Storyline
How the Inter-Faith Council’s homeless shelter and Community Kitchen settled in Chapel Hill’s old municipal building between 1985 and 1989: the temporary shelter in the basement, the kitchen’s move to Merritt Mill Road, the search for a permanent site, the 1987 lease, the 1988 task force and the 1989 renovation.
In briefIn January 1985 Chapel Hill let the Inter-Faith Council open a temporary homeless shelter in the basement of the old police building, and its Community Kitchen moved to Merritt Mill Road. After searches for other sites, the council leased the building to the IFC in 1987 and kept the shelter there in 1988 over downtown merchants' objections. Renovation began in 1989, and the kitchen was to join the shelter there. The shelter and the kitchen reopened together in the renovated building in June 1990 and were dedicated as Community House that September. Use kept rising, to 897 guests in 1991, and in August 1991 some residents at a town crime task force meeting blamed the shelter for downtown crime.
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The Inter-Faith Council's Community Kitchen had served free weekday lunches since November 1, 1982 in the Masonic lodge at West Rosemary and Sunset streets. On January 14, 1985 the Chapel Hill Town Council let the Inter-Faith Council (IFC) use the basement of the old police building at 100 West Rosemary Street as a temporary night shelter for homeless people until April 30, staffed by trained volunteers from member congregations. By January 22 the Masons had asked the kitchen to move out by March 15, saying its supplies and patrons disrupted their meetings. In February the Board of Adjustment denied the IFC's appeal to have a house on Cameron Avenue rezoned as a permanent shelter; shelter director Jacquelyn Gist later said neighbors' opposition and the lack of any zoning category for a shelter had stopped the plan. Volunteers fed about 35 people a day from their cars until July, when the kitchen opened in a former hairdresser's shop at 111 Merritt Mill Road that they had rebuilt with an industrial kitchen. On August 26 the council directed Town Manager David R. Taylor to discuss with Orange County renovating the old police building as a joint local government center, and the same night Graham Street area residents petitioned against the IFC's planned shelter on South Graham Street.
In 1986 the Chapel Hill Service League gave the Community Kitchen $3,500. On November 14, 1986 the council set aside $25,000 in federal Community Development money as a challenge grant to help the IFC buy a building for a permanent shelter. On February 11, 1987 Mayor James Wallace formed a task force to improve services for the homeless and find a new home for the night shelter, and in April it recommended keeping the shelter in the old police building. In July downtown business owners, led by the owner of Spanky's, asked the council to wait until November while they looked for another site; the council set the vote for September 14 instead, with David Pasquini alone voting no. On September 14 the council voted unanimously to lease the building to the IFC for three years for the shelter and the Community Kitchen, rejecting the businessmen's proposal to move the shelter to the Mason Motel in Carrboro. On September 28 the town pledged $150,000 toward renovations; the shelter, kept in the damp, unheated basement since January 1985, was to move to the first floor while the IFC raised the rest.
The shelter housed 281 guests in 1988, 57 percent more than in 1987, and a state study put Orange County's homeless at about 400, more than double the 150 counted in 1987. In September the Public-Private Partnership's Task Force for Sheltering the Homeless began studying the shelter's location and was weighing 14 to 16 sites; the shelter's manager said only downtown merchants questioned its location. By late November the council had approved housing the shelter at the Community Kitchen while the old building was renovated, and the task force was preparing to recommend a new shelter on town land in the 800 block of Airport Road, which IFC president Richard Edens opposed. On November 28 Mayor Jonathan Howes called further study of that site a waste of time, though council members Julie Andresen and Nancy Preston, who sat on the task force, still favored a new building; the IFC said it would renovate the old building with $350,000 from its capital campaign and a $200,000 town commitment. In December the IFC, the town and the task force agreed that the old municipal building was the best place for the shelter, to house 56 people and feed 70 with the Community Kitchen moved there.
