First of three parts


The Civil War, Reconstruction and the closure of UNC from 1871 to 1875 combined to create a protracted non- growth period in Chapel Hill marked by economic decline and loss of population. Even with improved economic conditions, the village's 1880 population was 1,022 and UNC student body was 191.

Thirty years later, slow economic recovery brought those figures to only 1,991 persons and 802 students.

The construction of a number of large and quality residences on West Franklin Street was one bright feature of this long, depressed period. Local investment funds fueled expansion on the north side, while funds brought by "refugees," individuals or families trying to escape the adverse conditions of the Civil War and the post-war in eastern North Carolina, were a main factor on the south side.

However, this urban growth was confined to the first two western blocks, from Columbia Street to Mallette Street. The remainder of West Franklin, from Mallette Street to Merritt Mill Road, gradually evolved as a main black neighborhood. By the mid-1920s, both sides of West Franklin there were lined with black residences, businesses and churches.

Growth on the south side of the first two blocks got under way in 1845 with Dr. Johnston Blakely Jones' purchase of a rectangular tract of four acres that stretched along West Franklin from near the present Baptist Church (built in 1923) and eastward to near Cameron Avenue. The western half of the tract was bought and built upon in 1851. Soon thereafter Jones built his own home on the eastern half.

Both houses changed hands during and after the Civil War, sold mainly to prosperous "refugee" buyers. One of them, Harriett "Miss Hattie" Cole of Wilmington, bought the eastern house in 1873 and lived in it for 43 years, a West Franklin ownership record. The handsome house, which was set back from the street, featured a two-story central unit with traditional pillared front porch and two wings. The rear of the lot contained flower and vegetable gardens, a huge grape arbor, a chicken yard and two cow pastures.

Miss Hattie shared the house with her deaf, spinster sister Catherine and her nephew, James Taylor, who was retired from a banking career. Overseen by Miss Hattie, a full-time black cook, maid and yardman were needed for a lifestyle better than most Chapel Hill families could afford. In spite of her short figure, hair pulled up in a tight knot and plain manner, Miss Hattie came from a proud line of UNC and North Carolina notables and was kin to the Empress Eugenie of France's Second Empire. Dr. Isaac Taylor, former dean of the UNC School of Medicine, and his currently famous popular musician son, James Taylor, were additions to her line. She was a generous benefactor of the Methodist Church.

Beset by old age and poor health and her sister's death, Miss Hattie sold her house and part of her land in 1915 to the Town of Chapel Hill to build a new public school for grades one to 11. She and her nephew moved to Morganton, where she died in 1921 at age 94. Her nephew died in Shanghai, China, while on an around-the-world cruise

Stripped of it wings, the Cole house was moved several hundred feet eastward to near Franklin Street. New owners used it as a boarding house, then as an apartment-rooming house called the Hill House. Bought by the Baptist Church after World War II, it housed Chapel Hill's first public library from 1958 to 1968 despite the drawback of leaking roofs. Once the library was moved into its new building at the corner of East Franklin and Boundary streets in 1968, the old building was torn down.

The only other house of substance on the south side of West Franklin was the one built by Jones. It was probably a traditional two-story, large, boxy wooden structure. Owned by a succession of well-known people, it was later dressed up with a front porch and Victorian adornments, possibly in the 1890s, that gave it a greater air of importance. It was owned by Seaton Barbee, member of a prosperous local merchant family (1873) and Joseph Harris, editor of the short-lived Chapel Hill Ledger (1878). Baptist minister Needham Byron Cobb, the father of UNC geology professor Collier Cobb, lived in it while awaiting the completion of the Baptist parsonage across the street.

It was then owned by UNC professor of English Thomas Hume, who during his student days at the University of Virginia was one of the founders of the first YMCA in America (1887), and Milton Hogan, cashier at the Bank of Chapel Hill (1916). Caesar Cone, a wealthy UNC alumnus and philanthropist from Greensboro, bought it early in the Depression and rented it to Zeta Beta Tau, UNC's first Jewish fraternity. He sold it to UNC in 1935.

A new Chapel Hill High School was built in 1936 on South Columbia Street where the UNC School of Pharmacy is now, but that burned in 1942. A replacement high school of Georgian-style architecture built on the combined Cole and Hume-Cone properties facing West Franklin had to wait until three years after World War II for completion. The Hume-Cone house was retained for use as the school's administrative annex.

In response to explosive population growth in the 1960s, the town sold the West Franklin school property and replaced the school with a spacious suburban campus on Homestead Road. The new school was ready in 1966.

The West Franklin school property was sold for $1 million. Plans were set for the Central Carolina Bank quarters, stores and office space and the pair of seven-story private dormitory towers of University Square. Several vestiges of the past survived the bull-dozer onslaught. An old house abutting Mallette Street was soon replaced by a Hardees hamburger chain store. Preservationists fought unsuccessfully to keep the badly deteriorated old McDade House on the West Franklin side of the Baptist Church from removal. The church owned it and used its space for a planned expansion.

Sources: This column draws heavily from a magnificent computerized compilation, "Occupants and Structures of Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, North Carolina at 5-year Intervals, 1793-1998" by retired Chapel Hill engineer Bernard Lee Bryant Jr. Each five-year listing of details is prefaced by a general summary of trends and major events and changes. Bound copies of this extraordinary source material are on deposit with the Chapel Hill Historical Society, Chapel Hill Public Library and North Carolina Collection in UNC-CH Wilson Library. "Chapel Hill: An Illustrated History, 1985," by James Vickers is still the best town history, strong in individual identifications and family relationships.