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Colonial and Regulator years · 1680–1774
- 1740s
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A log house, later the Weaver House, is built beside the Hillsborough wagon road
A story-and-a-jump house of hewn logs, one room on each floor, went up a few yards from the wagon road to Hillsborough, whose roadbed could still be traced in 1983. Tradition says it was first a tavern; it is the oldest building standing in Carrboro.
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Shearley Whatley buys 200 acres from the Earl Granville
Whatley paid thirty pounds for the grant, the first known private ownership of the land where the farmhouse later called Webb's Happy Acres stands. The grant document passed down through the family owners.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1810s
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Allan Bubberly sells the future Weaver House property to Thomas Weaver
In 1811 Allan Bubberly conveyed the old homestead and tavern property on the Hillsborough road to Thomas Weaver. Weaver's descendants kept it for ninety-nine years, and the house still carries the family name.
- 1830s
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A two-story frame farmhouse is built on the land later called Webb's Happy Acres
The one-room-deep house with a pegged frame, log sills and end chimneys may have been built by Carolina Kirkland and her husband or by earlier owners. Her grandson J. Richard Webb and his wife moved in about 1954, restored it and named it Webb's Happy Acres.
- 1860s
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The Weavers add a frame front wing to the log house
A plain one-and-a-half-story frame block with two rooms per floor was built across the front, by family account to shelter the wife and children of a Weaver who went off to the Civil War. The log wing got matching Greek Revival doors and sash at about the same time.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
- 1870s
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Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, formerly enslaved, bought thirty acres in what became Carrboro
The Strayhorns bought about thirty acres and built a one-room log cabin at what is now 109 Jones Ferry Road, and their son William built the house next door at 107 in 1915. Toney Strayhorn is remembered as a founder of First Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, and the house is still owned by a great-granddaughter.
- 1880s
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Jack Brim, a Black blacksmith, and then Bennie F. Ray open smithies at West End
As the settlement around the depot and Lloyd's mills grew in the later 1880s, Jack Brim, an African American blacksmith, opened a shop at West End, and Bennie F. Ray opened a second smithy after him. Ray's shop was still working north and east of the depot in the early 1910s.
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Robert F. Hoke raises subscriptions to run the railroad toward Chapel Hill
When iron prices rose in 1880 and shipping ore to Pennsylvania furnaces paid, Gen. Robert F. Hoke, who owned most of Iron Mountain north of Chapel Hill, began organizing the branch line from University Station. His Iron Mountain Company put up $6,000, the largest single pledge, and Julian S. Carr was among the other subscribers.
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Ruffin Cheek and then Hiram Stone open West End's first general stores
Ruffin Cheek, followed by Hiram Stone, opened grocery and general merchandise stores at West End in the 1880s. The book counts their stores, east of the railroad spur on what became East Main Street, as the start of Carrboro's business district.
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The Neville Building, thought to be Carrboro's first store, goes up east of the depot
A one-story frame store later called the Old Neville Building was put up in the 1880s on East Main Street between Broad and Lloyd streets and is believed to be the first store building in Carrboro. Its last tenant was the Carrboro Cash Store, run by Cliff and Wilbur Partin.
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Thomas F. Lloyd buys the brick house on West Cameron Avenue later called the Lloyd-Wiley House
With his West End gin and grist mill doing well, Thomas F. Lloyd bought a two-story brick house on West Cameron Avenue in Chapel Hill in 1885. It has been known since as the Lloyd-Wiley House.
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Thomas F. Lloyd buys out his partner and adds a flour mill by the depot
Lloyd bought William Pritchard's share of the steam grist mill and cotton gin the two had built north of the station in 1883, and had a flour mill built on the property.
- 1890s
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Brodie Lloyd builds a rental house on Oak Avenue before the Alberta mill opens
The house at 307 Oak Avenue is one of very few in Carrboro older than the Alberta Cotton Mill and among the first investment houses of Brodie Lloyd, Thomas F. Lloyd's cousin; once the mill opened it was rented to its workers. Carpenter Thomas Clark and later his daughter and her husband, knitter Ben Williams, lived there from the 1920s.
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A new mill house on Center Street becomes the community's first school
The Alberta Cotton Mill built the house at 109 Center Street about 1898, apparently the first on that side of the street, and it was soon put to use as the village school. It went back to being a house when the Carrboro Public School opened on West Main Street about 1908.
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Carpenter Thomas Clark moves to West End at Brodie Lloyd's request
Thomas Clark, the earliest carpenter known to have worked in Carrboro, came in from the Cane Creek section of Orange County while the Alberta Cotton Mill was going up, at Brodie Lloyd's urging. He built rental houses for Lloyd, among them 101, 103 and 109 Shelton Street and 205 Weaver Street, and helped Bennie Ray build his two-story house at 301 Weaver Street.
