Carolina Inn (Chapel Hill, N.C.)

Visitors to Chapel Hill in the years around 1920 faced a troubling dilemma. Hotel accommodations were scarce, and when the privately owned and sadly dilapidated University Inn was gutted by fire in November 1921, the town lost its only provider of short-term commercial lodging.

The following year, University of North Carolina alumnus and trustee John Sprunt Hill proposed to alleviate the accommodations shortage by forming the Carolina Club Inn Inc., a non-stock corporation devoted to securing funds for a combination alumni center, faculty club, and hotel for the use of the University community. As part of this plan, approved by the Board of Trustees on 2 November 1922, Hill offered to donate the old Graves property located at the intersection of Cameron Avenue and Pittsboro Road, former site of the eighteenth-century New Hope Chapel, from which Chapel Hill took its name.

The Carolina Club Inn corporation met with little success. Despite the widely acknowledged need for hotel rooms in Chapel Hill, few alumni bought the subscriptions required for Club membership, the corporation's main projected source of income. Hill refused to abandon the project, however, and investing some $200,000 of his own resources, financed the building of the Carolina Inn himself.

Construction commenced in the spring of 1923 and was finished by December of the following year. Designed by Arthur C. Nash of the T.C. Atwood firm and erected by contractor H.L. Smith of Durham, the original red-brick, Southern Colonial style Inn was situated at the corner of Cameron Avenue and Columbia Street and contained fifty-two bedrooms, a dining room, a ballroom, a lobby, and several parlors. A covered walkway connected the Inn proper to a white clapboard cafeteria, formerly the Graves residence and later a boarding house, which had been moved from the north end of the property to an area just south of the new building.

For more than a decade after its opening in December 1924, the Carolina Inn was run as a private business and was open to the general public, rather than only to University alumni and staff, as initially planned. The Inn's first manager, Irving Gattman, oversaw operations for owner John Sprunt Hill until 1930, when he was replaced by Annie Martin, who leased the Inn from Hill for a portion of her five-year tenure. Under Gattman and Martin, the Inn provided much-needed lodging for visitors to Chapel Hill and to the University. It also became a popular meeting place for conferences, conventions, civic groups, and the community at large, a function it would retain for the next sixty years.

Hill's dream of providing the University with its own hotel materialized in 1935, when he and his family donated the entire Carolina Inn property to the University. An inscribed plaque hanging in the Inn's lobby sums up their intentions: This gift affords a cheerful inn for visitors, a town hall for the state, and a home for returning sons and daughters of alma mater. In a letter to Governor J.C.B. Ehringhaus, dated 5 June 1935, Hill described the Inn and continued:

It is our desire that this property be held in trust by the Trustees of the University of North Carolina, and the income therefrom used: First: For the maintenance and upkeep of the above mentioned property. Second: For the maintenance and support of the University Library, and especially for the support of that collection of books and papers known as the North Caroliniana, a part of the University Library heretofore partially endowed by us.

With the Hill family gift, the Carolina Inn became a part of the University campus and its workers University employees. Its services were not, however, reserved exclusively for the University community. The Inn continued--and continues--to welcome members of the general public seeking food, lodging, or both.

Haywood Duke, hired as Inn manager by UNC to replace Annie Martin in 1935, turned operations over two years later to Leigh Skinner, who served until 1948. During Skinner's tenure, the Carolina Inn more than doubled in size, thanks to a Public Works Administration grant and to the sale of revenue bonds. In 1939, the old wooden cafeteria on the south side of the property was removed and a new complex, designed by architect George Watts Carr and stylistically matched to the original Inn building, was erected in its place.

The addition included forty-two bedrooms, a new cafeteria with a seating capacity of two hundred, a faculty club room, and offices for the General Alumni Association, which had occupied a suite in the Inn since 1936. The expansion also provided long-term housing facilities for faculty, staff, and married graduate students--namely, a wing of two-room apartments attached to the Inn and twelve three-room flats, the Bryan apartments, in a separate structure to the southeast.)

A second expansion, accompanied by changes in the existing buildings, took place between 1969 and 1972. Forty-five new bedrooms and a large banquet hall were added, the kitchen expanded and modernized, and the lobby divided into meeting rooms. The Inn's front entrance, which had faced Cameron Avenue since 1924, was moved to Pittsboro Street, and the 1939 cafeteria, entirely remodelled, became a lobby for the new entrance. The additions included a new cafeteria, as well, erected on the Pittsboro Street side of the complex and decorated in 1971 with animals from the Circus Parade, a wood carving made in the 1940s by Carl Boettcher and formerly displayed in the Circus Bar of the Monogram Club.