In March 1989 the Campus Y formed the Student Homeless Outreach Coalition to send volunteers to the shelter and set out to raise about $125,000 for it. Asbestos removal, estimated at $28,000, cost $71,000; on September 18 the Orange County commissioners gave $10,000 of the $20,000 the IFC asked toward it, and the next night the Carrboro aldermen put off its $5,000 request 6 to 1, with Mayor Eleanor Kinnaird the only vote to grant it. The IFC had begun renovating on September 15, meaning to reopen the shelter and the kitchen there together in the spring of 1990. On October 2 about 20 coalition members slept out in the Pit before the national Housing Now march, with Kinnaird speaking and aldermanic candidate Jacquelyn Gist at the start, and co-chairman Trey Loughran said about 30 homeless men would lack beds that winter while the shelter was closed. On November 14, 49 Chapel Hill and Carrboro restaurants gave 10 percent of the day's receipts to the Community Kitchen and the Family Services Food Pantry. On November 21 the council voted 7 to 2 to accept $108,000 from the N.C. Building Finance Commission so the kitchen could join the shelter in the renovated building; the programs had to stay there at least 10 years, and the IFC's lease was extended three years.
The IFC's year-end report for 1989 counted 354 homeless people given 7,837 nights at the shelter, and its soup kitchen had served 35 percent more meals than in 1988; Chapel Hill's public housing waiting list then held about 200 names. After nine months of renovation the IFC Community Shelter at West Rosemary and Columbia streets reopened in June 1990 with room for about 30 men and 20 women. The soup kitchen moved in from Merritt Mill Road with a 68-seat dining room, a walk-in freezer and an examining room for volunteer doctors and nurses; women guests moved in on June 5, and the men were to follow that week. More than 100 people came to the dedication and open house of the kitchen and shelter, named Community House, on September 16, with a Chapel Hill High School choir and speakers from the IFC and the Town Council; Mayor Pro Tem Nancy Preston said the town leased the building and lot to the IFC for $1 a year and kept up the property. By November 7 fliers bearing the names of the Downtown Commission and the Inter-Faith Council had been posted near North Columbia Street, saying poor people were not wanted on the block and offering free one-way bus tickets out of town; both groups disowned the fliers in a press release that day. In December a number of Chapel Hill-area restaurants gave 10 percent of one Sunday night's receipts to the IFC in a benefit called RSVVP, which led Il Palio at the Siena Hotel to give it 5 percent of its gross receipts on each Tuesday in March 1991.
On August 19, 1991, at a meeting of the town's Task Force on Reducing Violent Crime, Alcohol and Illegal Drug Use, chaired by social work dean John B. Turner, some residents blamed Community House for downtown crime and proposed barring people with jail records or busing homeless people out of town. Carrboro alderman Jacquelyn Gist, a founder of the first shelter, and Black Cultural Center director Margo Crawford defended the shelter and warned against judging the people downtown, and council candidate Mickey Ewell called for tougher enforcement of panhandling laws. By the end of October shelter director Chris Moran reported that the kitchen had served more than 50,000 meals so far in 1991, against 44,999 in all of 1990, and that the shelter had taken in 683 guests against 483 the year before, with more women, children and families. He blamed the recession, the lack of affordable housing and low wages, noting that half the guests had jobs. The Daily Tar Heel later reported that the shelter housed 897 men, women and children in 1991, against 125 in 1985.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 34 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 the 1 with a known location.
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.
Dorothy J. Kiester's account of the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service, the Chapel Hill and Carrboro charity through which local congregations pooled volunteer and professional effort, subtitled 'a volunteer/professional partnership'. Published by the council in 1984, 68 pages with illustrations. It relates to charities, churches and social service in Chapel Hill and Carrboro.
A 1996 publication of the Inter-Faith Council for Social Service in Chapel Hill, describing the agency as a partnership between volunteers and paid staff. Topics include social service in Chapel Hill and volunteer workers in social service.
Myles Presler's 1996 report on the demonstration phase of the Employment Project, which paired job training with substance abuse treatment for homeless people in Chapel Hill. The introduction gives the aim as helping participants overcome addiction and reach independence through work. Topics include Community House, the town's shelter, occupational training and substance abuse treatment in Chapel Hill.
Kathryn M. Yount's 1991 case study of Community House in Chapel Hill, examining voluntarism and how far it met the needs of homeless women. The bibliography runs on leaves 131 to 133.
Blueprint by Atwood and Weeks, Inc. of Durham, August 1938, showing the basement and first floor plans of the Chapel Hill Municipal Building. The basement plan includes segregated restrooms. Drawing H-1.