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Herbert Lloyd takes over his brother's cotton gin and grist mill
As Thomas F. Lloyd turned to building the Alberta Cotton Mill, his brother Herbert took charge of the steam gin and grist mill by the tracks, the frame buildings that had started the settlement in the early 1880s.
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Thomas F. Lloyd builds the Alberta Cotton Mill
Lloyd built the Alberta Cotton Mill beside the railroad in West End in 1898 and 1899, the brick mill that later became Durham Hosiery Mill No. 4 and then Carr Mill Mall.
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Brodie Lloyd builds a row of rental houses on Weaver Street for Alberta mill workers
Brodie Lloyd put up the one-story house with a triple-A roof at 302 Weaver Street, along with nearly identical houses at 300, 304 and 306 Weaver, as rentals for hands at the Alberta Cotton Mill run by his cousin Thomas F. Lloyd, renting either to the workers or through the mill. By 1983 only 302 stood where it was built; 300 had been moved and the others torn down.
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Thomas F. Lloyd builds twelve houses for Alberta Cotton Mill workers
On the mill tract east and northeast of the new Alberta Cotton Mill, Lloyd put up a dozen one-story frame houses for his hands. A house of the same period built for Alberta workers still stands at 105 Short Street.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
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A frame depot replaces the box car that had served West End as a station
From 1882 a box car had been the passenger depot at West End. In 1900 a one-story frame depot was built a few yards north of the later station; after the 1913 station opened it became a freight shed, and a new freight house had replaced it by 1925.
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Four mill houses go up on Shelton Street for Bill Lloyd
Bill Lloyd, a cousin of Alberta Cotton Mill owner Thomas F. Lloyd, had four identical one-story houses built to rent to the mill's workers. Each had two front doors so family members on different shifts could come and go; carpenter Thomas Clark, brought from Cane Creek by the Lloyds, built number 107.
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Lloyd and Neville's cotton gin operates on Laurel Street
The gin occupied the lot at 108 Laurel Street from the first years of the century into the 1930s. When it was dismantled its materials are said to have gone into houses, perhaps the two porcelain-enamel-tile houses at 108 and 110 Laurel Street.
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Southern Railway begins buying cross ties from farmers at the Carrboro depot
In the 1900s the Southern Railway began buying hand-hewn oak cross ties at the depot, where its agent graded them and paid the farmers who hauled them in from Orange and nearby counties. By the early 1920s Carrboro was among the largest tie markets in the East, and tie wagons crowded its streets into the early 1930s.
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Thomas F. Lloyd gives a church lot facing his mill to Chapel Hill's four congregations
Lloyd offered a Weaver Street lot to the Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Baptists and Methodists of Chapel Hill. The first two gave up their rights, and the Baptists and Methodists built Union Chapel on it in 1901 or 1902, a frame building about twenty by thirty feet.
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The Carrboro Public School is built on West Main Street
The one-story frame school at 114 West Main Street replaced the first school, held in a Center Street mill house, and taught seven grades under Mr. McDuffie, also the Baptist pastor. After the graded school opened late in 1921 it became the Methodist parsonage, serving until 1955.
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Estelle Ray builds a two-story house on Oak Avenue and takes in boarders
The Ray-Upchurch House at 301 Oak Avenue went up in 1909, likely with help from Estelle Ray's carpenter son and other relatives who later worked on the Lloyd yarn mill. For almost fifty years Ray, and after her, her daughter Bedie Upchurch, let rooms there to boarders.
- 1910s
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Blacksmith Bennie Ray builds a two-story house on Weaver Street
With carpenter Thomas Clark, Ray built a cross-shaped two-story house at 301 Weaver Street, rare among Carrboro's early houses; his family still owned it in 1983. He ran a blacksmith shop on Lloyd Street with his brother Tom and son Atlas, who kept it going after Bennie died in 1933.
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Carrboro's business district shifts from Weaver Street to East Main Street
In the late 1910s the center of Carrboro's trade moved from the Weaver Street block by the Alberta mill to East Main Street. Some frame store buildings were hauled over from Weaver Street, and others were newly built on East Main.
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Durham Hosiery Mills builds a two-story company house on New Hill for the Oakley family
The L-shaped house at 303 South Greensboro Street was one of three two-story houses for large families in the last group the mill built for Mill No. 7. The company recruited the experienced Oakleys from Burlington, whose men became superintendents and foremen, and Cora Oakley ran part of the house as a boardinghouse at 25 cents a room a week.
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Luther Sturdivant and Knute Mann plat Partridge Field for houses
In the late 1910s Carrboro businessmen Luther Sturdivant and Knute Mann laid out streets, blocks and lots on the open ground called Partridge Field, east of the railroad spur, and each built a bungalow there in the early 1920s. Few buyers followed them in the 1920s; most new builders chose wooded lots on Hillsborough Road.
