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Chapel Hill Up Close
by Charly Mann
A Chapel Hill bee that I met on Morgan Creek Road
Ever since I was very young I have loved being outside in Chapel Hill. When I was eight I would spend hours in my tree house behind my house on Old Mill Road observing the birds around me in the woods. Eventually some cardinals and blue jays would feel safe enough to perch within two feet of me.
A fly enjoying a rose petal on Coker Drive in Chapel Hill
When I was nine I became fascinated with the insects that I would find in my yard, especially the ants, bees, and flies. Flies were so common that many people, including my family, had screened-in-porches to keep them away while they enjoyed the "outdoors". I thrilled at watching flies soar through the air and marveled at their beauty when they landed on my arm. I also spent countless hours watching bees pollinate my mother's flower garden. Today my interest in the outdoors and the creatures that inhabit it has not waned, and I often enjoy photographing nature up close.
A busy bee enjoying a garden along Coker Drive in Chapel Hill
On a recent visit to Chapel Hill I took a long walk starting at where Country Club Road intersects with Raleigh Road and walked down to the end of Laurel Hill Road, before carefully crossing over the 15-501 bypass to Coker Drive where I walked on through all of Morgan Creek Road. My primary purpose was to take photographs of houses for future articles in Chapel Hill Memories, but along the way I was lucky enough to find some insect friends who allowed me to take their pictures.
A hoverfy on a bladle of grass on Laurel Hill Circle in Chapel Hill
I have not lived in Chapel Hill for twenty years, but I still spend an hour or more outside communing with nature. For many years my daughter and I have enjoyed taking photographs of the birds and butterflies that live near us, and last week I began posting some of these photographs to our new web site: oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
Grasshopper enjoying a flower on Laurel Hill Road in Chapel Hill
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Chapel Hill - The Town of Eternal Love
by Charly Mann
Growing up in Chapel Hill in the 1950s and 1960s I came to believe that love is the most powerful force in existence. I saw firsthand what a propelling power it was.
A picture that defines pure love, from the University of North Carolina campus in the fall of 1961
Chapel Hill is a place where if you are careful and aware, you can meet the soul you were destined to blaze a trail together with through eternity. Fairytale love affairs really do happen in this town of eternal love.
Pat Hole from the UNC class of 1946. She was chosen by Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall as the most beautiful girl in Chapel Hill that year.
This is Roxanne Kalb from 1965. She was a senior from Suffield, Connecticut. Her major was international studies. She was involved in a wide array of campus organizations and was also President of the Alpha Delta Pi sorority and was the Senior Class Social Chairman. Her hobbies included painting, swimming, and fishing.
Charlie Hoffmam, from the University of North Carolina class of 1926, a beautiful coed with my favorite name.
Mary Thom White UNC coed clearly going places from 1960
Love blooms on the UNC campus in 1943.
Sara Rose of the UNC class of 1953
Hometown Chapel Hill beauty Ditzi Bruce from 1941
Mary Ann Henderson UNC coed from 1962. She was then a senior majoring in studio art. Her plans were to go into fashion advertising after graduation, She was a member of Chi Omega sorority. Even though her home was in New Orleans, in 1961 she was named Miss Chapel Hill. She was active in the campus YWCA and her favorite pastimes were horseback riding and water skiing.
The Sky Over Chapel Hill
by Charly Mann
For years I lived on the edge of Chapel Hill surrounded by Duke Forest. Looking up at the sky I enjoyed seeing a wide variety of local and migratory birds.
A rare Bald Eagle soaring over Chapel Hill near Whitfield Road
At night when the moon began to rise I often enjoyed its luminescence. There was a peaceful essence flowing from the heavens that often sparked memories of my childhood days near the woods across from Greenwood Road.
The moon rising through the winter trees of Duke Forest
The Red-tailed Hawks of University Lake
by Charly Mann
Since I was very young I have loved to observe the birds that inhabit Chapel Hill. I may have inherited this tendency from my mother who had several generations of blue jays that would come into our house and eat peanuts out of her hand from our dining room table. I have learned that with patience and a tranquil disposition most birds will eventually allow you to get very close to them.
