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Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
- 1790s
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George Clarke is buried in the ground that becomes the Chapel Hill town cemetery
The oldest dated stone in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, at Raleigh and Country Club roads, marks the 1798 grave of George Clarke, a member of the university's Philanthropic Society. It shows the burial ground in use by that year.
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The Philanthropic Society adopts rules for marking its members' graves
When its minutes resumed in January 1799, after George Clarke's burial, George Long of Halifax County moved that the society honor members buried at Chapel Hill. Three weeks later a committee called for a black-painted oak or poplar railing around each grave with the name, date and society lettered in white, and a black armband worn for three months.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1810s
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Margaretta Chapman's marble headstone becomes the oldest surviving monument in the Chapel Hill graveyard
The Baroque-style marble headstone of sixteen-year-old Margaretta Chapman, who died in 1814, was probably set soon after her death and is thought to be the oldest stone monument in the cemetery. Like other early stones it was likely shipped in, since no gravestone carvers worked in North Carolina before the 1820s.
- 1830s
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University trustees pay for a stone wall around the Chapel Hill graveyard
By 1835 about six more marked graves had joined George Clarke's, among them society members James Neal and James Smith, and the trustees set aside $64.41 to enclose the burying ground with a stone wall.
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President Joseph Caldwell dies
The university's first president died after years of a painful illness and was buried in the Chapel Hill village cemetery. The trustees' executive committee adopted a tribute on February 6, 1835, and the students resolved to wear badges of mourning.
- 1840s
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Fayetteville carver George Lauder makes Lewis Bowen Holt's tomb-table in the Dialectic Society plot
The marble tomb-table over Dialectic Society member Lewis Bowen Holt, who died in 1842, carries a carved desert scene of a broken fountain and cistern drawn from Ecclesiastes 12. It is unsigned but matches a signed Lauder stone in Fayetteville's Cross Creek Cemetery.
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University trustees name the burying ground the College Graveyard
After Judge William Gaston died in 1844, faculty members asked the trustees for a separate burying ground in sight of the campus for eminent men of the university, starting with Gaston's body brought from Raleigh. The trustees let the petition lapse and in June 1845 named the existing ground the College Graveyard instead.
- 1850s
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Signed marble obelisks go up in the Dialectic and Philanthropic plots
George Lauder signed obelisks for Philanthropic members David White Fisher (died 1850) and Mark Bennett (died 1851) and for Dialectic member John Alexander Smith (died 1855), and the Raleigh firm of Maunder & Campbell signed the obelisk of Joshua P. Perry (died 1856). Signed stones are rare in the cemetery.
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Ellington Burnett's grave becomes the earliest dated African American burial in the Chapel Hill graveyard
A brownstone ledger for Ellington Burnett, 1831-1853, son of Cornelius and Caroline Burnett, is the oldest inscribed stone in Section B, the burial ground used for enslaved people. The section was almost certainly in use earlier, its graves marked only by fieldstones.
- 1860s
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A carved brownstone headstone marks Thomas Fletcher's grave in the enslaved people's section
Thomas Fletcher, 1838-1862, received a round-topped brownstone headstone with a monogrammed footstone in Section B, as did George, son of Samuel Barbee (no dates). The rough local stone points to a mason cutting gravestones on the side; with Burnett's ledger they are among the few inscribed antebellum markers in a North Carolina slave cemetery.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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James Phillips dies in the college chapel
On the morning of March 14, 1867, James Phillips went early to the college chapel to lead morning prayers and was found dead on the rostrum as the bell rang. He had taught at the university since 1826 and was buried in the Chapel Hill Cemetery.
- 1870s
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November Caldwell, once enslaved by President Joseph Caldwell, dies
November Caldwell (1791-1872), held in slavery by Joseph Caldwell, brought firewood to the students, who were fond of him for his humor. A memorial in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery on the campus honors him.
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Adolphus W. Mangum joins the faculty of the reopened university
When the university reopened in 1875 Mangum became professor of mental and moral science, history and English language and literature. He taught until he died in Chapel Hill in May 1890 and was buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
- 1880s
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Chapel Hill's Black residents begin burying their dead in Section A
Section A, beside the old slave section on the west side of the cemetery, came into general use by Chapel Hill's African American community in the mid-1880s. Its later markers include cast concrete headstones common in Black cemeteries of the period.
