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Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1860s
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Northside, Pine Knolls, and Tin Top
Chapel Hill’s historic Black neighborhoods took shape after emancipation around the West End church and school, the Orange County Training School and its Rosenwald campus of 1924, St. Joseph CME and First Baptist, and the tin-roofed houses that named Tin Top. Lincoln High opened on Merritt Mill Road in 1951, residents resisted urban renewal in the 1970s, and as the Black population fell by about 40 percent the conservation districts, the Jackson Center and the 2015 Northside initiative worked to keep the neighborhoods in place.
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Freedpeople build a church and school at Chapel Hill's West End
After emancipation, Black families kept homes and small farms on Chapel Hill's west end. St. Paul's congregation, first gathered under an arbor in December 1864, built a log church on Merritt Mill Road and bought land in 1878, and in 1866 Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal bought an acre nearby for a freedmen's school.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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Benjamin Craig and Green Cordal secure land for a Black school
At an estate auction in January 1866 Benjamin Craig, a local farmer, and Green Cordal, a formerly enslaved minister, bought one acre opposite the northwest end of Franklin Street for fifty dollars, and by August 1867 had conveyed it to three Philadelphia Friends for the relief of colored freedmen. The Friends sent George Dixon and his family to run the school, which stood at what is now 100 Merritt Mill Road on the edge of Northside.
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A count of Chapel Hill finds 483 white and 454 Black residents
Four years after emancipation, Chapel Hill had 483 white and 454 Black residents, close to half and half. Freed families were making homes on the village's western side, on West Cameron Avenue, West Franklin Street and around Potter's Field west of Church Street.
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Black families make homes on Lot 16 on East Franklin Street
After E. Hunt closed his boarding house and Dr. Johnston B. Jones left town, Black families moved into both buildings: Tom Moore into the larger two-story house and the Burnett family into the small former medicine shop. Several other Black families settled on what had been Lot 16.
- 1870s
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Toney and Nellie Strayhorn, formerly enslaved, bought thirty acres in what became Carrboro
The Strayhorns bought about thirty acres and built a one-room log cabin at what is now 109 Jones Ferry Road, and their son William built the house next door at 107 in 1915. Toney Strayhorn is remembered as a founder of First Baptist Church in Chapel Hill, and the house is still owned by a great-granddaughter.
- 1890s
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Black families' homes on Lot 16 are razed and an Alpha Tau Omega cottage goes up
The houses of Jordan Weaver, a Black preacher, and of two other Black families who had built on the old Lot 16 were torn down, and a cottage for the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity was built on the lot facing the Episcopal church.
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Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten was born on Lloyd Street in what became Carrboro
Elizabeth Nevills, later known as Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, was born near the railroad tracks on what is now Lloyd Street in Carrboro. As a child she wrote “Freight Train,” which Folkways released on record in 1958 and which carried her into the folk revival.
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Cotton Chapel CME Church, the forerunner of St. Joseph CME, was organized
Chapel Hill members of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church, who had worshipped at Hamlet Chapel in Pittsboro, formed their own congregation named for founder Henry Cotton. Its first building later burned and was rebuilt as a frame church.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1910s
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Black-owned town lots in Chapel Hill nearly double in ten years
The African American community's real estate grew from 98 lots in 1910 to 170 in 1920. The same passage names Black-owned barber, shoe repair, restaurant, grocery and pressing businesses of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
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The Strayhorn log cabin on Jones Ferry Road reaches its two-story form
Toney Strayhorn, born enslaved in Orange County, became a farmer and brick mason and in the late 1800s built a one-room log cabin on his tract. He and later his son William enlarged it until, by about 1910, it stood two stories high with a rear ell and big brick end chimneys that show the family's skill.
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The Chapel Hill Community Club runs an improvement contest in a Black neighborhood
Susan Moses Graham and the Community Club, with YMCA students under Frank Porter Graham, organized a project in an African American neighborhood at the edge of town, giving prizes for the cleanest house, the cleanest yard and the best fence.
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Contractor Charles Craige builds a gambrel-roofed bungalow for mason William Strayhorn
The house at 107 Jones Ferry Road was built for William and Margie Strayhorn beside the home of his father Toney, head of a family of brick masons. William died young in 1933; his daughter Laura and her husband Albert Reaves kept the house in 1983.
