Storyline
How Orange County voted in 1993 and 1994: the race for district attorney, the field for three county commissioner seats, the May primary, the new single ballot counted by computer, and the November results for the commissioners, the sheriff, the state Senate, Congress and the farmland bond.
In briefIn 1994 Orange County Democrats Alice Gordon, Stephen Halkiotis and newcomer Bill Crowther won the three open county commissioner seats, and Sheriff Lindy Pendergrass won a fourth term. In the Republican wave Sen. Howard Lee lost his state Senate seat and Rep. David Price lost the 4th District though Orange County backed him. Voters also turned down a $5 million farmland preservation bond.
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On September 30, 1993 Chapel Hill attorney Barry Winston, who had served a year as Orange-Chatham solicitor in the 1960s, said he would challenge District Attorney Carl Fox in the May 1994 Democratic primary, promising to concentrate on jailing repeat offenders. By January 27, 1994 Hillsborough Planning Board member Bill Crowther had become the only newcomer in the race for three seats on the Orange County Board of Commissioners, against incumbents Alice Gordon, Stephen Halkiotis and Verla Insko. When filing closed on February 7, Insko withdrew for personal reasons, leaving Gordon and Halkiotis, newcomers Sam Brooks and Crowther, and Richard Hammer, the only Republican. Hammer said conservatives outside Chapel Hill and Carrboro had no voice on a board elected mostly by those towns' voters.
In the May 3 primary Gordon (6,913 votes), Crowther (6,400) and Halkiotis (6,395) won the three Democratic nominations for commissioner, with Brooks fourth at 4,978. Fox beat Winston 8,660 to 2,175, Sen. Howard Lee and Fred Hobbs took the two Senate nominations for the 16th District, Joe Buckner won the nomination for district judge, and Joan Terry and Myra Lee Crawford went to a May 31 runoff for clerk of court. As of August 30, 63,835 county residents were registered to vote, up from 61,980 in November 1993, and by the October 10 mail deadline Campus Green Vote had registered 2,032 students, a total it later gave as 2,142. For November 8 the Board of Elections put every race on one ballot counted by computer in new voting booths; some voters found the long ballot slow, and residents of Hinton James, Craige and Odum Village had to vote off campus.
On November 8 Democrats kept all three open commissioner seats. Gordon led the field with 17,531 votes by the paper's count, Halkiotis, principal of Orange High School, won a third term, and Crowther took the third seat, with Hammer fourth at about 9,870. Sheriff Lindy Pendergrass, in office since 1982, beat Republican Bill Apple, a Durham police investigator from Hillsborough, 20,588 to 5,929; Apple objected that uniformed deputies had driven voters to the polls, and Pendergrass said they were helping at the Board of Elections' request. In the Republican wave, former Chapel Hill mayor Howard Lee finished third in the two-seat 16th Senate District behind Hobbs and Republican Teena Little, the first time he had lost as an incumbent; UNC officials said the University had lost one of its strongest advocates in the legislature. Congressman David Price carried Orange County 17,485 to 8,407 but lost the 4th District to Republican Fred Heineman, a former Raleigh police chief, and a hand recount on November 17 kept Heineman the winner by 1,215 votes. Voters also turned down the county's $5 million Farmland Preservation Bond, 13,564 to 11,258, which would have bought development rights on about 2,000 acres of farms; the Tax Watch group campaigned against it, and supporters including Agricultural Districts Advisory Board chairwoman Dolly Hunter said they would try again in a larger bond.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 11 dated events in the chronology →
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Howard N. Lee (born 1934) tells his own story, from a farm childhood in Lithonia, Georgia, through college, army service in Korea at Camp Casey and the move from Savannah that planted him in Chapel Hill, to his election as mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969 and his later run for Congress and years in the state legislature. Published by Cotton Patch Press of Chapel Hill in 2008, 199 pages with plates.
Edwin Caldwell, Jr. reviews a life in Chapel Hill politics in a three-hour Southern Oral History Program interview recorded March 2, 2001, by Oliver White. A skilled organizer, Caldwell worked in the campaign that made Howard Lee the town's first Black mayor in 1969, ran for office more than once without winning, and became a local political power. The conversation also covers race relations, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board and the Church of Reconciliation. Published online in 2006 in Documenting the American South.