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Thomas West Harris, first dean of UNC's medical school, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Thomas West Harris (1839-1888), the first dean of the university's medical school, was buried in the cemetery.
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Professor emeritus Charles Phillips dies
Phillips, who came to Chapel Hill at four, graduated in 1841, taught mathematics for decades and chaired the faculty at the 1875 reopening, died ten years after retiring. He was buried in the Chapel Hill cemetery, and a tablet in the Presbyterian church records his work in building it.
- 1890s
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The W. S. Guthrie family plot is enclosed with a cast-iron fence
The Guthrie plot in Section I has one of the most ornate iron fences in the cemetery, its gate cast with the family name, the date 1892 and a willow shading two lambs.
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Dilsey Craig, enslaved in the household of professor James Phillips, dies
Dilsey Craig (1802-1894) and Ben Craig were enslaved by the family of mathematics professor James Phillips and lived in the brick kitchen behind 501 East Franklin Street. Dilsey remained with the family long after freedom, and a memorial marks her in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Wilson Caldwell dies and is buried in the Chapel Hill town cemetery
Wilson Caldwell, head of the university's campus workforce, died on July 8, 1898 and was buried the next day in the Chapel Hill town cemetery, now the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery; Kemp Battle gave the funeral address.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
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A survey enlarging the graveyard is laid before the Chapel Hill aldermen
After a 1902 trustee resolution to enlarge the crowded burying ground, a survey by James O. Webb presented to the town board on December 12, 1903 added two-thirds of an acre on the west and one and one-third acres on the east. No approval is recorded, but the east addition matches Section II, where regular burials began in the early 1900s.
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The old Joseph Caldwell obelisk is taken down, later to stand for four college servants
In July 1904 the remains of President Joseph Caldwell and his wife were moved to the base of the 1858 marble monument, and the original sandstone obelisk was taken down, to be set up again in the Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. It was later raised over Wilson Caldwell's grave, and a marble tablet placed in its base by the Class of 1891 names Wilson Swain Caldwell, November Caldwell, David Barham and Henry Smith, who served the university.
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The Leonidas Polk Chapter of the UDC holds Confederate memorial exercises
On May 10, 1905, the Leonidas Polk Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy held memorial exercises in Gerrard Hall, reading the roll of students who had served in the Confederate army. Children and adults then carried flowers to decorate soldiers' graves in the village cemetery.
- 1910s
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George Trice, who ran an oyster restaurant and shoe shop on Franklin Street, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
George Trice (1838-1915), an African American businessman who kept an oyster restaurant and a shoe repair shop on Franklin Street, was buried in the cemetery's Black section.
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Susan Moses Graham, the president's wife, dies at Chapel Hill
Susan Moses Graham, 34, died on the last day of the fall session after six weeks of infection. Remaining classes were called off, and she was buried in the Chapel Hill cemetery on December 23 after a service at the Chapel of the Cross. She had helped found the Chapel Hill Community Club.
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Former mayor Algernon Barbee is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Algernon Barbee (1840-1918), once mayor of Chapel Hill, was buried in the cemetery.
- 1920s
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Chapel Hill aldermen order a cemetery survey, burial permits and a deed from the university
After noting in December 1922 that the cemetery needed more room, the town board on May 10, 1923 told the town manager to survey the grounds, begin burial permits and obtain a deed from the university showing that the town owned the cemetery. Nothing is recorded to have come of it.
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University trustees give Chapel Hill three more acres for the cemetery
Answering an aldermen's petition of June 11, 1928 about crowding, the trustees granted two acres on the east, laid out as Sections III and IV, and an acre on the south that extended the Black Sections A and B. Lot sales went into a maintenance fund overseen by a joint town and faculty committee.
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Mary Bayley Pratt, namesake of Chapel Hill's public library, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Mary Bayley Pratt (1874-1929), for whom the Chapel Hill public library of the time was named, was buried in the family plot she shares with Joseph Hyde Pratt.
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Sophia MacNider, who kept a boarding house and preparatory school on Franklin Street, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Sophia MacNider (1846-1929), who ran a boarding house and a preparatory school in her Franklin Street home, was buried in the cemetery.
