UNC A TO Z - Key Persons
Bingham Hall was completed in 1929 for use by the School of Commerce. It shared the same architectural style as nearby Murphey and Saunders Halls. Bingham housed the Department of English from the 1950s through the early 1970s, followed by the Department of Speech (now the Department of Communication). The building is named for Robert Hall Bingham, an 1857 graduate of UNC. Bingham was a Civil War veteran and an educator, serving as headmaster of the Bingham School in Hillsborough, which was founded by his grandfather. Bingham was known as an especially enthusiastic alumnus. He was a prolific speaker and writer on education, race, and the Civil War. His article "An Ex-Slave Holder's View of the Negro Question in the South," published in Harper's in 1900, outlined his beliefs in white supremacy and racial purity and argued against African American suffrage.
The building now known as Carolina Hall was named Saunders Hall from 1922 to 2015. Completed as part of the campus expansion in the early 1920s, Saunders was built as a classroom building, originally housing the Departments of History, Economics, and Commerce. It was named for William L. Saunders, an 1854 graduate of UNC who served in the Confederate army during the Civil War. After the war he worked as a newspaper editor, North Carolina secretary of state, and historian, compiling the ten-volume Colonial Records of North Carolina (1886-90). He was a member of the UNC Board of Trustees from 1878 until his death in 1891. When he was selected as the namesake for the new building on campus, he was called an "ardent friend of the University and one of the master minds of North Carolina." He also led the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.
In the late 1860s Saunders and other conservative leaders in North Carolina were angered by the multiracial coalition that had elected a Republican government and approved a new state constitution that, for the first time, gave every man, regardless of race, the right to vote. Saunders helped organize Ku Klux Klan groups throughout the state to intimidate, threaten, and in some cases murder opposing politicians and supporters. Saunders and his allies forced the impeachment of Governor William Holden in 1871 after the governor tried to suppress Klan violence in the state. Saunders's leadership of the Ku Klux Klan was cited by the board of trustees when the building was named in his honor.
By the late twentieth century students at UNC-Chapel Hill were frequently calling for Saunders's role in the Klan to be acknowledged by the university and the building renamed. In 2014 a coalition of students from the Real Silent Sam Coalition, the Black Student Movement, the Campus Y, and other organizations organized the largest protests yet around Saunders Hall. Students and faculty from the Department of Geography, which was housed in the building, were especially active. The students called for the building to be renamed Hurston Hall in honor of author Zora Neale Hurston, who visited UNC in the late 1930s as a guest of playwright Paul Green.
In a rare acknowledgment of poor judgment by their predecessors, the UNC-Chapel Hill Board of Trustees voted in 2015 to remove Saunders's name from the building. Instead of following the students' requests to name the building for Hurston, the trustees selected Carolina Hall as the new name. Student activists were further frustrated when the trustees immediately followed the action by declaring a sixteen-year moratorium on renaming buildings on campus. In 2016 the university installed an exhibit in the lobby of Carolina Hall that examines the history of Saunders and his allies in the late nineteenth-century white supremacy campaigns in North Carolina.
Chase Hall opened in fall 1965 to serve as a dining hall for the growing population of students on South Campus. With a modern design and bright furnishings, the building was impressive, but the cafeteria service was plagued with problems from the start. Despite plans to serve up to 5,000 students per meal, customers complained of long lines and food that was inadequate in both quality and quantity. After the cafeteria received a "C" sanitation rating in 1967, students formed Project RETCH (Refuse to Eat Trash in Chase Hall) to lobby for better food and service. Yet problems persisted -a 2001 Alumni Review article called Chase "a metaphor for nearly everything students dislike about campus food." The original Chase was torn down in 2005 to make room for two new campus buildings. The Chase Hall name moved to Ram's Head Plaza.
The building was named for former UNC president Harry Woodburn Chase. Serving as president from 1919 to 1930, Chase, a native of Massachusetts, presided over a period of significant growth and change at the university. Building on plans started by his predecessor, Edward Kidder Graham, Chase helped develop Carolina into a modern research university. Under his leadership the university expanded graduate education, more than doubled the size of the faculty, and launched an extensive building campaign that would include new dorms, classrooms on Polk Place, and major new buildings, such as Kenan Stadium and Wilson Library. Chase also stood up for the university in the mid-1920s when the North Carolina legislature proposed a bill that would limit the teaching of evolution in state-supported schools. Using language that would inspire university responses to future ideological battles, Chase wrote to the legislature about the importance of academic freedom and the necessity of faculty being able to teach without interference from the state. Chase left Carolina in 1930 to take over as president of the University of Illinois, staying there for just a few years before going to New York University, where he spent a long tenure as president to finish his career.
