Chronology

Memorial Hall rises at UNC under Paul C. Cameron's building committee

The cornerstone of Swain Memorial Hall was laid on September 25, 1883, and the hall was dedicated on June 3, 1885, honoring President David L. Swain, faculty and the university's Confederate dead. Paul C. Cameron, president of the Alumni Association and chairman of the building committee, raised money for it and gave money himself.

People: Kemp Plummer Battle · David L. Swain

Subject: Memorial Hall

The university dedicates Memorial Hall

Memorial Hall, the big arched-roof auditorium near the west end of Cameron Avenue, was dedicated in June 1885. It had no heat and swallowed speakers' voices, so it served mainly during commencement week and at times as a gymnasium until it was judged unsafe and torn down.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Emile Alexander de Schweinitz is awarded a Doctor of Philosophy degree

At the 1885 commencement, held in the newly dedicated Memorial Hall, the university conferred the Ph.D. on de Schweinitz, who became a government chemist and a professor in Washington.

Subject: Memorial Hall

The university celebrates the centennial of its charter

Alumni from Colorado to Florida filled Memorial Hall for a roll call of classes back to 1824, then sat down to a banquet for three hundred in Gerrard Hall with delegates from Harvard, Yale, Virginia and other schools. The reunion led to an annual alumni banquet, branch alumni associations and a drive to endow a chair of history.

People: Kemp Plummer Battle

Subject: Memorial Hall · Gerrard Hall

Edward Kidder Graham wins the Mangum Medal

Added to the commencement orators after Horace Williams showed Alderman one of his papers, Graham won the top senior speaking prize with an address on "the economic man" that foresaw business coming to rule Southern life. He reworked the theme over the next decade into his argument for the university's service to the state.

People: Edwin Anderson Alderman · Henry Horace Williams

Subject: Memorial Hall

Commencement marks twenty-five years since the university reopened

The 1900 commencement was given over to the reopening of 1875, with nineteen members of the 1875-76 student body present and addresses by Kemp Battle, George T. Winston, W. J. Peele and President Alderman.

People: Kemp Plummer Battle · George Tayloe Winston · W. J. Peele

Subject: Memorial Hall

Kemp P. Battle and Thomas Hume retire on Carnegie pensions

At the 1907 commencement President Venable announced the resignations of Kemp P. Battle, professor of history and former president, and Thomas Hume, professor of English, both placed on the Carnegie Foundation pension list.

People: Kemp Plummer Battle · Francis Preston Venable · Thomas Hume

Subject: Memorial Hall

Governor Woodrow Wilson gives the commencement address

Woodrow Wilson, governor of New Jersey, spoke at the alumni luncheon and gave the 1911 commencement address in Memorial Hall, and the university made him a Doctor of Laws.

People: Francis Preston Venable

Subject: Memorial Hall

Acting president Graham pledges to carry the university to the whole state

In his University Day remarks in Memorial Hall, Graham said the new Bureau of Extension would put the university in close touch with every problem of North Carolina life, a break with Venable's narrower view, and he answered charges that students cared mostly for football. Raleigh and Greensboro papers praised the idea the next day.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Edward Kidder Graham is inaugurated president in Memorial Hall

A procession of about 1,400 marched to Memorial Hall, where Chief Justice Walter Clark gave Graham the oath and Governor Locke Craig presided. Graham's address cast the state university as the instrument of democracy. Three former presidents walked with him in the procession.

People: Edwin Anderson Alderman · Francis Preston Venable · Kemp Plummer Battle · Locke Craig · Walter Clark

Subject: Memorial Hall

William Jennings Bryan argues against entering the war in Memorial Hall

Former secretary of state William Jennings Bryan, campaigning for peace, spoke in Memorial Hall to students and townspeople, a crowd that spilled into the street, and urged Americans to keep out of Europe's war.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Graham tells a Memorial Hall gathering how the university will serve in the war

Two weeks after the United States entered the war, more than a thousand people heard Graham in Memorial Hall urge students to stay in school until called. He promised military training on campus and a faculty program of instruction to aid the war effort.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Secretary of War Newton D. Baker gives the wartime commencement address

Baker spoke to an overflowing Memorial Hall hung with flags, the day after draft registration, warning that the war would be long and urging those who stayed to keep learning. Of the 161 graduates in the class of 1917, 65 were already in training camps, and all dances were canceled.

