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Colonial and Regulator years · 1680–1774
- 1750s
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Hillsborough is laid out
William Churton laid out a town and common on a 400-acre tract on the north side of the Eno that was granted to him in 1754, where the trading path crossed the river. Known as Corbinton by 1755, it was incorporated as Childsburg by an act of the 1759–60 session and renamed Hillsborough in 1766.
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A law orders a road from Orange courthouse to the Cape Fear
The act was not carried out at once, and in the meantime farmers cut their own rough roads across the county.
- 1760s
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German settler David Ephland comes to Orange County
David Ephland, later spelled Efland, arrived with other German settlers in the 1760s. His descendants still lived in the railroad town that carries the family name when the county was surveyed in 1993.
- 1770s
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Governor Josiah Martin complains about Orange County's roads
On his time in the backcountry in 1772, Governor Martin wrote of how poor the roads in Orange were.
Revolution and early republic · 1775–1799
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The county court orders the road from Bennehan's to New Hope Chapel finished
The road ordered earlier from Richard Bennehan's to New Hope Chapel had been cleared only as far as John Patterson's, so the May 1777 court named an overseer to clear the rest.
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Hillsborough becomes a depot for the army's supplies
As the war moved south the town became a collection and storage point for army supplies, and the governor split his time between Halifax and Hillsborough.
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Orange County militia serve at Stono Ferry in South Carolina
Under General John Butler, militia from Orange took part in Benjamin Lincoln's attack on the British at Stono Ferry.
- 1780s
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A post route is opened between Hillsborough and Richmond
The route was part of a push, gaining ground in 1783, to make Hillsborough the permanent seat of state government.
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The county court names a jury to lay off a road from McCauley's mill to Hillsborough
At the week-long August 1786 term, held by justices John Butler, William McCauley and William Ansley, the court named a jury to mark the best and most direct road from McCauley's mill to Hillsborough. The same term licensed three taverns and named tax collectors for all seven taxing districts.
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A county bridge over the Flat River at Island Ford is finished
James and John Carrington, appointed to let and oversee the work, reported the bridge on John Carrington's land completed to contract. The court allowed their account of 370 pounds.
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A road jury reroutes the road from Hillsborough to General Person's around a hill
On Theophilus Thompson's petition, a jury of twelve laid off a new line taking the road from town to General Person's around a hill. The court ordered Thompson to open it and Richard Williams and his hands to keep it in repair.
- 1790s
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Meeting in Hillsborough, UNC's trustees adopt the ordinance placing the university within fifteen miles of Cyprett's Bridge
Twenty-five of the university's forty trustees gathered at Hillsborough on August 2, 1792. They balloted for Cyprett's Bridge as the center point on August 3 and on August 4 adopted the ordinance fixing a fifteen-mile radius and naming the site commissioners. In early November a commission chaired by Frederick Hargett toured the area and recommended New Hope Chapel Hill in southern Orange County.
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Hinton James arrives as UNC’s first student
Hinton James became UNC’s first student on February 12, 1795.
Antebellum and Civil War · 1800–1865
- 1810s
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Mary Mendenhall keeps Union School near Woody's Ferry on the Haw
In 1818 Union School, about a mile south of Woody's Ferry on the Haw River in Orange County, was in the charge of Mary Mendenhall.
- 1820s
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Farmers of Orange, Chatham and Guilford meet to talk about a railroad
In 1828 farmers from Orange, Chatham and Guilford counties met to discuss building a railroad, the first such meeting in North Carolina. Public meetings on a line through the county went on into the early 1850s.
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An Orange County mass meeting calls for state aid to roads and river navigation
A county meeting chaired by James Webb, with Dennis Heartt as secretary, adopted an address to the people of Orange in favor of internal improvements and had 500 copies printed for circulation in the county.
- 1830s
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Commissioners seek bids to repair the Eno bridge at Hillsborough
John U. Kirkland was one of five commissioners, with Cadwallader Jones, Edmund Strudwick, Josiah Turner and Catlett Campbell, who advertised for proposals to repair the bridge over the Eno at Hillsborough, with bids due in November.
- 1840s
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A stage inn, later the Snipes House, is built near White Cross
The Snipes House near White Cross began in the 1840s as a stagecoach inn, with paired chimneys at each end. It has since been altered.
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The North Carolina Railroad is chartered and built
The General Assembly chartered the North Carolina Railroad in 1849, after Senate speaker Calvin Graves cast the deciding vote. The state built the 223-mile line from Goldsboro to Charlotte between 1851 and 1856, running it through Hillsborough, and the first train ran its full length in January 1856.
- 1850s
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Orange County residents put up $100,000 for the North Carolina Railroad
Orange County people pledged $100,000 in 1850 toward building the North Carolina Railroad, planned to cross the state from Goldsboro through Hillsborough to Charlotte. Its first rails went down at Greensboro in 1851.
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Campus grove is thinned and paved walks laid
Until 1851 the campus was forest with only the underbrush cleared, fenced off from the Raleigh road by rails and a hedgerow and used to pasture the president's cattle. In that year the trees were thinned and the first paved walks were built.
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Nancy Hilliard sells the Eagle Hotel, renamed the Union Hotel
In the early 1850s Miss Nancy Hilliard, long the students' and travelers' landlady, sold her hotel interest for $10,000 to Hugh B. Guthrie, who renamed the Eagle the Union Hotel. She went on to run the North Carolina Railroad eating house at Company Shops.
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The legislature charters the Chapel Hill and Raleigh Plank Road Company
The charter allowed $40,000 in capital, and the incorporators included W. J. Hogan and Edward Mallett of Chapel Hill.
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The Hillsborough Recorder calls for a plank road from Hillsborough to Milton
An editorial regretted that no one had asked the last legislature to charter a company to build a plank road from Hillsborough to Milton by way of Roxboro or Yanceyville. It hoped a stock company would form under the general act of 1850-51 while a charter was sought.
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A railroad depot is built at the Orange-Alamance line and Mebanesville grows up around it
The North Carolina Railroad put a depot on the county line in 1854, and the settlement of Mebanesville, later Mebane, soon formed there.