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Hackney's school on Merritt Mill Road is bought for a public training school
Louis Hackney had opened his school for Black students on Merritt Mill Road in 1912. In 1916 the property was bought for a public training school for Black students, after Black residents raised $3,000 toward the purchase.
- 1920s
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Carpenter Luther Hargrave builds a bungalow on Lindsay Street for his daughter's family
In the African American section of Northside west of Church Street, carpenter Luther Hargrave built a side-gabled bungalow with a large front dormer at 308 Lindsay Street in 1920 for his daughter and her husband.
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Luther R. Hargraves built the tin-roofed houses that gave Tin Top its name
Luther R. Hargraves, a carpenter and Chapel Hill's first African American mortician, built a row of houses with tin roofs on Hargraves Street near the railroad tracks behind St. Paul AME, and the cluster became known as Tin Top or Tin Top Alley.
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Orange County Training School burns
On June 12, 1922, a kitchen fire started by boarders in the neighboring Flanner-Carr House destroyed the Orange County Training School building, the Flanner-Carr House and several outbuildings. Classes met in scattered places until a Rosenwald-funded brick school opened in Northside in 1924.
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Kennon Cheek helps negotiate the land swap that brought Hackney's school to Northside
Cheek's daughter Marian Cheek Jackson said he was instrumental in negotiating the 1924 land swap that moved Hackney's Educational and Industrial School from South Merritt Mill Road into the Northside community.
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Orange County Training School opens a Rosenwald campus
The Orange County Training School's new brick building for Black students rose on land given by Henry Strowd at the north end of Church Street in Northside, Chapel Hill. Its cornerstone was laid on Labor Day 1924 and it opened late that year; the Rosenwald Fund gave $1,500 of its $23,112 cost, Black residents $500.
- 1930s
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The Black neighborhood on the Chapel Hill line spreads west into Partridge Field
In the late 1930s the African American neighborhood straddling the Chapel Hill and Carrboro line grew west into Partridge Field. Only then, the book says, was it readily counted as part of either town; segregation and the community's own sense of itself had kept it apart, with its churches and schools facing Chapel Hill.
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St. Joseph CME built its first church on West Rosemary Street
Henry Baldwin, Margaret Burnette and Kennon Cheek mortgaged their homes for the down payment on the Rosemary Street lot, which Black leaders had judged too small for a new high school. A frame church went up under Rev. Joseph S. Miller and was dedicated as St. Joseph Colored Methodist Episcopal Church.
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Second Baptist Church is organized in Chapel Hill
A second Black Baptist congregation was organized in Chapel Hill and put up its building in April 1938.
- 1940s
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Jeter and Ethel Neville buy a corner lot at Cobb and Broad streets in Carrboro
On September 13, 1944, Jeter and Ethel Neville bought a small lot at the northwest corner of Cobb and Broad streets, in the Lloyd-Broad section of the Black Northside neighborhood, from Guilford Realty and Insurance Company. Jeter Neville was a janitor at Northside Elementary School.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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Black mason John Wesley Campbell and his sons build the stone Neville House in Carrboro
John Wesley Campbell and his sons, with Jeter Neville and mason Earnest Farrar, built the Nevilles' one-and-a-half-story bungalow of granite fieldstone trimmed in red brick, with an arcaded porch and a star and crescent moon set in stone beside the front windows. Campbell's son Handy said the stones came by army truck from Chatham County; the house is the least altered of Campbell's five 1940s stone buildings in Northside.
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John Wesley Campbell builds a fieldstone house for a pastor on North Graham Street
John Wesley Campbell designed and built a large fieldstone house at 214 North Graham Street in Northside for a local pastor, finished in 1945 and one of the first houses on the street. It is the largest of his four stone houses in the neighborhood, with a broad arched corner porch and a stone end chimney.
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Mason Alfred Barbee builds his own house on Jones Ferry Road
After working at the Carrboro munitions plant during the war, the African American mason Alfred Barbee spent three years building his own house on Jones Ferry Road near the Strayhorn family homes, using his carpentry as well as his masonry skills.
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The Campbells build a stone bungalow for carpenter Vance Thompson on Broad Street
Next door to the Neville House, John Wesley Campbell and his sons designed and built a fieldstone Craftsman bungalow at 201 Broad Street for carpenter Vance Thompson and his family just after World War II. Land records show it finished by 1947; a Thompson son recalls moving in in 1946, and the family kept it until 2013.