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The Carrs open a night school for Carrboro children working in the mills
In the early 1910s the Carr family's company started a night school for children who spent their days in the Carrboro mills. It soon closed because the pupils were too tired after work and had chores waiting at home.
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The Strayhorn log cabin on Jones Ferry Road reaches its two-story form
Toney Strayhorn, born enslaved in Orange County, became a farmer and brick mason and in the late 1800s built a one-room log cabin on his tract. He and later his son William enlarged it until, by about 1910, it stood two stories high with a rear ell and big brick end chimneys that show the family's skill.
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Lloyd organizes a second mill company and builds a yarn mill
Thomas F. Lloyd organized the Thomas F. Lloyd Manufacturing Company in February 1910 and built a second mill across Main Street from the Alberta mill in 1910 and 1911 to spin cotton yarn.
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Thomas F. Lloyd, founder of Carrboro's first two mills, dies
Thomas F. Lloyd died in May 1911, close to the time his second mill, a one-story brick yarn mill a block south of the Alberta mill, was finished. A Confederate veteran with no schooling, he had built the gin, grist mill and flour mill by the depot before starting the Alberta mill in 1898.
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Durham Hosiery Mills nearly doubles Mill No. 4
About 1912 the company added a two-story extension to the west end of the old Alberta mill, enlarged its one-story south wing and put up a new power house northeast of the reservoir. Orders for cotton hosiery had outgrown the building. The Sanborn maps show the work done between March 1911 and December 1915.
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Union Baptist Church becomes Venable Baptist Church
Once the Methodists stopped meeting there around 1910, the chapel was known as Union Baptist Church. In 1912 the congregation took the name of the newly incorporated town of Venable.
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The Lloyd yarn mill becomes Durham Hosiery Mill No. 7
The Thomas F. Lloyd Manufacturing Company mill was sold to Durham Hosiery Mills, which ran it as Mill No. 7 alongside Mill No. 4, the former Alberta mill.
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A. J. Blackwood recruits Cora Oakley's family from Burlington to the Carrboro mills
In 1914 A. J. Blackwood, a Burlington neighbor lately made superintendent of Mill No. 4, drew Cora Oakley and her large family to Carrboro with slightly higher wages and a ten-hour day. Durham Hosiery Mills hired many experienced hands away from Burlington-area mills in this way.
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Carrboro Methodists build their first church
Organized in 1910 as a mission of the Chapel Hill Methodists, the congregation met in the public school until early 1914, when it built a plain frame church on the large lot east of the school, later the Britt Building site. From about 1900 the town's Methodists had shared Union Chapel with the Baptists.
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Venable Baptist Church becomes Carrboro Baptist Church
In 1914, the year after the town was renamed for Julian S. Carr, the Baptist congregation changed its name again, to Carrboro Baptist Church.
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Contractor Charles Craige builds a gambrel-roofed bungalow for mason William Strayhorn
The house at 107 Jones Ferry Road was built for William and Margie Strayhorn beside the home of his father Toney, head of a family of brick masons. William died young in 1933; his daughter Laura and her husband Albert Reaves kept the house in 1983.
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Durham Hosiery Mills builds a house on West Main Street for its Carrboro superintendent
Some time between 1915 and 1925 the company built a one-and-a-half-story house with a tall hipped roof and Tuscan porch columns at 103 West Main Street for the head of its Carrboro mills; it was long thought the best house in town. Ralph Ward of Mill No. 4 lived there first and Floyd M. Durham of Mill No. 7 later, and Marvin J. Dawson bought it at the 1939 company sale.
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Durham Hosiery Mills builds its last group of mill houses on South Greensboro Street
Around 1915 carpenter John Squires built five houses on South Greensboro Street south of Carr Street, thought to be Durham Hosiery Mills' last housing project in Carrboro. The company then planted Lombardy poplars along the street, which was called Poplar Street until the diseased trees came down in the 1930s.
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Mill worker Jesse Riggsbee builds his own house on South Greensboro Street
Riggsbee and his wife both worked for Durham Hosiery Mills but chose to build rather than rent from the mill or a speculator, and two relatives later built on adjoining West Carr Street lots. A humidifier mechanic, he lived there until his death in 1946.
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St. Paul's A.M.E. Church widens its sanctuary by one bay
A growing congregation led to the widening of the 1892 frame church. Brick veneer went on in the 1950s, but the belfry and steeple kept their original look.
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Julian S. Carr Jr. starts the Industrial Democracy plan in Durham Hosiery's mills
In 1917 Julian S. Carr Jr., who ran Durham Hosiery Mills, set up a plan of worker representation and profit sharing in all sixteen company mills, Carrboro's among them. Its Senate of superintendents and foremen and House of elected workers met twice a month in the Carrboro clubhouse, voted help for families hit by sickness or death, and paid for repainting most of the mill houses.