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Paul Cameron tells the county agricultural society the railroad will wake Orange up
Speaking to the Orange County Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, the Mechanic Arts, and Manufactures, Cameron predicted the coming railroad would shake local farmers and businesses out of their old habits.
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North Carolina Railroad finished to Durham's Station
The railroad was completed to Durham's Station, then a single house on Dr. Bartlett Durham's plantation in Orange County, and the company gave legislators a free ride there. From then until 1882 a two-horse hack line between Chapel Hill and Durham replaced the four-horse stage to Raleigh.
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The legislature charters four plank road companies through Orange County
The 1855 charters were for roads from Chapel Hill to Morrisville and to Durhamsville, from Hillsborough to Chapel Hill, and from Hillsborough to Milton, with capital from $20,000 to $150,000. The book could not say which, if any, were built.
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The North Carolina Railroad reaches Hillsborough
The Hillsborough Recorder of Wednesday, April 4, 1855, announced that the North Carolina Railroad was finished to the Chapel Hill Road, a few hundred yards south of town, and that passenger cars would begin running there that day. The editor cheered the end of two-day trips over muddy roads to Raleigh and costly wagoning of farm produce.
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The first through trains run on the finished North Carolina Railroad, with mail trains at Hillsborough
The North Carolina Railroad was finished on January 29, 1856, when the last rail was laid about four and a half miles west of Greensboro. Two days later the regular mail and passenger trains made their first through run from Charlotte to Goldsboro, with a westbound train due at Hillsborough each morning and an eastbound one before dawn, replacing the coach connection that had carried the Burwells' letters to their daughter Fanny in New York.
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A small smoking-tobacco factory opens by the depot at Durham's Station
Built beside the tracks and worked by free Black and white laborers, the plant was the start of the tobacco industry that later made Durham a factory town.
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Charles Tew chooses a site west of Hillsborough for a military academy
In late July 1858 Charles C. Tew, with Moses A. Curtis and A. S. Galliard, searched Hillsborough for a school site and settled on a 40-acre tract about a mile and a half west of town near the new North Carolina Railroad. They engaged the Columbia architect John A. Kay, and local builders John Berry and Henry Richards built the barracks and commandant's house.
- 1860s
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Hillsborough counts 945 residents
Even with the railroad, the town hardly grew in the 1850s: about 900 people in 1850 and 945 at the end of the decade.
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County commissioners call for builders of a new bridge over the Eno at Hillsborough
In a notice dated March 4, 1863, commissioners William H. Brown and J. W. Norwood announced they would let the building of a bridge over the Eno at Hillsborough to contract at the courthouse on Saturday, March 14. The plan was on view at the county court clerk's office.
Reconstruction and the New South · 1866–1899
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Court strikes down the act for a state-built railroad to Chapel Hill
An 1869 plan had the state build a line from the North Carolina Railroad to Chapel Hill through commissioners, paid for with $300,000 in state bonds. When the commissioners chose Henry C. Thompson as president over Governor Holden's choice, Holden refused to sign the bonds, and in the University Railroad Company's suit against him the court held the act unconstitutional over Judge Reade's dissent.
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University treasurer puts the land-grant fund into railroad bonds later repudiated
Treasurer Robert W. Lassiter invested the $125,000 land-scrip fund in North Carolina bonds, including $160,000 face value of special tax bonds issued for the Western North Carolina Railroad. The legislature repealed the acts behind those bonds on March 8, 1870, and the fund earned nothing until 1875.
- 1870s
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Robert F. Hoke obtains a charter for the Chapel Hill Iron Mountain Railroad
While the university was closed, Robert F. Hoke, owner of an iron mine north of Chapel Hill, obtained a state charter for a railroad to carry ore from Iron Mountain to the North Carolina Railroad.
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A flood carries away the road bridge over the Eno at Hillsborough
Floodwater swept away the bridge over the Eno at Hillsborough, and the river rose to within a few feet of the railroad bridge. The same flood took bridges across Caswell County.
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Trustees burn the repudiated railroad bonds
As the act restoring the land-scrip fund required, trustees B. F. Moore, David M. Carter and Kemp P. Battle burned 160 special tax bonds of $1,000 each issued for the Western North Carolina Railroad, with Seaton Gales as witness. In return the state had given the university its bond for the $125,000 fund, paying $7,500 a year.
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The railroad is rechartered as the State University Railroad
The legislature rechartered the stalled iron-mine line as the State University Railroad, shifting its purpose to a rail link for the university, with UNC president Kemp P. Battle working alongside Hoke to raise funds.
- 1880s
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Jack Brim, a Black blacksmith, and then Bennie F. Ray open smithies at West End
As the settlement around the depot and Lloyd's mills grew in the later 1880s, Jack Brim, an African American blacksmith, opened a shop at West End, and Bennie F. Ray opened a second smithy after him. Ray's shop was still working north and east of the depot in the early 1910s.
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Robert F. Hoke raises subscriptions to run the railroad toward Chapel Hill
When iron prices rose in 1880 and shipping ore to Pennsylvania furnaces paid, Gen. Robert F. Hoke, who owned most of Iron Mountain north of Chapel Hill, began organizing the branch line from University Station. His Iron Mountain Company put up $6,000, the largest single pledge, and Julian S. Carr was among the other subscribers.
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Ruffin Cheek and then Hiram Stone open West End's first general stores
Ruffin Cheek, followed by Hiram Stone, opened grocery and general merchandise stores at West End in the 1880s. The book counts their stores, east of the railroad spur on what became East Main Street, as the start of Carrboro's business district.
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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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The Neville Building, thought to be Carrboro's first store, goes up east of the depot
A one-story frame store later called the Old Neville Building was put up in the 1880s on East Main Street between Broad and Lloyd streets and is believed to be the first store building in Carrboro. Its last tenant was the Carrboro Cash Store, run by Cliff and Wilbur Partin.
