Storyline
How UNC built the R. B. House Undergraduate Library, the Frank Porter Graham student union and the Josephus Daniels Student Stores between 1964 and 1968: the federal loan and grant, the site cleared beside Wilson Library, the roof collapse, the Carolina Union’s name and the opening around the Pit.
In briefIn the mid-1960s UNC built an undergraduate library, a student union and a student stores building beside Wilson Library. A federal loan of 1964 was for the union, and a 1966 federal grant enlarged the library, named for former chancellor Robert B. House. The site was cleared in 1966 and the library's foundations begun in 1967. In January 1968 a concrete roof section of the unfinished union collapsed without injuring anyone. The Josephus Daniels Student Stores and the House Undergraduate Library opened in the fall of 1968 and the union in January 1969, framing the sunken court known as the Pit.
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In August 1964 the federal Community Facilities Administration approved a $2 million loan to the University for a three-level College Union building. A $657,000 federal grant in February 1966 let UNC enlarge its planned undergraduate library, to stand beside Wilson Library and be named for former chancellor Robert B. House, from about 60,000 to about 80,000 square feet. That summer the University moved three wooden buildings to Emerson Field to clear the ground for a $7 million complex of library, student union and book exchange between Wilson Library, Bingham Hall and Lenoir Hall. Crews began the library's foundations in April 1967 on part of the old Wilson Library parking lot, in one contract with the new union and the Book Exchange, and in October the trustees named the student stores building for Josephus Daniels. On January 2, 1968 a 140-ton concrete roof section of the Frank Porter Graham student union fell 25 feet with about a dozen workmen on it; no one was hurt, and director Howard Henry later blamed the failure of a subcontractor's temporary wooden supports. In February the Graham Memorial board named the organization that would run the new union the Carolina Union. The Josephus Daniels Student Stores opened with the fall 1968 term. The R. B. House Undergraduate Library opened that fall, with its reserve collection on the main floor in early October and the undergraduate collection moving over from Wilson Library on October 28. The student union, delayed in part by the roof collapse, opened in part on January 6, 1969. The buildings frame a sunken brick court, the Pit, which moved the center of student life there.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 9 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 4 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.
Louis Round Wilson's 40-page review of the University of North Carolina library, subtitled on the cover a review of its past and a look at its future. Wilson had directed the library for three decades before leaving for Chicago, and the university's main library carries his name. Published by the University of North Carolina Library in Chapel Hill in 1960, with illustrations.
Judith M. Panitch's illustrated account of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library between 1992 and 2004, published by the library in 2004. It is a history of the academic library, and the notes point out its references to the Aldo P. Magi collection of Thomas Wolfe material. 50 pages with color illustrations in an oblong format.
Edward G. Holley's twelfth Hanes Lecture, given in Wilson Library on 11 April 1995, on how the library, philanthropy and publishing helped the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill become a major American university. Printed by the Hanes Foundation, 28 pages.
Exhibition booklet from the Rare Book Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, published in 1996, recording the benefactors whose gifts built the collection and the items they gave. The cover reads Selections from the Rare Book Collection, and Henry Pearson, 1914 to 2006, is among the people it covers. 32 pages with illustrations.
A guide for students to Graham Memorial, the union building at the University of North Carolina, issued in 1974 by the union's board of directors in volumes of 19 centimeters with illustrations. It is a periodical about student unions in Chapel Hill. It sets out what the building offered undergraduates in the mid 1970s.
A serial publication of the board of directors of Graham Memorial, the student union at the University of North Carolina, issued in volumes of 19 centimeters with illustrations. The 1966 issue is signed at the end by Mayne Albright as director. Topics include student unions in Chapel Hill and the buildings of the university.
A single sheet folded to three unnumbered pages with one illustration, issued by the University of North Carolina and dated January 29, 1932, on the Graham Memorial Student Union at Chapel Hill. Topics include student unions in the town and the buildings of the university. Brief as it is, the leaflet marks a date in the building's early life.
Printed material on the Graham Memorial Building at the University of North Carolina, issued at Chapel Hill in 1924. Topics include college buildings, memorials and university planning in the town. One of several pieces surviving from the years when the student building was under discussion on the campus.
Millicent Meroney's 1986 Duke honors paper on the 1969 strikes by food service workers at the University of North Carolina, an episode in the town's race relations and its civil rights history. Eighty leaves of typescript with a bibliography, covering labor unions in food service, the strikes and lockouts themselves, and university employees at Chapel Hill.
Two 1980 photographs of Lenoir Dining Hall at the University of North Carolina: students gathered in the Pit and outside the building, and staff among empty tables inside. From the Chapel Hill Historical Society's Prints and Photographs Collection, CHHS.002.
Faculty member E. J. Woodhouse drinks from a coffee cup outside the University Dining Hall cafeteria at UNC-Chapel Hill, about 1940, beneath a sign saying state law bars the hall from serving the general public. Hugh Morton took the picture, and a tight crop appeared in the 1941 Yackety Yack.
A 1967 audiocassette about earlier Chapel Hill, concerning town history and social life. The people identified with the recording are Congressman Carl Thomas Durham, Samuel Huntington Hobbs and university chancellor Robert Burton House.
Photographs produced by the Photographic Services unit of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library between 1976 and 2003, about 2,500 items in the North Carolina Collection at UNC. Includes a run of copy negatives, 1977 to 2006. Subjects include William Aycock, Doris Betts, Reynolds Price, Dean Smith, William S. Powell and Hugh Morton.
Colonial Press postcard from 1969 of the flower ladies, the African American women who sold homegrown flowers along Franklin Street in downtown Chapel Hill. The caption names one of their regular customers: Robert B. House, the retired chancellor of the University of North Carolina.
Photographs made by Jock Lauterer in and around Chapel Hill from about 1964 to 1968, some 3,522 items in the North Carolina Collection at UNC. Subjects include the Speaker Ban Law, Ku Klux Klan activity in North Carolina, Tar Heel basketball and football, the Jubilee festival, the Old Well, and visitors including Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, Bob Hope and Jayne Mansfield.
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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