Storyline
How Chapel Hill and Hillsboro came to add fluoride to their water: Chapel Hill’s 1951 vote, the Lions Club campaign and Hillsboro’s start in 1960, the University’s postal poll, the lawsuit that held Chapel Hill back, and the aldermen’s pressure until fluoridation began in 1964.
In briefChapel Hill's aldermen voted in 1951 to add fluorine to the town water, which the University ran, but a lawsuit held fluoridation up until 1964. In Hillsboro, after the State Board of Health cited a survey finding twice as much tooth decay among Hillsboro and Chapel Hill children as in Dunn, which had fluoridated, the water works began adding fluoride in September 1960. In Chapel Hill a University poll in 1960 favored it about three to one, but a resident sued to stop it and the University held off. The aldermen pressed the trustees, the suit was dismissed in 1963, and Chapel Hill's filter plant began adding fluoride on February 28, 1964.
Read the full storyRead the 13 eventsAll storylines
Read the events and sources below.
No works in the index are currently linked directly to this storyline. The works below provide background on Law, Courts & Justice.
On November 26, 1951 the Chapel Hill aldermen voted unanimously to add fluorine to the town water, which the University ran, on a proposal backed by dental dean John Brauer and health officer O. David Garvin. In Hillsboro the Lions Club opened a campaign in December 1959, when Dr. E. A. Pearson Jr. of the State Board of Health cited a survey finding twice as much tooth decay among Hillsboro and Chapel Hill children as in Dunn, which had fluoridated. After a postal poll of water customers ran about four to one in favor, the Hillsboro board ordered fluoridation in April 1960, and a $2,000 machine at the water works began adding fluoride that September. In Chapel Hill a University postal poll in May 1960 favored fluoridation about three to one, but on August 18 a resident sued to stop it, and the University held off. The aldermen renewed their call in March 1962, voted in August to take the town's case to the trustees, and in November demanded fluoridation forthwith; a citizens' committee formed in September to join the court fight. Judge Hamilton Hobgood upheld the University's demurrer (its plea that the suit stated no legal claim) by March 1963, the suit was dismissed that September when the plaintiff let his appeal deadlines pass, and Chapel Hill's filter plant began adding fluoride on February 28, 1964.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 13 dated events in the chronology →
Background reading on Law, Courts & Justice. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
An Alex Cross thriller by James Patterson with Chapel Hill among its settings alongside Washington, D.C. Bombings, a kidnapping, a missing-persons investigation, terrorism and fathers and sons are its subjects; the Sampson of the title is Cross's longtime partner John Sampson. Published by Little, Brown in 2026.
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.
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.
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.
John Bare's mystery set in Chapel Hill. Lassie James is drinking at the Pig Farm Tavern one October night when Holly Pike, the woman who left him years earlier when they were about to marry and never explained, walks in; before he can settle his feelings she draws him into trouble involving fraud, corruption and a murder that he ends up investigating as an amateur. Published by Wisdom House Books of Chapel Hill in a first edition of 2021, 287 pages.
Patricia S. Parker draws on civil rights organizer Ella Baker (1903-1986) to set out a method of community engagement and communication for social justice work, illustrated by case studies from the Ella Baker Women's Center for Leadership and Community Activism in Chapel Hill. Chapters cover entering into community partnerships, creating participative spaces for organizing, storytelling as leadership, and self-care for activists, with a case study timeline and curriculum overview appended. Published by the University of California Press in 2020, 177 pages.
Charlotte Fryar's 2019 doctoral dissertation on racial justice movements at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1951, the year the university admitted its first Black students, through 2018. Topics include African American students and employees, school desegregation, racial discrimination and activism, and the work belongs to the history of race relations on the Chapel Hill campus.
J. G. Hetherton's mystery novel set in Hillsborough, in which a woman journalist returning home investigates murder and missing children. Published in New York by Crooked Lane in 2018, 312 pages.
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).
Jean Bolduc's 2016 collection of interviews with African American residents of Durham and Orange counties, presented as short biographies. The subjects are Floyd McKissick (1922-1991), the first African American admitted to UNC's law school, Walter Jackson, Brenda Stephens, Nate Davis, poet Jaki Shelton Green, Jackie Wagstaff, Diane Wright and Michelle Johnson, with a closing chapter on the Ku Klux Klan. 125 pages with illustrations.
Stewart E. Dunaway's 2015 addendum to his history of Hillsborough's town lots, adding deed records arranged by lot number and further town history, with the expansion of the 1890s covered for the first time. Self-published in North Carolina as version 1.0, 446 pages with illustrations, facsimiles and maps. Topics include deeds, court records, land titles and real property in Hillsborough.
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.
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.