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Mebaneville, the railroad village on the Orange-Alamance line, is incorporated
The settlement that grew along the North Carolina Railroad from 1854 was incorporated in 1881 and shortened its name to Mebane in 1883. Part of the town lies in Orange County.
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From West End to Carrboro: railroad, mills, and a new town
In 1882 a university railroad spur ended a mile west of Chapel Hill, and the settlement of West End grew around its boxcar depot. Thomas Lloyd opened a gin and grist mill in 1883 and the Alberta Cotton Mill in 1899, which Julian Carr's Durham Hosiery bought in 1909. Incorporated as Venable in 1911, the town became Carrboro in 1913.
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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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Julia Spencer drives a last spike to celebrate the finished University railroad
Chapel Hill celebrated the completed State University Railroad with speeches and the driving of the last spikes, one by Julia J. Spencer, daughter of Cornelia Phillips Spencer, and one by the railroad's agent, J. G. Cooley. Passenger trains had been running to the West End terminus since February.
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Thomas Lloyd and William Pritchard build a grist mill and cotton gin at the West End depot
Thomas F. Lloyd, a Confederate veteran, and his partner William Pritchard built a steam-powered grist mill and cotton gin in a two-story frame building just north of the railroad depot at West End in 1883. Farmers from southern Orange County brought grain and cotton there, and Lloyd bought out Pritchard's share in 1886.
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Thomas F. Lloyd buys out his partner and adds a flour mill by the depot
Lloyd bought William Pritchard's share of the steam grist mill and cotton gin the two had built north of the station in 1883, and had a flour mill built on the property.
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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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The Keystone Bridge Company replaces the wooden railroad bridge over the Eno at Hillsboro with an iron one
Crews of the Keystone Bridge Company of Pittsburgh began replacing the wooden railroad bridge over the Eno near the Hillsboro depot with an iron bridge, expecting to finish by August 10. Trains kept running across it at three miles an hour.
- 1890s
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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.
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Orange County adopts a countywide road tax
Using an 1889 state act, the county laid a road tax of 7 cents per $100 valuation and turned the money over to the township supervisors. It ran for 1891 and 1892 before the justices forced its repeal.
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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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The justices of the peace vote to repeal the county road tax
In joint session, a majority of the county's justices voted to end the alternative road system while every commissioner voted to keep it. After a second standoff in July, the commissioners gave way on August 8, 1893.
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W. W. Pickard opens a livery stable at Franklin and Pine streets
Hotel man W. W. Pickard opened a livery stable on the northwest corner of Franklin and Pine streets. William J. 'Tank' Hunter bought it in 1910.
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Thomas F. Lloyd builds the Alberta Cotton Mill
Lloyd built the Alberta Cotton Mill beside the railroad in West End in 1898 and 1899, the brick mill that later became Durham Hosiery Mill No. 4 and then Carr Mill Mall.
Early twentieth century · 1900–1944
- 1900s
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A frame depot replaces the box car that had served West End as a station
From 1882 a box car had been the passenger depot at West End. In 1900 a one-story frame depot was built a few yards north of the later station; after the 1913 station opened it became a freight shed, and a new freight house had replaced it by 1925.
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Blackwood Station grows into a small railroad settlement
In the early twentieth century a cluster formed where Mount Sinai Road meets NC 86, with a store, a building remembered as store and post office, and two bungalows. The Blackwoods are said to have kept a post office and store on their farm nearby once the railroad arrived.
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Mill owner Isaac W. Pritchard builds a large frame house on Ransom Street
Isaac Pritchard, who ran one of the first textile mills near the Carrboro depot, built a spacious house at 400 Ransom Street combining a hipped roof and Palladian dormer with a Queen Anne entrance and wraparound porch. Most of his land later became part of the Westwood subdivision.
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Southern Railway begins buying cross ties from farmers at the Carrboro depot
In the 1900s the Southern Railway began buying hand-hewn oak cross ties at the depot, where its agent graded them and paid the farmers who hauled them in from Orange and nearby counties. By the early 1920s Carrboro was among the largest tie markets in the East, and tie wagons crowded its streets into the early 1930s.
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Hillsboro Township petitions for and votes a special road tax
A petition presented on October 1, 1900 led to an election that carried, and the commissioners levied 10 cents per $100 and 30 cents a poll for Hillsboro Township roads. Bingham followed, and by 1903 all seven townships taxed themselves for roads.
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Harriet Berry works for the state Geological and Economic Survey in Chapel Hill
Berry began work in Chapel Hill with the North Carolina Geological and Economic Survey in 1901 and rose from stenographer to secretary and, in 1917, acting head. She left in 1921, the year her Good Roads lobbying produced the state highway commission law.
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Jesse Ruffin, coachman and stagecoach driver, dies
Jesse Ruffin died in his nineties at his grandson Lindsey Faucette's house, out between Hillsborough and Durham. The Durham Sun remembered him as Judge Ruffin's servant and later Paul Cameron's, and a stagecoach driver before the railroad came; he was carried to Hillsborough by train for burial.
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The Blanche Hosiery Company builds its own knitting mill near the West End depot
After more than a year in the upper story of Tom Lloyd's cotton mill, the Blanche Hosiery Company put up a $1,500 building of its own near the depot and planned to move in about July 1. The owners said Lloyd charged too much for power.
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Edward Vernon Howell owns Chapel Hill's first automobile
Pharmacy dean Edward Vernon Howell, then living in the old Fetter house on East Franklin Street, became the first in town to own a car, a one-cylinder Oldsmobile.
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Elizabeth Cotten composes Freight Train
At about age eleven, growing up near the railroad tracks in the settlement that became Carrboro, Elizabeth Cotten wrote "Freight Train." She played a right-handed guitar upside down, and the song became a folk standard after Folkways released her recording in 1958.
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P. C. Collins buys the southern part of the future Bellevue mill site from J. W. Hooker
Before the Bellevue company was incorporated, P. C. Collins bought the south half of the mill site near the West Hillsborough depot from J. W. Hooker; a later hand added that he acted as the mill's agent. Collins, a shareholder, passed the land to the company in 1905.
