Entries

Hickerson House

The two-story historic house on Battle Lane is the home of the Center for Urban and Regional Studies. The house was built between 1915 and 1925 by Thomas Felix Hickerson, a Carolina alumnus and longtime faculty member. He deeded the house to the university in 1952, but it was not used by the university until he died in 1968. The Center for Urban and Regional Studies, created in 1957, is one of the oldest university-based research centers of its kind. Its focus is on basic and applied research on urban, regional, and rural planning and policy issues.

Hickerson taught engineering and mathematics at UNC from 1909 to 1952. He was an authority on highway engineering, producing authoritative works on road and bridge building and advising on numerous projects, including the Blue Ridge Parkway. At UNC he was one of the longest-serving trustees of the Order of the Gimghoul. He helped plan the Gimghoul Road development and oversaw the construction of the order's Gimghoul Castle.

Date Established: 1930

Date Range: 1930 – Present

Health Sciences Library

In 1971 UNC—Chapel Hill dedicated a new Health Sciences Library, bringing together the separate departmental libraries from the five health affairs schools: medicine, dentistry, nursing, public health, and pharmacy. At first many services were available only to graduate students; in 1976 the Health Sciences Library began circulating its collection to undergraduate students. The original three-story building was expanded in the early 1980s.

Date Established: 1966

Date Range: 1966 – Present

Hanes Hall

Hanes Hall was dedicated in 1953 as one of three new buildings for the School of Business Administration (Gardner and Carroll were the others). For several decades Hanes Hall was also the home of the university registrar and career services offices.
The building is named for Robert March Hanes, UNC class of 1912 and veteran of World War I. The Winston-Salem native had a very successful career in business, most notably as president of Wachovia Bank. He served in the state legislature, where he advocated for the establishment of a statewide sales tax, and on the UNC Board of Trustees. He was also active in the establishment of Research Triangle Park —the main administrative building at the park is named in his honor.

Date Established: 1950

Date Range: 1950 – Present

Hanes Art Center

The Frank Borden and Barbara Lasater Hanes Art Center is the home of the Department of Art and Art History. Completed in 1982, the building allowed the department to centralize all of its activities. The center includes classrooms, offices, studio spaces, and the Joseph Curtis Sloane Art Library, named in honor of a former department chair.

Frank Borden Hanes and Barbara Lasater Hanes were active arts and civic supporters at Carolina and in their hometown of Winston-Salem. Frank was the first chairman of the university's Arts and Sciences Foundation, which generates private support for the College of Arts and Sciences.

Date Established: 1980

Date Range: 1980 – Present

Hamilton Hall

Hamilton Hall was built in 1972 to house the departments of history, political science, and sociology. The Research Laboratories of Archaeology occupies the basement. When it opened the university celebrated the fact that they had managed to preserve an old oak, located on the building's southeast side, throughout the construction process. That tree still shades Hamilton's entrance.

The building is named in honor of Joseph Grégoire de Roulhac Hamilton. Hamilton chaired the history department from 1908 to 1930 and then turned his attention to the collection and preservation of personal papers and historical records from throughout the Southeast. Equipped with the selling point of the new university library building (now Wilson Library, Hamilton and his wife and colleague, Mary Cornelia Hamilton, traveled widely and convinced many families to donate their family and business papers to UNC. Dubbed "Ransack" by those who claimed he was robbing their states of their history, he gathered materials that would be the foundation of the newly established Southern Historical Collection. Hamilton was an avowed white supremacist whose own historical works helped construct the "Lost Cause" version of American history and justified Ku Klux Klan violence and Jim Crow segregation. Yet he was a meticulous scholar who preserved the primary sources that a younger generation of historians would use to challenge and eventually discredit the work of Hamilton and other Confederate apologists.

Date Established: 1968

Date Range: 1968 – Present

Greenlaw Hall

In the mid-1960s construction began on a new building for the English department, which was the largest on campus and had long outgrown its home in Bingham Hall. Opened in 1970, Greenlaw Hall contained over 100 faculty offices, classrooms, and an auditorium. The original plans also called for a second-floor bridge connecting Greenlaw to Bingham, but it was abandoned due to lack of funds.

The building is named for former faculty member and administrator Edwin A. Greenlaw. Although he spent only twelve years at Carolina (1913—25), he had a lasting influence. Hired as an English professor and later promoted to department chair and then dean of the graduate school, Greenlaw helped grow the department, starting a program in comparative literature. He led the university's efforts to join the prestigious Association of American Universities and helped establish the University of North Carolina Press. He was also one of the original group of Kenan Professors. In The Web and the Rock, a novel by his former student Thomas Wolfe, the character of Randolph Ware is based on Greenlaw.

Date Established: 1966

Date Range: 1966 – Present