"This is a beautiful place indeed. The main college buildings are 3 in number each 3 story high coloured yellow and surrounded with neat terraces of earth thrown up and platted down with grass . . . . They are all situated in a beautiful oak & poplar grove, checkered off with splendid white gravel walks, set out in shrubbery, and the whole, I suppose about 20 or more acres surrounded with a stone wall neatly put up."

-- Zebulon B. Vance, Governor of North Carolina, 1862-1865, 1877-1879, on the University of North Carolina in the 1850s

 

Source: Letter from Zebulon B. Vance to Martha E. Weaver, August 12, [1851]. The Papers of Zebulon Baird Vance. Volume one. Raleigh: State Department of Archives and History, 1963, p. 4.

Image Source: Clement Dowd, Life of Zebulon Vance. Charlotte, N.C.: Observer Printing and Publishing House, 1897. Frontispiece.