Storyline
How the University’s trustees worked their way out of debt in the 1830s: the crisis of 1830, the state loan they refused, the land and bank stock sales, the executive committee of 1835, the sale of the Tennessee lands and the endowment put into Bank of the State shares.
In briefWith debts of about $37,500 and only some 82 paying students in 1830, the University's trustees refused the General Assembly's terms for help and sold property instead. The Assembly offered a $25,000 loan only as a lien on all University property, with the legislature free to take over the charter, and the trustees refused. They sold the Grammar School lot and, in 1833, their Bank of Newbern stock. In 1835 a new executive committee sent Treasurer Charles Manly to Tennessee, where 42,345 acres plus the 20,000 Smith acres went to Orme and Gifford of Boston. In 1837 the endowment went into Bank of the State shares, whose dividends, with tuition, made up the University's income until the Civil War.
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In June 1830, with debts of about $37,500 and only some 82 paying students, the trustees called the whole board to Raleigh, where on July 19 it adopted a memorial drawn by Thomas Ruffin asking the General Assembly for relief. The Assembly offered a $25,000 loan only as a lien on all University property and with the legislature free to take over the charter; the trustees unanimously refused it. In 1831 they named William Polk, James Mebane and James Webb to offer the University's lands around Chapel Hill for sale, though little came in, and in 1832 they sold the old Grammar School house and lot. On April 1, 1833 their Bank of Newbern stock brought $15,208.56 at auction, paid at once toward the bank debts. That September Polk sold part of the Gerrard lands in Tennessee, and in November Treasurer Charles Manly reported the board still owing the Bank of Newbern $1,500. On January 2, 1835 the trustees placed management in a seven-member executive committee, which sent Manly to Tennessee; 42,345 acres plus the 20,000 Smith acres went to Orme and Gifford of Boston for $56,345.83. In 1837 the trustees put the endowment into 1,000 shares of the Bank of the State, whose dividends of about eight percent, with tuition, made up the University's income until the Civil War.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 11 dated events in the chronology →
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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.
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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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