Town in Orange County
A mill village on the western edge of Chapel Hill, incorporated in 1911 as Venable and renamed in 1913 for Julian S. Carr, the Durham industrialist who electrified its cotton mill. The mill village grew into a town of its own, known today for its farmers’ market, its music venues and its independent politics.
Source: NCpedia, North Carolina Gazetteer
950 indexed works are connected with this place. 19 held at OCPL →
Themes here. The subjects the index files most often under Carrboro.
Storylines set here, earliest first. Each has its own page.
Other dated events here: sixteen of 464, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 464 dated events in the chronology →
A story-and-a-jump house of hewn logs, one room on each floor, went up a few yards from the wagon road to Hillsborough, whose roadbed could still be traced in 1983. Tradition says it was first a tavern; it is the oldest building standing in Carrboro.
Subject: Weaver House
Manly McCauley, an 18-year-old Black farmhand, left Milton Brewer's farm west of Chapel Hill with Brewer's wife on October 26, 1898. A posse caught them beyond Jonesboro, and on the way back masked men took McCauley from the officer holding him and hanged him. His body was found on November 6, about three miles west of Chapel Hill.
Part of Racial-terror lynchings in Orange County · 36 events
People: Manly McCauley
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.
Once the Methodists stopped meeting there around 1910, the chapel was known as Union Baptist Church. In 1912 the congregation took the name of the newly incorporated town of Venable.
Part of From West End to Carrboro: railroad, mills, and a new town, 1882–1913 · 79 events
Spanish influenza swept the University in early October 1918, putting the campus and its student soldiers under a three-week quarantine. By October 23 about 300 students had been ill and three had died, and President Edward Kidder Graham died of influenza and pneumonia on October 26.
Bryant Nevilles's son Jesse turned the log homestead farm into a dairy, adding a gable-roofed cow barn in 1924 and a frame milking barn in 1925 that still held its machinery in 1992. His son Lacy added a concrete-block milk cooling house and two silos in the 1950s.
While Sara Watters owned the Weaver House she deeded its two-story board-and-batten barn and several acres to her sister, a Charlotte interior decorator. The sister made it a dwelling with log and frame wings built from salvaged materials.
Subject: Weaver House
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.
People: Braxton Foushee
The Division of Community Services in the state Department of Natural and Economic Resources, with planner Ervin G. Dobson, prepared a handbook for the Town of Carrboro and its Appearance Commission that surveys the town street by street, praising its wooded approaches and marking problem spots. A federal urban planning grant under Section 701 of the Housing Act of 1954 paid for part of the work.
Robert "Bob" Drakeford, a Carrboro alderman since 1975 and a Carrboro Community Coalition candidate, won the mayor's race on November 8, 1977, with 57 percent of the vote over John Boone. He was the town's first Black mayor and served until 1983.
At 19, the Flat Duo Jets singer and guitarist was living in a shack he had fitted out behind the Romweber family house in Carrboro, sleeping beside a coffin. The house itself, where his siblings Sara and Joe also played in bands, was known for practices and police noise complaints.
Orange County adopted the Orange County-Chapel Hill-Carrboro Joint Planning Area Land Use Plan and map on August 19, 1986, designating a low-density Rural Buffer. The three governments signed the Joint Planning Agreement on November 2, 1987, and the county dates the buffer to 1988.
In early 1999 Joal Hall Broun, an assistant public defender, was appointed to fill out the term of the late Alderman Hank Anderson, and she won election to the board that fall. She served on the board until 2011.
People: Joal Hall Broun · Hank Anderson
A federal judge struck down North Carolina's ban on same-sex marriage late on Friday, October 10, 2014, by which time the Orange County Register of Deeds office in Hillsborough had closed for the day. The office issued its first licences to same-sex couples when it reopened on Monday, October 13, with Carrboro mayor Lydia Lavelle and Alicia Stemper first in line; the two married at the Carrboro Town Commons on October 25, 2014.
People: Lydia Lavelle
Orange County's Southern Branch Library opened in February 2025 in the $42 million Drakeford Library Complex at 203 South Greensboro Street in Carrboro, replacing the Carrboro Cybrary, which had closed on January 31, 2025. The building, named for Robert Drakeford, Carrboro's first Black mayor, also houses town recreation offices and WCOM Radio.
Subject: Orange County Public Library
The Town Council passed a resolution by council members Eliazar Posada-Orozco and Cristóbal Palmer condemning discriminatory actions by U.S. Customs and Border Protection and reaffirming Carrboro's status as a 4th Amendment town. The council had voted unanimously for that designation on May 20, 2025.
People: Barbara Foushee
Dated maps that show this place, oldest first: town plans, county, road and soil maps, fire insurance sheets and the U.S. Geological Survey’s topographic maps, each linked to the library or archive that holds it. The USGS maps are free to download.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina, the most widely held first, novels aside. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Narrow these works. Each link opens the search already limited to this place. Counts are indexed works, not copies on a shelf; a work can carry more than one period or place.