A Red-tailed Hawk soars near the shoreline of University Lake in Chapel Hill
Over the years I have found one of the best places to enjoy birds is around University Lake. Besides being the source of drinking water for Chapel Hill since 1932, many wild birds enjoy living in the trees of the heavily forested shoreline.
A Red-tailed Hawk at University Lake
I have observed many Red-tailed hawks at University Lake from late spring to early fall. These are magnificent and highly intelligent creatures that can live as long as twenty years. They are often mistakenly identified as eagles. Their diet consists primarily of snakes and rodents. They have wingspans of about five feet and are members of the falcon family. These hawks weigh as much as four pounds and their eyesight is so keen that they can clearly see a mouse a hundred feet away.
This Red Tail Hawk has just lept off a limb as she begins to descend on a prey
A great thing about red-tails is that if you know where they like to live they are relatively easy to find. Just walk or kayak around the shoreline of University Lake in late morning or early afternoon when they like to hunt and you will likely see one. If you are quiet and observant you can often get very close to these birds.
Red Tail Hawks are often camouflaged in the trees around University Lake in Chapel Hill
Walking through some of the unpsoiled forests outside of town is a great getaway from the stress, congestion and noise I find in the ever more urban Chapel Hill environment. Getting close an animal like this reminds me of the following lines from Ekhart Tolle:
"Negativity is totally unnatural. It is a psychic pollutant, and there is a deep link between the poisoning and destruction of nature and the vast negativity that has accumulated in the collective human psyche. No other life form on the planet knows negativity, only humans, just as no other life form violates and poisons the Earth that sustains it. Have you ever seen an unhappy flower or a stressed oak tree? Have you come across a depressed dolphin, a frog that has a problem with self-esteem, a cat that cannot relax, or a bird that carries hatred and resentment? The only animals that may occasionally experience something akin to negativity or show signs of neurotic behavior are those who live in close contact with humans and so link into the human mind and its insanity."
photos by Kathryn Mann
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Chapel Hill's Newest Work Of Art
by Charly Mann
Chapel Hill became a town because General William Davie considered the place he found to build the university and its accompanying community the most beautiful spot he had ever encountered. Since that time generations of architects, artists, and landscapers have added to this magnificence. William Meade Prince, Chapel Hill's most beloved and inspiring artist, called the town the Southern Part of Heaven, and helped create a theme of life affirmation and joy that has endured for more than sixty years.
William Meade Prince painting in Chapel Hill
Carl Boettcher carving the Circus Parade in 1948 from William Meade Prince illustration
In 1948 Prince decided to create a permanent piece of art for Chapel Hill that would capture forever the magic and spectacle of the circus. After sketching out the idea in a pen and ink drawing, his friend and fellow Chapel Hillian, master wood carver Carl Boettcher took his design and carved The Circus Parade and the accompanying circus animals. If you have not seen it, you owe it to yourself to go the UNC Alumni Center on Stadium Drive next to Kenan Stadium to view this work of art in person.
Part of the PARADE mural by Michael Brown on the wall of the Carolina Coffee Shop in Porthole Alley
This is a typical William Meade Prince painting. Like his friend Norman Rockwell, he did many magazine covers in the 1930s and 1940s.
Michael Brown, a UNC art school graduate, has continued the tradition of these two men in recent decades by painting whimsical murals on the sides of buildings throughout both Chapel Hill and Carrboro. His best mural is on Porthole Alley and is called Parade. It was directly inspired by the piece of art that Prince and Boettcher created.
This is Circus Parade Animals Under the Big Top by Kathryn Mann from 2009.
This week my favorite artist, who coincidently happens to be my daughter, has completed the next chapter in the saga of the Circus Parade. After hearing from me for years about how much I loved this work, she has created a new piece of art which takes the original designs of Prince's animals and has placed them into a circus tent with yours truly as the ringmaster. Since Prince did not color his original sketch she has finished that job for him as well.
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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".
Check out Charly Mann's other website:
Oklahoma Birds and Butterflies
http://oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
Oklahoma Birds and Butterflies
http://oklahomabirdsandbutterflies.com
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.