Storyline
How Carrboro bought the old Carrboro School on West Main Street when the new school opened, voted bonds to remodel it, and made it a town hall with room for the library, the police and fire departments and a National Guard platoon.
In briefAfter the new Carrboro elementary school opened, the Town of Carrboro bought the empty old school on West Main Street and turned it into its town hall. The Orange County Board of Education accepted the town's $30,000 bid on September 14, 1959. On March 19, 1960 voters approved $95,000 in bonds, 122 to 28, to buy and renovate the building. Contractor L. G. Tripp remodeled the main floor as a town hall with a community meeting room and made the auditorium a police and fire station, and the town gave the Carrboro Library a room. Several hundred people toured the new town hall on April 9, 1961.
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No works in the index are currently linked directly to this storyline. The works below provide background on Schools & Education.
After the new Carrboro elementary school opened, the Orange County Board of Education on September 14, 1959 accepted the Town of Carrboro's $30,000 bid, the only one at an August auction, for the empty 14-classroom school and auditorium on West Main Street. In November the town commissioners applied to issue $95,000 in bonds, $30,000 to buy the school and $65,000 to renovate it as a municipal building, and on March 19, 1960 voters approved the bonds 122 to 28. In May the Bank of Chapel Hill bought the town's $30,000 bond anticipation note, a short-term loan to be repaid from the bonds, letting it close the purchase of the building and about four acres. In June the board authorized a $25,000 note for the renovation, and in September it ordered the main floor remodeled as a town hall, with a meeting room for community use and the auditorium made a police and fire station; contractor L. G. Tripp, who had reroofed the building, did the work. In October the board promised the Carrboro Library a room, and in November it assigned it a large main-floor room. That month the National Guard approved a 44-man rifle platoon for Orange County, and Carrboro prepared quarters for it in the building. Several hundred people toured the new town hall at an open house on April 9, 1961.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 9 dated events in the chronology →
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.
Background reading on Schools & Education. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
A 2026 novel set in Carrboro. Frances, thirty and grieving her mother, and her husband Ben open their marriage, and the book follows what that decision does to them and to the people closest to them. The characters include college teachers and a ghostwriter. 296 pages.
An illustrated online timeline of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, issued by the school in 2025. One page with portraits.
A 2025 history of University of North Carolina baseball from its nineteenth-century beginnings to the program's rise as an ACC power. Chapters cover the early years on campus, the building of Boshamer Stadium, and the Mike Fox era. Self-published by the author, 288 pages.
Joanna Pearson's novel of a cold case at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Karlie Richards was a nineteen-year-old student when she was murdered; decades later her onetime roommate, divorced and in middle age, finds herself drawn back to the crime as online conspiracy theories about it multiply. A psychological thriller with a Chapel Hill setting, published by Bloomsbury in 2024, 275 pages.
The 2023 issue of Carrboro High School's literary magazine, featuring fiction and poetry written by its students.
William R. Burk's history of botany at the University of North Carolina, from its early natural scientists such as Denison Olmsted and Elisha Mitchell through later figures including George Francis Atkinson, Joseph Austin Holmes and Henry Van Peters Wilson, closing with a chapter on the Department of Botany itself. Published in Fort Worth in 2023.
Willis P. Whichard's biography of David Lowry Swain, governor of North Carolina from 1832 to 1835 and president of the University of North Carolina from 1835 until his death in 1868. The subtitle ties Swain, nineteenth-century North Carolina and the university together, and the book belongs with the lives of college presidents and governors. Published in 2022.
Jim Grimsley's coming-of-age novel about Ronny, who grew up in a trailer alongside his mother and a string of stepfathers, kept his head down, earned good grades and won a scholarship to UNC in Chapel Hill. On campus he finds his first love and begins to sort out who he is. Subjects include gay college students, first loves and mothers and sons. Published by Levine Querido in 2022, 322 pages.
Scott Madry's recollections of the student tech crew at Memorial Hall, the University of North Carolina's auditorium in Chapel Hill, presented under the banner of the Carolina Union, the campus student union. Published in Chapel Hill in 2021.
Geeta Kapur's history of race at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, from the enslaved labor that built the campus through desegregation and the Black student protests that followed. Twelve chapters, with a foreword by William Barber II, move from the founding era and the Great Depression controversies to the state's response to integration and the turmoil of later decades; North Carolina Central University also figures. Published 2021 by Blair in Durham.
Tracy Deonn's young adult fantasy about an African American teenager who arrives as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after her mother's death and finds a secret society bound to Arthurian legend, with demons, magic and her own family's past. Published by Margaret K. McElderry Books in 2020, 501 pages, for ages 14 and up. Winner of the 2021 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Reviewed in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books./Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (2020).
Sylvia D. Hoffert's article on Margaret Anna Burwell, 1810 to 1871, and the work of being a Presbyterian minister's wife in North Carolina from 1835 to 1857, the years of the female school she and her husband kept in Hillsborough. Pages 245 to 275 with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits, issued by the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh in 2019.
Books in OCPL’s Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection whose titles, catalog subjects, or descriptions match this storyline. The Friends’ recommended starting points are labelled. Books marked Wider context cover the broader subject rather than this storyline itself.
The Historic Hillsborough Commission's account of slavery in antebellum Hillsborough and of the enslaved and free people of color who worked at the Burwell School, the female school the Burwells kept in town, between 1837 and 1857. African American history in Hillsborough and the school's own history are its two threads. Published in 2019.
Milburn Gibbs's history of Staley School and the community it served in Staley, a small Randolph County town, published by Five Hawks Press of nearby Liberty in 2000; 225 illustrated pages.
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