The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill Holiday House Tour

The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill at the Horace Williams House

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The Preservation Society of Chapel Hill's 2006 Holiday House Tour
Saturday, December 9, 2006 and Sunday, December 10, 2006 - 1 - 5 p.m.

Rosemary Street & Tenney Circle

Village lore indicates that Rosemary Street is named for two ladies, Rose and Mary, who lived on opposite ends of what was, at the time, one of two residential streets in the village. In his memoir of growing up in Chapel Hill at the turn of the century, William Meade Prince explains, “Most of the better homes, where the Faculty members lived, and our more prosperous citizens, were on Front Street, or Franklin.” Although his own family lived on Rosemary, or “Back Street,” he assures his readers that their “social status . . . was not impaired . . . . Chapel Hill has ever stood for the things of the spirit and the real virtues, with little emphasis on material values and keeping up with the Joneses.”

The history of the land that now comprises Tenney Circle is also in part legend. In his history of Chapel Hill, James Vickers notes that Benjamin Yeargin, after donating 50 acres of land for the campus, “retained possession of property extending north and east to Bolin Creek containing slave quarters and a house he built about 1791 on what is now Tenney Circle.” Archibald Henderson, in The Campus of the First State University, describes the land that was later developed as Tenney Circle as idyllic and remote. He writes, “Through the spacious plantation of Benjamin Yeargin, later owned by Oregon Tenney, overrunning the steep slopes from the village to Bowlin’s Creek, wound a main-traveled country road. In the valley to the west of this road stood an old farm house in the second decade of the last century where James K. Polk, William H. Battle, and other lusty youths who delighted equally in long walks and savoury fare were served thrice daily.” Paul Shearin, a historian writing in the Chapel Hill News, notes that John B. Tenney owned land in this area from at least 1840 and continues, “Upon the death of John Tenney in 1892, the ownership of his land passed to his son, Oregon B. Tenney. The main Tenney home stood near the center of the present Tenney Circle, and a smaller house apparently used by the Tenney farm overseer stood on the present site of [300 Tenney Circle]. In 1929 this house was moved to the adjacent lot and is now occupied by Mrs. Jane Tenney Gilbert, daughter of Oregon B. Tenney.”

We know for certain that in 1922, the Tenney family employed Dean G. M. Braune of the UNC School of Engineering to survey and design the Tenney Circle Development. A Chapel Hill Weekly author in March 1923 cites a building boom in every part of Chapel Hill; the author comments that, “One professor who considers building on the Tenney tract hesitates about it because he says it is so far from college that he will have to buy an automobile. He does not see how he can raise the money to build a house and buy an automobile at the same time.”

Gutters on Tenney Circle

The neighborhood landscape retains many traces of its history. The brick gutters were created by local mason Jess Kirkland as part of the original development. The concrete street signs were part of the award-winning 1951 effort of Chapel Hill’s Junior Chamber of Commerce to post street signs in a village that had not had them. The large open area between 325 and 305 Tenney Circle was once part of W. C. Coker’s apple orchards. Mrs Johnsie Burnham once owned the land and lived in the house on the western edge of the property. She sold the land to Roland Giduz, a long-time Tenney Circle resident, who maintains it as Burnham Park.

Strolling in Chapel Hill

Chapel Hillians have always been walkers, and it is clear that walking in a university town has a unique symbolism. Kemp Battle’s history of the university suggests that the University of North Carolina began with a walk: “A long procession of people for the first time is marching along the narrow road, afterwards to be widened into a noble avenue. Many of them are clad in the striking, typical insignia of the Masonic Fraternity. . . They march with military tread, because most of them have seen service, many scarred with wounds of horrid war. Their faces are serious, for they feel that they are engaged in a great work. They are proceeding to lay the cornerstone of the first building to be erected on the campus of the first American State University to open its doors.” The first student to arrive at the university, Hinton James, is said to have walked 90 miles to Chapel Hill from Wilmington and had to rest his feet for a week before beginning classes. At commencement exercises and University Day commemorations, scholars dressed in academic regalia still march in stately procession that commemorates the serious pursuits and rich associations of the university’s history.

In a community relatively isolated from the amusements and temptations of larger cities, walking became a form of camaraderie and education in addition to exercise. In her memoir of growing up in Chapel Hill from 1900 to 1921, Jane Toy Coolidge comments, “The popular legend that the whole faculty took talks in the woods together must have had some basis of truth. Certainly they took walks—there was nothing else to do—and there were so few of them that it was possible to do it in a group.” Cornelia Spencer Love came to Chapel Hill in 1917 and, in her memoir, notes, “There are so many beautiful walks in and around Chapel Hill, some in the woods, others out in the countryside.” She comments on the treat of listening to great scholars and storytellers like W.C. Coker or Kemp Battle as they took her over the paths that had been well traveled by generations of students.

In addition to walks for tradition and walks for amusement, there were walks meant to initiate change. In the 1960s, civil rights activists picketed theaters and businesses and organized a “Durham to Chapel Hill Walk for Freedom” to call attention to the need to make public accommodations available to all.

The great joy of living in a university community consists of that blend of change and constancy that come with a transient population committed to the university’s traditions and to freedom of thought.

Robert House, in his memoir of his years as a UNC student from 1912-1916, conjectures, “I think the miracle of falling in love with Chapel Hill comes when you get one of its red grits in your shoe. Chapel Hill then enters your soul to stay.” He goes on to say, “There are virtues in the rapid panorama of country seen from an automobile, but nature, human associations, science, history, poetry in nature need also to be seen, heard, tasted, smelled, and felt close-up. This can be done only on foot... I have explored Chapel Hill for fifty years and I see each day some fresh aspect of its past, its present, and its future. I know when to use the automobile, but I also know on foot what the automobile can never reach.”

We invite you to take this stroll through history, to see our past, present, and future, and to get a little of that red grit in your soles and your soul.

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