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9 dated events match your filters.
Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–9.Back to highlights
Entries
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
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Thomas Kirkland starts a frame house and finishes it after the Civil War
Thomas Kirkland began a two-room frame house on University Station Road before he left for the war and completed it when he came back.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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State convicts build the University Railroad
Governor Thomas J. Jarvis supplied state convicts at low hire to grade the line from University Station to Chapel Hill, while the Richmond and Danville company laid the rails. A white convict was shot dead while fleeing, and a Black convict named Fries died of gangrene after a whipping by the road's managers, which the solicitor found no ground to prosecute.
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Railroad service reaches West End
The first passenger train on the University Railroad left Chapel Hill on Monday, February 6, 1882, and ran through University Station to Raleigh. The line ended about a mile west of the village at West End, where a boxcar served as the depot, and the settlement that became Carrboro grew up around it.
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Fred Smith begins about fifty years as conductor on the Chapel Hill branch train
Captain Fred Smith became conductor on the University Station branch in 1889 and kept the job for about half a century, until passenger service ended.
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Benjamin Duke builds a country house at University Station
Durham tobacco industrialist Benjamin Duke built a large, richly trimmed country house at University Station in 1891. The site lay south of Hillsborough, where a railroad spur met the North Carolina Railroad. The retreat once took in a big pond, bridges, an office and many outbuildings; by 1993 most of these were gone, but the house with its wraparound porch was well kept.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
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The school at University is burned, and the board offers a reward for the arsonist
Fire destroyed the school building in the University community in the fall of 1910, and on November 3 the board asked the state for a $700 loan to rebuild it. In April 1911 the board offered a $100 reward, if the law allowed, for conviction of whoever had set the fire.
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Southern Power Company builds a steam plant on the Eno near University Station
Duke's Southern Power Company built a coal-fired steam generating plant beside the Eno near University Station, a backup for its hydroelectric stations, with Fiske-Carter Construction Company holding the contract in 1915. By July 1916 the Eno steam plant was sending current as far as Charlotte while flooding shut down the company's river stations. Its power went to Durham's factories, not to Orange County.
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Passenger trains stop running on the University Railroad
Mixed passenger service on the ten-mile line between University Station and Carrboro ended as car ownership spread and roads improved, leaving the line to freight.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Duke Power dismantles its Eno steam plant
Duke Power sold most of the equipment of its standby steam plant in Eno Township to the Sid Rancer Company, a junk dealer, for $30,500 before January 1, 1960, and tore down six of the twelve company houses. The county lost several hundred thousand dollars in tax valuation.
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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.
