Storyline
How the University raised Old East a story and built Old West and Gerrard Hall to William Nichols’s designs: the trustees’ vote of about 1821, the enslaved men who did much of the work, the settled accounts, the naming of Gerrard Hall and its completion in 1837.
In briefAbout 1821, at Joseph Caldwell's urging and against the faculty's plea to spend on books and apparatus, the trustees voted to raise Old East a story, build Old West to match it and start a new chapel, borrowing from banks against Tennessee land sales. William Nichols ran the work. Bills from it list enslaved carpenters, bricklayers and laborers, with their pay due to their owners, and the University paid trustee William Polk $600 for the labor of men he enslaved. Battle gives the cost of Nichols's work as about $26,587. The chapel stood unfinished until 1833, when the sale of Major Charles Gerrard's Tennessee tract paid toward it and it was named Gerrard Hall; Thomas Waitt completed it in 1837.
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About 1821, at Joseph Caldwell's urging and against the faculty's plea to spend on books and apparatus, the trustees voted to raise Old East a story, build Old West to match it and start a new chapel, borrowing from banks against Tennessee land sales. Architect William Nichols ran the work and in 1822 drew Old West and the chapel, Gerrard Hall. Bills from his 1822 to 1824 enlargement of Old East list enslaved carpenters, bricklayers and laborers, among them Bob, Henry, Nelson, Allman, Tony, Luke, Isaac and Ned Peek, with their pay due to their owners. Jourdan, Jim, Stephen, Charles and Joe, men enslaved by trustee William Polk, worked on Old West, then called New College, and by a settlement of May 22, 1823 the University had paid Polk $600 for their labor. In 1824 the trustees settled Nichols's accounts for Old West, the new chapel, bricks and repairs; Battle gives the cost as about $26,587. The chapel stood unfinished until 1833, when the trustees sold Major Charles Gerrard's Tennessee tract for $6,400, voted $2,000 of it toward the building and named it Gerrard Hall in his memory. Carpenter Thomas Waitt completed it in 1837, and that year's commencement was held there.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 7 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 Black Life & Civil Rights. 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.
Theodore Parrish's memoir of a Black life in Chapel Hill and of gentrification in the town, subtitled race, gentrification, and the path of my own life. Published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in August 2025, 243 pages with illustrations. Subjects include African Americans in Chapel Hill, race relations and gentrification in North Carolina.
Sylvia D. Hoffert's study of gossip, rumor and reputation in nineteenth-century Hillsborough, using the town as a case study of how talk shaped social standing and race relations in a small Southern place. Chapters take up the workings of idle chatter, people living on the edge of freedom under slavery, schooling, daily labor, and a period of fear over madness in the community. Published 2025 by the University of Georgia Press.
Beverly A. Scarlett's 2024 study of a free community of color in nineteenth-century Orange County, drawing on apprenticeship and freedmen's records among other county sources.
Brian Burns's collection of lesser-known episodes from Chapel Hill's past, published by The History Press of Charleston, South Carolina, in 2023. Topics include the town's history, its buildings and structures, and the history of civil rights in Chapel Hill. 158 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Tracy Deonn's young adult fantasy novel set around the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bree, an African American teenager with newly awakened powers she cannot yet control, learns that the leaders of the secret Order mean to hide the coming demon war, and she and her friends flee so that she can find her own training. Subjects include magic, secret societies, imaginary wars and psychic trauma. Published by Simon & Schuster in 2022, 561 pages.
Reviewed in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books./Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (2022).
Picture book by Courtney Soling Smith, published by the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough in 2022, about a collie named Minnie and an African American family in Cedar Grove Township. Twenty-nine unnumbered pages, chiefly color illustrations, with portraits that point to a real family behind the story.
Companion picture book about Minnie the collie by Courtney Soling Smith, again from the Orange County Historical Museum in 2022, following an African American farm family in Cedar Grove Township. Thirty-seven unnumbered pages, chiefly color illustrations, with a facsimile. Written for children, with the museum's local history interest behind it.
Adam Lucas's account of the 2021-2022 Carolina men's basketball season, Hubert Davis's first as head coach. Davis, appointed in April 2021, was the first Black head coach in the program's history, and the season ended at the NCAA tournament in New Orleans. Published 2022 by the UNC Department of Athletics, 155 pages with color illustrations. Topics include the Tar Heels, Davis, and college basketball in Chapel Hill in the twenty-first century.
A folded walking tour map of Northside, the historically African American neighborhood near downtown Chapel Hill, produced by Alexander Stephens for the Marian Cheek Jackson Center for Saving and Making History in 2021. One illustrated sheet, 43 by 28 centimeters, folded to pocket size. The walk introduces the neighborhood through its residents' own histories of home.
Collected first-hand and second-hand stories from the Eno River valley as told from the standpoint of African Americans and Native people who have lived along the river in Orange and Durham counties, from prehistory to the present day. Issued by the Eno River Association in Durham as volume 10, number 2 of the Eno Journal, 2021, 106 pages with illustrations.
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.
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