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George Campbell and his father build a stone house on North Graham Street
On a lot owned by George Campbell, he and his father John Wesley Campbell, helped by the other Campbell sons, designed and built a small one-story fieldstone house at 203 North Graham Street, finished in 1948. It is the only one of the family's Northside stone houses whose stonework runs up into the gable.
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The Town of Chapel Hill buys land for a new cemetery for its Black residents
The town bought about ten acres of the former Roberson property, just beyond the railroad on the Carrboro side of town, for a segregated cemetery for Black residents. It became the West Chapel Hill Cemetery on Village Drive.
- 1950s
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African American flower sellers known as the Flower Ladies set up on Franklin Street
A group of Black vendors, each working independently, began selling fresh-cut flowers on the Franklin Street sidewalk around 1950 and became one of the town's best-known enterprises.
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Lincoln High School opens on Merritt Mill Road
In 1951 Lincoln High School, Chapel Hill's high school for Black students, moved from the old Orange County Training School building on Caldwell Street to a new building on Merritt Mill Road, and the old building became Northside Elementary. Lincoln used the Merritt Mill Road campus until 1966; the building is now the school district's Lincoln Center.
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The name Northside began to replace Pottersfield and Sunset
When the old Lincoln building became Northside Elementary in 1951, the school's name spread to the Black neighborhoods around it. By the mid-1950s Pottersfield, north of West Rosemary and west of Columbia Street, and its western neighbor Sunset were both being called Northside.
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Stephen J. Edwards's Midway Barber Shop is open on West Rosemary Street
Edwards's Midway Barber Shop was advertising on West Rosemary Street, at the Chapel Hill and Carrboro line, by late 1952. His son Stepney Edwards later ran the Black-owned shop.
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Rock Hill Baptist, renamed First Baptist, holds its first services on North Roberson Street
The Black Baptist congregation organized in 1865 had worshipped for decades as Rock Hill Baptist Church on the south side of West Franklin Street. Under its pastor, the Rev. J. R. Manley, it raised $10,001 in the first months of 1952 and began a colonial-style brick church on North Roberson Street between Franklin and Rosemary streets. The first services in the $100,000 building were held on Sunday, September 27, 1953, opening three weeks of dedication services; with the move the congregation took the name First Baptist Church. By early 1954 the old Franklin Street lot stood vacant.
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Charlie Mason's motor court on West Rosemary Street was lodging Black travelers
Mason's Motor Court at 603 West Rosemary Street, with the Starlite Supper Club, gave Black travelers and touring musicians a place to stay when other Chapel Hill hotels turned them away. The building is gone and the Greenbridge condominiums now stand on the site.
- 1960s
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Northside Elementary closed as the school system integrated
The Caldwell Street school closed soon after the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools began mandatory integration in 1966, and the building was turned into office space.
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Stonemason John Wesley Campbell, builder of Northside stone houses, dies
John Wesley Campbell, born about 1888 to a white father and a Black mother and trained in masonry from age seven, died in 1968. He worked on UNC buildings, Memorial Hospital and Franklin Street stores, built stone houses and the Hargraves Center in Northside, and taught the trade to his five sons and other Black masons.
- 1970s
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Northside and Pine Knolls residents resist federal urban renewal
When Northside and Pine Knolls were targeted for urban renewal, residents confronted HUD and avoided the wholesale clearance seen in Durham's Hayti, winning home improvements and new construction instead.
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The Flower Ladies move off the main sidewalk to NCNB Plaza
In 1971 the Flower Ladies moved their stands from the Franklin Street sidewalk into the NCNB Plaza passage and the alley next to the Intimate Bookshop.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
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St. Joseph CME sold Henry W. Baldwin's Broad Street land to Carrboro for a park
Henry W. Baldwin, a Black landowner in the Lloyd/Broad neighborhood, left his estate to St. Joseph CME Church. During the pastorate of Dr. L. Kenneth Bennett the church sold a tract on Broad Street to the Town of Carrboro for a park, which was named Baldwin Park in his honor.
- 1980s
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Northside's Black population falls by about 40 percent
Between 1980 and 2010 Northside's Black population fell by roughly 40 percent as investors bought homes and converted or replaced them as student rentals; over the same period the share of university workers living 10 or more miles away rose above 60 percent.