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The Colonial Movie Theatre on Weaver Street closes
The Colonial Movie Theatre, one of the frame businesses in the Weaver Street block facing the Alberta mill by 1914, closed around 1917, about when Carrboro's stores started moving to East Main Street.
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Durham Hosiery sets up looping machines in a Center Street house
After the former school at 109 Center Street was lengthened at its north end, the company, out of room in Mill No. 4, installed extra looping machines there for closing the toes of hose. It became a house again a few years later, once the mill was enlarged.
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The power house wing of Mill No. 4 is raised to two full stories
In 1918 Durham Hosiery Mills built the original power house wing of Mill No. 4 up to two full stories and gave it a taller two-story tower on the north side.
- 1920s
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A fenced playground is built beside Mill No. 7
Around 1920 a fenced playground with swings and horseshoe pits went up on the north side of Mill No. 7, one of the projects of the mills' Industrial Democracy plan. It was taken apart in World War II so its metal could go to the war effort.
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A wedge-shaped brick store replaces a frame general store at 111 East Main Street
The one-story building, nicknamed the Flatiron for its nearly triangular plan, took the place of a frame store that had sold general goods and then drugs. It served as Carrboro's post office in the early 1930s.
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Brodie Glenn, founder of Glenn Oil Company, builds a bungalow on Ragan Street
When built, the house at 503 Oak Avenue, then Ragan Street, was the only one on the west side of the street north of Shelton Street, facing six older houses across the way.
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Carrboro's lettered streets receive names
Until about 1920 the mill village's streets went by letters. Around then most got the names they still had in 1983; the H, I and J streets north of Mill No. 4 became Ice Avenue, Durham Street and Hosiery Street.
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Dr. Brack Lloyd has Charlie Martindale build a bungalow with Carrboro's first central heating
Around 1920 Dr. Brack Lloyd, the village doctor, hired Chapel Hill contractor Charlie Martindale to build a large one-story bungalow at 406 South Greensboro Street. It was the first house in Carrboro with a central heating system.
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Merchant Dwight Ray builds a bungalow on Hillsborough Road
Ray, co-owner of Lloyd-Ray Hardware and later an Orange County commissioner, had the one-and-a-half-story house built at 218 Hillsborough Road. Bungalows lined the road through the 1920s and early 1930s, among them one next door built for businessman Miles Andrews.
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Merchant Luther Sturdivant builds a house in Partridge Field
Sturdivant and his wife, longtime principal of the Carrboro Graded School, expected the empty tract called Partridge Field to become the town's new fashionable neighborhood. Knute Mann and builder John Squires soon built nearby, but by about 1940 only three more houses had followed and families were moving to the Hillsborough Road area instead.
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Mills own only a third of Carrboro's houses
In 1920 Carrboro had about 280 textile workers and 223 houses, and the mills owned only about a third of those houses. Most of the rest were private, many of them rentals put up by local farmers and businessmen such as Brodie Lloyd.
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R. H. Marks builds Carrboro's first brick commercial building on East Main Street
R. H. Marks' Dry Goods Store, built around 1920 at 104 East Main Street, was the first brick store in Carrboro. It came through the 1924 fire that burned its frame neighbors, and the other owners on the block rebuilt in brick after its example.
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Lightning sets fire to the new brick grist mill
A few years after the brick mill replaced the burned frame buildings, a strike burned out its interior. It was soon repaired, and W. Albert Lloyd is said to have made it a grocery and his home; the 1925 Sanborn map lists it as his grocery warehouse.
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Toney and William Strayhorn begin Carrboro Baptist's brick church
When the Rev. J. B. Davis called for full-time services, the Baptists traded their lot for a larger Durham Hosiery lot on North Greensboro Street and hired the Strayhorns, who laid the foundation and ground-floor walls in 1921. Money ran short and work stopped until 1924, a break visible in two shades of brick.
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J. F. Sturdivant completes a master's thesis on the Carrboro mill village
In 1924 J. F. Sturdivant finished a UNC master's thesis studying Carrboro as a small mill village. It found every house painted and about two-thirds with electric lights, and it counted 197 workers at Mill No. 4 and 81 at Mill No. 7 in the early 1920s.
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Union Chapel is taken down and its materials go into McDuffie Baptist Church
Once the brick Carrboro Baptist Church was finished, the old frame chapel was dismantled and its materials used to build a church on N.C. 86 north of Chapel Hill, named for early Carrboro Baptist minister McDuffie.
