CHAPEL HILL, N.C. — The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill ranks as the fifth best public university in the country, but when it opened its doors, there were no students in attendance. 

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill opened its doors for students on Jan. 15, 1795 as the first public university in the nation. 

“You would see North Carolina legislature do two things right at the end of 1789. The first thing they did was they ratified the federal constitution. That was when North Carolina formally became a part of the new United States. And the very next thing they did was they issued a charter for a university,” said Nicholas Graham, the university archivist at UNC-Chapel Hill. 

Graham helps oversee the extensive public collection of artifacts located in the Wilson Special Collections Library, which houses many items of the university's history and more broad history of the state and Southern United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. 

A letter from Hinton James, UNC-Chapel Hill's first student. (Spectrum News 1/Sydney McCoy)

“Researchers come from all over the country to use special collections here,” Graham said. 

Some of the items he oversees include the first documents of the university's founding, like notes from the board of trustees from the 1780s planning where the school would be located and hiring the first professor. 

“It was really a part of a revolutionary era belief that having educated citizens were essential for growing and maintaining a democracy. And so they got to work on that,” Graham said. 

When the school first opened, many buildings were not finished being constructed and no students were enrolled until weeks later, when Hinton James arrived on campus. James later graduated with a degree in civil engineering in the first class in 1798. 

“The campus legend is that he walked all the way from, what's now Pender County, near Wilmington. There's no evidence that he did. There's no evidence that he didn’t,” Graham said. 

Graham says despite the formal opening including the governor, bad weather and slow-traveling news kept students away.

“Some of the earliest records that we have show how they laid out the curriculum…the earliest years were devoted to study of languages. They studied a lot of Greek and Roman classics. Later years, they'd study math, navigation, geography, things that would have been components of a classical liberal arts education. But also, things like navigation and surveying, things that they would use in professions in North Carolina at their time,” Graham said. 

Other documents in the Wilson Special Collections Library archives include lists of items students will be provided with such as tables and bedsteads, although students would need to provide their own candles. 

A map depicting UNC-Chapel Hill's campus from its early days. (Spectrum News 1/Sydney McCoy)

A list of laws and regulations for the student body focused on students' time in prayer, behavior and punishment during its earlier days. 

“I think they were worried that they were to have a bunch of unruly young men. And, you know, many of them away from home for the first time on campus,” Graham said. 

For around the first 100 years, only white men could attend UNC-Chapel Hill. Women were allowed to attend the school for the first time in the 1890s. Women who attended the university had different rules than men for around 80 years, and African American students were allowed to be enrolled at the school in the mid-1950s, after losing a lawsuit. 

“It was really 160 years later before [the] university was fully open to all students from North Carolina,” Graham said. 

While some buildings, including Old East, built in the 1790s and a national landmark as the first public university building in the U.S., still stand tall, the campus has changed with the times and the needs of the state. 

“It mainly grew toward Franklin Street for its first century, but continued to grow to a decent size before the Civil War. After the Civil War [UNC-Chapel Hill] grew more slowly after that. But it really in the 20th century, that's when [the] university really began to expand into a modern research university,” Graham said. 

Today, the school has more than 20,000 undergraduate students and has 250 degrees across all of its programs — much different from its beginning 230 years ago. 

“This was specifically, for the people of North Carolina, specifically for educating future leaders and future citizens of North Carolina,” Graham said. 

Graham says he believes the university's biggest accomplishments include the majority of undergraduate students being from North Carolina and the university's global impacts for its research. Multiple political leaders have also attended UNC-Chapel Hill, including 32 North Carolina governors. 

The university's Wilson Library will also soon celebrate its centennial birthday.