- 1990s
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Northside Gymnasium opens at Hargraves Park
Chapel Hill's Northside Gymnasium at William H. Hargraves Park, beside the Hargraves Center on North Roberson Street, opened to the public on June 15, 1998. Construction began April 21, 1997, paid for in part with parks bonds voters approved in November 1996, and the gym was dedicated on September 16, 1998.
- 2000s
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Chapel Hill enacts the Northside neighborhood conservation district
After residents asked for protection from student-rental conversions, the council enacted the town's first neighborhood conservation district, a zoning overlay limiting house size and height in Northside. An advisory committee drafted it through 2003 before a January 21, 2004 public hearing.
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Chapel Hill enacts the Pine Knolls neighborhood conservation district
The council voted 9-0 to adopt Ordinance O-7 creating the Pine Knolls district, which bans new duplexes, caps floor area at 2,500 square feet and reduces front-yard parking. The Greenwood and Kings Mill/Morgan Creek districts were adopted the same night.
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St. Joseph CME Church and UNC begin the Northside oral history partnership
Rev. Troy Harrison and UNC professor Della Pollock began collecting oral histories in Northside, the project that grew into the Marian Cheek Jackson Center.
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Marian Cheek Jackson Center opens at St. Joseph CME Church
The Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History held its ribbon cutting on the second floor of the H.W. Baldwin Fellowship Hall at St. Joseph C.M.E. Church. It is named for Marian Cheek Jackson, the church historian and lifelong Pine Knolls resident.
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The Greenbridge condominium towers topped out on West Rosemary Street
The 10-story and 7-story Greenbridge towers, with 98 condominium units, rose on the former Black business block that had held the Mason Motel. Northside residents opposed the project in an open letter, and restaurant owner Mildred "Mama Dip" Council said rising property values threatened her business.
- 2010s
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Council freezes building in Northside and Pine Knolls for six months
The council voted 7-0 for a six-month development moratorium in Northside and Pine Knolls, backdated to May 23, 2011, while a community plan was drafted. Jackson Center staff helped organize residents in support.
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The Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board decides to build a new Northside Elementary on the old school's site
The board announced a new elementary school on the grounds of the Northside school that had closed in 1966, to carry the Northside name. Black families in the Northside neighborhood, whose children had been bused to other schools for decades, welcomed it as a return of their school.
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Council adopts the Northside and Pine Knolls community plan
The council approved three resolutions under the plan, amending both conservation districts with building rules effective February 1, 2012 and a four-vehicle-per-lot parking limit effective September 1, 2012.
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A new Northside Elementary opened on the old Training School grounds
The Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools opened a new Northside Elementary on the former Orange County Training School site. In 2012 neighbors had rallied to make sure the new school kept the Northside name.
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Ethel Fuller Neville dies at 99 in the stone house on Cobb Street
Ethel Fuller Neville, widowed in 1960, lived at 107 Cobb Street until her death in 2013 at 99. Her five children all took part in the local civil rights movement, and son Calvin became a stonemason trained by the Campbells. The house stood mostly empty afterward.
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UNC, Self-Help, the Jackson Center and the town launch the Northside neighborhood initiative
UNC-Chapel Hill committed a $3 million, 10-year, no-interest loan to Self-Help to buy Northside homes as they came on the market and hold them in a land bank for affordable resale or rental. The Jackson Center and the Town of Chapel Hill were partners.
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A stone gateway honoring Northside's freedom fighters was opened at Rosemary and Roberson streets
The gateway of Chatham stone carries eight black granite slabs with civil rights images and quotations from oral history interviews. It was opened with a ribbon cutting at the first Northside Festival, as the Jackson Center renamed its annual celebration.
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Carrboro created a zoning overlay district to protect the Lloyd-Broad neighborhood
At residents' request the Board of Aldermen set square-footage and parking limits and a cap of four unrelated occupants per household for the historically African American neighborhood, which had seen more student rentals and larger replacement houses. New building had to comply at once and existing houses were given three years.
- 2020s
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EMPOWERment broke ground on PEACH apartments at the former Pine Knolls Community Center
The nonprofit began building 10 debt-free apartments for households earning 30 percent or less of area median income at 107 Johnson Street, where Ted Parrish had run the independent Pine Knolls Community Center. It had raised $3.5 million for the project.
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