Storyline
How the University built its new gymnasium, the Bowman Gray pool and its first dormitory for women with a PWA grant: the 1936 grant, the work begun in 1937, the presentation of the gymnasium, the pool’s opening and the naming for Charles T. Woollen.
In briefOnce the state supreme court settled the legal questions in 1935, the University won a Public Works Administration grant of $283,000 toward a physical education building with a swimming pool and a dormitory for graduate women, meeting its own share with a self-supporting bond issue and gifts. The dormitory, later named for Edwin Alderman, was occupied by September 1937. The gymnasium was presented to the University in March 1938, its pool the gift of Mrs. Nathalie Gray and her sons in memory of Bowman Gray, and the trustees named the building for Charles T. Woollen, who had advocated for it. Two more women's dormitories opened in 1939, and by August 1941 the University had six dormitories for women.
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No works in the index are currently linked directly to this storyline. The works below provide background on Women's Lives & History.
Once the state supreme court settled the legal questions in the fall of 1935, the University could apply to the Public Works Administration. By October 30, 1936 state PWA director Stanley H. Wright had announced a grant of $283,000, 45 per cent of the $629,000 cost of a physical education building with a swimming pool and a three-story dormitory for 104 graduate women. By February 12, 1937 the University had begun digging foundations for the dormitory, meeting its share with a self-supporting $225,000 bond issue and gifts. By April 9 clearing had begun for the gymnasium by Fetzer Field, with Arthur C. Nash as supervising architect. The dormitory, later named for Edwin Alderman, was occupied by September 1937.
On March 25, 1938, at a dinner at the Carolina Inn, Wright presented the gymnasium to the University and Governor Hoey accepted it; President Graham said the pool was the gift of Mrs. Nathalie Gray and her sons in memory of Bowman Gray. Students were expected to swim from about April 19, and from May 7 Chapel Hill children had a Saturday morning hour in the pool. The trustees' naming of the building for Charles T. Woollen, who had advocated for it, was news on June 3, 1938, and it was formally named at the alumni luncheon of June 7.
Two more women's dormitories opened in September 1939. On June 7, 1941 the trustees gave names to buildings known until then by letters and numbers, among them the women's dormitories Kenan, Alderman and McIver, and the men's dormitory built in 1939 and known as K became Alexander, for Eben Alexander, former professor of Greek and first dean of the faculty. Expecting about 700 women students that fall, the University by August 22 assigned the Mary Ann Smith building, lately called the Graduate Club, to women, reversing a June decision to give them the new Alexander dormitory by the women's athletic field; with the Archer house it had six dormitories for women.
Events in this storyline, in date order. See these 12 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 them all.
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 Women's Lives & History. These works cover the broader subject and may not discuss this storyline. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
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.
A short history for young readers of how the Eno River was kept free of a dam. The Eno rises in Orange County and runs through Hillsborough into Durham County. When Durham proposed a dam in the 1960s, Margaret Nygard (1925-1995) and her neighbors formed the Association for the Preservation of the Eno River Valley; Julie J. Thomson tells how they won Eno River State Park instead. Eno River Association, Durham, 2023; 25 illustrated pages.
Tracy Deonn's young adult fantasy novel set around the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bree, an African American teenager with newly awakened powers she cannot yet control, learns that the leaders of the secret Order mean to hide the coming demon war, and she and her friends flee so that she can find her own training. Subjects include magic, secret societies, imaginary wars and psychic trauma. Published by Simon & Schuster in 2022, 561 pages.
Reviewed in Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books./Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books (2022).
John Bare's mystery set in Chapel Hill. Lassie James is drinking at the Pig Farm Tavern one October night when Holly Pike, the woman who left him years earlier when they were about to marry and never explained, walks in; before he can settle his feelings she draws him into trouble involving fraud, corruption and a murder that he ends up investigating as an amateur. Published by Wisdom House Books of Chapel Hill in a first edition of 2021, 287 pages.
Patricia S. Parker draws on civil rights organizer Ella Baker (1903-1986) to set out a method of community engagement and communication for social justice work, illustrated by case studies from the Ella Baker Women's Center for Leadership and Community Activism in Chapel Hill. Chapters cover entering into community partnerships, creating participative spaces for organizing, storytelling as leadership, and self-care for activists, with a case study timeline and curriculum overview appended. Published by the University of California Press in 2020, 177 pages.
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.
J. G. Hetherton's mystery novel set in Hillsborough, in which a woman journalist returning home investigates murder and missing children. Published in New York by Crooked Lane in 2018, 312 pages.
Laura Veirs's picture book biography of Elizabeth Cotten, the folk singer and guitarist who grew up near Carrboro and Chapel Hill and wrote Freight Train as a girl. Written for young readers, it was published by Chronicle Books in 2018. Topics include African American women singers and singers of the United States in juvenile literature.
Rosalind Rosenberg's 2017 biography of Pauli Murray (1910-1985), lawyer, poet and Episcopal priest, raised in Durham. Its six parts follow a Southern childhood, the move to New York, the 1938 application to the University of North Carolina that was refused because Murray was Black (the chapter is titled 'Members of your race are not admitted'), law school and the coining of the phrase Jane Crow, the Cold War years, the push toward 'an NAACP for women', and a late-life ordination. 494 pages with portraits.
Reviewed in The Journal of Southern History (2018).
A reader on Elizabeth Keckley edited by Sheila Smith McKoy, gathering criticism and interpretation of Behind the Scenes, Keckley's 1868 memoir of enslavement and of her years as Mary Todd Lincoln's dressmaker. Keckley's enslavement included years in Hillsborough, which is the book's Orange County link. Published in 2016, 274 pages.
Nic Brown's novel about a nineteen-year-old student at the university in Chapel Hill who becomes pregnant, places her baby with an adoptive couple, and then follows that family to the coastal town of Beaufort, where she takes work as their nanny while her own mother is ill with cancer. It is domestic fiction set in Chapel Hill and Beaufort, centered on mothers and daughters. Published by Counterpoint in 2015, 269 pages.
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