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A narrow brick store goes up at 106 East Main Street
The narrow unit at 106 East Main Street went up when the block was rebuilt in brick after the December 1924 fire; the 1983 inventory remembers it as built for the post office, though in December 1924 the burned-out post office was to move across the street into Mrs. Stone's new building. Beside it stood the R. H. Marks dry goods store, the town's first brick commercial building.
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A two-story brick store block rises in stages at 114 to 120 East Main Street
Beginning in the mid-1920s brick buildings replaced the frame stores at the east end of the block, among them the two-story row at 114 to 120 East Main Street. Samply Merritt's drug store held the east end and Gurnie H. Ray ran the Melba movie theater at 118.
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Lueco Lloyd builds the brick store that houses Hearn's grocery
After the December 1924 fire that began in the Pendergraph boarding house, Lueco Lloyd put up a one-story brick building at 102 East Main Street as rental property, with T. C. Thompson as contractor. His only tenant was John Hearn, who had moved his grocery from Chapel Hill after World War I and ran what by 1983 was Carrboro's oldest business.
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Southern Railway adds a larger freight house at the Carrboro depot
In 1925 the railroad built a bigger freight house at the Carrboro station, following its 1913 depot and freight shed, to handle the growing traffic in goods for Carrboro and Chapel Hill.
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The old Blanche Hosiery mill building on Lindsay Street is cut into two houses
Blanche Hosiery's small frame mill, about 50 by 24 feet, was already a dwelling by 1915. It was sawn in half to make the mirror-image cottages at 102 and 104 Lindsay Street, which stayed rental houses into the 1970s.
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The Fitch family buys out W. T. Riggs and the business becomes Fitch Lumber Company
The Carrboro yard had opened in 1923 as a branch of the Mebane firm Fitch-Riggs Lumber Company, run by R. B. Fitch Sr. In 1927 the Fitches bought Riggs's share and renamed the company; in 1983 it was Carrboro's oldest working industry.
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Durham Hosiery Mills begins cutting back its Carrboro operations
With demand for cotton stockings sliding since silk hosiery came in during the mid-1910s, the company began curtailing work at its Carrboro mills in 1928. The 1929 crash deepened the slump, and Mill No. 4 shut in 1930.
- 1930s
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Carrboro builds a small brick town hall and fire station at Lloyd and Cobb streets
Around 1930 a small one-story brick building went up at the corner of Lloyd and Cobb streets, east of the railroad, to house Carrboro's town hall and fire department.
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Numa Taylor builds a stuccoed block house on a lot he won in a raffle
Taylor built the one-story, hip-roofed house at 700 North Greensboro Street of cement block covered with stucco, with unusually tall windows. Martin and Myrtle Luther bought it about 1960.
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The Black neighborhood on the Chapel Hill line spreads west into Partridge Field
In the late 1930s the African American neighborhood straddling the Chapel Hill and Carrboro line grew west into Partridge Field. Only then, the book says, was it readily counted as part of either town; segregation and the community's own sense of itself had kept it apart, with its churches and schools facing Chapel Hill.
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Andrews and Lloyd sell their North Greensboro Street cedar mill site to Fitch Lumber
Dick Andrews and Brodie H. Lloyd had kept running a cedar mill on the lot after leasing buildings to Fitch in 1923. They then sold the whole industrial site, including early frame sheds built for the Thelma Knitting Mill, later Blanche Hosiery.
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Standard Oil builds a Spanish Revival service station on West Main Street
Brothers Stacy and Eric Neville ran the stuccoed station at 210 West Main Street, with its stepped pilasters and imitation tile roof, for many years. Before it was built they had worked from a frame station on the small paved triangle across the street.
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Durham Hosiery closes its last Carrboro mill
Durham Hosiery Mills dissolved its business at Mill No. 7 in June 1938 and laid off the workers, ending the company's operations in Carrboro.
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Durham Hosiery Mills sells its Carrboro houses and land at auction
A year after its last Carrboro mill closed, the company auctioned much of its Carrboro property in 1939. Most houses went for $500 to $550, many to the families living in them, while Marvin J. Dawson of Chapel Hill, merchant Ernest Hearn, former foreman W. A. Riggsbee and Dick Andrews bought others as investments.
- 1940s
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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.
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The cotton warehouses beside Carrboro's two mills are torn down
The large cotton warehouses next to Mill No. 4 and Mill No. 7, where ginned cotton was bought and stored for Durham Hosiery Mills, were torn down and hauled away in the 1940s.
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Fitch Lumber buys the Crawford brothers' spoke plant on Lloyd Street
Walter S. and Charlie M. Crawford had made wooden wheel spokes in a sheet-metal building beside the tracks, probably built about 1930. Fitch made it a planing mill that dressed rough lumber from county sawmills, later adding a raised shavings bin that farmers drove under to load bedding for their stock.
