By April 1980 Chapel Hill's plan for its three-year, $2.1 million federal community development grant sent most of the money to the Northside and Pine Knolls neighborhoods, where a 1978 study by UNC professor Michael Stegman had found students moving into traditionally low-income areas. Landlords who received money had to rent only to low- and moderate-income tenants for 15 years, a safeguard against students outbidding families for housing, and the town hoped to build new low-cost housing there. On September 8 the council voted 5-3 to use part of the grant to remove the hairpin curve where Caldwell Street, once School Lane, met Gomains Avenue and Mitchell Lane. By late October the town attorney had begun condemnation proceedings against a house on Caldwell Street Extension that had been its owner's home for about 40 years; the town offered market value, up to $15,000 in relocation money and moving costs, or to move the house to a vacant lot.
A council hearing on January 26, 1981 on the HUD-funded plan to improve substandard housing north of Rosemary Street, between Church Street and Carrboro, ran more than two hours as residents objected that the Chapel Hill Housing Authority could condemn property not brought up to code within a year. Housing Authority chairman Theodore Parrish said condemnation was unlikely, council member R.D. Smith sided with the residents, and the council referred the plan to Town Manager Gene Shipman. On April 13 the council adopted the redevelopment plan 6 to 2. Paid for by the $2.1 million federal Small Cities grant for 1979-1982, it let the town condemn substandard and vacant lots so the Housing Authority could clear them and resell them to low-income families, with 21 duplexes and single-family homes and 18 units for the elderly planned. Smith, voting no, said it had taken Black families "a long, long time" to acquire the property, and Jim Wallace called forced transfer distasteful; Mayor Joe Nassif said the land was needed for homes.
Northside residents objected again at a Planning Board hearing on April 21 on the program's 1981-82 phase. Housing Authority director Al Stevenson said owners who brought property up to standard would not lose it, and the board asked the town and the Housing Authority to use one set of inspection standards. At a council hearing on June 8 several landowners strongly protested the provisions to condemn their vacant lots for homes to be resold to low-income families, one saying her own family was struggling, and council members said they were surprised. By October 1 HUD had approved $700,000 for the grant's third year, for house rehabilitation, water and sewer lines and street repairs in Northside, land for public and subsidized housing, and a linear park along Tanbark Branch near Umstead Drive. On September 13, 1982 the council voted 7-1 to begin condemning two lots near Mason Road and McMasters Street whose owners had turned down the town's offers of $10,500 and $6,000. The land was needed to finish a greenway linking Umstead Park with the Hargraves Center, part of a community development plan that went back to the 1965 report of the Mayor's Task Force on Open Space.
Further reading
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are the most widely held histories of the theme it is filed under, so they may not discuss it. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Kinship and Neighborhood in a Southern Community
Kenzer, Robert C. · 1987 · University of Tennessee Press
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).
African Americans of Durham and Orange counties : an oral history
Bolduc, Jean · 2016 · The History Press
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.
Rogers Road
Pearce, Emily Eidenier · 2009
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.
The Copperline chronicles: a history of the Kings Mill-Morgan Creek neighborhoods
2020
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.
African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties
Bolduc, Jean · 2016
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.
"Whites only" : a pastor's retrospective on signs of the new South
Seymour, Robert E. (Robert Edward), 1925-2020 · 2011 · Chapel Hill Press
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.
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Cedar Grove, 1939 : revisiting Marion Post's photos of a Black rural neighborhood
Bennett, Evan P. · 2025 · Historical Research Office, Office of Archives and History
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.
Making Carrboro home : user alteration of company space
Lachenman, Sara Regan · 2005
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.
James J. Freeland
Freeland, Maxine · 1999
Maxine Freeland's biography of James John Freeland (1918-1999), a Hillsborough man of the twentieth century, compiled in 1999.
Portrait of a southern community, 1849-1881 : family, kinship, and neighborhood in Orange County, North Carolina
Kenzer, Robert C., 1955- · 1982
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.
Council on the Status of Women, Public Relations File, Orange County Commission for Women
Messenheimer, Judith M. · 1989
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.
Kings Mill-Morgan Creek Neighborhood Collection (Chapel Hill Historical Society)
2003
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.
