“The university at Chapel Hill serves as a symbol for unity in aspiration as do few other institutions in the country . . . North Carolina was so long in ignorance, so long in poverty! Its people today are restless in the consciousness of their former stagnation. Chapel Hill is no longer remote, embodies their aspiration that the vale may become the mountain (if, indeed, already it has not!) – that the inconsiderable people between the two aristocracies [South Carolina and Virginia] may yet accomplish a greater destiny than either.

-- Jonathan Daniels, author and Editor of the News & Observer, 1939

 

Source: North Carolina: A Guide to the Old North State. Compiled and written by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Federal Works Agency Work Projects Administration. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 1939, p. 6.