Just moved to Chapel Hill?

Worth knowing: UNC-Chapel Hill admitted its first student in February 1795 — the first public university in the country to open its doors to students. (source)

Worth knowing: Between 1960 and 1975, nearly every astronaut in the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and Apollo-Soyuz programs trained in celestial navigation at UNC's Morehead Planetarium: 62 NASA astronauts, including the first to walk on the moon. (source)

Worth knowing: For most of UNC's first century, students and faculty got their drinking and bathing water from the Old Well. In 1897 the university's president proposed a new structure over it, based on the Temple of Love at Versailles. That structure is now the university's most recognizable symbol. (source)

Worth knowing: UNC's mascot is a ram because of Jack "The Battering Ram" Merritt, a football star. Rameses debuted on November 8, 1924, against VMI, bought with $25 from the athletics department, and Carolina won 3-0. (source)

Worth knowing: Everything at the Carrboro Farmers' Market has to be produced within 50 miles of Carrboro by the vendors themselves, and they must live within 50 miles too. It has been run by its farmers since it started with barely 20 vendors in 1978. (source)

Worth knowing: North Carolina's first vote on the U.S. Constitution happened in Hillsborough. On July 21, 1788, 270 delegates met there and voted 184 to 84 to neither ratify nor reject it, so North Carolina stayed out of the Union until a second convention in 1789. (source)

Worth knowing: Occoneechee Speedway in Hillsborough was one of the first two NASCAR tracks to open and is the only track left from NASCAR's inaugural 1949 season. Its grandstands and mile-long oval, where Richard Petty and Junior Johnson raced, are still visible in the woods, and it's one of only three race tracks on the National Register of Historic Places. (source)

Worth knowing: Chapel Hill is named for New Hope Chapel, a Church of England chapel that once stood at the crossroads on the wooded hill. The town's lots were first sold on October 12, 1793, and it was incorporated in 1819. (source)

Worth knowing: UNC's University Day, October 12, marks the laying of the cornerstone of Old East in 1793. Old East was the university's first building and is the oldest state university building in the nation. The original plaque from that cornerstone disappeared from campus for more than 40 years, turned up at a foundry in Tennessee, and was returned to Chapel Hill in 1916. (source)

Worth knowing: Hillsborough has had three names. The site was known as Corbinton in 1754, for colonial official Francis Corbin; it was established as Childsburgh in 1759, for the province's attorney general Thomas Childs; and it became Hillsborough in 1766, for Wills Hill, Earl of Hillsborough. The spelling later drifted to "Hillsboro" unofficially, and the original spelling was restored in 1965. (source)