Storyline
How Chapel Hill and Carrboro voted in 1991: Jonathan Howes’s decision not to seek a third term, Ken Broun’s election as mayor over Rosemary Waldorf, the UNC student Mark Chilton’s council seat, Carrboro’s re-elected aldermen and its rejected recreation center bond, and the December swearing-in.
In briefMayor Jonathan Howes did not seek a third term in 1991, and on November 5 Chapel Hill elected the UNC law professor Ken Broun mayor over Rosemary Waldorf and Tommy Gardner and put Joe Capowski and the UNC senior Mark Chilton on the council. Carrboro returned its three incumbent aldermen and Mayor Eleanor Kinnaird but turned down a $2.15 million recreation center bond.
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In mid-May 1991 Mayor Jonathan Howes announced that he would not seek a third term as mayor of Chapel Hill, saying he planned to write about local government and to keep directing UNC's Center for Urban and Regional Studies; Rosemary Waldorf was then the only declared candidate for mayor. On July 17 Mark Chilton, a rising UNC senior and student government's liaison to the Town Council, filed for one of four at-large council seats. He said issues such as recycling and South Loop Road now united students and townspeople and that he wanted curbside recycling for more apartment complexes, and council member Joe Herzenberg called him well informed.
In Carrboro the Board of Aldermen voted on September 3 to put a $2.15 million bond for a community recreation center, with a gymnasium, two multipurpose rooms and four racquetball courts, before voters on November 5. The bond could raise the town's property tax by up to 6.5 cents per $100. Alderman Jay Bryan voted against it, citing the recession and two straight years of tax increases, and Town Manager Bob Morgan had advised the aldermen not to put the bonds to a vote. The aldermen's race turned partly on former mayor Jim Porto's summer proposal to merge Carrboro with Chapel Hill, which the three incumbents and challenger Charles Riggsbee opposed and challenger Robert Proctor favored.
On November 5 Chapel Hill elected Ken Broun, a UNC law professor and former dean of the law school, mayor with 3,992 votes to 3,061 for Waldorf and 903 for Tommy Gardner. The same voters returned council members Herzenberg and Roosevelt Wilkerson and elected Joe Capowski and Chilton, who won his seat at 21 while still an undergraduate and served until 1997. Every mayoral and council candidate who belonged to the spending watchdog group TaxWatch lost. Carrboro voters returned all three incumbent aldermen, Bryan with 1,065 votes, Frances Shetley with 1,011 and Randy Marshall with 815, over Riggsbee and Proctor, and gave Mayor Eleanor Kinnaird, who had no opponent, 1,088 votes. They turned down the recreation center bond 921 to 629. Kinnaird said the town's children would be hurt most, while Morgan said the economy did not yet warrant building the center.
On December 2 Broun took the oath as mayor at town hall from Chief Justice Jim Exum and took the gavel from Howes. Capowski and Chilton joined the council, and Herzenberg and Wilkerson were sworn in again. The new council chose Herzenberg as mayor pro tem, both councils passed resolutions honoring Jimmy Wallace, and outgoing member Nancy Preston gave the town $3,000 to buy work by local artists.
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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).
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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