Storyline · 1971–1994
In 1971 an Adam & Eve contraceptive shop opened on Columbia Street, which the Daily Tar Heel called the first of its kind in the country. In 1986 District Attorney Carl Fox issued guidelines under the state's new obscenity law, and a federal-state task force raided PHE Inc., the Adam and Eve mail-order company west of Carrboro. In 1990 the company sued the Justice Department over threatened prosecutions in several places at once, and a federal judge barred multiple indictments. Postal inspectors raided PHE again in 1992; no charges were filed. In 1993 Hillsborough's Board of Adjustment refused PHE's move to town, but a judge cleared it, PHE settled its federal case, and it moved into its Hillsborough building in 1994.
In November 1971 Population Planning Associates opened Adam & Eve at 123 North Columbia Street in Chapel Hill, a shop of nonprescription contraceptives, cosmetics, books on sex and birth control, posters and cards, which the Daily Tar Heel called the first store of its kind in the United States.
On February 7, 1986 District Attorney Carl Fox met Orange County video dealers to go over guidelines he had written for applying the state's new pornography law, in force since October 1, 1985, which let local standards define obscenity. A tape with even one scene of child pornography, rape, torture or similar acts would be treated as obscene, and investigators would screen films from the stores. On May 29 about 30 federal, state and county officers, working as a new federal-state pornography task force, searched PHE Inc., the Adam and Eve mail-order firm on N.C. 54 about six miles west of Carrboro. They questioned and photographed some 125 employees and ordered them to testify before a federal grand jury; the company said it had always cooperated with officials.
On March 16, 1990 Adam and Eve, which sold condoms and sexually oriented magazines and videotapes, sued the U.S. Department of Justice in federal court in Washington, D.C., to stop agents from threatening simultaneous prosecutions in several jurisdictions unless it quit selling such materials. It said they were not legally obscene and that under the pressure it had stopped selling in North Carolina for three years. On July 23 a federal judge in Washington barred the department from indicting the company in several jurisdictions at once, pending a hearing on the suit. On December 1, 1992 about 30 federal postal inspectors acting on obscenity complaints from Alabama raided PHE and made it hand over the names of about 2,000 customers in central Alabama. No charges were filed; the owner called it the latest in six years of raids, and Carrboro Mayor Eleanor Kinnaird called it harassment of a business that operated under the law.
In February 1993 ministers opposed to PHE's plan to move its mail-order business to Hillsborough formed the Orange Coalition Against Pornography. About 500 people rallied in the rain in Hillsborough on February 21 against the move, which PHE said would bring about 100 jobs, and on February 24 the Hillsborough Board of Adjustment denied it a permit for a building in the Meadowlands industrial park; chairman Frank Ray said the site was too close to residential areas. After a five-hour hearing on April 14 the board voted 3 to 2 to grant a site-plan permit, one vote short of the four-fifths needed, and PHE appealed to Superior Court. On May 24 the Hillsborough Town Board voted not to defend the denial, its attorney saying the town could not win. On June 21 Judge Knox Jenkins let the coalition and the American Family Association join the case, and on July 6 he ruled that PHE was not an adult-use business under the town's ordinance, clearing it to build. The N.C. Court of Appeals dismissed the coalition's appeal as moot on November 16. On December 6 PHE settled its federal case by agreeing to plead guilty to a 1985 breach of postal rules on labeling sexually oriented advertising, while the government agreed not to pursue obscenity and child-pornography investigations of the company, and PHE dropped its civil suit. The company broke ground in Hillsborough in January 1994, the N.C. Supreme Court declined that March to hear the coalition's last appeal, and by October 20 PHE had moved into its new building; Mayor Horace Johnson said the controversy had faded once the case left the courts.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
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 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.
Rick Jackson's true crime history of Chapel Hill, published by The History Press in 2023, in 28 short chapters. Cases include the Efland bank robbery, the execution of John Henry Breeze, the unsolved murder of Suellen Evans, the killing at the Internationalist Bookstore and the death of Eve Carson.
Albert Coates's own account of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina, which he founded, subtitled 'out of a classroom in Chapel Hill' and published in 1981. The 303 pages trace the institute's history and its role in educating North Carolina's public officials.
Kemp Plummer Battle's memoir, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1945, 296 pages with plates and portraits. Battle, a lawyer, state treasurer and president of the university from 1876 to 1891, recalls North Carolina manners, customs and public life across the nineteenth century, with Chapel Hill and the university's reopening after Reconstruction at the center.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1946), The Journal of Southern History (1946).
William J. Billingsley's history of the Speaker Ban Law, the 1963 North Carolina statute that barred known Communists from speaking on state campuses, and the fight over it at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The subtitle sets the scope: race, politics and the public university in sixties North Carolina. It treats academic freedom, anti-communist movements and free speech in the state. University of Georgia Press, 1999, 308 pages with eight pages of plates.
Reviewed in Academe (2000), The American Historical Review (2001), The Journal of Southern History (2001), Journal of American History (2001), The Journal of Politics (2001).
Francis Nash's history of Hillsborough in colonial and Revolutionary times, first published in 1903 and reprinted in 1953 by Edwards & Broughton with an index and a sketch of the author. Topics include the Regulator Insurrection of 1766 to 1771, the Revolution and local genealogy.
Howard E. Covington Jr.'s biography of Albert Coates (1896-1989), the law professor who founded the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina and led it through its early years. Topics include Coates as a law teacher and the institute's history as a center for the study of public administration in Chapel Hill. Published in 2010 by the University Library at Chapel Hill, 322 pages with 32 pages of plates.
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.
Abstracts of the minutes of Orange County's Inferior Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions for 1777 to 1788, the county court of justices of the peace in the Revolutionary years. The abstracts name the people who came before the court. First published in Charlotte in 1966 and later reprinted from Greenville, South Carolina, in three paginated sections with a map.
David Cook collects the grim side of the Eno River's past in Orange and Durham counties: ghost stories, crimes, train wrecks and accidents, including the hanging of rebels near the river in 1771, a sawmill accident said to have started a run of hauntings, and a dance one Valentine's Day that ended badly. Published by The History Press in 2025, 141 pages with illustrations.
Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest, raised in Durham. Its six parts follow a Southern childhood, the move to New York, the 1938 application to the University of North Carolina that was refused because Murray was Black (the chapter is titled 'Members of your race are not admitted'), law school and the coining of the phrase Jane Crow, the Cold War years, the push toward 'an NAACP for women', and a late-life ordination. 494 pages with portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2018).
Deed transcripts for the town lots of Chapel Hill and adjoining land from 1790 to the 1930s, compiled by Stewart E. Dunaway. Each transcript keeps only the working facts: grantor and grantee, price, acreage and the metes and bounds of the parcel. Self-published in 2014 as Issue 1G, 702 pages with maps and facsimiles.
Nora Gaskin's short true account of a murder investigation in 1960s Chapel Hill and the judicial error that followed, centered on Frank Rinaldi (1929 to 2009). Published in 2013 by Lystra Books, 52 pages with references.
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. “Obscenity prosecutions and PHE, from Carrboro to Hillsborough, 1971–1994.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/phe-obscenity-storyline-1986/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
