Storyline
How the University spent the building money the legislature gave it in 1923: the trustees’ division of the fund, Old East and Old West rebuilt inside their old walls, the new roads and the three dormitories across the Raleigh road, the Tin Can, the Swain Hall fire, Venable Hall and the first building for women students.
In briefThe 1923 legislature gave the University $1,650,000 for buildings, and the trustees divided it among men's dormitories, a chemistry building, the remodeling of old buildings, a water supply and a women's building. Old West was gutted and rebuilt as a modern dormitory, and Old East, found unsafe, was saved inside a concrete frame. The Weekly called 1923 by far the greatest building year in the town's history. Three dormitories went up across the old Raleigh road, the metal-walled Tin Can athletic building opened, and Swain Hall was rebuilt after a fire in 1924. The chemistry department moved into the new Venable Hall in 1925, and the women's building opened that fall.
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In March 1923 the legislature gave the University $1,650,000 for buildings, its share of a $10.7 million bond issue for state institutions, though $667,300 less than the construction money it had asked for. As the first step of the building program the University cleared and graded a road carrying Cameron Avenue across the old Raleigh road and in a curve through Battle's Park. On April 19 the trustees' executive committee divided the appropriation among men's dormitories, a chemistry building, the remodeling of old buildings and a permanent water supply, with $100,000 for a women's building on the old Hooper, Alexander and Bain house lot next to the Episcopal church.
In June 1923 the inside of Old West was torn out to make a modern dormitory with fireproof stairs. Workmen gutting Old East found some of its walls bowed out of plumb, and by July 5 the building was pronounced unsafe. The trustees' building committee decided to save it, and Atwood and Nash put a fireproof concrete frame inside the old walls, leaving the outside lines unchanged. By November 1 H. D. Carter of the T. C. Atwood Organization put the year's building in town and at the University at about $2.56 million, nearly $1.5 million of it University work, and the Weekly called it by far the greatest building year in the town's history. In December T. C. Thompson and Brothers began three new dormitories across the old Raleigh road from the east campus wall. That winter the University began a road around the old Battle place toward East Franklin Street, and by the end of January 1924 its South road behind the campus, between the Pittsboro and Raleigh roads, was in use.
By January 31, 1924 the new athletic building south of the campus, built of metal plates around a floor with five basketball courts and a running track, was in daily use, and students had nicknamed it the Tin Can. On April 3 fire burned out the kitchen of Swain Hall, the University dining hall. It was rebuilt in time for the alumni luncheon at commencement on June 10, and by the fall term it could take 800 student boarders. In July the trustees' building committee kept the women's building on the lot beside the Episcopal church rather than moving it near the new men's dormitories, and named the new chemistry building for Francis P. Venable. That month Carter put the University work just finished, under way or planned at $660,000: the chemistry hall, the three men's dormitories, the women's building and the Playmakers' theatre in the old law building, Smith Hall, where the work was under way by September. The University occupied Aycock Residence Hall in 1924, and by October 9 wreckers were pulling down the old Alexander house to clear the site for the women's building. The chemistry department moved into Venable Hall in June 1925, and the women's building opened with the fall term that September.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 23 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 7 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.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Venable Hall at the University of North Carolina, dedicated in 1925 and named for chemistry professor and university president Francis Preston Venable, on a black and white Graycraft Card Co. postcard with a white border. Undated, from the Ellen Payne Odom Genealogy Library Postcard Collection.
An architect's drawing of a planned addition to Venable Hall at the University of North Carolina, reproduced in an undated photograph from the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection, CHHS.002.
Walter Spearman's account of the Carolina Playmakers, the theater company at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, across its first fifty years, as the subtitle puts it. The company was founded in 1918 under Frederick H. Koch. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1970, 178 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Brief biography of Frederick Henry Koch (1877-1944), founder of the Carolina Playmakers at the University of North Carolina, by Samuel Selden and Mary Tom Sphangos, with notes by Jonathan Daniels and others. It reprints Koch's own essay 'Folk playmaking' on pages 59 to 68. Published by the University of North Carolina Library in 1954, viii and 92 pages with illustrations and a portrait.
Reviewed in Educational Theatre Journal (1956).
Archibald Henderson's short history of the Carolina Playmakers, the University of North Carolina's theater company at Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1945, 104 pages. Written while the company was still in its first decades, it gives a contemporary view of how the Playmakers saw their own mission as a people's theatre.
Cecelia Moore on the Carolina Playmakers, the folk drama company Frederick H. Koch built at the University of North Carolina. The text is the talk she gave on April 8, 2014 in Wilson Library for the Gladys Hall Coates university history lecture series, printed by the university. Topics include the Playmakers, Koch and theatrical companies in Chapel Hill.
A 2005 study by Robin S. D. Chen tracing the principal library buildings of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1853 to 1984: Smith Hall, the Carnegie Library, the Louis Round Wilson Library and the Walter Royal Davis Library. Academic library architecture is the subject throughout, set against buildings elsewhere in the United States. 65 leaves.
A philatelic souvenir from the University of North Carolina bicentennial: a single printed sheet cut to hold the nineteen cent Playmakers Theatre postal card, which the Postal Service issued in its historic preservation series. The card was designed by Bob Timberlake and cancelled with a bicentennial postmark dated September 15, 1993. Playmakers Theatre itself stands on the university campus in Chapel Hill.
Program for the September 14, 1993 ceremony dedicating a United States Postal Service postal card picturing Playmakers Theatre at the University of North Carolina, together with a card bearing the first day of issue postmark from Chapel Hill. Designed by Bob Timberlake, the card marked the university's bicentennial in the Postal Service's Historic Preservation series. One folded sheet in color.
