Storyline
How UNC and Chapel Hill marked their 200th year in 1993 and 1994: the town’s markers, mural, books and exhibits, the University’s convocation with President Clinton, its lectures, music and open house, and the town’s Chapel Hill Revisited day, through the commencement that closed the Observance.
In briefUNC and Chapel Hill marked their 200th year from 1993 to 1994. President Bill Clinton spoke at the University's Bicentennial Convocation in Kenan Stadium, and the town unveiled a post office mural of the 1793 lot auction. Lectures, a musical, books, exhibits, entranceway markers and an open house followed, and the town's Chapel Hill Revisited day and UNC's 1994 commencement closed the celebrations.
Read the full storyRead the 20 eventsAll storylines
Read the events and sources below.
No works in the index are currently linked directly to this storyline. The works below are about the places and people this story names.
On January 25, 1993 the Chapel Hill Town Council voted $30,000 toward its Bicentennial Committee's $72,000 program for the town's 200th birthday: a "Chapel Hill Revisited" festival on April 24, 1994, a book by local historians, a Franklin Street parade, a play and entranceway markers at five points of entry. In April the council approved the five markers. On September 14 a ceremony in Polk Place, which the Daily Tar Heel called the first official ceremony of the University's Bicentennial Observance, unveiled a postal card bearing alumnus Bob Timberlake's watercolor of Playmakers Theatre. Citing recent violence downtown, the council refused a noise permit for an outdoor student kickoff at Granville Towers, and organizers moved it indoors.
On October 11 Li Lu, a leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations chosen by students, opened the Observance with a lecture to more than 600 people, and the N.C. Symphony gave the premiere of alumnus Richard Adler's Bicentennial Commemorative Suite in Memorial Hall. On October 12, 200 years after the laying of Old East's cornerstone, President Bill Clinton spoke to about 45,000 people at the Bicentennial Convocation in Kenan Stadium and received an honorary doctorate of law from Chancellor Paul Hardin. About 13,000 high school musicians invited from across the state lost their seats amid changing security plans and never performed; Bicentennial officials apologized. That day Mayor Ken Broun unveiled Michael J. Brown's mural of the 1793 auction of the village lots in the Franklin Street post office, on the site of the sale.
In February 1994 the Red Clay Ramblers' Bland Simpson and Jack Herrick staged Tar Heel Voices, a Bicentennial musical, at Memorial Hall, and Broun dedicated the town's second entranceway marker. In March cartoonist Jeff MacNelly unveiled a postal cachet he drew for the Observance. On April 7 the town's historical exhibit opened at the Horace Williams House with two new books, Chapel Hill 1793-1993: Close to Magic and A Backward Glance. More than 30,000 visitors came to the University's Carolina Saturday open house on April 9, the Preservation Society and the Bicentennial Committee published a guide to the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, and an art exhibit filled the old Hector's building. On April 24 Chapel Hill Revisited brought speeches by Broun, Hardin and Sen. Howard Lee, tours, history programs in five downtown churches, among them one on the Black community at St. Paul AME, a parade and a closing where Rep. David Price spoke. UNC's 192nd Commencement on May 15 closed the Observance as bells rang in 92 of the state's 100 counties.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 20 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.
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.
A 2005 study by Robin S. D. Chen tracing the principal library buildings of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1853 to 1984: Smith Hall, the Carnegie Library, the Louis Round Wilson Library and the Walter Royal Davis Library. Academic library architecture is the subject throughout, set against buildings elsewhere in the United States. 65 leaves.
A philatelic souvenir from the University of North Carolina bicentennial: a single printed sheet cut to hold the nineteen cent Playmakers Theatre postal card, which the Postal Service issued in its historic preservation series. The card was designed by Bob Timberlake and cancelled with a bicentennial postmark dated September 15, 1993. Playmakers Theatre itself stands on the university campus in Chapel Hill.
Program for the September 14, 1993 ceremony dedicating a United States Postal Service postal card picturing Playmakers Theatre at the University of North Carolina, together with a card bearing the first day of issue postmark from Chapel Hill. Designed by Bob Timberlake, the card marked the university's bicentennial in the Postal Service's Historic Preservation series. One folded sheet in color.
