Baity Hill Graduate and Family Housing
This housing complex, completed in 2005, sits on land once owned by Herman G. and Elizabeth Chesley Baity. Their family home now serves as the student center there. Over a number of years the Baitys sold more than fifty acres to the university, including the areas now occupied by the Dean Smith Center, Koury Natatorium, and part of the Kenan-Flagler Business School. The university purchased the home and surrounding nine acres in 1991. The complex was designed to replace Odum Village, Carolina's first purpose-built family housing complex.
Herman G. Baity, UNC class of 1917, was a prominent faculty member who earned the first ever doctor of science degree in sanitary engineering from Harvard University. At Carolina he was dean of engineering until that program was transferred to North Carolina State College of Agriculture and Engineering in Raleigh (now North Carolina State University). Baity convinced university leaders that clean water was a public health issue and succeeded in keeping his program at the university within what is now the Gillings School of Global Public Health. In the 1950s he was director of the environmental division of the World Health Organization, helping eradicate malaria. His work was honored with the naming of the Herman G. Baity Environmental Laboratory, dedicated in 1990, adjacent to McGavran-Greenberg Hall.
Elizabeth Chesley Baity, UNC class of 1929, taught anthropology at Carolina. She also wrote poetry and children's books, including Man Is a Weaver (1942) and Americans before Columbus (1951).
Date Established: 2004
Date Range: 2004 – Present