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A Southern Railway freight train wrecks at the Eno railroad bridge in Hillsboro
Eastbound freight No. 72 left the track just west of the Eno bridge; one car went over the side into the river and eleven more piled up, twisting the bridge's iron supports. No one was hurt, and mail trains crossed again the next morning.
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The Durham Recorder hails "Progressive Hillsboro" and the mill town at its depot
A Recorder article pointed to Hillsborough's new buildings, macadam roads and growing textile trade, and to a large mill that had raised a settlement around the depot called West Hillsboro. The authors think the mill meant was the Eno Cotton Mill, since Bellevue was not yet running.
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The Eno Methodist congregation builds its church on land given by Allen Ruffin
The congregation formed for Eno Cotton Mill workers first met in an upper room of a mill building. In 1908 it moved into a simple front-gabled frame church with pointed-arch windows and a small belfry, on land Ruffin donated facing the mill across the railroad tracks.
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Hillsborough Township issues $40,000 in bonds for macadam roads
Under a 1901 state act, Hillsborough was the only Orange township to vote road bonds, floating $40,000 to build a few miles of macadam road. When the county sold its own road bonds in 1913, the township was repaid half.
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Julian Carr's Durham Hosiery Mills buys the Alberta Mill
In early February 1909 Julian S. Carr and his sons closed a deal for both the Alberta Cotton Mill that Thomas F. Lloyd had built at West End and the Blanche Hosiery Mill, to change hands on April 1 and run together as Durham Hosiery Mills' Mill No. 4. The deeds were recorded in March.
- 1910s
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Luther Sturdivant and Knute Mann plat Partridge Field for houses
In the late 1910s Carrboro businessmen Luther Sturdivant and Knute Mann laid out streets, blocks and lots on the open ground called Partridge Field, east of the railroad spur, and each built a bungalow there in the early 1920s. Few buyers followed them in the 1920s; most new builders chose wooded lots on Hillsborough Road.
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The Bellevue Commercial Block is built as West Hillsborough's shopping street
Five one-story brick buildings with seven storefronts on South Nash Street near the old depot became the West End business district for the mill village and West Hillsborough. Over the years they held a drug store, the Cates brothers' general store with a branch post office, a barber, a dry cleaner, a cafe and a movie theater.
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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 county board builds a new school for white children at Efland
The board sought a state loan of $750 for a new Efland building, chose a three-acre lot of Jordan land south of the railroad, and had the superintendent hire carpenters while patrons supplied the framing and free hauling from West Hillsboro depot. It paid Mary W. Jordan $246 for the land in 1911 and sold the old Efland schoolhouse to J. R. Riley for $50 in February 1912.
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William J. 'Tank' Hunter runs a jitney between Chapel Hill and Durham
Hunter, who had bought W. W. Pickard's livery stable in 1910, began running a jitney from the Royal Cafe, a new store beside the post office, to Durham. By 1912 J. T. Durham and Swain Pendergraft ran competing services.
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Thomas F. Lloyd, founder of Carrboro's first two mills, dies
Thomas F. Lloyd died in May 1911, close to the time his second mill, a one-story brick yarn mill a block south of the Alberta mill, was finished. A Confederate veteran with no schooling, he had built the gin, grist mill and flour mill by the depot before starting the Alberta mill in 1898.
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The Noxall Bottling Works buys a lot near the Hillsborough depot for its plant
The Noxall Bottling Works, newly chartered under state law with its headquarters at Hillsborough, bought a lot near the Southern Railway station and planned to run its plant there.
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Orange County voters approve $250,000 in road bonds
Under a 1911 local act, the county voted 919 to 831 to borrow for grading and macadamizing its roads, with a nine-member good roads commission to pick them. The bonds, sold about a year later at 5 percent for 40 years, were the county's first and left a debt not cleared until 1953.
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A new wood-frame railroad station is built in Carrboro
The depot that still stands beside Carr Mill was built around 1913, replacing the earlier West End stop that had drawn settlement to the end of the line.
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R. B. Mason's land west of the Bellevue mill is platted as the West Hill Property
To meet the need for workers' housing near the two mills, Mason's holdings were laid out in 1913 as a grid of roughly equal lots, bounded by the Bellevue mill village, Eno Street and the railroad, West Hill Street, and Mount Willing Road (later King Street). Most houses there went up from the 1920s to the 1940s, and the section beyond West Hill Avenue was platted in the 1930s.
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Strowd's Garage opens in Chapel Hill as the first garage in Orange County
A plate caption identifies Strowd's Garage in Chapel Hill, pictured about 1913, as the county's first garage.
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The Corporation Commission orders three railroad underpasses for the Durham-Greensboro highway in Orange County
Ruling on a petition from the Orange County Good Roads Commission against the Southern Railway, the Corporation Commission ordered the county to lower the Durham-Greensboro highway at three railroad crossings and the two sides to build 26-foot underpasses there. The county was to pay half to two thirds of each, and the railroad the rest, including the widening of an existing underpass.
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The first Good Roads Institute meets at Chapel Hill
State geologist and faculty member Joseph Hyde Pratt chaired the first Good Roads Institute held at Chapel Hill. The institute later became part of the university's extension program.
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A. W. Clarke becomes Orange County's superintendent of roads
A 1915 act ended township road administration in Orange and put every county road under a superintendent. Clarke accepted $65 a month from March through November and $3 a day for winter work.
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The county road superintendent is equipped to work convicts on the roads
In 1916 the board authorized the road superintendent to buy the equipment he needed to put convicts to work. Prisoners were used on county road projects until the state took over most sentenced prisoners in 1931.
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The Chapel Hill to Durham road is turned over to the federal engineer
The commissioners placed the road under the U.S. government engineer, as the central highway through Hillsborough already was, and set $40 a mile a year for upkeep. On May 1 they did the same for the road from Carrboro to the Alamance line by way of White Cross.
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Township road inspectors classify the county's roads
The inspectors the board had named in each township reported 37 miles of central highways, 62.1 miles of Class A roads and 365.2 miles of Class B roads. The same year the board began paying for bridges, pipes and road tools from general county funds.