People: Josephus Daniels · Edward Kidder Graham

Subject: Memorial Hall

Governor Bickett gives a wartime University Day address

A month after the term opened, Governor Thomas W. Bickett spoke at University Day in a chilly Memorial Hall, denouncing slackers. Marshals led the academic procession through ranks of uniformed men.

People: Edward Kidder Graham

Subject: Memorial Hall

A subdued wartime commencement honors the governor, Senator Overman and the Rev. W. D. Moss

With about a third of the class of 1918 already in camps, the university gave honorary degrees to Governor Bickett, Senator Lee S. Overman, Edwin Mims and the Presbyterian pastor W. D. Moss. Frederic C. Howe, immigration commissioner at New York, gave the address.

People: William Dygnum Moss · Thomas W. Bickett

Subject: Memorial Hall

Orange County holds a Fourth of July war rally on the UNC campus

At the Governor's request the UNC Summer School invited the county to its July 4, 1918 celebration, and at least 3,000 people came for a parade, a flag raising and S. M. Gattis's address in Memorial Hall. The county Council of Defense met in Gerrard Hall, and Adolph Vermont's pageant on French-American friendship played in Battle's Park.

People: M. C. S. Noble · Adolph Vermont · J. Cheshire Webb · Samuel Mallett Gattis

Subject: Gerrard Hall · Memorial Hall · University Summer School · Battle Park

Chapel Hill welcomes home its World War soldiers alongside Confederate veterans

On Saturday, May 10, 1919, a parade of Confederate veterans, returned soldiers and sailors, former student soldiers and town groups filled Franklin and Columbia Streets. Over 2,000 people crowded Memorial Hall to hear Archibald Henderson, L. P. McLendon and Joseph Hyde Pratt, with William Cain presiding.

People: Archibald Henderson · Joseph Hyde Pratt · Andrew Henry Patterson

Subject: Memorial Hall

The University opens its first postwar year with a record 1,350 students

On opening day almost 400 freshmen filled Memorial Hall to hear Chase. Enrollment reached 1,350, about 500 more than the spring before; three or four men shared rooms built for two, some 600 boarded in the village, and 80 veterans of the AEF formed a club.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · Frank Porter Graham

Subject: Memorial Hall

Biologist Edwin Grant Conklin gives the McNair lectures on evolution

Over three evenings in Memorial Hall, the Princeton biologist dismissed the clay-molding account of creation and said scientific doctrines stood or fell on evidence alone. His lectures were printed as part of the McNair series, and Presbyterians later cited them in charging that the university ignored the terms of John Calvin McNair's bequest.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Harry W. Chase is inaugurated as president in Memorial Hall

The new ROTC unit led a procession of students, faculty, alumni and delegates from over a hundred institutions to Memorial Hall, where Chief Justice Walter Clark gave Chase the oath. Chase asked the state to see its University as the university of the South; the day ended with a banquet at Swain Hall and a reception in Bynum Gymnasium.

People: Josephus Daniels · Walter Clark

Subject: Memorial Hall

Memorial Hall is renovated with heat, electric light and sound padding

Builders laid cork on the floors and padded the vaulted ceiling with felt and burlap to fix the acoustics, and added electric lights and heat so the hall could be used year-round. It reopened for the fall 1921 term.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Chase and Coates rally students to revive the Graham Memorial drive

President Chase, Albert Coates and student body president Julian Allsbrook held a special chapel meeting in Memorial Hall to restart the stalled fund drive, with plans cut back to a smaller building whose exterior was under way. In March Coates set out a University Life Unification Plan centered on the building.

People: Albert Coates

Subject: Memorial Hall · Graham Memorial

General Albert J. Bowley warns of campus radicals in a Memorial Hall address

Two weeks after he had berated extension director Chester D. Snell at a Raleigh luncheon, the commander of Fort Bragg spoke for nearly an hour in Memorial Hall on the occasion of Washington's birthday before a crowd of about 3,000. He repeated his charges that Soviet-backed agitators were working through colleges and welfare groups, and his closing call for an ROTC unit at the university drew long applause.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Chase opens the year with his address on the university's intellectual responsibility

Speaking to more than 2,200 students in Memorial Hall at the start of the fall term, Chase answered the university's critics without naming them: the attack on intellectual freedom fell on biology and the social sciences, and suppressing debate led to sterility. He offered a test for responsible free speech and defended the building program ahead of the legislature. The talk was printed more widely than any of his others.