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Sara Thomas Watters buys the Weaver House and its road takes her name
Alexander and Leta Hogan, owners since 1910, sold the old Weaver place to Watters. The dirt lane to it, formerly Old Hillsborough Road, was renamed Watters Road about then; a mapmaker misread the name and it has been Walters Road since.
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Len Hearn buys the East Main Street building his family grocery rents
After John Hearn died his son Len ran the store as L. D. Hearn, bought the building in 1944 and extended the back three times. It became L. D. Hearn & Son in the 1950s and, under grandson James, Hearn's Grocery.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Fitch Lumber moves its Mebane business to Carrboro after the Mebane branch burns
A. B. Fitch and all of the firm's Mebane operations came to Carrboro, and the Lloyd Street plant was enlarged around the same time.
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The National Munitions plant in Mill No. 7 closes
The shell-loading plant that National Munitions Corporation had run in Mill No. 7 since 1942 closed in August 1945. At its peak it employed 1,600 people, many of them former mill hands assembling anti-aircraft rounds, and it won the Army-Navy E award for production three times.
- 1950s
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A Weaver farm barn is rebuilt as a house, the Barnstable
While Sara Watters owned the Weaver House she deeded its two-story board-and-batten barn and several acres to her sister, a Charlotte interior decorator. The sister made it a dwelling with log and frame wings built from salvaged materials.
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A two-story company house is moved from Maple Avenue to East Carr Street
Thomas F. Lloyd built a few identical L-shaped two-story houses about 1910 for large families working at his new mill. This one stood at the southwest end of Maple Avenue until it was moved to 203 East Carr Street in the 1950s.
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Carrboro's last general store closes
Cliff Partin bought the Carrboro Cash Store on Lloyd Street in 1945 and ran it with his son Wilbur until competition from newer stores closed it in 1954. The store building, which dated from 1888, was torn down about 1960.
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St. Paul's A.M.E. adds an annex with a meeting hall and kitchen
The annex was built at the northwest corner of the church.
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Pacific Mills closes its Carrboro woolen mills
Pacific Mills, which had reopened Mill No. 4 as Carrboro Woolen Mills in 1945 and later bought the idle Mill No. 7, shut the woolen operation in the mid-1950s. By then the university and nearby businesses had taken industry's place as Carrboro's employers.
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A new Carrboro Elementary School is built at the end of Ash Street
With the new school open, the 1921 graded school on West Main Street, where Josie Sturdivant had been principal until about 1947, was converted to Carrboro Town Hall.
- 1960s
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Braxton Foushee becomes Carrboro’s first Black alderman
Braxton Foushee was elected to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen in 1969, the first Black member of the town's governing board, and served until 1981. He pressed for paved roads and sidewalks in Black neighborhoods and counted bringing bus service to Carrboro as his proudest achievement.
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Carrboro’s Black political firsts
Braxton Foushee became Carrboro’s first Black alderman in 1969 and Robert Drakeford its first Black mayor in 1977, followed by Richard Knight Jr. as town manager, Hilliard Caldwell and Joal Hall Broun on the board, and Walter Horton as police chief in 2013. Barbara Foushee was sworn in as the first Black woman mayor in 2023, and the town named the Drakeford Library Complex in 2024.
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Hank Anderson directs the Chapel Hill Parks and Recreation Department
Henry "Hank" Anderson III, who took a master's degree in recreation administration at UNC in 1969, directed the Chapel Hill Parks and Recreation Department from 1969 to 1977.
- 1970s
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Fitch Lumber razes its early buildings and opens a self-service hardware store
All the first frame buildings on North Greensboro Street came down for new shops and sheds, and a large one-story hardware store was built south of the rail spur on ground once lined with mill houses.
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Rogers Road environmental justice
In 1972 officials placed the county landfill on Eubanks Road beside the historically Black Rogers Road community, promising it would run about ten years. It was expanded instead and did not close until 2013, and residents' organizing through the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association helped win a sewer line for the neighborhood, completed in 2019.
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The ArtSchool is founded
Jacques Menache, who had earned an MFA at UNC the year before, opened the ArtSchool in Carrboro in August 1974 to offer art classes. By 1978 the Carrboro ArtSchool also ran a gallery theatre, and the organization later became The ArtsCenter, which moved to Roberson Street in 2023.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
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The Carrboro Bicentennial Commission publishes Mack Watts's Carrboro Yesterday and Today
For the 1976 Bicentennial the town's commission issued Mack Watts's local history, Carrboro Yesterday and Today. The 1983 inventory drew on it for the Weaver House and other early sites and names Watts among the memoir writers who sharpened local interest in the town's past.
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Steven Fisher and Marcia Hawk move a threatened mill house to their Maple Avenue lot
The one-story house was to be torn down for an Andrews-Riggsbee Hardware expansion. The couple set it behind their own mill house at 202-A Maple Avenue and joined the two with a small room so they qualified as condominiums.
