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Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–4.Back to highlights
Entries
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
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Gooch's Café opens in Chapel Hill with seven seats
Gooch's Café began feeding university students in Chapel Hill about 1903, with seven seats by its own later account. It stayed a student gathering place for more than fifty years.
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Fire destroys Gooch's Café and a row of frame stores in Chapel Hill
An early-morning fire, thought to have started in Gooch's Café, burned five frame buildings in the business district, among them Pendergraft's grocery, Peace's barber shop and Foister's book store. Summer school students carried out the bookstore's stock, and the loss was put at $35,000.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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The Carl Smith Building is completed on North Columbia Street
Carl Smith's commercial building on North Columbia Street was completed in 1949; Gooch's Cafe moved in, and the area office of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis took rooms on the second floor.
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Gooch's Café serves its last meal and becomes Green's Cafe
Gooch's Café, a Chapel Hill fixture for more than half a century and owned since the 1940s by Clarence Simmons, served its last meal under that name. The next morning Charles T. Green of Durham took it over as Green's Cafe.
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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 1, 2026.
