University of North Carolina Campus and Coker Arboretum: Early Landscapes | Chapel Hill, North Carolina

In planning an annual meeting based in the Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh area, organizers will want to consider a tour of Chapel Hill’s historic university campus as well as a visit to Society co-founder William Lanier Hunt’s home base at the Coker Arboretum and the North Carolina Botanical Garden (NCBG). After all, along with NCBG’s intrinsic plant and design interest, this is where Hunt, Flora Ann Bynum, and John B. Flowers III had a series of conversations between 1979 and 1982 that led to the birth of the Southern Garden History Society.

Just like the creation of the University of Georgia (see previous posts), the establishment of the University of North Carolina immediately postdated the Revolution. Following a General Assembly charter in 1789, the university’s trustees chose an Orange County crossroads location allowing approximately equal access from all corners of the former colony. A bit ironically, given the recent break from Great Britain, the village’s name came from a former Church of England chapel located on a prominent knoll, the spot being known as New Hope Chapel Hill.

A 1795 map shows the chapel’s location along with adjacent village lots, springs and streams, and the intriguing term “Ornamental ground” being used for an almost ten-acre space immediately southeast of the first university construction site.* The founders quickly engaged local builder James Patterson, a planter and UNC land donor, to erect the first UNC structure. Completed in 1793, it ultimately would be termed “Old East.” As was typical across the South, enslaved laborers were responsible for most of the actual work on the brick structure that was initially only two stories high.  

Under near continual enlargement and repair over the coming years, Old East was complemented in 1814 by South Building, completed in 1814. and in 1823 by a building to its west, ultimately to be tagged (not surprisingly) “Old West.” Between them was a well that would become widely recognized for symbolizing the University of North Carolina, while collectively these structures would form a small campus still seen by many as the heart of UNC. Unlike nascent days, however, as the nineteenth century progressed school authorities could get guidance and construction management aid from such recognized architects as William Nichols and Alexander Jackson Davis, the pair also assisting with campus landscape design oversight.

In addition, UNC leaders welcomed grounds layout ideas from faculty members such as natural sciences professor Elisha Mitchell, a Connecticut native and Yale graduate. During the period when South and West Buildings were under construction, for example, Mitchell developed a formal plan featuring an orderly arrangement of trees and paths set within stone boundary walls, stone walls continuing to be signature elements of this segment of the campus.

Readers of the State Botanical Garden of Georgia post may recall that UGA’s first botanical garden dated to 1833, though the four-acre property fell victim to funding cuts just over twenty years later. At UNC, however, students of botany and allied sciences had to wait until 1903 for something similar, this being when William Lanier Hunt’s mentor William Chambers Coker began setting out the arboretum bearing his name mentioned in paragraph one. Curiously, though, there is reference to a botanical garden at the Coker site a half century earlier in a “Picturesque plan” prepared by A. J. Davis in the 1850s and used to illustrate this post.** Here east of the campus can be seen a “Botanic Garden,” complete with paths, located south of the “Episcopal Church” (Chapel of the Cross) and the president’s house. It included not only today’s Coker property but also extended beyond East Cameron Avenue (then termed Chatham Street) into an area that now includes four residence halls. The author continues to research the plantings that might have been established here in the pre-Coker period said to have then been “a 5.5-acre area of boggy, livestock-grazing meadow” for faculty livestock and nothing like the A. J. Davis depiction.***

Another half-century would pass before Coker’s arboretum (and a student oasis) would be complemented by a large-scale botanical garden begun in the 1950s on the outskirts of the UNC campus. Now totaling seven-hundred acres, it owes part of its expansion to a donation of one-hundred acres by our own Bill Hunt. We anticipate that a future post will take a closer look at the NCBG site, along with a discussion of Raleigh’s JC Raulston Arboretum and the landscape architecture program at N. C. State University.

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*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_University_of_North_Carolina_at_Chapel_Hill#/media/File:A_Plan_of_the_Situation_of_Ye_University_University_of_North_Carolina_Chapel_Hill_1795.jpg

**The term “Picturesque plan” is quoted from: https://www.tclf.org/landscapes/university-north-carolina-chapel-hill

***For details on Coker, see: https://ncbg.unc.edu/2019/05/19/william-chambers-coker-1872-1953/