“Viewpoints” is a place on Chapelboro where local people are encouraged to share their unique perspectives on issues affecting our community. If you’d like to contribute a column on an issue you’re concerned about, interesting happenings around town, reflections on local life — or anything else — send a submission to viewpoints@wchl.com.

 

Help Us Preserve Chapel Hill’s History and Make It Accessible to All

 

A perspective from Richard Ellington

 

For almost 60 years, the Chapel Hill Historical Society has been exploring, documenting and preserving the history of the Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and neighboring communities for future generations. We carry out our mission through our educational programs, reference collections and archives, publications, museum displays, walking tours, and assistance with a variety of research and informational requests – services we offer the public at no-cost. We’ve been able to offer our services and programs cost-free due to the generous support of our members, proceeds from book sales, and occasional grants; we don’t receive any direct financial support from our local governments.

Despite the challenges that we and many other non-profits face in the post-COVID environment, we’re pleased that we continue to be a vibrant organization. Indeed, over the last three years, we’ve expanded our reach into the community with both in-person and recorded Zoom programs; the introduction of downtown walking tours; grants and projects to support a fuller engagement about our collective histories, including communities and people whose stories were often overlooked; and exhibits about our town’s history at the Orange County Historical Museum. The latter fills a long-needed void since the closure of the Chapel Hill Museum many years ago.

We have several new initiatives in the works, including a Chapel Hill trivia night we will be co-hosting with Epilogue Books this summer, pop-up exhibits at the Seymour Center, and the resumption of our Community Treasures awards this fall. These awards honor long-time area residents who, often behind the scenes, have made our community a better place to live. Our website (https://chapelhillhistoricalsociety.org/) provides more information on our activities.

Notwithstanding these successes, we find ourselves at a critical crossroad and are reaching out to the community for help. Most critically, we need to find a new home for our extensive reference and archival collection. Although the Town of Chapel Hill provides no direct funding for our operations, it has for several years allowed us to use space at the Chapel Hill Public Library to house our collections. Unfortunately, the library has determined that it needs that space and has told us we must remove our reference collections and archives from the library by the end of this calendar year.

Our collections are sizeable and include approximately 800 reference books, 2500 photos and prints, 40 boxes of vertical files, and bound volumes of the Chapel Hill Weekly and Chapel Hill Newspaper from 1923-2011. These materials are an invaluable resource for folks looking to find out about the general history of our town as well as more specific research items. These collections are especially important given that the Chapel Hill Library does not have a dedicated collection about the town’s history – so we really are the sole repository of this type of information.

We have been searching for an alternative home for our collections without success. In the interim, we’re renting storage space, including a climate-controlled space for the newspapers, but this isn’t an optimal solution as it doesn’t provide access to our materials by the public.

We also recognize that to remain vibrant, we need to expand our membership base across the community. It’s the support of members that allows us to keep expanding our offerings and will help us offset the increased costs we are facing with the loss of our space at the library.

You can help in three ways:

  • First, if you know of any possible space for our collections, please let us know! You can get in touch with us via email at chhistoricalsociety@gmail.com or phone at 919-929-1793. Given our limited budget, we are fairly constrained in what we can afford, but we would welcome the community’s help in finding a new home for our collections – ideally, approximately 750-1000 square feet that would provide public access to these materials.
  • Second, if you aren’t a member of the Historical Society, please consider joining! As an incentive, we will be offering new members who join between June 1 and September 1 at the $100 donor level or higher, a copy of our published book, The Campus at Chapel Hill: 225 Years of Architecture while supplies last (note: this $30 value is not deductible for tax purposes). For information about membership levels and to join, see this link: https://chapelhillhistoricalsociety.org/join/.
  • Finally, if you share our concern that Chapel Hill needs a space where the public can research and learn about our town’s history, please share your views with our local officials.

We look forward to many more years of celebrating and preserving our local history!

 


“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.