Subject: Memorial Hall

University Day marks fifty years since the 1875 reopening

More than ninety representatives of American colleges joined a procession from the Alumni Building to Memorial Hall, where former commissioner of education Philander P. Claxton spoke. In his first address to the university, Governor McLean called it the head of the state's school system and asked it to help smooth religious and social divisions.

People: Harry Woodburn Chase · Edwin Anderson Alderman · Francis Preston Venable · Angus W. McLean

Subject: Memorial Hall

Commencement moves from midweek to a weekend

To draw more alumni, the 1926 exercises were shifted to the weekend for the first time, with a president's reception and an alumni ball added. The 366 graduates heard Richmond editor Douglas Southall Freeman, and Governor McLean received an honorary doctor of laws with a faculty citation that gently mocked his economies.

People: Angus W. McLean

Subject: Memorial Hall

James Weldon Johnson speaks at the YMCA's Institute of Human Relations

Harry F. Comer's weeklong institute, approved by Chase, brought speakers on race, labor and world affairs. Johnson, NAACP executive secretary, spoke in Memorial Hall and met classes. History chair J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton walked out when Howard Odum introduced him as 'Mister Johnson' and protested to Chase, while a Tar Heel editorial by David Donald Carroll welcomed the visit.

People: Howard W. Odum · J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton

Subject: Memorial Hall · University YMCA

A new Memorial Hall with a Doric portico replaces the Victorian auditorium

In January 1930 the university decided to raze Old Memorial Hall and build a larger auditorium to plans by Atwood and Nash. The new Colonial Revival hall, with three entrances under a monumental Doric portico facing Cameron Avenue, stood by early 1931, one of three buildings the university completed in the early Depression under Frank Porter Graham.

Subject: Memorial Hall

UNC tears down the old Memorial Hall

The first Memorial Hall, closed in the fall of 1929 and declared unsafe in December 1929, was torn down in February 1930 after the trustees voted on January 28, 1930 to replace it with a new auditorium on the same site.

Subject: Memorial Hall

The new Memorial Hall is dedicated

Chase had found the money for the replacement auditorium within university accounts, helped by $5,000 from John Sprunt Hill, but none was left to furnish it. Guests at the dedication sat on the scarred heart-pine benches saved from the old hall, along with its marble tablets to the Civil War dead.

People: John Sprunt Hill

Subject: Memorial Hall

Kay Kyser's band closes the May Frolics dances in the Tin Can

Kay Kyser and his orchestra, made up of former UNC students, played the formal dance that closed the fourth annual May Frolics in the Tin Can. The band also gave a benefit concert in Memorial Hall the next afternoon.

Subject: Memorial Hall

A memorial tablet for Robert Bingham is installed in Memorial Hall

A memorial tablet in Robert Bingham's name was installed in the university's Memorial Hall in Chapel Hill on October 12, 1939.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Eleanor Roosevelt speaks at Memorial Hall to close a post-war planning conference

Eleanor Roosevelt spoke in Memorial Hall at UNC to a capacity audience of about 2,000 people, closing a two-day conference on post-war planning sponsored by the Carolina Political Union and the International Student Service. She warned the audience that there was no going back to normalcy.

People: Frank Porter Graham

Subject: Memorial Hall

Andy Griffith plays his first role, in The Gondoliers at Memorial Hall

Andy Griffith, who had arrived at Carolina in July 1944, auditioned on a whim and made his stage debut in a Carolina Playmakers production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Gondoliers at Memorial Hall.

Subject: Memorial Hall · Carolina Playmakers

Swalin's newly professional North Carolina Symphony plays Memorial Hall

Benjamin Swalin brought the North Carolina Symphony to Memorial Hall after an expansion campaign that let him hire a professional orchestra for the first time. The Daily Tar Heel's critic, a longtime skeptic, wrote that it had become the most capable musical organization then playing in the state.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Kay Kyser leads a rained-out pep rally in Memorial Hall

When rain cancelled the outdoor rally and torchlight parade before the Texas game, Kay Kyser, his wife Georgia Carroll and coach Carl Snavely entertained more than 1,800 students in a packed Memorial Hall.

