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Life in Chapel Hill in 1930
In the above-illustrated portraits of Chapel Hill from 1930, you will note several groups of students hitchhiking toward Durham. In those days the streets were packed with students urging every car that went by to pick them up. If the car did not stop, it was common for the students to make rude jesters and catcalls at the driver. Durham offered these young men more restaurants, theaters, stores, and girls than Chapel Hill.
The Strowds were long time business and land owners in Chapel Hill. They had been in the livery stable business before the car business, and also had one of the town's first restaurants.
This is the theater that everyone in crowding into in the above illustration.
By 1930 Chapel Hill had gone from being a small country village to a town that had aspects of a small city. Massive structures were being planned throughout the University including the Bell tower that was to include a large park and a pond. The sidewalks on both sides of Franklin Street had been transformed from dirt and mud to pavement.
The north side of Franklin Street in 1930
There were a record number of students enrolled at UNC that year, 2759. The pressures of the modern world were also taking a toll on the population. For a town of less than 5000, suicide and depression were becoming a common occurrence. That year for example, L.J. Bell, a German professor who was one the most prominent members of the UNC faculty, was a suicide victim. He was only twenty-two, and had graduated with highest honors from UNC in three years at 19 in 1927. He later received a master’s degree. Besides German, he was fluent in French, Italian and Hungarian
While the above prices seem inexpensive by today's standards, by 1936 as the Depession worsened, restaurant meals in Chapel Hill were often less than half what they were in 1930.
There were other barbers offering haircuts for 25 cents in Chapel Hill in 1930. You can see this barber shop on the left-hand side of the theater in the photo in this article.
All the ads in this article are from 1930s Chapel Hill newspapers.
Comments:
Margaret Jones
10:39 AM Tue 4/21/2009
I love this illustrated version of Chapel Hill. It really does a great job conveying life in the town in 1930.
Adam Brandon
4:06 PM Mon 4/20/2009
I can't believe these prices for restaurant meals, cars, and haircuts.
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Chapel Hill is located on a hill whose only distinguishing feature in the 18th century was a small chapel on top called New Hope Chapel. This church was built in 1752 and is currently the location of The Carolina Inn. The town was founded in 1819, and chartered in 1851.
What is it that binds us to this place as to no other? It is not the well or the bell or the stone walls. or the crisp October nights. No, our love for this place is based upon the fact that it is as it was meant to be, The University of the People.
-- Charles Kuralt
Dark Side of the Hill -- Pink Floyd, the creators of the most popular album in history, Dark Side of the Moon, took the second half of their name from Floyd Council, a Chapel Hill native, and great blues singer and guitarist. He once belonged to a group called "The Chapel Hillbillies".
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There would probably be no Chapel Hill if the University of North Carolina Board of Trustees in 1793 had not chosen land across from New Hope Chapel for the location of the university. By 1800 there were about 100 people living in thirty houses surrounding the campus.
The University North Carolina's first student was Hinton James, who enrolled in February, 1795. There is now a dormitory on the campus named in his honor.
The University of North Carolina was closed from 1870 to 1875 because of lack of state funding.
William Ackland left his art collection and $1.25 million to Duke University in 1940 on the condition that he would be buried in the art museum that the University was to build with his bequest. Duke rejected this condition even though members of the Duke Family are buried in Duke Chapel. What followed was a long and acrimonious legal battle between Ackland relatives who now wanted the inheritance, Rollins College, and the University of North Carolina, each attempting to receive the funds. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, and in 1949 UNC was awarded the money for the museum. Ackland is buried near the museum's entrance. When the museum first opened, in the early sixties, there were rumors that his remains were leaking out of the mausoleum.
The official name of the Arboretum on the University of North Carolina campus is the Coker Arboretum. It is named after Dr. William Cocker, the University's first botany professor. It occupies a little more than five acres. It was founded in 1903.
Chapel Hill's main street has always been called Franklin Street. It was named after Benjamin Franklin in the early 1790s.
Chapel Hill High School and Chapel Hill Junior High were on Franklin Street in the same location as University Square until the mid 1960s.
The Colonial Drug Store at 450 West Franklin Street was owned and operated by John Carswell. It was famous for a fresh-squeezed carbonated orange beverage called a "Big O". In the early 1970s, I managed the Record and Tape Center next door, and must have had over 100 of those drinks. The Colonial Drug Store closed in 1996.
Sutton's Drugstore, which opened in 1923, has one of the last soda fountains in the South. It is one of the few businesses remaining on Franklin Street that was in operation when I was growing up in the 1950s.
Future President Gerald Ford lived in Chapel Hill twice. First when he was 24, in 1938, he took a law couse in summer school at UNC. He lived in the Carr Building, which was a law school dormitory. At the same time, Richard Nixon, the man he served under as Vice President, was attending law school at Duke. In 1942, Ford returned to Chapel Hill to attend the U.S. Navy's Pre-Flight School training program. He lived in a rental house on Hidden Hills Drive.
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