Plan of the second floor of Chapel Hill's Municipal Building, sheet H-2 in the August 1938 set from Atwood and Weeks, Inc. of Durham. The back bears the name of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, the New Deal public works agency. The building is remembered as the Old Town Hall.
First sheet of the August 1938 blueprints for the Chapel Hill Municipal Building, a set commissioned by the Durham firm Atwood and Weeks, Inc. It lays out the foundation plan, wall footings and columns, with the building's lot on Rosemary Street. The job also carried Public Works Administration project number N.C. 1123F.
Blueprint dated August 1938 from Atwood and Weeks, Inc., the Durham firm, numbered drawing 2 in its set for the Chapel Hill Municipal Building. The sheet carries plans of the basement and first floor, with framing plans for the first and second floors.
Jonathan Howes, a former mayor of Chapel Hill who served in Governor Hunt's cabinet and later worked in the UNC chancellor's office on urban planning, gave this illustrated talk on the past and future of the Chapel Hill campus. Cassette, 1998.
Papers of Ellie Kinnaird, born 1931, a North Carolina state senator, spanning 1987 to 2016 and running to roughly 6,400 items across 20.5 linear feet in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 5356. The papers focus on capital punishment in North Carolina and the campaigns against it, health insurance legislation, voting technology, and the work of women legislators in the General Assembly.
Eleanor Kinnaird beside an election campaign poster in an undated candid photograph. Kinnaird served as mayor of Carrboro and in the North Carolina Senate. From the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection (CHHS.002).
Robert C. Kenzer's study of kinship and neighborhood in Orange County between 1849 and 1881, the decades before and after the Civil War, tracing family ties and neighborhood networks through the county's records. Published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1987, 251 pages with illustrations, maps, portraits and a bibliography. Topics include kinship, neighborhoods and social conditions in the county in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (1988), Journal of American History (1988), The American Historical Review (1989), The Journal of Southern History (1989), Civil War history (1989), Journal of Social History (1989).
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.
Emily Eidenier Pearce's history of Rogers Road, the historically African American neighborhood on the edge of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and of what happened to it after Orange County opened its landfill next door in 1972. Drawing on interviews with residents, the book records the neighborhood's origins, family life, churches and customs, and then the environmental and social burdens of decades beside the landfill. Privately issued in 2009, 298 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
Neighborhood history of the Kings Mill and Morgan Creek area of Chapel Hill, published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 2020. The project started in June 2014 when neighbors were asked over the community email list to share memories of life there, and replies came from current residents and from former residents raised there who had since scattered across the country. 268 pages with illustrations, color maps and portraits.
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.
Robert E. Seymour, a Baptist pastor in Chapel Hill associated with Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, looks back on segregation and race relations in the South from the pulpit. A clergyman's memoir covering church history in the town, Baptists in North Carolina and the segregation of African Americans. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2011, 204 pages.
Evan P. Bennett returns to the photographs Marion Post Wolcott made in 1939 in Cedar Grove, a Black farming neighborhood in northern Orange County that she documented for the federal resettlement program. Published in 2025 by the Historical Research Office in Raleigh, pages 384 to 406, with illustrations and portraits. Topics include rural African Americans in the Cedar Grove township and photographers in the state.
Sara Regan Lachenman's 2005 thesis on how the people living in Carrboro's company built housing altered it to suit themselves. It takes up domestic architecture, working class housing and the social side of the textile industry in the town, with 158 pages of text and illustrations.
Maxine Freeland's biography of James John Freeland (1918-1999), a Hillsborough man of the twentieth century, compiled in 1999.
Robert C. Kenzer's study of family, kinship and neighborhood in Orange County between 1849 and 1881, covering the county's households from the late antebellum years through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Completed in 1982 in 248 leaves with maps. Topics include kinship, neighborhoods, race relations and social conditions in the county during the nineteenth century.
Public relations material on the Orange County Commission for Women, 1989 to 1992, from the files of the North Carolina Council on the Status of Women, 26 images, with Judith M. Messenheimer named as creator. Issues include child care, teenage pregnancy, abortion, older women, low-income housing, taxation, AFDC, and women's education and employment.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Material on the Kings Mill and Morgan Creek neighborhood of Chapel Hill, 2003 to 2019, gathered from residents and the neighborhood association while The Copperline Chronicles (Chapel Hill Historical Society, 2020) was being prepared. Three boxes, collection CHHS.017.
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