Thursday. May 22, 1SSQ The Tar Hl 1 1
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By Sarah West
Chapel Hill is an historic town in which
every other building seems to have some
sort of historical significance. In spite of
this overcrowded situation, some
"landmarks" do manage to stand out. The
little stucco cottage on the corner of
Franklin and Hillsborough streets is such a
place.
he cottage is interesting notjnerely
because of its legitimate historic value as
the first law school at UNC, but also
because of the famous or creative, and
usually unusual, individuals who have
lived there during its 130-year history.
Unique in appearance, the cottage
perches on the edge of the big corner lot
next to the Delta Delta Delta Sorority house
on Franklin Street. Passers-by may have to
look twice to see it because it is nearly
obscured by the huge oak in front. Upon
looking twice, the house is definitely worth
looking at again. The gargoyles peering
down from the front porch are just one of
the many interesting features of the house.
Inside, one room of the two-room dwelling
is dominated by a large fireplace; the other
by an 8-foot bar complete with mirror.
The bathroom provides the final touch
to the house's distinctive, even quirky, but
ultimately charming personality. The,
bathroom walls are papered with a wide
selection of pictures from pornographic
magazines, as well as some really
interesting posters. . The 1960 Carolina
Symposium poster, done by Al Hirschfield
who is currently the theatrical and film
cartoonist for The New York Times, is up
there, as well as a sign "A Bathroom
Named Desire" which is accompanied by a
promotional picture of Marlon Brando
and Vivien Leigh from the film A Streetcar
Named Desire.
According to John Hoke, who recently
moved out, both the bathroom
"wallpaper" and the gargoyles on the front
porch were added to the house by the
owner, Walter D. Creech, a retired UNC
French professor. Creech bought the
gargoyles when he studied in France. They
are copies of the ones on Notre Dame
cathedral in Paris.
Hoke lived in the house for two years,
continuing a family tradition. Hoke's
father, Robert L. Hoke, lived in the house
in 1943. Father and son both served as
managing editor for The Daily Tar Heel.
Hoke said that getting the chance to live
in the house was a case of being in the right
place at the right time. "I knew my dad had
lived there, and one day when I was driving
past, I noticed people on the front porch
and I drove back to ask them about the
house."
They were moving out. Hoke looked
around, called Creech, and got the house.
He is the most recent in a long line of
people whose residence there seems'
curiously fitting.
The cottage was built around 1846 by
Samuel Field Phillips as a law office and
study. It is referred to as the University's
first law school because students from the
University read law there under Phillips'
supervision.
Phillips was a rather interesting man
the auditor for Governor Vance's
Confederate cabinet, he shocked the
residents of Chapel Hill when he agreed to
serve as Solicitor General on President
Grant's Federal cabinet during
reconstruction. Phillips held this office
under the three presidents following
Grant.
Phillips was also an early advocate of
women's rights when he advocated a
summer normal school at the University in
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Staff photo by John Dresdter
Stucco cottse partkily obscured by trees
...its structure and residents make it unique
1876 an unpopular stand. Fittingly, the
cottage served to house the earliest coeds at
UNC in the early 1920s. One of these coeds
was Elizabeth Lay, who later married Paul
Green. Green taught philosophy and
playwriting at UNC and is the author of
the outdoor drama "The Lost Colony".
Other interesting individuals who have
resided in the house include Dr. "Bully"
Bernard, who taught Greek at the
University in the early 1900s, and who
served as the model for Eugene Gant's
Greek professor in Thomas Wolfe's novel
Look Homeward, Angel. Lynn Riggs, who
wrote the play "Green Grow the Lilacs",
on which Oklahoma! was based, was
another notable resident. Creech has also
lived in the house off and on over the years.
Chapel Mill offers a distinctive experience in summer
By John Behm
There are advantages to staying in Chapel Hill for the
summer You never see 12 inches of snow, for one. Even
better, you can stay out of school without staying away
from it. For three months you can disassociate yourself
from old UNC as much as you want become footloose,
aloof, a stranger to Wilson Library. And then be glad to
return in the fall.
The summer environment in Chapel Hill is
characterized by change change of temperament, change
of style. Even so, the new faces will become the familiar
ones, the new job becomes the routine, the new hangout
becomes the summer haunt.
Some changes are good and some are not The location
next to the post office has tranformed itself from Tello's to
the Rendezvous to an unpaid rent notice to Four Corners,
finally, a place of some worth. Not so assuring was the
change that suddenly happened one day when Clearwater
Lake (or Lake Never-Clear) went from being a rope swing
haven for every fun lover around to a YMCA camp that
charged a couple of dollars to any intruder who dared come
close.
In some cases, the visible changes around Chapel Hill
can be written off to progress or to respectability or to a
search for permanence. In other cases, it's just an inevitable
development brought on by powers far away from this
small town.
Through good and bad change, the constancy of a
frontier that almost every young person believes in will
always be there. In the summer time, that's all that saves
the town from the doldrums. After the longest day, the
hottest day, the most miserable blown-from-over-Carrboro
summer shower, the most miserable mail-order pizza
dinner, there will always be acrowd that dissolves from the
Village Green at 2 a.m. and disappears and reappears
magically all night long, burning through the night from
one apartment pool to the next, skinny-dipping through
life, drinking cold white California wine, promising each
other that this youthful life will always last, hammering
sentiment and youth's quick energy into salient ideas and
morals' that will last a lifetime and always keep us
together we who understand this power and keep us
separate from the rest, who will never know.
There's more free time during the summer to look for the
good things that life has to offer; there are people and
places to love. There's Marietta Lodge, an obscure
encampment off Highway 54, once a fashionable but
under-attended party ground. Now everyone seems to be
equally capable of finding it, having the time of a lifetime,
and leaving with every intention of coming back but being
too muddled to ever remember where it was.
There's the sight of a girl in an Apple Chill Cloggers t
shirt, crying silently and in plain view of thirty other
people when a university-contracted wrecking crew tore
down a house on Pittsboro Street to leave room for parking
and no more room for one of the finest pieces of early 20th
century architecture seen in this town.
There are people who make solar iced tea, there are long
rides at sunset past Long Meadow on the back of a
motorbike, there are places that fill you to the brim with
the happy residue of reminiscences that stick with you like
the old pair of sneakers with broken laces that just can't be
thrown away.
Anyone planning to spend a summer in Chapel Hill
should ignore the inconveniences and social cramps of
high rent and town police count on these eventualities
and give them the distance they deserve. The taste of
Chapel Hill summer at its best, and the best is within
reach, is a quenching throatful of fresh-squeezed
orarjgeade from Colonial Drug after a long afternoon of
baseball at Boshamer. It's a quencher and a satisfier and
more of that than you really need. It should be refreshment,
not depletion, a great wide juicy flavor that extinguishes
any thoughts you may have had that going home for the
summer to work at the local branch of a state bank would
have been the best thing to do after all.
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