Named event or history
Reconstruction Republicans took control of the trustees in 1868, Solomon Pool’s presidency emptied the campus, the university closed in 1871, and in 1875 the legislature revived it and Cornelia Phillips Spencer rang the bell.
In briefReconstruction Republicans took control of the trustees in 1868 and dismissed the old faculty; Solomon Pool's presidency drew almost no students, and the university closed in February 1871. The legislature revived it in March 1875, Cornelia Phillips Spencer rang the bell, and it reopened in September under a rebuilt faculty.
3 indexed works are connected with this event.
Related works found in catalogs and archives across North Carolina. Each links to the institution that holds or provides it.
Josephus Daniels's memorial address for Adolphus Williamson Mangum, delivered in the university chapel at Chapel Hill on Sunday, May 31, 1891 and printed by the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies. Mangum, who died in 1890, was a Methodist minister on the University of North Carolina faculty. The text was detached from the North Carolina University Magazine for that year.
A memorial of John DeBerniere Hooper, a member of the University of North Carolina faculty, who died in 1886. Cornelia Phillips Spencer wrote it, and the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies printed it at Chapel Hill after it appeared in the North Carolina University magazine for March 1886. It is faculty biography and North Carolina biography.
Papers of Locke Craig, Asheville lawyer who served in the North Carolina legislature from 1898 to 1903 and as governor from 1913 to 1917. The 126 items, beginning in 1880, include personal letters, political and religious speeches, an address on Freemasonry, and a chemistry notebook he kept as a University of North Carolina student. Kemp P. Battle, Henry G. Connor and Woodrow Wilson are among the names that appear.
Dated events connected with this event: sixteen of 46, the highlights and a sample of the rest spread across the years, in date order. See all 46 dated events in the chronology →
At a meeting Governor Jonathan Worth called to face the university's collapse, Charles Phillips presented the resignations of President Swain, Professors Hubbard, Fetter and Smith, law professor William H. Battle and himself, and the trustees adopted Kemp P. Battle's resolution for a committee to plan an elective university system with higher standards.
People: David L. Swain · Charles Phillips · Jonathan Worth · Kemp Plummer Battle
Believing the societies would not be run under their constitutions after the university changed hands, their last officers gave the Dialectic records to Alexander McIver and the Philanthropic records to William L. Saunders. The property lay safe until the societies revived in 1875.
People: Alexander McIver
Learning that the new Reconstruction trustees had declared his 1867 resignation final, David L. Swain wrote Governor William W. Holden, as chairman of the board, that no charge had been made against him and that a resignation accepted by a board that no longer existed could not be revived. He asked for reconsideration, but died later that month.
People: David L. Swain · William W. Holden
Pool accepted the presidency of the University of North Carolina in 1869 at a salary of fifteen hundred dollars and was permitted to keep his federal appraiser post at the same time. Governor William W. Holden had taken charge of the board of trustees to secure a president with Republican affiliations.
People: William W. Holden
The Reconstruction trustees had the state sue in the United States Circuit Court, returnable at the June 1869 term, to cancel the university's mortgage to the Bank of North Carolina, but Judges Hugh L. Bond and George W. Brooks dismissed the bill for want of jurisdiction. On July 20, 1871 the trustees present advised against an appeal.
An undertaker, K. P. Waitt, carried the coffins of the former governor and university president and his daughter Annie from their graves in Chapel Hill to Raleigh, where they were buried side by side in the old city cemetery with only family and a few friends present.
People: David L. Swain
Under President Solomon Pool and the Reconstruction board of trustees, the university shut down on February 1, 1871, after years of few students, little money and public opposition. It reopened on Monday, September 6, 1875.
People: Solomon Pool
At the invitation of trustees led by Superintendent Alexander McIver, fifty-five alumni met in the state Senate chamber with B. F. Moore in the chair. Their committee proposed that the alumni association nominate a new board for the Board of Education to appoint, but most of the 1868 trustees did not resign and the plan lapsed.
People: Alexander McIver · William A. Graham · William Horn Battle · Richmond Mumford Pearson
John Manning became a trustee of the University of North Carolina in 1874 and held the post for two decades, through the university's 1875 reopening.
At the May 1874 term of Orange Superior Court the new board brought one action against Superintendent Alexander McIver, who held the university's seal and books and had agreed to a friendly test suit, and another against Solomon Pool for the buildings. Judge Albion W. Tourgee ruled against the trustees; John W. Graham and James A. Graham of Hillsborough argued for them without fee, as did B. F. Moore and William H. Battle on appeal in June 1874. At its January term 1875 the state Supreme Court decided for the university on every point, and possession passed to Andrew Mickle, the board's agent, with the seal, books and papers going to Treasurer Kemp Battle.
People: Solomon Pool · Albion W. Tourgée · Kemp Plummer Battle · Alexander McIver · James Augustus Graham · John W. Graham · Andrew Mickle
Winston, a Cornell graduate who had also studied at UNC, came to Chapel Hill in 1875 as professor of Latin and German when the university reopened.
A telegram from Raleigh on March 20, 1875, reported that the legislature had passed a bill letting the closed University of North Carolina reorganize with some state support. Spencer, whose letters to state leaders had pressed for the reopening, and a few friends entered South Building and tolled the college bell to celebrate.
Subject: South Building
Electing the reopened university's professors, the trustees broke with the old practice of making a professor bursar and chose Andrew Mickle, the Chapel Hill merchant who had acted as their agent, at $400 a year. He held the post until he left to live with his children in Texas in the early 1880s.
People: Andrew Mickle
The university resumed classes on Monday, September 6, 1875, after more than four years closed, with Charles Phillips as chairman of the faculty, and held a public celebration on September 15. Kemp P. Battle, then secretary of the trustees, was elected president in 1876.
People: Kemp Plummer Battle
Battle names Francis Donnell Winston of Bertie County the first student on the Hill in 1875, arriving a day ahead of other entrants with his brother Robert and Charles Bond. Bond was the only student to enter the agricultural department on opening day, and Battle calls him the first student of the first college of agriculture in the state.
The 1900 commencement was given over to the reopening of 1875, with nineteen members of the 1875-76 student body present and addresses by Kemp Battle, George T. Winston, W. J. Peele and President Alderman.
People: Kemp Plummer Battle · George Tayloe Winston · W. J. Peele
Subject: Memorial Hall
Buildings, schools, churches and other sites named in the dated events on this page, the most often named first. The map shows the 3 with a known location.
Map tiles © OpenStreetMap contributors. Site locations from the N.C. State Historic Preservation Office survey, Open Orange and OpenStreetMap; town and community pins mark the middle of their mapped buildings.
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Picture: South Building and the Old Well, about 1912. Public domain. Kemp P. Battle, History of the University of North Carolina, vol. 2 (1912); via the Internet Archive
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