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Orange County Indexed

Chronology

Key events from Orange County history: 100 highlights to start, then the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, each connected to the index. A storyline gathers many dated events into one history, such as the Regulator crisis.

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4 dated events match your filters.

Searched the full chronology of 6,171 dated events and 63 storylines, not only the highlights. Showing 1–4.Back to highlights

Entries

  1. Early twentieth century · 1900–1944

  2. Life event · UNC campus, Chapel Hill Kennon Cheek joins the janitorial staff of Venable Hall

    Cheek began working for the university as a boy, helping his father Rubin Cheek, a stonemason born in slavery in Warren County, lay the stone walls around the campus. Around 1920 he joined the janitorial staff of Venable Hall.

  3. Naming or commemoration · UNC campus, Chapel Hill The new chemistry building, Venable Hall, is dedicated

    The university dedicated its new chemistry building in 1925 and named it Venable Hall while Venable was still teaching there.

  4. Civil rights era · 1945–1975

  5. Construction or physical change · Venable Hall, UNC, Chapel Hill A ten-story chemistry laboratory tower is added to Venable Hall

    In 1971 the university added a ten-story laboratory tower for chemistry to Venable Hall, one of the modernist buildings of its 1960s and early 1970s building boom along South Road.

  6. Recent decades · 1976–2026

  7. Disaster or outbreak · Venable Hall, UNC campus, Chapel Hill A 70-foot oak weakened by Hurricane Fran falls on Venable Hall

    A 70-foot white oak fell against Venable Hall at about 2:10 p.m., damaging handrails on the building's steps; no one was hurt. University forester Kirk Pelland said Fran's winds and Wednesday's heavy rain had left many old campus trees at risk, and Executive Vice Chancellor Elson Floyd asked people to report damaged trees to the Grounds Division.

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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 2, 2026.

Two mice reading back to back against a leaf, with the hand-lettered words Friends of the Orange County Public Library
Illustration by Caldecott Medalist Matthew Cordell, gifted to the Friends 2026