Storyline
How the county board planned and built one high school for northern Orange: the 6-3-3 plan, the Latta land, the 1961 bonds and the architect, the Aycock fight over consolidation, and the opening of Orange High and Orange Junior High in 1963.
In briefOrange High School was planned in 1960 as one senior high school for all white students in northern Orange, and building it meant consolidating the Hillsboro and Aycock high schools over protests from Aycock. The board bought 100 acres from S. T. Latta that August, and in March 1961 an Aycock petition with 476 names asked to keep an accredited high school there, while voters approved school bonds that included the new school. The board voted the consolidation in March 1963 after about 150 people protested at a hearing. Orange High opened on September 9, 1963 with 460 pupils, and that fall Tonya and Narviar Cathcart entered it after their family's transfer petition was approved, beginning its desegregation.
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On January 4, 1960 the Orange County Board of Education resolved to plan for a 6-3-3 system (six elementary grades, three of junior high and three of senior high), with one new senior high school for all white students in northern Orange and Hillsboro High becoming a junior high. In August it bought 100 acres from S. T. Latta for the school, and in December UNC's Guy Phillips and Neal Tracey began a curriculum study for it. In March 1961 an Aycock petition with 476 names asked to keep an accredited high school there. On March 18 voters approved $1.5 million in school bonds, with $660,000 for the county system, including the new high school. In May the board chose Durham architect Archie Royal Davis by a four-to-one vote, and it accepted construction bids in May 1962. On February 4, 1963 the board resolved to consolidate the Hillsboro and Aycock high schools; about 150 people protested at a hearing at Aycock on February 25, and the board voted the consolidation in March. It closed Caldwell School and enlarged the Aycock and West Hillsboro districts. Orange High opened on September 9, 1963 with 460 pupils under principal Charles Yelverton, and Orange Junior High took the old Hillsborough High building. That fall Tonya and Narviar Cathcart entered Orange High after their family's transfer petition was approved, beginning the school's desegregation. Both later won regional accreditation.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 13 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 6 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.
Background reading on Schools & Education. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
A 2026 novel set in Carrboro. Frances, thirty and grieving her mother, and her husband Ben open their marriage, and the book follows what that decision does to them and to the people closest to them. The characters include college teachers and a ghostwriter. 296 pages.
An illustrated online timeline of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Nursing, issued by the school in 2025. One page with portraits.
A 2025 history of University of North Carolina baseball from its nineteenth-century beginnings to the program's rise as an ACC power. Chapters cover the early years on campus, the building of Boshamer Stadium, and the Mike Fox era. Self-published by the author, 288 pages.
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.
The 2023 issue of Carrboro High School's literary magazine, featuring fiction and poetry written by its students.
William R. Burk's history of botany at the University of North Carolina, from its early natural scientists such as Denison Olmsted and Elisha Mitchell through later figures including George Francis Atkinson, Joseph Austin Holmes and Henry Van Peters Wilson, closing with a chapter on the Department of Botany itself. Published in Fort Worth in 2023.
Willis P. Whichard's biography of David Lowry Swain, governor of North Carolina from 1832 to 1835 and president of the University of North Carolina from 1835 until his death in 1868. The subtitle ties Swain, nineteenth-century North Carolina and the university together, and the book belongs with the lives of college presidents and governors. Published in 2022.
Jim Grimsley's coming-of-age novel about Ronny, who grew up in a trailer alongside his mother and a string of stepfathers, kept his head down, earned good grades and won a scholarship to UNC in Chapel Hill. On campus he finds his first love and begins to sort out who he is. Subjects include gay college students, first loves and mothers and sons. Published by Levine Querido in 2022, 322 pages.
Scott Madry's recollections of the student tech crew at Memorial Hall, the University of North Carolina's auditorium in Chapel Hill, presented under the banner of the Carolina Union, the campus student union. Published in Chapel Hill in 2021.
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.
Tracy Deonn's young adult fantasy about an African American teenager who arrives as a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after her mother's death and finds a secret society bound to Arthurian legend, with demons, magic and her own family's past. Published by Margaret K. McElderry Books in 2020, 501 pages, for ages 14 and up. Winner of the 2021 Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent.
Reviewed in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books./Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (2020).
Sylvia D. Hoffert's article on Margaret Anna Burwell, 1810 to 1871, and the work of being a Presbyterian minister's wife in North Carolina from 1835 to 1857, the years of the female school she and her husband kept in Hillsborough. Pages 245 to 275 with illustrations, facsimiles and portraits, issued by the Office of Archives and History in Raleigh in 2019.
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