Storyline · 1980–1986
Chapel Hill extended its ban on drinking in public to parks in 1980 and began strict enforcement in August 1981, with plainclothes officers on Franklin Street and near fraternity court. A plan let those cited before October 6 take an alcohol course and have the charge dismissed, and arrests rose through 1982. That fall the Town Council created a task force to look at alcohol problems beyond police enforcement. Carrboro banned drinking beer and wine on town property in 1985. As the state drinking age rose to 21 in 1986, UNC barred students under 21 from drinking on campus, a crowd of up to 10,000 took over Franklin Street on the last legal night, and Chancellor Christopher Fordham banned public drinking on campus.
By August 1980 Chapel Hill had added a clause to its public drinking ordinance that made it illegal to drink alcohol in public parks and recreation areas as well as on sidewalks, streets and parking lots. On August 27, 1981 police began a program to enforce the ban, sending plainclothes officers along Franklin Street and near fraternity court; each citation was a $31 fine, and they wrote 69 between September 17 and 19 alone. On October 6 Student Body President Scott Norberg announced a plan worked out with Mayor Joe Nassif and District Attorney Wade Barber that let anyone cited before that day take an alcohol-abuse course and have the charge dismissed. Police counted 22 public-drinking arrests in 1980, 116 in 1981 and 136 in the first nine months of 1982, and by November 1982 the course was no longer offered, Barber said, because the strict enforcement was now well publicized. Student Government proposed a work program for first offenders; Carrboro had no such ordinance, and its mayor, Robert Drakeford, called arrests for drinking a beer on the street "ridiculous."
On October 11, 1982 the Town Council created a task force of students, officials and others to identify the community's alcohol problems and propose remedies. Council member Marilyn Boulton said the town had until then treated the problem mainly as a matter of police enforcement. At its first meeting on October 27, with Police Chief Herman Stone among its members, the task force took up public drinking, underage drinking, false identification, alcohol education and advertising.
On January 22, 1985 the Carrboro Board of Aldermen, at the request of Alderman John Boone after west Carrboro merchants complained, banned drinking beer and wine in public anywhere on town property, from sidewalks to parks, effective at once; Mayor Jim Porto thought the ban too broad, saying small picnics and the Fourth of July did no harm. State law already barred drinking liquor in public, and Chapel Hill had had such an ordinance since 1966, the Daily Tar Heel reported.
By April 11, 1986, after rowdy incidents at a baseball game attended by the Board of Governors and a beer-can fight at a lacrosse game, the University had put up signs and begun enforcing its long-standing ban on alcohol and coolers at spring games in Boshamer, Fetzer and Kenan stadiums. Under a revised campus alcohol policy explained that month by Vice Chancellor Donald A. Boulton, to take effect August 13, before the state's new drinking age of 21 took hold on September 1, students under 21 could no longer have or drink alcohol on campus, while those 21 and older could drink in residence hall rooms, television lounges and other designated places and at authorized events of student government, the Carolina Union, the graduate federation or residence halls; Student Congress had objected to starting the rule ahead of the state law. On August 31, the last night that 19- and 20-year-olds could legally buy beer and wine in North Carolina, an estimated 8,000 to 10,000 people filled Franklin Street for six hours, breaking at least a dozen storefront windows, throwing bottles and smashing car windshields, for $10,000 to $15,000 in damage. About 150 officers from five agencies were on hand, 12 people were charged and 15 were treated by the South Orange Rescue Squad; Police Chief Herman Stone called it open defiance of the new law. On September 22 the Downtown Chapel Hill Association, a group of merchants and other citizens, asked the Town Council for a working committee of town staff, police, University administrators, student government and merchants to keep crowds from taking over downtown, warning that it could become a student tradition after a basketball championship; the council referred the letter to the town manager. On September 30 Chancellor Christopher Fordham issued a memo forbidding the public display or drinking of any alcoholic beverage on the campus unless allowed by the student alcohol policy or by written permission from his office, a ban that reached students of legal drinking age as well; University police began writing warning citations at football tailgates, seven at the October 18 homecoming game, and said a $25 fine would follow. On November 6 sixteen representatives of the town, the University and downtown business met in the Student Union on handling large crowds that spill onto Franklin Street; Stone proposed an ordinance letting police ask alcohol sellers to close in special situations, but no decisions were reached.
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. The map shows them all.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange, Orange County GIS, OpenStreetMap and a few other published sources named on each site’s page; town and community pins show approximate locations.
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.
Lee Pace's second illustrated volume on Kenan Memorial Stadium in Chapel Hill, where the North Carolina Tar Heels play football. The dust jacket advertises forty-eight new pages, and the added title page lists original essays by Jill McCorkle, Will Blythe, Erskine Bowles, Tony Barnhart, Ron Green Jr., Ted Keith, Larry Keith, Debbie Moose and David Menconi. Pace Enterprises, 2020; 240 pages, large oblong format.
Memoir by William Rand Kenan, Jr., 1872 to 1965, the donor of Kenan Memorial Stadium at Chapel Hill. Written at intervals between 1949 and 1951 and privately printed at Lockport, New York, in 1952, it follows first and second editions of 1946 and 1949. Eighty-five pages with illustrations, touching the Kenan family and Kenansville as well as the university.
Benjamin Joseph Downs traces the money behind Kenan Memorial Stadium at Chapel Hill from 1926 to 1962, an article running pages 276 to 304, published in 2019 by the Historical Research Office of the state Office of Archives and History. Topics include William Rand Kenan Jr., university endowments and the finance of college sports. Illustrated with portraits.
Twelve page color booklet issued in 2015 by the Rams Club, the athletic support organization at the University of North Carolina, laying out the equity seating plan for Kenan Memorial Stadium. Color plans show where seats fall. Topics include football fans at Chapel Hill and the Tar Heels, making it a small record of how stadium seating was tied to giving.
Episode of the North Carolina People television program, broadcast in 1988 by North Carolina Public Television as program number 1750 and recorded here as a 29 minute videocassette. The guest is Christopher C. Fordham III, chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Chancellor's office records from the tenure of Carol L. Folt at Chapel Hill, 2013 to 2018, 8 linear feet in the University Archives at UNC, collection 40024. Topics include university administration and educational fund raising, curriculum planning, health occupations schools and medical education, and race relations and college integration in North Carolina. Holden Thorp and Christopher C. Fordham also appear.
Groundbreaking for the George Watts Hill Alumni Center at UNC-Chapel Hill on 13 May 1989. The group includes Ralph Strayhorn, George Watts Hill, Doug Dibbert, trustees chairman Robert C. Eubanks and Tom Lambeth, with Paul Hardin and Christopher C. Fordham also pictured. Hugh Morton photograph.
Chancellor Christopher C. Fordham III posed with the scholar Robin Hadley in 1985. A single print among the UNC Faculty and Administration photographs of the Chapel Hill Historical Society, CHHS.002.
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. “Public drinking and the drinking age in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, 1980–1986.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/public-drinking-storyline-1980/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