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The Town of Carrboro pledges $2,500 for an architectural and historic inventory
In 1979, at the Appearance Commission's request, the town committed $2,500 for a survey of Carrboro's historic buildings, seeing such a record as a basis for planning decisions. The commission hired UNC geographer John Florin to lead the work.
- 1980s
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Carrboro is named a Governor's Community of Excellence
The state named Carrboro a Governor's Community of Excellence in 1980, partly for the quality of life its historic neighborhoods gave the town.
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A former mill house at 203 Weaver Street is renovated as offices
In 1981 the old mill house at 203 Weaver Street was rehabilitated for office use, one of the early private preservation projects in central Carrboro.
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Anna and Larry Hayes restore the old Lloyd grist mill as the Broad Street shop
The Hayeses bought the brick mill, long a Johnson-Strowd Furniture warehouse, and restored it to federal preservation guidelines as a wine and cheese shop named for the street that once ran in front. They rebuilt the lost loading dock and set stained glass in the arched openings.
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Hilliard Caldwell is elected to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen
Hilliard Caldwell, who had advised the students of the 1960 Colonial Drug sit-in in Chapel Hill, was first elected to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen in 1981. He served four terms, through 1997.
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Neighbors form Friends of Old Carrboro to press for traffic controls
In 1981 a small group of residents banded together to seek traffic regulation in one of Carrboro's early mill neighborhoods. By 1983 Friends of Old Carrboro, Inc., had become a tax-exempt nonprofit of about 80 members working to preserve central Carrboro, and it had helped research the inventory.
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State reviewers put several Carrboro buildings on the National Register Study List
On April 9, 1981, as the inventory was being finished, the State Professional Review Committee of the Department of Cultural Resources judged several Carrboro buildings eligible for the National Register and added them to the state Study List.
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The Hill House is moved to Oak Avenue and joined to the Half House
Velma Hill sold her Weaver Street corner in 1981 to Orange Savings and Loan for a branch office. A contractor split her mill house, built by Brodie Lloyd early in the century for Alberta workers, moved it to 209-A Oak Avenue, rejoined it and attached it to the Half House to meet a one-house-per-lot zoning rule.
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Friends of Old Carrboro holds its first annual house tour
In October 1982 Friends of Old Carrboro held its first yearly tour of the town's old houses, collecting oral history about their builders and owners that the 1983 inventory later used.
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Carrboro aldermen appoint a subcommittee to study historic district zoning
In 1983 the Board of Aldermen named a Subcommittee on Historic Districts, under its Blue Ribbon Downtown Revitalization Task Force, to look into local historic district zoning.
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The Carrboro Appearance Commission publishes the town's architectural and historical inventory
Carrboro, N.C.: An Architectural and Historical Inventory, by Claudia Roberts Brown, Burgess McSwain and John Florin with photographs by Jane Hamborsky, came out in 1983. It grew from the 1980 survey of more than 150 pre-1930 buildings and covers 75 of them; the aldermen funded printing in 1981 and local businesses covered rising costs.
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Eleanor Kinnaird is sworn in as mayor of Carrboro
Elizabeth R. Holland administered the oath of office to Mayor-elect Eleanor Kinnaird at the Board of Aldermen meeting of December 1, 1987. The board had approved the abstract of votes cast at the November 3, 1987 election earlier in the meeting, and outgoing mayor James V. Porto Jr. and departing aldermen Zona Norwood and John Boone made their parting remarks.
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Eleanor Kinnaird is sworn in for a second term as mayor of Carrboro
Town clerk Sarah C. Williamson administered the oath to Mayor-elect Kinnaird and to aldermen-elect Hilliard Caldwell and Tom Gurganus after the board approved the abstract of votes from the November 7, 1989 election. Jacquelyn Gist was sworn in as an alderman at the same meeting.
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Jacquelyn Gist is sworn in as a Carrboro alderman
Robin Lackey administered the oath of office to alderman-elect Jacquelyn Gist at the Board of Aldermen meeting of December 5, 1989. The board had approved the abstract of votes cast at the November 7, 1989 election earlier in the same meeting, at which Eleanor Kinnaird was also sworn in as mayor.
- 1990s
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Carrboro's LGBTQ municipal firsts
From the 1990 equal employment policy and the 1994 domestic partnership ordinance, through Mike Nelson's mayoralty and Lydia Lavelle's, to the 2021 nondiscrimination ordinance: the town acts that made Carrboro a series of firsts.
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Carrboro adds sexual orientation to its equal employment opportunity policy
The Board of Aldermen unanimously amended the town's personnel ordinance to add sexual orientation to the characteristics protected in its merit principle and equal employment opportunity policy. On November 13, 1990 the Board had written a sexual orientation nondiscrimination clause into a planning grant agreement with the City of Durham and asked for the code amendment to be scheduled.
