Senior Walk
The path that runs on the north side of the Coker Arboretum behind Spencer Residence Hall and Chapel of the Cross, the Episcopal church on Franklin Street, is what remains of Senior Walk, a popular campus landmark well into the 1960s. It began as an informal path some time in the 1890s and became a formal designation with the Senior Class Gift of 1928, which placed a sandstone tablet designating the path and flowering cherry trees on each side of it. Students for many years lined up on Senior Walk to process to commencement in Memorial Hall. It was also a favorite path for male students to walk their dates home to Spencer and other women's residence halls.
Senior Walk originally extended west from Hillsborough Street to the south end of Graham Memorial Hall. Construction of the Morehead Planetarium in the 1940s shifted the path to the north, and with the building expansion in the 1970s, the senior class tablet disappeared from campus. In 2017 the tablet returned to campus from a backyard somewhere in Chatham County, just south of Chapel Hill, and has been reinstalled at the Hillsborough Street entrance.