- 1920s
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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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A rail spur from Carrboro brings building materials to the campus
With the nearest railhead in Carrboro, convict labor built a $73,000 spur that ran south of Franklin Street, crossed Pittsboro Street and ended near Raleigh Road at the new dormitory sites; it was later moved toward the new mall. Neighbors blamed the Chapel Hill Limited for cracked plaster, cinders and smoke.
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The center of East Franklin Street is paved
With the town's cars numbering 95 in 1921, an 18-foot strip down the middle of East Franklin Street was paved. About ten feet of packed dirt was left on each side.
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The legislature passes the Highway Act championed by Harriet Morehead Berry of Hillsborough
The 1921 act paid for a state highway network tying together the main cities and county seats. Its trunk route, the Central Highway (later U.S. 70), ran straight through Hillsborough.
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A freight wreck at the Occoneechee Farm siding sets a gasoline tank car burning
Three cars of a Southern freight train, one a gasoline tank car, left the track at the Occoneechee Farm siding east of Hillsboro. The tank car caught fire and burned through the night, a flour car and a lumber car burned, and passengers were transferred around the torn-up track until repairs the next afternoon.
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The State Highway Commission builds a concrete bridge over the Eno at Hillsboro
The commission let State Project 453, a bridge over the Eno at Hillsboro, to contractor George W. Kane for $30,651.20 on February 8, 1922, and work was well along by July. The reinforced concrete bridge, now on Exchange Park Lane, was the main way into town from the south until 1964.
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A hard-surface road links Chapel Hill and Durham
A new eighteen-foot concrete road ran from the center of Chapel Hill to Durham, credited to trustee John Sprunt Hill as a state highway commissioner. Franklin Street merchants declined to pay for paving its edges, so mud borders remained.
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Murphey School is built in brick on the Durham-Hillsboro road
Murphey School, a hip-roofed brick consolidated school for white children named for Archibald D. Murphey, was built in 1923 on the Durham-Hillsboro road (Old NC 10). H. C. Linthicum drew the plans and W. H. Woods of Durham built it for $8,995. The school closed in 1959; the road nearby is spelled Murphy School Road.
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The Chapel Hill chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy puts up four Jefferson Davis Highway markers
The Chapel Hill UDC chapter, with Mrs. W. S. Bernard in charge, marked the state road from Durham to Pittsboro as the Jefferson Davis Highway. The four signs stood at the one-mile bridge on the Durham road, at Andrews corner, at the new Baptist church and near the west gate of the campus.
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Cleveland Lindsay puts up a nine-foot-wide brick building on Carrboro's Main Street
Cleveland Lindsay of the Damascus section built a one-story brick building nine feet wide and about 50 feet deep next to J. D. Webb's store, near the depot. He would not say what it was for, and the Chapel Hill Weekly called it Carrboro's "mystery house."
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The county board orders its first school buses
The board ordered ten trucks, six GMC, two Reo and two Chevrolet, with bus bodies from the Carolina Body Company of Greensboro, to carry children to the new consolidated schools. At an August hearing in the courthouse some residents urged the commissioners not to sign the notes for the buses, but no action was taken against them.
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Southern Railway adds a larger freight house at the Carrboro depot
In 1925 the railroad built a bigger freight house at the Carrboro station, following its 1913 depot and freight shed, to handle the growing traffic in goods for Carrboro and Chapel Hill.
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Bruce Strowd opens his new Ford dealership at Franklin and Columbia streets
Strowd Motor Company formally opened its new Ford sales and service building at 100 West Franklin Street, on the corner of Columbia, with a dance and contests. Chapel Hill's first automobile dealer had outgrown his quarters; the two-story brick building, one of the largest downtown, went up in 1924 on the old Carr place, with the showroom and service area below and a paint and body shop above.
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The university paves Cameron Avenue through the campus
Ziegler Brothers laid Kentucky asphalt on a six-inch concrete base along Cameron Avenue from the west gate to the east gate and up the Raleigh road to Franklin Street, part of a 1925 paving program with the town and the state highway commission.
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T. Felix Hickerson publishes Highway Curves and Earthworks
UNC civil engineering professor Thomas Felix Hickerson, who laid out the curving roads of Rocky Ridge Farm, first published his road design text in 1926. Later issued as Route Location and Design, it was used in engineering programs at some 83 colleges.
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John Maddry builds a bungalow on his Airport Road dairy farm
Maddry put up the story-and-a-half bungalow at 1500 Airport Road in place of an older house and milked 25 cows by hand. Eleven log and frame outbuildings, some older than the house, still stood in 1992.
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The university sets aside land on the Pittsboro highway for fraternity houses
The university set aside a strip on the west side of the Pittsboro highway for a new fraternity colony, taking fraternity lots on old Fraternity Row in exchange. Phi Delta Theta and Pi Kappa Phi began building there first and moved into their brick houses that fall.
- 1930s
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Carrboro builds a small brick town hall and fire station at Lloyd and Cobb streets
Around 1930 a small one-story brick building went up at the corner of Lloyd and Cobb streets, east of the railroad, to house Carrboro's town hall and fire department.
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The state takes over Orange County's roads and most of its prisoners
The 1931 act moved every public road outside town streets to state upkeep and made the state responsible for longer-term prisoners, ending one of the county's oldest duties. The Gardner survey had found Orange spent $48,076 on its 412 miles of roads in 1929.
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The county board sets bus driver pay and a one-mile limit on walks to the bus
The board paid student drivers $10 a month and adult drivers $20, and told the superintendent to lay out truck routes so that no child walked more than a mile to a bus. A few weeks later the state told the superintendent that $15 a month was the most a driver could be paid.
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The Institute prints 250,000 copies of a highway safety issue of Popular Government
The September 1935 issue was given over to traffic safety, using fatality figures gathered by law student Harry McGalliard at a time when North Carolina had the most deaths per mile driven. Standard Oil helped pay for a pocket-size 32-page edition sent to high schools, police departments and civic groups.