Hill Hall was completed in 1907 as a new library, replacing separate spaces for the libraries of the Dialectic and Philanthropic Societies, and a small university collection. Its construction marked a step in the university's evolution into a research institution, based on the model of German universities that trained specialists as faculty and emphasized the discovery of new knowledge. Industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie provided the funds, with the requirement that the university match his gift to provide for upkeep and expansion. When it opened, the Carnegie Library Building, as it was originally called, had 45,822 volumes, with room to accommodate 200,000. The UNC Bureau of Extension and the University of North Carolina Press had its beginning in this building until they outgrew their space there. In 1930, following the completion of the new University Library (now Wilson Library), the Department of Music moved into the Carnegie Building. The department added an auditorium and an organ. Durham philanthropist John Sprunt Hill and his family funded the new construction and renovations, and the university renamed the building in their honor.
John Sprunt Hill was an 1889 university graduate who built a fortune in banking, insurance, and real estate. He served as a university trustee for many years. In addition to his support for the music department, Hill donated $5,000 to the library to be used for collecting historical and literary material about North Carolina, an enterprise now known as the North Carolina Collection. During the 1920s Hill built the Carolina Inn and later donated it to the university, stipulating that its profits support the North Carolina Collection.
After a major renovation, the auditorium reopened in 2017 as the James and Susan Moeser Auditorium. It was named in recognition of former chancellor James C. Moeser and his wife, Susan. Moeser, who was chancellor from 2000 to 2008, served in administrative positions at various universities and as chancellor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. During his tenure at Carolina, Moeser oversaw campus-transforming construction funded through a bond referendum and the successful Carolina First fund-raising campaign; he also oversaw the creation of the Carolina Covenant. Susan Moeser is a member of the music department faculty. Both Moesers are concert organists.
Dedicated in 1912, Caldwell was built to house the UNC School of Medicine. It is named for Joseph Caldwell, the university's first president. Designed as a state-of-the-art medical facility, it included laboratories and classrooms. In the basement it also contained pens for animals, including dogs, rabbits, guinea pigs, and mice, that students used for experiments. Known informally as Carolina's Zoo, the animal pens were a source of controversy. Students in nearby dorms complained about the noise, and the facilities hastened the tragic end of the first two Rameses mascots. Rameses I, the first live ram mascot at UNC, was purchased in the fall of 1924. He died in Caldwell Hall the following summer, believed to have been overheated in the closed facilities. In 1926 Rameses II died after medical students drew blood from him.
By the late 1930s the School of Medicine had outgrown the facilities in Caldwell Hall, and the building was converted to be used for classrooms. During World War II it served as the headquarters of the U.S. Navy pre-flight school. Renovated and expanded in the 1970s and 1980s, Caldwell now serves as the home of the Departments of Philosophy and Women's Studies.
Joseph Caldwell (1773-1835) came to UNC in 1796 to teach mathematics. He was a graduate of Princeton, where he also qualified for the ministry. He became UNC's first president in 1804 and served to 1812 but afterward remained on the faculty. The trustees asked him to take on the presidency again in 1817, and he served until his death in 1835. Caldwell not only labored to build academic programs, using his own funds to purchase books and astronomical equipment, but also was tireless in raising money and support for the new university. During his tenures UNC completed South Building, added a floor to Old East, and constructed Old West and Person Hall.
With basketball growing in popularity following the 1957 national championship, UNC decided in the early 1960s to build a new arena. Completed in 1965, Carmichael Auditorium, as it was then named, was the home of the Tar Heel basketball team for more than twenty years. Originally seating 8,000 fans (later expanded to more than 10,000), the notoriously loud venue played host to many of Coach Dean Smith's greatest teams, including the 1981-82 national champions. Built along South Road next to Woollen Gym -the previous location of home basketball games -Carmichael was completed in time for the October 12, 1965, University Day celebrations. Lectures and concerts were also held there, including a performance by the Supremes just a month after it opened. In the fall of 1982 Carmichael hosted a week of lectures by evangelist Billy Graham.
The first men's basketball game in Carmichael was played on December 4, 1965, a UNC victory over William and Mary. By the 1980s the men's basketball team was in need of an even larger venue and moved to the Dean Smith Center once it was completed. Carmichael underwent an extensive renovation in 2010 and was renamed Carmichael Arena when it reopened. Carmichael currently hosts Tar Heel volleyball, gymnastics, wrestling, and women's basketball.
The building is named for William D. Carmichael Jr., a university administrator in the 1940s and 1950s. A native of Durham, Carmichael graduated from UNC in 1921 and was a captain of the basketball team. He had a successful career on Wall Street before returning to Chapel Hill in 1939 to serve as controller for the UNC System (coincidentally, he succeeded Charles T. Woollen, namesake of the building Carmichael Auditorium was built to replace). Carmichael, a successful fund-raiser, was named acting head of the university after Frank Porter Graham left in 1949 and was considered a possible successor to Graham. He was later named vice president and finance officer of the UNC System, serving in that role until his death in 1961.