Named event or history
The 1882 spur line and depot, West End and Lloydville, the Alberta and Durham Hosiery mills and their villages, Venable’s incorporation in 1911, and the renaming for Julian Carr in 1913.
In briefIn 1882 a university railroad spur ended a mile west of Chapel Hill, and the settlement of West End grew around its boxcar depot. Thomas Lloyd opened a gin and grist mill in 1883 and the Alberta Cotton Mill in 1899, which Julian Carr's Durham Hosiery bought in 1909. Incorporated as Venable in 1911, the town became Carrboro in 1913.
97 indexed works are connected with this event. 5 held at OCPL →
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Narrow these works. Each link opens the search already limited to this event. Counts are indexed works, not copies on a shelf; a work can carry more than one period or place.
Second Images of America volume on Carrboro by David A. Otto and Richard Ellington (Arcadia, 2015). Chapters follow the town from mill village to growing urban center, then turn to its merchants, the arts, festivals, changing demographics and changing architecture, in 95 illustrated pages.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Carrboro (N.C.) -- History -- Pictorial works.
Pictorial history of Carrboro in Arcadia's Images of America series by David A. Otto and Richard Ellington, published in 2011. Its 127 pages of photographs, maps, facsimiles and portraits cover the town's history, social life and African American community, with a bibliography and index.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Carrboro (N.C.) -- History -- Pictorial works.
Elizabeth Shreve Ryan's combined histories and tour guides for Hillsborough, Chapel Hill and Carrboro, the three towns of Orange County, with the University of North Carolina treated alongside Chapel Hill. Each town gets a narrative history and a tour of its streets and buildings. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2004, 369 pages with illustrations and maps.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Carrboro (N.C.) -- History.
Anniversary booklet marking fifty years of WCHL 1360, the Chapel Hill radio station, with profiles of fifty people from Chapel Hill and Carrboro. Published in 2003, 36 pages with portraits. Contributors include Roland Giduz, Jim Heavner, Jonathan Howes, Neil Offen and Rosemary Waldorf.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Carrboro (N.C.) -- History.
Lesley Wyatt's history calendar for 1999, subtitled the amazing history calendar, a wall calendar with local history notes on Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsborough. Published by the author in Carrboro in 1998, 28 unnumbered pages with illustrations in a large 28 by 44 cm format. Topics include the history of all three towns and of Orange County.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the OCPL record: Carrboro (N.C.) -- History.
Maurice M. Bursey's biography of Francis Preston Venable (1856 to 1934), chemist and president of the University of North Carolina, published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 1989. It also covers the history of the university's chemistry department. Illustrated, 111 pages, with bibliographies.
Why this is here: The record names this subject alongside a heading for the county or its towns.
Reviewed in Isis (1992).
Architectural and historical inventory of Carrboro by Claudia Roberts Brown, published in 1983 by the Carrboro Appearance Commission and the town. The 48-page survey, with illustrations and maps, documents the town's historic buildings and their conservation.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the NC Cardinal record: Carrboro (N.C.) -- History.
Valerie Quinney's article on the Carrboro mill village, pages 98 to 109 of a 1980 publication, with illustrations and portraits. Topics include Carrboro history and mills and mill work, drawing on residents' recollections of life around the town's cotton mills. It also discusses mill owner Thomas F. Lloyd.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Carrboro (N.C.) -- History.
A six-page illustrated leaflet on Carrboro, printed in December 1978 at the expense of Frances L. Shetley and Lou Bonds, whose names appear on the cover. A short piece of Carrboro history focused on the town's historic buildings, it is a brief local portrait of older structures as they stood when it was printed. A small ephemeral piece.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Carrboro (N.C.) -- History.
A short booklet on Carr Mill, the former Carrboro mill remodeled as a shopping village, issued around 1977. A note beneath the title names the owner, a limited partnership called Carr-Mill, the leasing agent Southern Real Estate of Charlotte, the architects Miller/Steever/Finch of Charlotte, and the contractor Wooten-Brawley of Statesville. Five unnumbered pages with illustrations, a map and a plan.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Carr Mill (Carrboro, N.C.).
