TIMELINES
NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION
‘The
amazing thing
for the
people of
Chapel Hill
had its doors
open all through
the Civil War.
Ernest Dollar
executive director
of the Preservation
Society of Chapel Hill
When Chapel Hill Lost Its Purpose
They are Chapel Hill’s lost years — from the end of the Civil War nearly 150 years ago, through the University’s closing in 1871, to its reopening in
1875. The South was struggling to accept a
new identity, and the town’s narrative during
that time follows a village on life support.
Chapel Hill was commonly referred to
as a “one-industry village” in the late 1880s,
with its lifeblood being the University. Having operated through the war, the University saw its numbers dwindle at war’s end as
a biracial Republican alliance wrested away
the traditional Democratic control — until
there were but two students left.
“Its antebellum alumni abandon [the
University] for the most part,” said UNC his-
torian and associate history professor James
Leloudis ’ 77. “As far as they’re concerned, it’s
fallen into the hands of the enemy.”
The story of Carolina’s triumphant
reopening is familiar; much less has been
written of the atmosphere in town during
those quiet years after the war.
Republican trustees voted to end fac-
ulty salaries, leading UNC to close on Feb.
1, 1871. An anonymous author wrote on a
campus chalkboard, “This old University
has busted and gone to hell today.”
“The students drifted away by ones,
twos and threes,” says Harry Watson, history
professor and director of the Center for the
Study of the American South. “I won’t say
it was a ghost town, but it appeared to be a
dying community.”
Faculty joined the exodus. Phillips Rus-
sell (class of 1904) wrote that the faculty
could no longer pay debts to merchants
and “were reduced to cutting the groves of
the campus for firewood.”
Cornelia Phillips Spencer wrote in
December 1871 that the poverty worsened
by the day. “People in C.H. are getting
poorer all the time. … There are very very
few families left here to assist the poor as
formerly — & some who in old times did
not think of asking help are sinking into
the condition of paupers.”
The campus’s eight buildings fared no
better. They became places for vagrancy
and revelry. “Gangs of negroes and idle
white boys infest the buildings at night and
on Sundays,” Spencer wrote, “gambling and
drinking and cursing parties hold carnival
in the old ‘South.’ ”
As students and faculty departed, farm-
ers felt the burden, their markets for pro-
duce drying up. Dropping real estate values
led to a number of sheriff’s sales.
After the Civil War,
the campus’s eight
buildings became
places for vagrancy
and revelry. “Gangs
of negroes and idle
white boys infest the
buildings at night
and on Sundays,”
Cornelia Phillips
Spencer wrote,
“gambling and drinking and cursing parties hold carnival in
the old ‘South.’”
Above, an engraving
of campus as it
appeared circa
1861.