Twelve essays by novelist Daphne Athas (1923-2020) on the Chapel Hill she knew across the twentieth century. Subjects include Carrboro as 'the Paris of the Piedmont', philosopher Horace Williams, Betty Smith writing in Chapel Hill, Junius Scales, Ab Abernethy and the Intimate Bookshop, Richard Wright's visit, and a set of Chapel Hill murders. Published 2010, 243 pages with illustrations.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the OCPL record: Athas, Daphne, 1923-.
John Cook's history of Merge Records, the independent label that Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance of Superchunk built in Chapel Hill. Chapters follow the label year by year from 1987 to 2009 and pause for profiles of Butterglory, Neutral Milk Hotel, the Magnetic Fields, Spoon, Lambchop and the Arcade Fire, ending on how it managed to stay small. Advance reading copy of the first edition, published in Chapel Hill in 2009, 289 pages with twelve pages of plates.
Maurice M. Bursey's biography of Francis Preston Venable (1856 to 1934), chemist and president of the University of North Carolina, published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 1989. It also covers the history of the university's chemistry department. Illustrated, 111 pages, with bibliographies.
Why this is here: The record names this place alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Reviewed in Isis (1992).
Architectural and historical inventory of Carrboro by Claudia Roberts Brown, published in 1983 by the Carrboro Appearance Commission and the town. The 48-page survey, with illustrations and maps, documents the town's historic buildings and their conservation.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Carrboro (N.C.).
David Menconi's history of popular music in North Carolina, from the working-class roots of the state's traditions to the Chapel Hill and Carrboro rock scene of recent decades. Menconi, who covered music for the Raleigh News and Observer for nearly thirty years, builds the book on interviews and reporting, and Black musicians' contributions run through it. First issued in print by UNC Press in 2020; this is the online edition, 329 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2022).
Elizabeth Shreve Ryan's combined histories and tour guides for Hillsborough, Chapel Hill and Carrboro, the three towns of Orange County, with the University of North Carolina treated alongside Chapel Hill. Each town gets a narrative history and a tour of its streets and buildings. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2004, 369 pages with illustrations and maps.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the Library of Congress record: Carrboro (N.C.) -- Tours.
Emily Eidenier Pearce's history of Rogers Road, the historically African American neighborhood on the edge of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and of what happened to it after Orange County opened its landfill next door in 1972. Drawing on interviews with residents, the book records the neighborhood's origins, family life, churches and customs, and then the environmental and social burdens of decades beside the landfill. Privately issued in 2009, 298 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
Mark Chilton's short history of transportation planning in the North Carolina Piedmont, drawing lessons from earlier projects. Subjects include the Cape Fear Navigation Company and river navigation, and the railroads of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, including the State University Railroad Company whose spur brought trains to the two towns. Chilton was mayor of Carrboro when the book appeared. Published by Hand Made Books, Carrboro, 2012, 92 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: North Carolina -- Carrboro.
Recently indexed: The 100 best art towns in America : a guide to galleries, museums, festivals, lodging, and dining (2005) · El Kanil, man of lightning : a legend of Jacaltenango, Department of Hueheutenango, Guatemala (1984) · Francis Preston Venable, Ph.D. : a brief sketch (1900) · The University of North Carolina, 1900-1930 : the making of a modern university (1957) · The use of economic incentives and public education to increase seat belt use in a community (1984) · Chapel Hill, Orange County, North Carolina, December 1915 : including Carrboro (1916)
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this place. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled.
Elizabeth Shreve Ryan's combined histories and tour guides for Hillsborough, Chapel Hill and Carrboro, the three towns of Orange County, with the University of North Carolina treated alongside Chapel Hill. Each town gets a narrative history and a tour of its streets and buildings. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2004, 369 pages with illustrations and maps.
Architectural and historical inventory of Carrboro by Claudia Roberts Brown, published in 1983 by the Carrboro Appearance Commission and the town. The 48-page survey, with illustrations and maps, documents the town's historic buildings and their conservation.
Second Images of America volume on Carrboro by David A. Otto and Richard Ellington (Arcadia, 2015). Chapters follow the town from mill village to growing urban center, then turn to its merchants, the arts, festivals, changing demographics and changing architecture, in 95 illustrated pages.
Pictorial history of Carrboro in Arcadia's Images of America series by David A. Otto and Richard Ellington, published in 2011. Its 127 pages of photographs, maps, facsimiles and portraits cover the town's history, social life and African American community, with a bibliography and index.
Lesley Wyatt's history calendar for 1999, subtitled the amazing history calendar, a wall calendar with local history notes on Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsborough. Published by the author in Carrboro in 1998, 28 unnumbered pages with illustrations in a large 28 by 44 cm format. Topics include the history of all three towns and of Orange County.
Stories of Mexican migrants told through a collaboration of the anthropologist Hannah Gill, the artist Todd Drake and migrant communities in Carrboro and Celaya, Guanajuato, subtitled narrating Mexican migrant experiences. It deals with migrant labor and Mexican workers in Carrboro and emigration from Celaya. Published by the University Center for International Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2006, 78 pages with color illustrations.
Resources picked for this place, each with a note on what it holds.
More to discover
The Friends connect people with new library materials, local writers and publishers, and resources documenting Orange County.