Poster by Bob Goldstein from 2020 arguing that Carrboro should stop carrying the name of Julian Shakespeare Carr, and proposing Cottenboro after the musician Elizabeth Cotten. A single sheet measuring 30 by 31 centimeters. Topics include Carr, Cotten and the question of the town's name, placing the poster with the local debate over commemoration.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Carr, Julian Shakespeare.
Published in April 2011 as a supplement to the Carrboro Citizen, this forty-seven page commemorative marks Carrboro's first hundred years with history, biography and recollections of town life, illustrated with photographs, portraits and facsimiles. The subtitle uses the town's own nickname, Paris of the Piedmont.
Why this is here: Catalog heading in the UNC record: Carrboro (N.C.) -- History.
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this event. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled. Books marked Wider context cover the broader subject rather than this event itself.
In 1849 the legislature chartered the North Carolina Railroad, finished in 1856 from Goldsboro through Raleigh, Greensboro and Salisbury to Charlotte. Allen W. Trelease follows the company to 1871, when it leased its line to the Richmond and Danville, and weighs what the railroad meant for the state's development; the line spurred the growth of Durham, Company Shops (later Burlington) and High Point. UNC Press, 1991; 486 pages with illustrations and maps.
Architectural and historical inventory of Carrboro by Claudia Roberts Brown, published in 1983 by the Carrboro Appearance Commission and the town. The 48-page survey, with illustrations and maps, documents the town's historic buildings and their conservation.
Burlington began as Company Shops, the town the North Carolina Railroad built around its maintenance shops in the 1850s, incorporated in 1866 and renamed in 1887, and Durward T. Stokes tells its history. The town lies in Alamance County, formed from Orange in 1849. John F. Blair published the 169 pages, with illustrations, a bibliography and an index, in 1981.
Charles B. Stanley's stories and poems about growing up in West Hillsborough, the mill village on the west side of town, subtitled by a native son. Born in 1940, Stanley writes of the neighborhood's social life and customs in the twentieth century in autobiographical verse and prose. Published in 2018 by the Create Short Book Writers Project, 162 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Railroads of the Sandhills region of North and South Carolina, in essays by S. David Carriker on the lines and how they were run. Heritage Publishing Company of Matthews issued the first volume, on the nineteenth century from 1825 to 1900, in 1985 and the second, on 1900 to 1985, in 1987. Both are illustrated, partly in color, and indexed, and Carriker later wrote and edited further volumes.
Elizabeth Shreve Ryan's combined histories and tour guides for Hillsborough, Chapel Hill and Carrboro, the three towns of Orange County, with the University of North Carolina treated alongside Chapel Hill. Each town gets a narrative history and a tour of its streets and buildings. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2004, 369 pages with illustrations and maps.
Second Images of America volume on Carrboro by David A. Otto and Richard Ellington (Arcadia, 2015). Chapters follow the town from mill village to growing urban center, then turn to its merchants, the arts, festivals, changing demographics and changing architecture, in 95 illustrated pages.
Lesley Wyatt's history calendar for 1999, subtitled the amazing history calendar, a wall calendar with local history notes on Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Hillsborough. Published by the author in Carrboro in 1998, 28 unnumbered pages with illustrations in a large 28 by 44 cm format. Topics include the history of all three towns and of Orange County.
Pictorial history of Carrboro in Arcadia's Images of America series by David A. Otto and Richard Ellington, published in 2011. Its 127 pages of photographs, maps, facsimiles and portraits cover the town's history, social life and African American community, with a bibliography and index.
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 47, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 47 dated events in the chronology →
Julian S. Carr was born in Chapel Hill on October 12, 1845, the son of the Franklin Street merchant John Wesley Carr, and later studied at the university. He built tobacco, banking and textile fortunes in Durham, and his Durham Hosiery Mills went on to own both Carrboro mills; the town took his name in 1913.
People: Julian S. Carr
As the settlement around the depot and Lloyd's mills grew in the later 1880s, Jack Brim, an African American blacksmith, opened a shop at West End, and Bennie F. Ray opened a second smithy after him. Ray's shop was still working north and east of the depot in the early 1910s.
The first passenger train on the University Railroad left Chapel Hill on Monday, February 6, 1882, and ran through University Station to Raleigh. The line ended about a mile west of the village at West End, where a boxcar served as the depot, and the settlement that became Carrboro grew up around it.
