by Charly Mann

Chapel Hill has changed a lot in the last 100 years. Since starting Chapel Hill Memories a year ago I have been fortunate to talk to two centenarians from Chapel Hill which has inspired me to write about what the town was like in 1910.

The population of Chapel Hill in 1910 was 1,449. The total value of all the real estate and personal property in town was less than a million dollars. The combined value of all the buildings, houses, and property in Chapel Hill that year was $410,562. All the personal property in town had a value of $585,750.

UNC students gather in front of their social club in downtown Chapel Hill with their servant in 1910

The mayor of Chapel Hill was Algernon S. Barbee, who graduated from the University of North Carolina in 1860 and served as Lieutenant Commander for the Confederacy during the Civil War. The chief of police was D.S. Long.

1910 Chapel Hill mayor Algernon Barbee

Chapel Hill had four churches in 1910. Reverend Starr was the minister at Chapel of the Cross, the Episcopal church. R.L. Smith was the minister of the Baptist congregation. W.S. Patton was the pastor for the Methodists, and Mr. Moss was reverend at the Presbyterian church.

Advertisement for the University of North Carolina in 1910. In those days there were no SATs or college entrance exams. Most students who went to UNC came from wealthy and upper middle class families.

More than half of the population of Chapel Hill were farmers, and their primary cash crop was cotton. A lucrative business in town in those days was owning a cotton gin, and there were six of these in Chapel Hill in 1910. These machines quickly separated commercial cotton from its seeds. Fred Sparrow, I.S. Riggsbee, and G.W. Purefoy had the three most popular cotton gins in town.

During the early twentieth century many wealthy Cubans sent their sons to UNC, and there was even a Cuban club on campus. This is Francisco Fuentes from the UNC class of 1910.

Chapel Hill had two hotels in 1910, the University Inn and Pickard's Hotel, both were rather rustic and primitive. If you could afford it, better lodging could be found at numerous boarding houses in town, which were actually local houses that had extra rooms for rent. The best was the home of Mrs. A.A. Kluttz. The other houses in town that rented rooms were run by Mrs. W.L. Thankersley, Mrs. Gattis, Mrs. J.C. Cole, Mrs. Josephine Archer, Mrs. E.W. Nevill, Mrs. Mary Burch, Mrs. J.E. Merritt, Mrs. W.J. A. Cheek, and Mrs. R.S. McRea. Most of these women's husbands were merchants in town or professors at the University. Two men, W.B. Thompson and T.B. Farrar also rented rooms in their houses. Swain Hall, besides being the student dining hall, was then the most inexpensive place to rent a room. There was no running water nor indoor plumbing in any of these hotels or boarding houses in 1910.

An old man in 1910 standing by a rock wall along Franklin Street next to where Graham Memorial is today. In the background is the Pickard Hotel. 

In 1910 there was only a rudimentry water service in Chapel Hill and there was no indoor plumbing nor hot water. People did not bathe on a regular basis, but in 1910 a business in town offered hot baths. 

There were three drug stores in Chapel Hill in 1910; Eubanks, Patterson Brothers, and Norwood Drug Company, as well as four town doctors, Lewis Webb, E.A. Abernathy, C.S. Mangum, and Brack Lloyd. If you wanted meat there were two butcher shops where chicken and cows were regularly slaughtered in the back. They were owned by William Creel and R.M. Leigh.

Homes and buildings in 1910 were heated in Chapel Hill by either by coal or wood, and two merchants in town, G.C. Pickard and T.E. Best, provided these essentials. There was electricity in Chapel Hill then but it was primarily used for lighting, and the electric company was owned and operated by the University. There were also two hardware stores in town; one owned by S.L. Herndon and the other by H.C. Willis.

1910 UNC baseball team. Until the early 1960's college baseball was almost as popular as football in North Carolina. (Basketball did not attract a large following until about 1960.) From 1935 to 1986 North Carolina was the only state that had Easter Monday as a state holiday because it was the day of the NC State - Wake Forest baseball game 

Chapel Hill had only two small restaurants in 1910, one in the house of J.E. Gouch (later changed to Gooch), and the Royal Cafe.

This is a 1910 parody ad for Gooch's Cafe, then one of only two restaurants in Chapel Hill

Shoes were often custom made in those days, and Chapel Hill had two shoe makers, George Trice and Brooks Brewer. The primary means of transportation in town was by horse, and Chapel Hill had two thriving livery stables, one owned by G.C. Pickard and the other by L.J. Hargrave. One was located behind where the Carolina Coffee Shop is today, and the other where the sundial now stands in front of the Morehead Planetarium.

A black carriage driver with "yessuh boss" attached to photo in Chapel Hill from 1910. Fifty years later there were two taxi services in Chapel Hill. One was white owned and operated called Tarheel Cab, and the other was black called Carolina Cab. Carolina Cab operated more than 16 blue and white Checker cabs and was the dominant cab company for both black and white passengers by 1965.

Mr. Pickard was a successful businessman who was also a grocer and owned a hotel. This ad is from 1910. Later they would offer a shuttle service by automobile to Durham.

In 1910 Chapel Hill had a weekly newspaper called The Weekly News that was operated by W.B. Thompson. The Tar Heel in those days was published twice a month. Few people in town could afford a camera, but Robert Foister and W.B. Sorrell had photography shops downtown where you could get a portrait made.

This is a black UNC servant carrying student laundry in front of Foister's Camera store on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill in 1910.

The average lifespan for a Chapel Hill resident in 1910 was 47. E.A. Brown and A.J. Hargrave were the town's two undertakers and embalmers.

In 1910 UNC's debate team won contests against Tulane and the University of Pennsylvania, both of which received more press coverage than any sporting event.

UNC Class of 1910 senior Levy Ames Brown. Note he graduated at the age of 18. In those days every student knew everyone else enrolled in their class.

As a young boy in the 1950s I spent a lot of time in the woods around Chapel Hill and often found abandoned saw mills (There was even one in the woods behind Glenwood School). I have discovered that in 1910 there were seven saw mills in operation in what are now Chapel Hill's city limits.

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