Storyline
The American Legion posts at Chapel Hill, Hillsborough and Carrboro and the Black veterans’ posts, and the VFW, Marine Corps League and other groups formed after the Second World War.
In briefBetween 1943 and 1958 Orange County's veterans organized posts in each town, and Black veterans formed their own, in Chapel Hill in 1944 and in Hillsboro in 1947. Chapel Hill's American Legion post drew many protests in 1943 for a traveling carnival with a strip act and gambling games, and editor Louis Graves, a Legion member, criticized the post. Hillsborough veterans organized Post No. 85 in 1944. After the war came a Carrboro Legion post, the county's first two Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, a Marine Corps League post and a county veterans' service office. In 1955 Chapel Hill's Paul Robertson became the Legion's state commander, and in 1958 fire gutted Hillsboro's Legion hut, which reopened in 1959.
Read the full storyRead the 29 eventsAll storylines
Read the events and sources below.
No works in the index are currently linked directly to this storyline. The works below provide background on Wars & Military Service.
In early October 1943 a traveling carnival brought by Chapel Hill's American Legion post played for a week on the Airport Road just outside town, and its strip act and gambling games drew many protests; the Weekly reported the Legion's share at about $700, and editor Louis Graves, a Legion member, criticized the post for bringing it. Chapel Hill's American Legion Post No. 6 burned the mortgage on its Rosemary Lane hut in March 1944, and that April Black veterans of both world wars formed the Craige-Allen post in Chapel Hill. Hillsborough veterans organized Post No. 85 in 1944 with A. H. Graham as commander. After the war Carrboro veterans formed Legion Post 283, Hillsboro and Chapel Hill-Carrboro organized the county's first two Veterans of Foreign Wars posts, former Marines chartered a Marine Corps League post, and the county opened a veterans' service office. In 1947 Hillsborough's Post No. 85 bought the Hines Harris property on Churton Street for its hut, and Black veterans in Hillsboro formed a veterans' club and then an American Legion post. In 1955 Chapel Hill's Paul Robertson was installed as the Legion's state commander. Carrboro veterans organized VFW Post 7999 in 1956, and fire gutted Hillsboro's Legion hut on North Churton Street in December 1958; the post repaired it and reopened it in February 1959.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 29 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 2 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.
Background reading on Wars & Military Service. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
A picture book set in the Eno River valley of Orange County in 1776. Four red wolf pups are born in a woodland den and spend their first summer and fall learning to hunt and howl with their family, while nearby a young widow, Sally Few, keeps her household going as the Revolution unsettles the countryside. Eileen Heyes wrote the story, published in 2025 by the North Carolina Office of Archives and History with color illustrations and maps, 42 pages.
Anne R. Keene's history of the Cloudbusters, the baseball team of the Navy Pre-Flight School at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill during the Second World War, on which Ted Williams played in 1943. The chapters move from a batboy's trunk of keepsakes through the pre-flight training program to the players' lives after the war, and Keene's own family is part of the story. Published by Sports Publishing in New York in 2018, 340 pages with sixteen pages of plates.
Alex Albright's history of the B-1 band, the group of Black musicians drawn largely from students and graduates of North Carolina A&T who became the first Black sailors of the modern Navy to serve above the rank of messman, and the first of more than a hundred Black Navy bands in wartime. The band was posted to the Navy Pre-Flight School at Chapel Hill, the book's Orange County link. Published by R.A. Fountain in 2013, 194 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Suzanne Adair's 2011 mystery, one of her Michael Stoddard novels, set in Hillsborough during the Southern campaign of the American Revolution and written as a historical thriller. Adair is a North Carolina author.
Letters of the Sparrow family, including Thomas Sparrow and George Attmore Sparrow, gathered and published in 2011. The correspondence includes material associated with the Hillsboro' Military Academy, which opened in Hillsborough in 1859, and combines family and military history.
Stewart E. Dunaway's account of the Battle of Lindley's Mill, fought in September 1781 after the Loyalist David Fanning raided Hillsborough and carried off Governor Thomas Burke. Burke, Fanning and the Lindley family, whose mill gave the fight its name, are the people at its center, with the Revolutionary campaigns in North Carolina as the frame. Published in 2009.
Stewart E. Dunaway's transcription of letters exchanged between Jesse Benton and Thomas Hart from 1780 to 1790, concerning Hart's affairs at Hartford, his place at Hillsborough. The letters concern the economic and social conditions of Hillsborough in the eighteenth century and the Revolution in North Carolina. Self-published through lulu.com in 2009, 68 pages with illustrations and facsimiles, and part of the library's Wall Local History Collection.
Suzy Barile's account of Eleanor Hope Swain, daughter of the University of North Carolina's president, and Smith D. Atkins, the Union general whose troops occupied Chapel Hill in April 1865; the two married later that year. Published by Eno in Hillsborough in 2009, 237 pages with illustrations and portraits.
Civil War letters of Colonel Frank Schaller of the 22nd Mississippi Infantry, combining personal narrative with regimental history. Schaller was associated with the Hillsboro Military Academy in Hillsborough. Published by the University of South Carolina Press in 2007. 185 pages with six pages of plates and illustrations.
A congregational history of New Hope Presbyterian Church in Orange County, written by Barbara A. Murphy and published in 2006 by Chapel Hill Press. Chapters take up the five successive church buildings, the land itself, the ministers who served, the cemeteries, members who went to war, the church's organization, its music, gifts and memorials, and its outreach to the surrounding community. It also covers Presbyterian experience of the Civil War. 126 pages with illustrations and portraits.
The Rev. Charles M. Jones (1906-1993), minister of Chapel Hill's Presbyterian church in the late 1940s, and his wife Dorcas talk with John Egerton in a Southern Oral History Program interview recorded July 21, 1990. Jones spends most of the hour on the disputes his stand on race provoked, when the regional presbytery objected to his conduct of the church, and his dealings with university president Frank Porter Graham. Published online in 2006 by the UNC-Chapel Hill Library in Documenting the American South.
Guion Griffis Johnson (1900-1989), a historian of the antebellum South, talked with Jacquelyn Hall and Mary Frederickson in August 1974 for the Southern Oral History Program. She recalls her training, her years at the Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina, the standing of women historians in higher education, and the research behind her study of antebellum North Carolina society. Running about an hour; electronic edition issued by the UNC library in 2006 through Documenting the American South.
Sources and research tools for this storyline. Research guide: Follow an event across several accounts.
More to discover
The Friends connect people with new library materials, local writers and publishers, and resources documenting Orange County.