Subject: University Station
Lloyd bought William Pritchard's share of the steam grist mill and cotton gin the two had built north of the station in 1883, and had a flour mill built on the property.
People: Thomas F. Lloyd (Carrboro mill builder)
Subject: Lloyd grist mill (Broad Street)
Lloyd built the Alberta Cotton Mill beside the railroad in West End in 1898 and 1899, the brick mill that later became Durham Hosiery Mill No. 4 and then Carr Mill Mall.
People: Julian S. Carr · Thomas F. Lloyd (Carrboro mill builder)
Subject: Carr Mill
The secretary of state issued a charter to the Blanche Hosiery Mills Company, formed by W. R. Lloyd, T. J. Hogan, John Lloyd and W. E. Lindsay to make hosiery. The company began on $6,500 in stock, with leave to raise it to $15,000.
At about age eleven, growing up near the railroad tracks in the settlement that became Carrboro, Elizabeth Cotten wrote "Freight Train." She played a right-handed guitar upside down, and the song became a folk standard after Folkways released her recording in 1958.
In early February 1909 Julian S. Carr and his sons closed a deal for both the Alberta Cotton Mill that Thomas F. Lloyd had built at West End and the Blanche Hosiery Mill, to change hands on April 1 and run together as Durham Hosiery Mills' Mill No. 4. The deeds were recorded in March.
People: Julian S. Carr
Subject: Carr Mill
One-story frame houses with front porches were built between 1910 and 1915 as worker housing for the Thomas F. Lloyd Manufacturing Company; 25 of them form the Thomas F. Lloyd Historic District on the National Register.
Thomas F. Lloyd died in May 1911, close to the time his second mill, a one-story brick yarn mill a block south of the Alberta mill, was finished. A Confederate veteran with no schooling, he had built the gin, grist mill and flour mill by the depot before starting the Alberta mill in 1898.
A 1913 act of the General Assembly changed the name of the Town of Venable to Carrboro. Julian S. Carr, owner of the local mill since 1909, had asked UNC president Francis Venable's consent in January 1913, and the town's own history says Carr agreed to supply the community with electricity.
People: Julian S. Carr
In 1923 the Mebane firm Fitch-Riggs took over Andrews and Lloyd, a small Carrboro lumber business with one employee, and R. Bernice Fitch ran the Carrboro plant. It traded as Fitch-Riggs Lumber Co. into 1925 and as Fitch Lumber Co. by 1927, and by 1953 it was Carrboro's oldest small concern, with 20 men, a planing mill and a coal yard.
Durham Hosiery Mills stopped operations at Mill No. 4 in 1930 as the Depression cut into the hosiery business.
Subject: Carr Mill
National Munitions Corporation converted the empty Mill No. 7 on Roberson Street into a shell-loading plant that pressed tetryl pellets for Navy anti-aircraft ammunition, growing from about 126 workers to more than 500; an explosion hit its pellet houses on September 6, 1942.
Lee Epting and Mike Macomson finished renovating the disused depot in 1976 after two years of negotiations, reopening it as The Station restaurant, later a music venue.
The Town Council unanimously approved an agreement to study converting the 11-mile rail corridor, which still carries coal to UNC's cogeneration plant, into a multi-use trail once the plant stops using coal.
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 4 with a known location.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange and OpenStreetMap; town and community pins mark the middle of their mapped buildings.
Background from selected state and local sources
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Held in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection. Selected because their titles or catalog subjects provide wider historical context for this event; they may not discuss the Orange County event directly.
The company history of Rocky Mount Mills, issued in 1943, 125 years after the cotton mill was founded at the falls of the Tar River by a group that included Joel Battle. North Carolina's second cotton mill, it ran on enslaved labor until the 1850s, was burned by Union raiders in 1863 and was rebuilt after the war. Fifty pages with portraits, a map and a color frontispiece.
Subjects in the OCPL catalog record: Textile industry OCPL call number: NC 677.21 ROCPicture: Carr Mill, Carrboro. CC BY-SA 3.0. Photograph by Ikanreed; via Wikimedia Commons
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