University of North Carolina Papers

University of North Carolina Papers

1757-1935


Collection Excerpt

"The University of North Carolina was chartered by the state's General Assembly in 1789. Its first student was admitted in 1795. The governing body of the University, from its founding until 1932, was a forty-member Board of Trustees elected by the General Assembly. The Board met twice a year; at other times the business of the University was carried on by the Board's secretary-treasurer and by the presiding professor (called president beginning in 1804). Other faculty members later assumed the responsibilities of registrar and bursar. The administrative structure of the University remained essentially the same until the twentieth century. The collection consists of routine administrative correspondence and miscellaneous financial papers of the University of North Carolina as well as miscellaneous student and faculty records. Papers prior to 1874 are mainly those of the Secretary-Treasurer of the Board of Trustees; post-1874 papers are largely those of the President of the University. Twenty-three letterpress volumes contain the correspondence of Presidents Alderman and Venable, 1898-1904. The records also contain a number of early plats and other documents pertaining to University lands. Also included are numerous papers related to the University Normal School, a summer program for public school teacher training that began in 1877. The records also contain the correspondence, regulations and pay records of the World War I Student Army Training Corps. There is also a group of documents collected by President Swain for a proposed history of the University and a partial narrative written by Swain. The records in this group constitute most of the surviving eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early twentieth-century records of the University. Individuals figuring prominently include Edwin Anderson Alderman; Kemp P. Battle; Joseph Caldwell; Robert H. Chapman; Harry Woodburn Chase; James Smiley Gillespie; Edward Kidder Graham; Charles Wilson Harris; Elisha Mitchell; Charles Phillips; Solomon Pool; Marvin Hendrix Stacy; David L. Swain; F. P. Venable; and George Tayloe Winston."

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