Prisoners of war

A small group of prisoners of war worked briefly at the university during World War II. Camp Butner, located in Granville County about thirty miles northeast of Chapel Hill, began receiving German prisoners of war in the spring of 1944. By the summer some of the prisoners were working as dining hall...

Eagle Hotel

Eagle Hotel once stood on the present site of Graham Memorial Hall on the east side of McCorkle Place. The university's first steward, John "Buck" Taylor, opened a tavern on the site in 1796, which he and his son operated until the 1820s. It was known simply as the Tavern House and, like...

University Railroad

The eighteenth-century choice to locate UNC in a relatively sparsely populated area left the university and town stranded in the 1840s when railroad lines began to crisscross the state. The east-west line between Goldsboro and Greensboro bypassed Chapel Hill some eight miles to the north, which enco...

Eshelman School of Pharmacy

Eshelman School of Pharmacy is the only public school of pharmacy in North Carolina and one of the oldest in the nation. It began in 1897 with the hiring of Edward Vernon Howell as a professor of pharmacy. An earlier training program existed from 1880 as part of the first School of Medicine. The pha...