Fun Facts About Carrboro

  • Carrboro was founded in 1882, when a spur from the Durham-Greensboro Southern Railway line was extended to link students at the University of North Carolina with the outside world. (The last passenger train to Carrboro ran in 1936, a result of the growing use of automobiles.)
  • The train depot, first named West End, was located one mile from campus, the minimum distance (as mandated by a state law) to keep students as far as possible from “city temptations”.
  • Thomas F. Lloyd built Alberta Mill, the town’s first textile mill, in 1899. The second floor was a hosiery mill in 1902 and then back to a cotton mill. Ten years after it was built, Julian Carr, a Durham tobacco magnate, bought the mill.
  • Carrboro was incorporated in 1911 and named after Carr when he agreed to furnish electricity to town residents from his mill. (The town had been named Venable, in honor of Francis P. Venable, who was president of the University at the time.)
  • The abandoned, dilapidated mill site was rehabilitated as Carr Mill Mall under the Tax Reform Act of 1976. Many of the bricked-in windows were opened and the interior masonry walls, heavy timbers and maple floors were left exposed. Today the mall has restaurants and some great up-scale boutique shops.
  • Carrboro has been referred to as “the Paris of the Piedmont” because of its high concentration of art galleries and related facilities and services. The name originated with Nyle Frank, a UNC student, who picked it up from Chapel Hill Weekly reporter John Martin, after Frank moved to Carrboro.
  • In its Travel Guide on June 18, 2002, USA Today named Carrboro 2nd of “10 great places with arts-filled spaces”.
  • The ArtsCenter, a 21,000 sq.ft. community facility in Carrboro that offers a variety of classes and events in the visual, literary and performing arts, began as a painting class in a loft in 1975. First called The ArtSchool, it adopted its current name in 1986. On April 3, 1996, Joan Baez scheduled a fill-in concert at The ArtsCenter, and tickets to its 350-seat concert hall sold out in an hour.

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