At the same time, the Bryan Apartments underwent a transformation, albeit of function rather than form. In 1969 the building was taken out of residential use and turned over to the General Alumni Association, which had outgrown its old quarters in the Carolina Inn. Known thereafter as Alumni House, the building housed the offices of the Alumni Association until 1993, when they were transferred to the George Watts Hill Alumni Center.

By the late 1980s, the Carolina Inn's sixty-year run as Chapel Hill's chief purveyor of hospitality had ended. New hotels and restaurants in the area had begun to draw business away from the Inn, significantly lowering its once-exceptional occupancy rate. An aging building compounded the problem. Lacking the amenities of newer hotels--reliable heating and air conditioning, soundproof rooms, modern plumbing, a swimming pool--the Inn was ill-equipped to survive in the newly competitive market and needed renovations estimated in 1989 at $6.5 million. The Inn's status as an arm of the University made it subject, moreover, to the same salary schedules and purchasing systems as other State agencies, a severe disadvantage with respect to privately-owned competitors.

By fiscal year 1988-1989, the Carolina Inn was operating at a loss of $73,000, a deficit that more than quadrupled the following year. Alarmed, University officials considered three strategies for saving the venerable hotel: seeking legislative relief, including special exemptions to state personnel and purchasing regulations; transferring Inn operations to a non-profit branch of the UNC-CH Foundation; and allowing a private corporation to manage the Inn on the University's behalf.

The first two options proved unworkable. A state budget crisis precluded significant financial input from the legislature, and by May 1990, it had become clear that entrusting the Inn to the UNC-Chapel Hill Foundation, which had no hotel management experience, would put both Inn and Foundation at risk. Only the third option remained, and in March 1991, the University announced that it would hire a private company to manage the Inn.

Bids were accepted in August 1991 and more detailed proposals requested of selected bidders in the fall. A year and a half of deliberations ensued. Finally, in April 1993, the University announced that Doubletree Hotels, Inc., of Phoenix, Ariz., had been selected. The decision was approved by the North Carolina Council of State in May and made effective on 1 July 1993, when Doubletree Hotels received the Inn under a renewable five-year lease from the University.

On 20 November 1994, the Carolina Inn closed for a nine-month, $13.5-million expansion and modernization. Improvements to the Inn had commenced roughly two months earlier with the demolition of Alumni House, which was removed to make way for a new, 56-room wing. Then, with the November closing, a thorough overhaul of the existing buildings, and in particular the original structure, began. The renovations were carried out by general contractor McDevitt Street Bovis of Charlotte, N.C., after plans by the Richmond firm of Glave Newman Anderson.

The project resulted in a total of 185 guest rooms and suites, as well as several formal parlors and executive meeting rooms, an executive lounge, and a restaurant and bar. The cafeteria was eliminated and replaced by the John Sprunt Hill Grand Ballroom. Guests could then enjoy comforts that the Inn in its former state could not offer: exercise facilities; individual climate control, voice mail, and data ports in every guest room; state-of-the-art mechanical systems and plumbing; and an enlarged, upscale restaurant with indoor and patio dining, as well as a buffet line to please the old cafeteria clientele. University administrators and Doubletree Hotels stressed, however, that the modernizations would not deprive the Inn of its old-fashioned charm.

For more information on the architectural history of the Carolina In, see Archibald Henderson, The Campus of the First State University (Chapel Hill, 1949) and Rachel Long, Building Notes: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1993), both available in the North Carolina Collection.

Managers of the Carolina Inn and their tenures are listed below.

For John Sprunt Hill:

• 1924 - 1930 : Irving Gattman
• 1930 - 1935 : Annie Martin

For the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill:

• 1935 - 1937 : Haywood Duke
• 1937 - 1948 : Leigh Skinner
• 1948 - 1961 : Livingston Bertram Rogerson
• 1962 - 1980 : Carl Moser
• 1980 - 1984 : William Milling, Director of Hotel and Conference Services
• 1980 - 1988 : Gene Walton, General Manager
• 1985 - 1987 : David Yawars, Director of Hotel and Conference Services
• 1987 - 1989 : Edward Rehkopf, Director of Hotel and Conference Services
• 1989 - 1991 : Edward Rehkopf, General Manager
• 1992 - 1993 : Margaret Skinner, Acting General Manager

For Doubletree Hotels, Inc.:

• 1993 - 1994 : Gary Walton
• 1994 - : Terry Murphy

From the guide to the Carolina Inn Records, 1843-1995, (bulk 1950-1995), (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Library. University Archives.)