- 1930s
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A Phillips grandchild sets a headstone for Dilsey Craig
A small granite headstone was placed over the grave of Dilsey Craig, who died in 1894 after sixty years enslaved, mostly in the household of Professor James Phillips. Its inscription says a Phillips grandchild erected it, and its style suggests the 1930s.
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Postmaster, mayor and state senator William Pritchard is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
William Pritchard (1850-1930), Chapel Hill postmaster and mayor and a state senator, was buried in the cemetery.
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Dr. Edwin Caldwell is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Dr. Edwin Caldwell, a Black physician and son of Wilson Caldwell, died in 1932 and was buried in the Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, near his father. He had taken his medical degree at Shaw University and practiced for many years in Chapel Hill.
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University physician Eric Abernethy is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Eric Abernethy (1876-1933), the university physician for whom Abernethy Hall is named, was buried in the cemetery.
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Former university president Francis Preston Venable is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Francis Preston Venable (1856-1934), the chemist and university president under whom UNC gained national standing, was buried in the cemetery.
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Geologist Collier Cobb is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Collier Cobb Sr. (1862-1934), professor of geology at the university for forty-two years, was buried in the cemetery.
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Attorney and three-time mayor William Roberson is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
William Roberson (1869-1935), a lawyer who served three times as mayor of Chapel Hill, was buried in the cemetery.
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Louis H. Hackney dies in Chapel Hill
Louis H. Hackney, pastor, principal of the Quaker school from 1898 to 1912 and founder of Hackney's Educational and Industrial School, died in Chapel Hill on December 19, 1937. He was buried in the segregated Black section of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Ralph H. Graves is buried in Chapel Hill
Ralph H. Graves, a New York editor and newspaper syndicate agent born in Chapel Hill, died at his home in Garden City, Long Island, on December 1, 1939. After a funeral there, a burial service was held at the Chapel Hill cemetery on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 5.
- 1940s
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Good-roads advocate Harriet Morehead Berry is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Harriet Morehead Berry (1877-1940), who campaigned for North Carolina road improvements in the 1920s, was buried in the cemetery.
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Horace Williams dies and is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Williams died at eighty-two and was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. He left all of his property to the university in trust, the income to pay for fellowships in philosophy.
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Geologist Joseph Hyde Pratt, first chairman of the Chapel Hill Planning Board, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Joseph Hyde Pratt (1870-1942), professor of geology and the first chairman of the Chapel Hill Planning Board, was buried in the cemetery.
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Frederick Koch dies and is buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Koch, who taught dramatic literature and playwriting at UNC for twenty-six years and organized the Carolina Playmakers, died on August 16, 1944 and was buried in the old Chapel Hill Cemetery. Samuel Selden succeeded him as chair of the Department of Dramatic Art and director of the Playmakers.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Medical dean Isaac Hall Manning is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Isaac Hall Manning (1866-1946), the physician and medical school administrator who started Hospital Savings of North Carolina, the state's first medical insurance plan, was buried in the cemetery.
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George Kirkland, Chapel Hill's first African American dentist, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
George Kirkland (1899-1948), the first Black dentist in Chapel Hill, was buried in the cemetery.
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Chapel Hill builds a brick tool shed in the wall between the white and Black sections of the cemetery
In October 1949 the cemetery committee found the old tool shed past repair and asked for a brick one at a gap in the wall dividing the white and Black burial grounds. The small shed stands in the rubblestone wall that separates Section B from Section I.
- 1950s
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Nellie Stroud Strayhorn, who learned of her freedom in 1865 as a girl, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Nellie Stroud Strayhorn (1850-1950) was buried in the cemetery at about one hundred; as a teenager in 1865 she was said to have been told by passing soldiers, while sitting on a cabin porch, that she was free.
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R. D. W. Connor is buried in the Chapel Hill Cemetery
Connor died in February 1950, a year after retiring from the university, and was buried in the Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Jim Tatum dies at Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill
Tatum apparently contracted an overwhelming viral infection while visiting Canada with the coaches Peahead Walker and Frank Howard, and died one week after entering Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill. He was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery.
- 1960s
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The university's attorney finds the trustees never deeded the cemetery to the town
In a letter of November 11, 1960 to J. A. Branch of the university business office, university attorney J. A. Williams reported no sign that the trustees had ever conveyed title to the cemetery land to Chapel Hill.
