Thanks to our partners at the Chapel Hill Historic Society, DigitalNC is pleased to announce nine new maps are now available online! The maps depict Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and the rest of Orange County in stunning detail. As a gestalt, this collection demonstrates the wide variety of purposes different maps can serve. They range in topic from geologic surveys to housing development promotional material, and reflect the county’s growth from the early nineteenth century to Chapel Hill’s bicentennial celebration in 1993!
A great example of the history on display in this collection is the map of the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery, located on UNC Chapel Hill’s campus. The cemetery was created alongside the nascent university in the late eighteenth century, and has served Orange County’s deceased since it’s creation. The map of the grounds displays how the cemetery was used differently through the centuries, splitting the grounds into distinct phases of interment. You can see how the cemetery’s plots became denser and smaller as years passed and the cemetery’s available real estate became sparser and more exclusive. Eventually, large family plots became tighter packed and more individualized, and the space allotted between plots grew smaller and tighter in order to offer more plots to interested parties. This pattern of interment demonstrates how the cemetery grew from an unfortunate necessity to a place where alumni and faculty were literally (and metaphorically) dying to get into!
You can find this map, along with many other (less macabre) examples of Orange County history online now at DigitalNC here. Interested in learning more about Chapel Hill’s history? Visit our partners at the Chapel Hill Historic Society online at their website here, or explore their collection on DigitalNC online here. Thanks again to our partners at the Chapel Hill Historic Society for making these maps available!
