. H. Merritt advertised for sale, in lots, the 1,500-acre Jones Grove tract just over the line in Chatham County that Mary Ruffin Smith had left the university. The sales took years and brought about $15,000, part of it later lent to start Chapel Hill's first electric plant.

18. Early twentieth century · 1900–1944

19. 1910s
20. 1910
    Naming or commemoration · Chapel Hill John Wilson begins designing UNC's Confederate monument

    After the monument committee weighed competing designs, it chose Canadian sculptor John Wilson's design for the Confederate soldier statue planned for the UNC campus. Wilson began the work in 1910, using sixteen-year-old Harold Langlois of Boston as his model.

21. October 7, 1918
    Law, policy or court · Orange County Orange County's new Board of Health orders churches, schools and theatres closed and forbids all meetings

    After the state Council of Defense warned county chairmen of the spread of Spanish influenza, they formed a County Board of Health, which on October 7 ordered the closing of all churches, schools and theatres and forbade meetings of every kind, the disease having already broken out in the community. Red Cross members carried most of the relief work that followed.

22. January 21, 1919
    Life event · Chapel Hill Acting president Marvin Hendrix Stacy dies of influenza

    Stacy, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and chairman of the faculty with a president's powers since Graham's death, died on Tuesday morning after several days' serious illness, the second university head lost to the pandemic in three months. The pandemic led the university to appoint its first university physician, Eric Alonzo Abernethy.

23. 1930s
24. November 1931
    Chapel Hill President Frank Porter Graham refuses to cancel Langston Hughes's Chapel Hill reading

    After Contempo printed Hughes's "Christ in Alabama" and his Scottsboro essay, Graham and town officials received a flood of letters calling Hughes sacrilegious and demanding the engagement be canceled. Graham did not interfere, and the reading went on as planned.

25. 1940s
26. May 23, 1942
    Publication, speech or performance · Chapel Hill Governor Broughton welcomes guests at the commissioning of the Navy Pre-Flight School

    The dinner program for the commissioning of the Naval Aviation Pre-Flight School at Chapel Hill on May 23, 1942 has Governor J. Melville Broughton offering the welcome, and Josephus Daniels giving greetings to the Navy Department representatives and to Commander O. O. Kessing. The school trained 18,700 pre-flight cadets before it was decommissioned on October 15, 1945.

27. May 1942–October 1945
    Storyline · 17 events · Chapel Hill Navy Pre-Flight School operates at UNC

    Commissioned at UNC in May 1942, the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School trained 18,700 cadets before it was decommissioned on October 15, 1945. Cadets ate in Lenoir Hall and drilled in a Navy-built armory that opened in 1943. George H. W. Bush trained there as a cadet, Gerald Ford taught there, and Ted Williams played on its baseball team.

28. Civil rights era · 1945–1975

29. 1950s
30. May to June 1951
    Chapel Hill Dean Brandis handles the applications of Pauli Murray and three other Black students to the law school

    After the trustees left admissions to each professional school's dean, Brandis wrote Chancellor R. B. House about four Black applicants, Pauli Murray, J. Kenneth Lee, Harvey E. Beech and William C. Chance Jr., and on June 6 told Murray the school offered no graduate law courses. The UNC Libraries exhibit reads these letters as showing the law school resisting integration.

31. 1960s
32. 1960–1964
    Storyline · 44 events · Chapel Hill Chapel Hill freedom movement

    Nine Lincoln High students began Chapel Hill's sit-ins at Colonial Drug on February 28, 1960. Through 1963 and 1964 Black residents and UNC students picketed, marched and sat in, and held a Holy Week fast at the post office, but the aldermen narrowly rejected a public accommodations ordinance and many businesses stayed segregated until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

33. 1963–1964
    Protest or organizing · Chapel Hill Floyd McKissick sends organizers to Chapel Hill and defends arrested demonstrators

    As head of CORE's Durham office, McKissick sent organizer Quinton Baker to Chapel Hill in 1963 to teach nonviolence and demonstration tactics, and he acted as attorney for many demonstrators arrested there. Letters to him in 1964 include one written from the Orange County jail.

34. 1963 to 1964
    Storyline · 25 events · Chapel Hill The Chapel Hill civil-rights demonstrations

    Marches, sit-ins and arrests over segregated businesses from 1963 into 1964, the aldermen's refusal of a public accommodations ordinance, the Holy Week fast, and the Watts Restaurant protests and the Klopfer speedy-trial case that grew out of them.