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Historian J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton (1878-1961), the historian who built the Southern Historical Collection in the university library, was buried in the cemetery.
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UNC moves the Mitchell family graves from the campus to the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Four graves of Elisha Mitchell's infant sons and grandsons, in the old Mitchell garden near the center of campus, were exhumed under archaeologist Joffre Coe to make room for the expansion of the university's television and communications work. They were reburied in the Horace Williams plot in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery with the Rev. Vance Barron officiating.
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Lillian Hughes Prince leaves funds to the Carolina Playmakers
Lillian Hughes Prince, who had acted in thirty or more Playmakers productions, left considerable funds to the Carolina Playmakers in her will. She died in New York and was buried in Chapel Hill Cemetery.
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Fanny McDade, laundress to generations of students, is buried at 103 in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Fanny McDade (1861-1964), an African American woman who did students' laundry for many years, died at 103 and is thought to be the oldest person buried in the cemetery.
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Chapel Hill Weekly founder Louis Graves is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Louis Graves (1883-1965), founder, publisher and editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly, was buried in the cemetery.
- 1970s
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Frank Porter Graham is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Frank Porter Graham (1886-1972), first president of the consolidated University of North Carolina and later a United States senator, was buried in the cemetery.
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Restaurateur Edward "Papa D" Danziger is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Edward "Papa D" Danziger (1893-1972), whose Chapel Hill restaurants fed generations of students, was buried in the cemetery.
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Vandals break or topple forty to fifty monuments in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
On the night of November 27, 1974, vandals broke or pushed over forty or fifty gravestones, and police patrolled for a week. Cemetery committee chair Shirley Marshall then faulted the town for ignoring earlier requests about ownership and repairs.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
- 1980s
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Playwright Paul Green is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Paul Green (1894-1981), the dramatist who wrote the outdoor drama The Lost Colony, was buried in the cemetery.
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The university drops a plan to take over the cemetery and extend it into the east grove
In 1982 the university proposed taking control of the cemetery from the town and extending it into the wooded grove on its east side for about 185 new graves, citing poor upkeep. Opposition in the neighborhoods east of the campus led it to abandon the plan.
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Bandleader Kay Kyser is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
James Kern "Kay" Kyser (1905-1985), the bandleader, was buried in the cemetery.
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Rebecca Clark shows the Town Council the neglect of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Rebecca Clark of Chapel Hill's Black community gave the Town Council a slide show of sunken graves, broken walls, trash and overturned markers on April 22, 1985. The council named a task force, which called for a phased master plan.
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A master plan for the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery is completed
The master plan, finished in 1987 and revised by landscape architect David Swanson, set goals, service levels and management for the cemetery and first called for settling its ownership. A new gazebo and lawn followed.
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Albert Coates, founder of the Institute of Government, is buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery
Albert Coates (1896-1989), who founded the Institute of Government at the university, was buried in the cemetery.
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The university and the state quitclaim the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery to the town
A quitclaim deed dated February 22, 1989 released the university's and the state's rights in the cemetery to the Town of Chapel Hill, settling a question of ownership open since the 1920s.
- 1990s
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The state puts the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery on the Study List
A committee member asked how the cemetery differed from other town burial grounds that held a community's leading people. Staff answered that cemeteries had to be judged one at a time and that the cemetery's clearly bounded older sections and the importance of those buried there met the test for cemeteries. The committee approved it on January 14, 1993.
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The Old Chapel Hill Cemetery is listed in the National Register
On June 3, 1994 the National Park Service listed the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery in Chapel Hill in the National Register of Historic Places.
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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.
- 2000s
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Gladys Coates dies at one hundred
Gladys Coates, partner in the founding of the Institute of Government and a student of the University's history, died at a hundred. After a service at the Chapel of the Cross she was buried beside Albert Coates in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, across the road from the School of Government.
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The Sonja Haynes Stone Center celebrates its grand opening
After more than a decade of organizing, the freestanding Sonja Haynes Stone Center for Black Culture and History opened in Coker Woods with a four-day celebration. A Friday candlelight procession from the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery preceded Saturday's dedication by Chancellor James Moeser before more than 500 guests.
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