Program for the rededication of Playmakers Theatre at the University of North Carolina on the evening of September 11, 1982, after the restoration finished the year before. The title gives the building's dates: a national historic landmark put up in 1851 and remodeled in 1924. Six unnumbered pages with two illustrations and a portrait.
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.
Government specification for building the United States post office at Chapel Hill, printed by the Government Printing Office in 1917 for the Treasury Department's Office of the Supervising Architect. Topics include post office buildings and building specifications for the town. It sets out the materials and workmanship required, a source for the construction history of the town's federal building.
Photograph of the outside of the Chapel Hill post office, taken in 1978. It belongs to the Chapel Hill Government binder in the Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
Two photographs of the Chapel Hill post office and the buildings around it under snow, dated 1950 to 1977. From the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection.
Real photo postcard of the United States post office in Chapel Hill, from about the 1940s. Card number 50C.
Adam Lucas marks one hundred years of basketball at the University of North Carolina in this illustrated history, published by UNC Press in 2010 in association with the athletics department. Chapters follow the program from the game's arrival on campus and the 'White Phantoms' of the Southern Conference through the founding of the ACC, the 1957 season, Dean Smith's changes to the game and the title seasons of 1982, 1993, 2005 and 2009, closing with a century of statistics. 289 pages.
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.
The Duke and North Carolina basketball rivalry written together by Johnny Moore and Art Chansky, the latter a sports reporter who has followed it since his student days at UNC. The book opens with the 2014 season and moves through recruiting battles old and new, 'Black and Blue Sunday', 'Blood and Roses', and chapters on the rivalry's heroes, leaders and teachers, with a foreword by Jay Bilas and a photo gallery. Published by Triumph Books in 2014, 289 pages.
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Steven J. Tepper's chronicle of how the University of North Carolina marked its bicentennial in 1993 and 1994. An appendix reprints the University Day speeches of October 12, 1993, given by Paul Hardin, James B. Hunt Jr., C.D. Spangler, William C. Friday, Charles Kuralt and President Bill Clinton, plus bicentennial addresses by Li Lu, Francis S. Collins and Richard J. Richardson. Published by the university in Chapel Hill, 1998; 284 pages.
Art Chansky's 2016 account of Dean Smith, Charlie Scott and the years that changed Chapel Hill as a Southern college town. Scott was the first Black scholarship player in the Carolina basketball program. Topics include civil rights, racism in sports and the university's twentieth-century history.
Biography of William C. Friday, president of the University of North Carolina system, by historian William A. Link, published by UNC Press in 1995 with the subtitle power, purpose, and American higher education. It covers Friday's career and the history of the university at Chapel Hill and statewide. Part of the Rebecca B. Wall Local History Collection.
William D. Snider's history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1992. It runs 370 pages with illustrations, a bibliography and an index.
Reviewed in History of Education Quarterly (1993), The Journal of Southern History (1993).
Twelve essays by novelist Daphne Athas (1923-2020) on the Chapel Hill she knew across the twentieth century. Subjects include Carrboro as 'the Paris of the Piedmont', philosopher Horace Williams, Betty Smith writing in Chapel Hill, Junius Scales, Ab Abernethy and the Intimate Bookshop, Richard Wright's visit, and a set of Chapel Hill murders. Published 2010, 243 pages with illustrations.
Scott Fowler gathers recollections from Carolina basketball players, decade by decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, organized around Roy Williams and the question in the title. Contributors include Lennie Rosenbluth, Larry Brown, Billy Cunningham, Charlie Scott, Phil Ford, James Worthy, Brad Daugherty, Eric Montross, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Raymond Felton and Sean May, each entry giving position and playing years. Published 2010 by Triumph Books of Chicago, 270 pages, here as an e-book.
Archibald Henderson's history of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, its buildings and grounds from the founding in the 1790s onward. Henderson, a professor of mathematics and a prolific historian of the university, wrote it in the years around the university's sesquicentennial. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 412 pages with illustrations and bibliographical footnotes.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1949), South Atlantic Quarterly (1950).
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
Sources and research tools for this storyline. Research guide: Follow an event across several accounts.
More to discover
The Friends connect people with new library materials, local writers and publishers, and resources documenting Orange County.