Interview recorded June 21, 2000 with Rebecca Clark (1915-2009), a Black Chapel Hill resident, for the Southern Oral History Program at UNC. Clark, educated in Chapel Hill's segregated schools, describes working life under segregation and the economic discrimination she met in it. Topics also include Lincoln High School, school integration, and Howard Lee, elected mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969. Interview K-0536 in collection #4007.
Howard N. Lee's account of his own career, published in 2021 by the North Caroliniana Society with the society award given to him that year, together with tributes from Angela Lee, Valerie Foushee and others. Lee became mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969, the town's first Black mayor.
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.
Albert Coates's own account of the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina, which he founded, subtitled 'out of a classroom in Chapel Hill' and published in 1981. The 303 pages trace the institute's history and its role in educating North Carolina's public officials.
William J. Billingsley's history of the Speaker Ban Law, the 1963 North Carolina statute that barred known Communists from speaking on state campuses, and the fight over it at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. The subtitle sets the scope: race, politics and the public university in sixties North Carolina. It treats academic freedom, anti-communist movements and free speech in the state. University of Georgia Press, 1999, 308 pages with eight pages of plates.
Reviewed in Academe (2000), The American Historical Review (2001), The Journal of Southern History (2001), Journal of American History (2001), The Journal of Politics (2001).
Julian M. Pleasants and Augustus M. Burns III on the 1950 Democratic Senate primary in North Carolina, in which Frank Porter Graham, the former president of the University of North Carolina, lost to Willis Smith after a campaign marked by race-baiting. Primaries, elections and race relations in the state are its subjects. Published by UNC Press in 1990, 356 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (1991), The American Historical Review (1991), Journal of American History (1991), The Journal of Southern History (1992).
Ruth Blackwelder's study of political and intellectual leadership in Orange County and North Carolina from 1752 to 1861, published in Charlotte by W. Loftin in 1961. Topics include state politics and government, intellectual life before the Civil War, and county genealogy. It runs 216 pages with illustrations and a bibliography. Part of the Wall Local History Collection.
Francis Nash's history of Hillsborough in colonial and Revolutionary times, first published in 1903 and reprinted in 1953 by Edwards & Broughton with an index and a sketch of the author. Topics include the Regulator Insurrection of 1766 to 1771, the Revolution and local genealogy.
Howard E. Covington Jr.'s biography of Albert Coates (1896-1989), the law professor who founded the Institute of Government at the University of North Carolina and led it through its early years. Topics include Coates as a law teacher and the institute's history as a center for the study of public administration in Chapel Hill. Published in 2010 by the University Library at Chapel Hill, 322 pages with 32 pages of plates.
Warren Ashby's biography of Frank Porter Graham (1886-1972), president of the University of North Carolina from 1930 to 1949 and later a United States senator. Published by Blair in 1981, x and 386 pages with sixteen leaves of plates and a bibliography.
Reviewed in The American Historical Review (1981), Journal of American History (1981).
Hugh Talmage Lefler and Paul W. Wager's history of Orange County across its first two centuries, 1752 to 1952, prepared for the county's bicentennial. It covers government and politics, biography and the county's families, and doubles as a genealogical reference. Published in Chapel Hill by the Orange Printshop in 1953, 389 pages with illustrations and an index; this copy is a later reprint.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1954).
Michael Thomas Smith's biography of Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, the University of North Carolina chemistry professor dismissed in 1856 after he declared support for the antislavery presidential candidate John C. Fremont. Published by University of Delaware Press in 2003, 216 pages with illustrations. Topics include abolitionists and dissenters in North Carolina, the antislavery movement in the state, and the university's biography before 1962.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2005).
The papers of Willie Person Mangum, 1792 to 1861, a lawyer, judge and United States senator from the part of Orange County that later became Durham County. Five volumes of correspondence published by the State Department of Archives and History beginning in 1950, arranged by date from 1807 to 1894, with illustrations, portraits and folding maps. A source for antebellum North Carolina and national politics, the Whig Party and the Mangum family.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1951), Journal of American History (1951), The Journal of Southern History (1953), Journal of American History (1953), The Journal of Southern History (1954), The Journal of Southern History (1955), The Journal of Southern History (1957), Journal of American History (1957), The American Historical Review (1957).
Address by Bishop Joseph Blount Cheshire at St. Matthew's Church in Hillsborough on 24 August 1924, marking the parish's hundredth anniversary. Printed in Durham in 1925 at the vestry's order, with a foreword by the rector. Cheshire discusses George Micklejohn, William Mercer Green and Moses Ashley Curtis.
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