Program for the rededication of Playmakers Theatre at the University of North Carolina on the evening of September 11, 1982, after the restoration finished the year before. The title gives the building's dates: a national historic landmark put up in 1851 and remodeled in 1924. Six unnumbered pages with two illustrations and a portrait.
Howard E. Covington Jr.'s history of how the University of North Carolina took shape under Presidents Edward Kidder Graham (1876 to 1918) and Harry Woodburn Chase (1883 to 1955), published by the University Library in 2018. The 528-page account covers campus history in the early twentieth century and includes portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2020).
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Louis Round Wilson's short biography of Harry Woodburn Chase (1883-1955), president of the University of North Carolina from 1919 to 1930 and afterward president of the University of Illinois and chancellor of New York University. Wilson was the university's longtime librarian and knew Chase's Chapel Hill years at first hand. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1960, 55 pages.
Reviewed in The Library Quarterly (1960), The Journal of Higher Education (1961).
Pamphlet by John W. Kurfees issued during the 1920s controversy over teaching evolution in North Carolina's state-supported schools, with the University of North Carolina and its president Harry Woodburn Chase (1883-1955) at the center of the dispute. A primary source on the state's anti-evolution campaign as it touched the university. Electronic edition issued 2002 by the Academic Affairs Library for Documenting the American South, in the collection The North Carolina experience, beginnings to 1940.
Albert Coates on the three men who led the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill through its change from a small college into a large university: Edward Kidder Graham, Harry Woodburn Chase and Frank Porter Graham, whose terms ran across the early twentieth century. Coates published the book himself in Chapel Hill in 1988, 122 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Adam Lucas marks one hundred years of basketball at the University of North Carolina in this illustrated history, published by UNC Press in 2010 in association with the athletics department. Chapters follow the program from the game's arrival on campus and the 'White Phantoms' of the Southern Conference through the founding of the ACC, the 1957 season, Dean Smith's changes to the game and the title seasons of 1982, 1993, 2005 and 2009, closing with a century of statistics. 289 pages.
Rick Jackson's true crime history of Chapel Hill, published by The History Press in 2023, in 28 short chapters. Cases include the Efland bank robbery, the execution of John Henry Breeze, the unsolved murder of Suellen Evans, the killing at the Internationalist Bookstore and the death of Eve Carson.
The Duke and North Carolina basketball rivalry written together by Johnny Moore and Art Chansky, the latter a sports reporter who has followed it since his student days at UNC. The book opens with the 2014 season and moves through recruiting battles old and new, 'Black and Blue Sunday', 'Blood and Roses', and chapters on the rivalry's heroes, leaders and teachers, with a foreword by Jay Bilas and a photo gallery. Published by Triumph Books in 2014, 289 pages.
H. G. Jones follows the fortune of Mary Ruffin Smith (1814-1885), the unmarried heiress whose Orange and Chatham County lands passed at her death to the University of North Carolina and the Episcopal Church. Chapters profile her grandfather Francis Jones, then trace the bequest through a quarrel among Episcopalians over Price Creek, the Chapel of the Cross and the university's buildings. A December 1885 New York Times report called the gift money; Jones shows it was land. Published by McFarland in 2014, 231 pages.
Steven J. Tepper's chronicle of how the University of North Carolina marked its bicentennial in 1993 and 1994. An appendix reprints the University Day speeches of October 12, 1993, given by Paul Hardin, James B. Hunt Jr., C.D. Spangler, William C. Friday, Charles Kuralt and President Bill Clinton, plus bicentennial addresses by Li Lu, Francis S. Collins and Richard J. Richardson. Published by the university in Chapel Hill, 1998; 284 pages.
Art Chansky's 2016 account of Dean Smith, Charlie Scott and the years that changed Chapel Hill as a Southern college town. Scott was the first Black scholarship player in the Carolina basketball program. Topics include civil rights, racism in sports and the university's twentieth-century history.
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.
William D. Snider's history of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1992. It runs 370 pages with illustrations, a bibliography and an index.
Reviewed in History of Education Quarterly (1993), The Journal of Southern History (1993).
Twelve essays by novelist Daphne Athas (1923-2020) on the Chapel Hill she knew across the twentieth century. Subjects include Carrboro as 'the Paris of the Piedmont', philosopher Horace Williams, Betty Smith writing in Chapel Hill, Junius Scales, Ab Abernethy and the Intimate Bookshop, Richard Wright's visit, and a set of Chapel Hill murders. Published 2010, 243 pages with illustrations.
Scott Fowler gathers recollections from Carolina basketball players, decade by decade from the 1950s to the 2000s, organized around Roy Williams and the question in the title. Contributors include Lennie Rosenbluth, Larry Brown, Billy Cunningham, Charlie Scott, Phil Ford, James Worthy, Brad Daugherty, Eric Montross, Vince Carter, Antawn Jamison, Raymond Felton and Sean May, each entry giving position and playing years. Published 2010 by Triumph Books of Chicago, 270 pages, here as an e-book.
Archibald Henderson's history of the campus of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, its buildings and grounds from the founding in the 1790s onward. Henderson, a professor of mathematics and a prolific historian of the university, wrote it in the years around the university's sesquicentennial. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 412 pages with illustrations and bibliographical footnotes.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (1949), South Atlantic Quarterly (1950).
Charles Phillips Russell's biography of Cornelia Phillips Spencer (1825-1908), the Chapel Hill writer remembered for ringing the bell of South Building when the university reopened in 1875 after its closure during Reconstruction. It doubles as a history of Chapel Hill and the university. Published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1949, 293 pages with illustrations.
Reviewed in Journal of American History (1949).
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