Storyline · 1963–1966
The Inter-Church Council, formed in 1963, was building homes on Community Chest money by 1965. In 1966 students from Morrison Residence College and the Nurses Dormitory finished a nine-room house it had begun for a Black family near the Carrboro town dump, and Adelaide Walters began her years as chair of its housing committee.
The Inter-Church Council formed in 1963, when the organizing of seven women led to coordinated local poverty relief, and by early 1966 it had been building homes for about a year on Community Chest money. In February 1966 about 45 students from Morrison Residence College and the Nurses Dormitory took over the finishing of a nine-room house the council had begun about a year earlier for a Black mother and her nine children, who lived in a shack next door near the Carrboro town dump. Working afternoons and Saturdays with donated materials, they laid sewer pipe, plastered, painted and put on siding, because the council could not pay to finish it. That year Adelaide Walters, after leaving the Board of Aldermen, began chairing the housing committee of the Inter-Church Council for Social Service, later the Inter-Faith Council, which she led until 1973.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first.
People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Dorothy J. Kiester's account of the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service, the Chapel Hill and Carrboro charity through which local congregations pooled volunteer and professional effort, subtitled 'a volunteer/professional partnership'. Published by the council in 1984, 68 pages with illustrations. It relates to charities, churches and social service in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
A 1996 publication of the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service in Chapel Hill, describing the agency as a partnership between volunteers and paid staff. Topics include social service in Chapel Hill and volunteer workers in social service.
Myles Presler's 1996 report on the demonstration phase of the Employment Project, which paired job training with substance abuse treatment for homeless people in Chapel Hill. The introduction gives the aim as helping participants overcome addiction and reach independence through work. Topics include Community House, the town's shelter, occupational training and substance abuse treatment in Chapel Hill.
Kathryn M. Yount's 1991 case study of Community House in Chapel Hill, examining voluntarism and how far it met the needs of homeless women. The bibliography runs on leaves 131 to 133.
Robert C. Kenzer's study of kinship and neighborhood in Orange County between 1849 and 1881, the decades before and after the Civil War, tracing family ties and neighborhood networks through the county's records. Published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1987, 251 pages with illustrations, maps, portraits and a bibliography. Topics include kinship, neighborhoods and social conditions in the county in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (1988), Journal of American History (1988), The American Historical Review (1989), The Journal of Southern History (1989), Civil War history (1989), Journal of Social History (1989).
Jean Bolduc's collection of oral history interviews with Black residents of Durham and Orange counties, published by The History Press in 2016, 125 pages with photographs and portraits. The narrators are the poet Jaki Shelton Green, civil rights lawyer Floyd McKissick, Walter Jackson, Nate Davis, Brenda Stephens, Diane Wright, Jackie Wagstaff and Michelle Johnson, and a closing chapter deals with the Ku Klux Klan. The interviews document Black life and race relations in the two counties across the twentieth century.
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.
Neighborhood history of the Kings Mill and Morgan Creek area of Chapel Hill, published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 2020. The project started in June 2014 when neighbors were asked over the community email list to share memories of life there, and replies came from current residents and from former residents raised there who had since scattered across the country. 268 pages with illustrations, color maps and portraits.
Jean Bolduc's 2016 collection of interviews with African American residents of Durham and Orange counties, presented as short biographies. The subjects are Floyd McKissick (1922-1991), the first African American admitted to UNC's law school, Walter Jackson, Brenda Stephens, Nate Davis, poet Jaki Shelton Green, Jackie Wagstaff, Diane Wright and Michelle Johnson, with a closing chapter on the Ku Klux Klan. 125 pages with illustrations.
Robert E. Seymour, a Baptist pastor in Chapel Hill associated with Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, looks back on segregation and race relations in the South from the pulpit. A clergyman's memoir covering church history in the town, Baptists in North Carolina and the segregation of African Americans. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2011, 204 pages.
Evan P. Bennett returns to the photographs Marion Post Wolcott made in 1939 in Cedar Grove, a Black farming neighborhood in northern Orange County that she documented for the federal resettlement program. Published in 2025 by the Historical Research Office in Raleigh, pages 384 to 406, with illustrations and portraits. Topics include rural African Americans in the Cedar Grove township and photographers in the state.
Sara Regan Lachenman's 2005 thesis on how the people living in Carrboro's company built housing altered it to suit themselves. It takes up domestic architecture, working class housing and the social side of the textile industry in the town, with 158 pages of text and illustrations.
Maxine Freeland's biography of James John Freeland (1918-1999), a Hillsborough man of the twentieth century, compiled in 1999.
Robert C. Kenzer's study of family, kinship and neighborhood in Orange County between 1849 and 1881, covering the county's households from the late antebellum years through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Completed in 1982 in 248 leaves with maps. Topics include kinship, neighborhoods, race relations and social conditions in the county during the nineteenth century.
Public relations material on the Orange County Commission for Women, 1989 to 1992, from the files of the North Carolina Council on the Status of Women, 26 images, with Judith M. Messenheimer named as creator. Issues include child care, teenage pregnancy, abortion, older women, low-income housing, taxation, AFDC, and women's education and employment.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Material on the Kings Mill and Morgan Creek neighborhood of Chapel Hill, 2003 to 2019, gathered from residents and the neighborhood association while The Copperline Chronicles (Chapel Hill Historical Society, 2020) was being prepared. Three boxes, collection CHHS.017.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “The Inter-Church Council's housing work, 1963–1966.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/inter-church-council-housing-storyline-1963/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