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Carrboro Board of Aldermen adopts a domestic partnership registry
The Board voted unanimously to amend the Town Code so that statements of domestic partnership could be filed with the Town Clerk, set the effective date at October 11, 1994, added a $40 registration fee, and extended the financial disclosure required of elected officials to cover their domestic partners. The Board took no action on a third proposal to extend health insurance benefits to domestic partners of town employees.
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Carrboro votes to pay for domestic partner coverage in its employee health plan
Setting town employee health insurance for fiscal 1995-96, the Board of Aldermen voted that the town would bear any expense of adding coverage for domestic partners to its Kaiser plan, after asking staff on May 23 to find out why the insurer Healthsource did not offer such coverage. The vote was six to one, with Michael Nelson opposed.
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Mike Nelson is elected mayor of Carrboro
Michael R. Nelson, then a member of the Carrboro Board of Aldermen, won the mayor's race at the municipal election held on November 7, 1995, becoming the first openly gay mayor elected in North Carolina. The Board approved the Orange County abstract of votes from that election at its meeting of December 5, 1995.
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Mike Nelson is sworn in as mayor of Carrboro
At the Board of Aldermen meeting of December 5, 1995, outgoing mayor Eleanor Kinnaird gave closing remarks and Mayor-elect Michael R. Nelson took the oath of office, along with aldermen-elect Jay Bryan, Hilliard Caldwell and Alex Zaffron. The Board then appointed Diana McDuffee to the alderman seat Nelson vacated.
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Mayor Mike Nelson proclaims June Lesbian and Gay Pride Month in Carrboro
At the Board of Aldermen meeting of June 3, 1997, Mayor Michael Nelson issued a proclamation naming June Lesbian and Gay Pride Month in the Town of Carrboro.
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Carrboro renames its community park for Hank Anderson
The Carrboro Board of Aldermen voted unanimously to rename Carrboro Community Park on N.C. 54 for Alderman Henry "Hank" Anderson III, on a motion by Alderman Jacquelyn Gist. The 55-acre park is one of the town's largest.
- 2000s
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Mike Nelson presides over his last meeting as mayor of Carrboro
At the December 6, 2005 meeting the Board of Aldermen approved the November 8 election results, in which Mark Chilton defeated Alex Zaffron for mayor, 1,337 to 776, and outgoing Mayor Michael Nelson gave his parting comments.
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Joal Hall Broun serves as Carrboro's mayor pro tem
Town budget documents for fiscal years 2006-07 and 2007-08 list Alderman Joal Hall Broun as mayor pro tempore, serving under Mayor Mark Chilton.
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Carrboro rewrites its density bonus for affordable housing
Section 15-182.4 of Carrboro's Land Use Ordinance sets a goal that at least 15 percent of units in new residential developments be affordable and offers density bonuses or payments in lieu to meet it. The section was rewritten on June 26, 2007.
- 2010s
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Carrboro accepts a community climate action plan
The Board of Aldermen accepted a plan setting out steps residents could take to cut greenhouse gas emissions, extending the Energy and Climate Protection Plan the town had adopted in 2014 for its own operations. The two plans aimed at an 80 percent cut from 2010 emission levels by 2030. Sammy Slade was the board's leading advocate for the town's climate policy.
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Barbara Foushee is elected to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen
Foushee, who announced her candidacy in March 2017 saying she wanted a seat at the table where changes were made, won a seat in the 2017 municipal election. She served on the town's governing board for six years before being elected mayor.
- 2020s
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Ground is broken for the Southern Branch Library in Carrboro
Carrboro and Orange County broke ground at 203 South Greensboro Street for the Orange County Southern Branch Library and civic building known as The 203 Project, after both boards gave final approval on March 15, 2022. Mayor Damon Seils led the program, with remarks by commissioners' chair Renee Price, County Manager Bonnie Hammersley, Town Manager Richard J. White III and Nerys Levy of the Friends of the Southern Branch Library.
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Carrboro unveils a truth plaque at the Strayhorn House
The Town of Carrboro unveiled a truth plaque at the Strayhorn House, 109 Jones Ferry Road. It records that Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, enslaved in Orange County, were one of the first Black families to settle in Carrboro and built a one-room log cabin there in 1879 after buying thirty acres.
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Carrboro and Orange County name the Drakeford Library Complex
The Carrboro Town Council on October 15 and the Orange County commissioners on November 7, 2024 approved naming the building under construction at 203 South Greensboro Street for Robert "Bob" Drakeford, Carrboro's first Black mayor. A naming committee of two council members, two commissioners and two Friends of the Library members recommended the name on September 24 after a community survey drew more than 200 responses.
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