People: Carl Snavely

Subject: Memorial Hall

Howard Mumford Jones gives the address at the dedication of the university library addition

Howard Mumford Jones, a former member of the university's English faculty then at Harvard, gave the principal address, on the library in higher education, at the dedication of the $1.6 million addition to the university library, held in Memorial Hall.

People: Robert B (Robert Bingham) Downs · Charles E. (Charles Everett) Rush

Subject: UNC Libraries · Memorial Hall

Floyd McKissick and Malcolm X appear together at UNC's Memorial Hall

A day after their meeting in Durham, Durham attorney Floyd McKissick and Malcolm X appeared at UNC in a meeting moved from Howell Hall to Memorial Hall when about 1,600 people came. McKissick said he believed the Muslim movement had grown out of the frustration of Black Americans.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Gary Waller joins a student panel on the Speaker Ban in Memorial Hall

The Daily Tar Heel reported that student body president Paul Dickson presided over a noon meeting of students and faculty in Memorial Hall, with a panel of four that included Waller, Carolina Conservative Club president Wilson Clark and the SDS faculty advisers Joseph Straley and Lewis Lipsitz. The meeting adopted a resolution about four and a half hours before the trustees' executive committee voted 8 to 3 to bar Herbert Aptheker from speaking.

People: Paul Dickson III

Subject: Memorial Hall

UNC trustees' executive committee bars Frank Wilkinson and Herbert Aptheker from the Chapel Hill campus

Meeting in Governor Dan K. Moore's office in Raleigh, the executive committee of the UNC board of trustees voted 8 to 3 to deny university facilities to Aptheker and Wilkinson and suspended all other invitations covered by the speaker ban law until the full board adopted rules. Earlier that day more than 800 students and faculty at a Memorial Hall meeting had backed Aptheker's right to speak.

People: Paul Dickson III · Herbert Aptheker · Dan K. Moore

Subject: Memorial Hall

Student Government's 'The Strike Continues?' release turns the strike toward canvassing and calls a Memorial Hall teach-in

Tom Bello's Student Government press release declared that rallies alone would not end the war and redirected the strike, which it said now involved well over half the student body, toward canvassing, petitions and visits to Congress. It announced a faculty panel on the war for 3 p.m. Monday, May 11 in Memorial Hall with Samuel Wells, James Leutze, Andrew Scott, Daniel Pollitt and David Lapkin.

Subject: Memorial Hall

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.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Andy Griffith speaks at University Day in Memorial Hall

Griffith gave the University Day speech in Memorial Hall and recalled fighting back tears as he approached the building where he had first performed.

Subject: Memorial Hall

UNC gives Jeff MacNelly its Distinguished Alumnus Award

At the University Day convocation in Memorial Hall, UNC presented Distinguished Alumnus Awards to cartoonist Jeff MacNelly, Justice Henry E. Frye, Rolfe Neill, Banks C. Talley Jr. and John A. Montgomery.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Annie Dillard is UNC's Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence

Dillard spent a week at UNC in the English department's Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence program, meeting creative writing students and giving a free public reading in Memorial Hall on February 1. The Daily Tar Heel reported a full house.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Charles Kuralt is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery

Kuralt died on July 4, 1997 and was buried on the UNC campus in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. About 1,600 people attended a memorial service in Memorial Hall, where Hugh Morton and William C. Friday spoke.

People: William C. Friday

Subject: Old Chapel Hill Cemetery · Memorial Hall

Elizabeth Spencer reads in Memorial Hall at the North Carolina Literary Festival

Spencer gave a program in Memorial Hall on the Saturday of the North Carolina Literary Festival at UNC, sponsored by the Center for the Study of the American South.

Subject: Memorial Hall

Merge Records marks its 20th anniversary with the XX Merge festival

The label held four nights at Cat's Cradle and a finale at UNC's Memorial Hall, with film screenings at the Ackland Art Museum and a free show at the Orange County Social Club in Carrboro.

People: Mac McCaughan · Laura Ballance

Subject: Memorial Hall · Cat’s Cradle · Ackland Art Museum