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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.
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Carolina Coach Company opens a new bus station at Rosemary and Columbia streets
Carolina Coach Company moved Chapel Hill's bus station from East Franklin Street to new quarters at the corner of Rosemary Lane and Columbia Street, opened the week of April 24, 1936. It ran ten round trips a day to Durham and four between Raleigh and Greensboro through Chapel Hill.
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Chapel Hill rededicates its Daniel Boone Trail marker opposite the post office
At a town ceremony Ella Boone Dixon, a Boone descendant, placed a flag over the Boone Trail plaque and J. Hampton Rich explained its legend. Mayor John M. Foushee led the program.
- 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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St. Mary's Road is paved and straightened
The old Trading Path route east of Hillsborough, later the Oxford Road, was paved and straightened in sections around 1940, though its side roads stayed dirt.
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UNC purchases Chapel Hill's airfield
In 1940 the university bought the Chapel Hill airport that Charlie Martindale had opened in 1928 on land bought from Professor Horace Williams. By August the trustees had set aside $15,000 for land, the university had agreed terms with Martindale and neighbor Fred Sparrow, Williams had given over 200 acres, and the field was to bear his name.
Civil rights era · 1945–1975
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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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Carolina Coach Company builds a Williamsburg-style bus station on West Franklin Street
The bus station at 311 West Franklin Street had a pedimented portico, a cupola with a weathervane and other Colonial details.
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The Institute builds a Highway Patrol training camp on Raleigh Road
Coates won approval to put a training camp on the eastern edge of the campus, on the south side of Raleigh Road at Country Club Road. State Highway Department crews brought seven wooden barracks built by the Civilian Conservation Corps from Camp Mackall near Fort Bragg and set them in a U around a drill yard, with water and sewer lines run from the university gym.
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The Institute of Government's first State Highway Patrol school opens in Chapel Hill
With money from the legislature to bring the Patrol back to its prewar strength, Governor Gregg Cherry's administration turned to the Institute, which offered an eight-week course for about a hundred recruits chosen from 1,300 applicants. Classes began on October 13, with instructors from the FBI, the State Bureau of Investigation, Northwestern University and New York University.
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Journey of Reconciliation comes to Chapel Hill
Interracial riders testing segregation on interstate buses reached Chapel Hill on April 12, 1947. The next day police arrested four of them at the bus station and a white cab driver struck rider James Peck. Convicted in Orange County, Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko and Joe Felmet surrendered at the Hillsborough courthouse on March 21, 1949 to serve chain-gang sentences.
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A bus route begins running through West Hillsborough
Until 1948, when a bus line started running through its streets, mill families without cars had no easy way to reach downtown Hillsborough, nearly a mile away, or the rest of the county.
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Hyconeechee Regional Library is established
The three county library systems incorporated as one region to enlarge book collections, run a shared bookmobile and provide trained supervision. The regional board held its second meeting on September 13, 1948 at the Confederate Memorial Library in Hillsboro, with Sydney Green of Orange County as president and Mrs. Douglas Davis as regional librarian.
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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.
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Railway Express agent Lonas Williams starts Chapel Hill's first Lustron house, on Stephens Street
Lonas Williams and his wife began putting up a factory-made Lustron house of porcelain-enameled steel off Airport Road, the first of its kind in or near Chapel Hill. Mrs. Williams had read about the houses in Life, and the parts came by trailer from the Columbus, Ohio, plant through Taylor-Made Homes of Greensboro.
- 1950s
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Jim and John Webb design a house on Stagecoach Road for Earl Wynn
The brothers designed a long house set at an angle to the road at 900 Stagecoach Road for Earl Wynn, head of UNC's radio, motion picture and television department, with low overhanging gables, a central clerestory, vertical pine siding and bands of windows.
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The Hillsboro Building and Loan Association opens its first office building on Calvin Street
After 37 years of meeting in stores and a depot office, the association held an open house for its own one-story Colonial-style brick office on Calvin Street in West Hillsboro, built with a fireproof vault.
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Morgan Creek Hills subdivision begins beside the new 15-501 Bypass
Work on Morgan Creek Hills, on the south side of the 15-501 Bypass, started while the bypass itself was being built between 1952 and 1954. The land had several owners, among them William Chambers Coker and Bill Hunt, and the neighborhood filled in over many years with large houses on rough, hilly lots.
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The 15-501 Bypass is built along the south side of Chapel Hill
The book places construction of the 15-501 Bypass in 1952 to 1954. Morgan Creek Hills, one of the town's large postwar subdivisions, was laid out along its south side during those same years.
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Eben Merritt stops highway crews with an injunction over land taken for the new bypass
Filling station owner Eben G. Merritt got an injunction that briefly halted State Highway Commission work near Morgan Creek, arguing that the new bypass and the rerouted Pittsboro road would cut through his pasture, isolate his new house and pull his station off the main highway for far less than they were worth. A court-appointed commission set his damages at $6,000 in March 1953, and he appealed.
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Poe and Mangum move their DeSoto-Plymouth dealership out of a West Franklin Street filling station
After World War II A. H. Poe and Marvin Mangum sold DeSotos and Plymouths from a 1930s Pure Oil station at 110 West Franklin Street, built in the company's half-timbered cottage design. They added service bays and a showroom before vacating it in 1956.
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Watts Restaurant holds its grand opening on the Pittsboro highway south of Chapel Hill
The new Watts Restaurant, a concrete-block building a mile south of town on the Pittsboro highway with counter, booths and private dining rooms, advertised its gala opening in mid-August 1957 after first advertising as Chapel Hill's newest restaurant in early July.
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Carr Store Road is paved through Cedar Grove
Carr Store Road, the east-west road through the Cedar Grove crossroads, was paved in 1958, about a decade after the north-south Efland-Cedar Grove Road. Until then farmers in the area could find farm-to-market roads impassable for months of the year.
