Storyline
How Orange County rebuilt its schools with Public Works Administration aid in 1935 and 1936: the application and approval, the county’s share cut and raised again, the Black schools in Chapel Hill and Hillsboro, the bonds, the rural additions and the new Chapel Hill high school.
In briefIn 1935 Orange County sought Public Works Administration money for school buildings, with the government to grant 45 per cent, and the size of the county's own share decided how much got built. A $471,000 application was approved, but the commissioners limited the county's share to $150,000, cutting the program to $272,000. When bids ran above estimates they raised the share to $190,000 and cut the new Hillsboro school for Black children and the Training School addition. The school board kept the Training School on its site despite a petition from some of Chapel Hill's Black residents. By May 1936 ten projects were under way, and the new Chapel Hill high school opened in October 1936.
Read the full storyRead the 29 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 Schools & Education.
By July 5, 1935 the Orange County commissioners had filed a $471,000 application with the Public Works Administration for school buildings designed by H. D. Carter, the government to grant 45 per cent. State PWA director Herman G. Baity received word of the approval on August 8. On September 2 the commissioners limited the county's own share to $150,000, cutting the program to $272,000. The county board of education bought five acres beside the Orange County Training School, and when some of Chapel Hill's Black residents petitioned to move the school, the board answered on October 11 that it would keep the site and add a new building. The University gave a three-acre site on the Pittsboro road for a new Chapel Hill high school. When bids ran above estimates, the county raised its share to $190,000, for a program of $345,500, and cut the new Hillsboro school for Black children to 8 rooms and the Training School addition to 6. The county's $190,000 in bonds sold at Raleigh on December 31. By May 1936 ten projects were under way, among them additions at Hillsboro, Carrboro and Aycock, auditoriums at Murphey and St. Mary's and a new West Hillsboro school. School board chairman Robert E. Coker laid the high school's cornerstone on May 11, and the $106,000 building opened on October 5, 1936.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 29 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 10 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.
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.
