Storyline · 1975–1994
Chapel Hill hired Sidney Hilliard from Florida as police chief in 1975; after he resigned in 1977, Herman Stone, who had joined the force in 1949, led the department until he retired in January 1987. A 1985 consultant's report proposed merging police and fire into a public safety department, and the council created a public safety director's post in 1987, but the town put off filling it. Arnold Gold, interim chief since Stone's retirement, became chief in 1988. Cal Horton was public safety director by 1990, when the town named Daniel Jones fire chief. In 1991 the council moved to split the public safety department into police and fire departments, and after Gold retired in 1992 Ralph Pendergraph became chief. In October 1993 the council ended the cross-trained public safety system and split police and fire services, and in 1994 Chapel Hill and Carrboro agreed to run their fire departments in cooperation.
On March 26, 1975 Chapel Hill named Sidney M. Hilliard, a 59-year-old criminal justice planner for Pinellas County, Florida, with more than 30 years in Florida police work, its police chief, to take office April 28. A committee that included Mayor Howard Lee and Town Manager Chet Kendzior chose him from 267 applicants. He succeeded William D. Blake, who had kept the post since October while serving as assistant town manager for public safety. The 1975-76 budget the aldermen adopted that July funded 15 public safety officers, trained for both police work and firefighting, to start in December. On February 28, 1977 the Board of Aldermen accepted Hilliard's resignation; he cited personal and professional concerns and planned to retire to his home in Florida. On September 7, 1977 Mayor James C. Wallace swore in Herman L. Stone, chosen from more than 400 applicants, who had been acting chief since Hilliard stepped down. On February 11, 1980 Stephan Putnam, the communication consultant the town had hired in October 1978 to study its troubled Public Safety Officer program, which combined police, fire and emergency medical duties, resigned abruptly; on February 14 he said Town Manager Gene Shipman had kept his 1979 report from the public and from the fire and police chiefs, and Shipman declined to comment.
On October 14, 1985 the Town Council, after members praised a report by Rusten Associates, asked Town Manager David R. Taylor to recommend changes in police and fire department policy by March. The report found that animosity among fire department officials hurt that department, recommended replacing Fire Chief Everett Lloyd, chief since 1968, with an outsider, and proposed merging police and fire into a public safety department by September 30, 1986.
Stone announced in December 1986 that he would retire, saying he wanted more time with his family, and took advantage of a change in the state retirement system that gave career officers supplemental benefits for retiring early. He retired on January 31, 1987, after 38 years with the department, which he had joined as a patrolman in 1949. Taylor named Assistant Chief Arnold Gold, who had joined the force as a patrolman in November 1966 and become assistant chief in 1984, interim chief from February 2. On February 12, at a farewell banquet for 445 guests in the Koury Natatorium at the Smith Center, Mayor Jim Wallace gave Stone the key to the town; Taylor, basketball coach Dean Smith and athletic director John Swofford spoke, and Swofford gave Stone season tickets on behalf of the University.
In the fall of 1987 the council created the post of public safety director to oversee both the police and fire departments. Three finalists were interviewed in January 1988, but after a leading finalist withdrew, the town's management put off the appointment indefinitely in early February; Assistant Town Manager Ron Secrist said the town still meant to consolidate the two departments. On February 29, 1988 Taylor named Gold permanent chief, with a public swearing-in set for March 3 at the Municipal Building on Airport Road, and said the search for a public safety director would continue.
On March 8, 1990 Interim Town Manager Sonna Lowenthal announced that Daniel Jones, deputy fire chief for operations in Pinellas Park, Florida, would become Chapel Hill's fire chief on April 23, ending a five-month national search to replace Lloyd; Public Safety Director Cal Horton praised Jones as a trainer and hazardous materials specialist. On October 1, 1991 the council gave preliminary approval to a task force proposal to end the public safety system, under which 65 of the town's 118 officers were trained both as police officers and as firefighters, and to create separate police and fire departments; Town Manager Horton put the added yearly cost at $135,000 to $149,000, with final approval set for January and the change for July 1992. On October 15 Gold said he would retire on February 1, 1992, and that the timing alone decided it, not the coming split. On January 11 Horton named Capt. Ralph Pendergraph, an 18-year veteran of the department, interim chief; Pendergraph said he would press the fight against the downtown drug trade, and the town had 208 applications for the permanent job. On July 6 Horton named him chief at $51,557 a year. A 48-year-old Orange County native who had joined the department in 1973, Pendergraph said his priorities were pushing the open-air drug market out of the area near the Carrboro line and computerizing the department. Herman Stone died on September 7, 1992, at 65, after a two-month illness; his funeral at University United Methodist Church on September 9 was followed by a police procession to the new Chapel Hill cemetery.
On October 13, 1993, as Town Manager Cal Horton recommended, the council voted unanimously to end the town's 17-year-old public safety system of officers cross-trained as police and firefighters. The town was to hire 10 firefighters by January, freeing four officers for downtown patrol from December, at about $311,000 a year; Mayor Ken Broun said the rise in crime made it the right time. Early in 1994 Chief Pendergraph said the program had ended and that he planned to return officers to neighborhood beats, last used in 1973, by July and to reopen precinct offices, reversing a change made in 1979. On February 28 the council approved a report by town managers Horton and Robert Morgan calling for shared purchasing, joint training, common procedures and joint public education by the two towns' fire departments; a study by N.C. State's Charles Coe, ordered by both towns in July 1993, had favored joint operations but rejected a full merger as too costly.
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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.
Jonathan Howes, a former mayor of Chapel Hill who served in Governor Hunt's cabinet and later worked in the UNC chancellor's office on urban planning, gave this illustrated talk on the past and future of the Chapel Hill campus. Cassette, 1998.
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. “Chapel Hill's police chiefs and the public safety department, 1975–1994.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/police-chiefs-storyline-1975/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