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Mayor Cornwell presses the state to widen the highways into Chapel Hill
Sworn in for a new term with aldermen F. E. Strowd and Sandy McClamroch, Mayor Cornwell wrote to the state's director of highways urging four-lane roads toward Durham and Raleigh and calling U.S. 15-501 and N.C. 54 major entrances to the university.
- 1960s
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James Freeland builds the General Joseph E. Johnston Motel at US 70 and Interstate 85
Builder James Freeland put up the General Joseph E. Johnston Motel on US 70 near the new Interstate 85, part of a roadside group with his ice rink and, across the highway, the General Sherman Restaurant.
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James Freeland's General Sherman Restaurant opens at US 70 and Interstate 85
The General Sherman Restaurant, built by James Freeland across the highway from his General Johnston Motel, opened around the clock and was billed as Orange County's newest. It became a common place for Democratic Party dinners and club luncheons in the early 1960s.
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Orange County's fourth ABC store opens at US 70 and Interstate 85
Orange County's fourth and largest ABC liquor store opened beside the General Sherman Restaurant, half a mile from the Durham County line. James Freeland built the colonial-style building and leased it to the county board; it was said to be the only ABC store in North Carolina on an interstate highway.
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Workmen begin tearing down Dave Neville's old store at Main Street and the railroad
Dismantling began on the frame store at Main Street and the University Railroad tracks, known over the years as Dave Neville's general store, Partin's grocery and the Carrboro Feed and Seed Store. Owner Harvey Bennett took it down at the town board's informal request, since Carrboro's fire code barred prolonging the life of frame buildings downtown.
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The Railway Express Agency moves its office to East Main Street in Carrboro
The Chapel Hill express office moved into new quarters at 209 East Main Street in Carrboro, with room for customers to park. Its old building on North Columbia Street was coming down for the new Orange Savings and Loan office.
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Godfrey's Home Supply Store moves into a new building on Highway 70
E. W. "Booster" Godfrey opened a new, larger building for his hardware, clothing and household goods store next door to his old location on Highway 70 north of Hillsboro, with Esso gas out front.
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James Riley opens the Hillsboro Fish Market in the old Godfrey's store on Highway 70
James Riley opened the Hillsboro Fish Market on Highway 70 West, in front of Kenan Oil Company in the former Godfrey's Home Supply store, selling fresh fish cleaned free. By August 1962 it had moved to his old market next to Eno Methodist Church.
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Edmund Strudwick speaks against a new federal access road and bridge into Hillsborough
At a public hearing in Hillsborough on a proposed $338,000 federal project for a new access road and bridge into the town, artist Edmund Strudwick opposed it, saying he did not want more cars coming up Churton Street. The News of Orange County called the opposition thin.
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James J. Freeland's Dixie Motor Inn opens at Interstate 85 and NC 86
The Dixie Motor Inn, owned by James J. and James Rae Freeland, opened two miles south of Hillsborough where Interstate 85 meets NC 86. It had 16 air-conditioned units and was the sixth motel the elder Freeland had built in Orange, Durham and Wake counties.
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James J. Freeland builds his third family house on Highway 70
After homes near Fairview and in his Mountain View development, Freeland built the family's third house in 1964 on Highway 70 a little northwest of that subdivision, and lived there the rest of his life.
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The last Southern Railway passenger trains run through Hillsborough
Trains 13 and 16, the daily Greensboro-Goldsboro round trip, made their final runs, ending more than a century of passenger service in Orange County. Hillsborough had been a flag stop without ticket sales for two years.
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The new high bridge over the Eno opens on South Churton Street
The 375-foot bridge, 55 feet above the river and built for about $450,000 with state and federal money, opened with the new access road from Interstate 85 into Hillsborough in the summer of 1964, taking traffic off the 1922 bridge.
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Interstate 85 is completed south of Hillsborough
The interstate linking Charlotte and Durham by way of Greensboro was finished in 1966 about a mile and a quarter south of downtown, and a commercial strip grew up along South Churton Street between the town and the interchange.
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James J. Freeland opens the Daniel Boone Inn and restaurant at South Churton Street and I-85
A 1966 plat of the "Daniel Boone Inn and Restaurant Tract", eleven acres lying behind the Shell station on the northeast side of the interchange, shows a pond, a general store, a restaurant later known as the D. B. Cafeteria and a long two-story motel. It was the start of Daniel Boone Village.
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Cedar Grove's advisory council asks for a painted lunchroom and a paved playground
Oscar Beasley and Arthur Wells of the Cedar Grove Advisory Council asked the board to paint the lunchroom, hang doors on the girls' restroom and give the school a hard-surfaced playground. The board granted part of the request.
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A new iron railroad bridge is built over the Eno at Hillsborough
An iron railroad bridge on poured concrete piers, bearing a plaque of the Virginia Bridge Iron Company of Roanoke dated 1969, is built across the Eno at the south end of the district near Gold Park.
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Braxton Foushee becomes Carrboro’s first Black alderman
Braxton Foushee was elected to the Carrboro Board of Aldermen in 1969, the first Black member of the town's governing board, and served until 1981. He pressed for paved roads and sidewalks in Black neighborhoods and counted bringing bus service to Carrboro as his proudest achievement.
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Governor Scott orders Lenoir Hall reopened under Highway Patrol guard
After Chancellor Sitterson closed Lenoir Hall on March 5 during the foodworkers' strike, Governor Bob Scott ordered it reopened, sent at least 50 state patrolmen to Chapel Hill and mobilized a National Guard unit in Durham. The dining hall opened the next morning with more than 40 riot-equipped troopers and about 25 Chapel Hill police at its entrances while as many as 300 people picketed.
- 1970s
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Daniel Boone Village grows into an amusement park
By 1972 the Daniel Boone Recreation Park had a roller rink, an ice rink, a ski lift, a refrigerated toboggan slide, an antique car and wax museum, a fort, an amphitheater and a campground, circled by a small railroad on which costumed performers staged holdups. With relocated log cabins and false-front shops it looked like a frontier town, and Freeland was dubbed the "Walt Disney of Hillsborough."