35. 1963–1968
    Storyline · 31 events · Countywide Speaker Ban controversy

    The General Assembly passed the Speaker Ban on June 26, 1963, barring known Communists and people who had pleaded the Fifth Amendment from speaking on state campuses. In March 1966 Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker spoke to UNC students from the Franklin Street side of the wall, and a federal court struck the law down on February 19, 1968.

36. February 28, 1966
    Protest or organizing · Chapel Hill Stuart Matthews and Gary Waller write to Chancellor Sitterson inviting Herbert Aptheker

    On the day the full board of trustees adopted new speaker regulations, Matthews and Waller wrote to Acting Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson for the UNC Chapel Hill chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, asking that Herbert Aptheker be allowed to speak on campus about the war in Vietnam on March 9. The letter set out his publications, speaking engagements and his Supreme Court passport case.

37. February 1966
    Appointment, election or service · Chapel Hill Gary Waller becomes chairman of the UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society

    A UNC Libraries exhibit states that Waller, a graduate student in the Department of Sociology, was vice chairman of the UNC chapter of Students for a Democratic Society and became chairman when Jim McCorkel resigned on February 2, 1966 to spend more time on his graduate studies.

38. March 14, 1966
    Protest or organizing · Chapel Hill Student leaders ask the chancellor to let Wilkinson and Aptheker speak on campus

    Paul Dickson and the heads of Carolina Forum, the YMCA, the YWCA, Di-Phi, the Carolina Political Union and SDS wrote to Chancellor J. Carlyle Sitterson asking that Wilkinson speak on March 23 and Aptheker on March 25, or on later dates.

39. February 23 – March 21, 1969
    Protest or organizing · Chapel Hill UNC food workers' strike

    On February 23, 1969 food service workers at UNC's Lenoir Hall left their counters and sat down at the cafeteria tables, and by the next morning nearly 100 dining hall employees had refused to report for work. The strike ended on March 21 when the University agreed to raise the hourly minimum from $1.60 to $1.80, pay roughly $180,000 in back wages, and appoint a Black supervisor.

40. May 19, 1969
    Property or economic transaction · Lenoir Hall, Chapel Hill UNC hands campus dining to the SAGA Food Service contract

    Two months after settling the spring strike the University signed a contract with SAGA Food Services on May 19, 1969, ending its own management of campus dining. SAGA laid off many temporary and part-time workers within weeks, which set up the second strike that autumn.

41. November 7 – December 9, 1969
    Protest or organizing · Chapel Hill UNC foodworkers strike a second time

    About 250 of UNC's 275 cafeteria workers, organized as the UNC Non-Academic Employees Union, struck SAGA Food Services on November 7, 1969 over pay, job reclassification, and the firing of workers for union activity. They voted on November 21 to affiliate with AFSCME, and the strike was settled in December after Ralph Abernathy visited the strikers and Black students from across the state threatened to converge on the campus.

42. 1970s
43. January 1975
    Protest or organizing · Memorial Hall, UNC, Chapel Hill Protesters stop Klan leader David Duke from speaking in Memorial Hall

    Black students filled the pit of Memorial Hall and kept Ku Klux Klan representative David Duke, invited by the Union Forum, from giving his speech. Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor called the disruption a transgression of one of the university's highest traditions.

44. Recent decades · 1976–2026

45. February 13, 1977
    Publication, speech or performance · Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill Pauli Murray celebrates her first Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross

    Murray, newly ordained an Episcopal priest, celebrated her first Eucharist at the Chapel of the Cross in Chapel Hill at the invitation of the rector Peter James Lee, who cited her family's connection to the parish. Her grandmother Cornelia Smith Fitzgerald had been baptized in the same chapel on December 20, 1854.

46. 1978
    Award or honor · Chapel Hill Pauli Murray declines an honorary degree from UNC

    Chancellor N. Ferebee Taylor wrote to Murray on February 10, 1978 offering her an honorary Doctor of Laws at the commencement of May 14, 1978. Murray declined, citing the University's dispute with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare over dismantling segregation and her refusal to share the platform with Governor Jim Hunt.

47. 1990s
48. 1996
    Appointment, election or service · Orange County Ellie Kinnaird is elected to the North Carolina Senate

    Kinnaird left the Carrboro mayor's office for the state Senate, where she sat from 1997 until 2013 representing a district that included Orange County. She had earned a law degree from North Carolina Central University while serving as mayor.

49. 2000s
50. December 2004
    Closing or ending · UNC-Chapel Hill UNC retires the Cornelia Phillips Spencer Bell Award after Yonni Chapman's campaign

    Chancellor James Moeser retired the Bell Award, given yearly since 1994 to a woman for outstanding contributions to the university, after graduate student Yonni Chapman led a campaign against it over Spencer's white supremacist and sexist views.

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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.