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Chapel Hill Transit begins service
Chapel Hill's municipal bus system began running on August 1, 1974, after Mayor Howard Lee and UNC Chancellor Ferebee Taylor cut the ribbon, with eight town, campus and park-and-ride routes. Carrboro was not yet served.
Recent decades · 1976–2026
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The idle Carrboro depot is converted into The Station
Lee Epting and Mike Macomson finished renovating the disused depot in 1976 after two years of negotiations, reopening it as The Station restaurant, later a music venue.
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The Alberta Mill complex is listed on the National Register
The mill, the railroad depot and the brick grist mill were listed together on the National Register of Historic Places, a year after the 1975 nomination made during the fight over demolishing the mill.
- 1980s
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I-40 through Orange County is named the Harriet Morehead Berry Freeway
The Board of Transportation named a section of Interstate 40 through Orange County for Berry, the Hillsborough-born Good Roads campaigner. A state highway marker to her was cast the same year for NC 86 at I-40 north of Chapel Hill.
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Interstate 40 is completed south of Hillsborough
I-40 was finished in 1988 about a mile and a half south of Daniel Boone Village, and commercial and residential building south of I-85 picked up sharply afterward.
- 1990s
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The Herndon House bungalow at Airport Road and Stephens Street is torn down
The story-and-a-half bungalow at 113 Stephens Street, sided in brown wood shingles with a porch on tapered columns over stone piers, stood until February 1992. A low stone wall and steps were left at the property line.
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Reviewers deny the OWASA Jones Ferry Road water plant a place on the Study List
The Orange Water and Sewer Authority's Jones Ferry Road Water Treatment Plant was among five central region requests on July 10, 1997. Staff recommended denial because of modern alterations, and the committee accepted the staff recommendations without separate discussion of the plant.
- 2000s
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Doug Marlette's novel The Bridge, set in a fictional Hillsborough, stirs the town's writers
Marlette's first novel, The Bridge, is set in the fictional town of Eno, modeled on Hillsborough, where he lived and worked. Some of Hillsborough's writers took offense at characters based on them, and the manager of the Bull's Head Bookshop in Chapel Hill cancelled a reading.
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Chapel Hill Transit becomes fare-free
Chapel Hill Transit stopped charging fares on January 2, 2002, and added 11 buses and new routes. Under the funding agreement, UNC paid about 40 percent of the cost and Chapel Hill and Carrboro split the rest by population.
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Orange County commissioners take up a request to name the Morgan Creek bridge for James Taylor
The Orange County Board of Commissioners was set to vote on a resolution asking the state Board of Transportation to name the U.S. 15-501 bridge over Morgan Creek in Chapel Hill after James Taylor. Alan E. Rimer made the request for the Chapel Hill Museum board, which was planning an exhibition on Taylor.
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The U.S. 15-501 bridge over Morgan Creek is named the James Taylor Bridge
The 1987 bridge on U.S. 15-501 South, a mile from Taylor's boyhood home, was named the James Taylor Bridge at a public ceremony at the Dean Smith Center held by the N.C. Department of Transportation and the Chapel Hill Museum. Taylor attended.
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UNC School of Medicine starts CAMPOS to train Spanish-speaking physicians
Marco Alemán and colleagues founded the Comprehensive Advanced Medical Program of Spanish in 2004 to prepare medical students to care for Spanish-speaking patients without relying on interpreters. Its first class graduated in 2008, and students do yearly service with Spanish-speaking communities.
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Robert Campbell petitioned Chapel Hill for bus service to the Rogers Road neighborhood
Minister Robert Campbell asked the Chapel Hill council to extend free transit service to the Rogers Road community, noting that it lacked sidewalks and sewer service and that children walked along the landfill's heavy truck route. He suggested rerouting underused Airport Road buses.
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Chapel Hill renames Airport Road as Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard
At a ceremony beginning outside Town Hall, Airport Road became Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and the small Martin Luther King Street became Jackie Robinson Street. Fred Battle, president of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro NAACP, had led the push for the change after noticing that the only public facilities named for Black people were in Black neighborhoods.
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Carrboro adopts an anti-lingering ordinance at the Jones Ferry and Davie roads day-labor corner
After neighbors complained about conditions at the corner where day laborers, many of them Latino, waited for contractors, the Board of Aldermen approved an ordinance barring waiting at the intersection of Jones Ferry and Davie roads from 11 a.m. to 5 a.m. In September 2007 the board had also approved an action plan and a motion to create a designated space for day laborers.
- 2010s
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Horace Williams Airport closes
UNC closed Horace Williams Airport on May 15, 2018, under a November 2017 trustees resolution, citing money lost running the field and at least $1 million in needed runway repairs. The airfield dated to 1928 and had trained Navy pre-flight cadets during World War II; the Carolina North campus once planned for the site had stalled.
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Durham–Orange light rail project ends
On March 27, 2019, the GoTriangle board voted unanimously to stop planning the 18-mile Durham-Orange light rail line between Chapel Hill and Durham after Duke University declined to sign needed agreements. Orange County commissioners voted unanimously on April 2 to end the county's work on it.
- 2020s
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Journey of Reconciliation convictions are vacated
On June 17, 2022, Orange County Superior Court Judge Allen Baddour vacated the disorderly conduct convictions of Bayard Rustin, Igal Roodenko, Andrew Johnson and Joseph Felmet. The four Journey of Reconciliation riders had been arrested in Chapel Hill in April 1947 for refusing to leave the front of an interstate bus.
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Carrboro backs a study of turning the old University Railroad line into a greenway
The Town Council unanimously approved an agreement to study converting the 11-mile rail corridor, which still carries coal to UNC's cogeneration plant, into a multi-use trail once the plant stops using coal.
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Tropical Storm Chantal floods Orange County
Chantal dropped up to 10 inches of rain on Orange County on the night of July 6, 2025. Chapel Hill crews made more than 50 water rescues around Camelot Village and Eastgate Crossing, Carrboro's Weatherhill Pointe flooded, and the Eno at Hillsborough set a record crest on July 7. The county declared an emergency that day.
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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.
