Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

Nearly a century later, town gets name on paper

Posted on March 22, 2007 by Staff

You hold in your hands the inaugural edition of The Carrboro Citizen. (You folks reading from afar on the Web, well, you’ll just have to imagine it.)

This is not the first newspaper based in Carrboro. Roland Giduz rang us up the other day to talk newspaper history and remind us that he had a little paper in the early 1950s based out of the building at 306 East Main Street where Surplus Syd’s is now located. His paper, the Chapel Hill News Leader’s motto was “Leading with the news of Chapel Hill, Carrboro and Glen Lennox.” The pressman did show up the first day with a zinc plate that said “Carrboro News” on it, Giduz said. But it wasn’t used.

The News Leader, which had a paid circulation of about 3,600, lasted until 1959 and Giduz went on to edit the News of Orange and a few other thousand things, including, recently, his blog “old codger blogger.” (http://rolandgiduz.wordpress.com/)

In addition to wishing us well, Giduz said it was about time. Carrboro, he said, has come into its own. He recalled how for a long time the talk was that merger between Carrboro and the big city across the tracks was inevitable. That’s history now, Giduz said, and he reminded us of former alderman Hilliard Caldwell’s famous remark that he didn’t object to merger with Chapel Hill as long as the merged metropolis was called Carrboro.

A slightly more obscure publication with the name of our fair town coincided with the founding of Nyle Frank’s Invisible University. He produced a mimeographed publication called the Carrboro Centipede. We’ve yet to see a copy, although author and Crook’s Corner chef Bill Smith tells us it was a hoot.
Of course, if it wasn’t for the town’s decision to change its name in 1909 we might have become The Venable Citizen—not nearly as nice a ring to that.

So, we’re not the first paper and not the first publication with the word Carrboro atop the front page. We’re glad to be here even if we’re not the first. And we’re glad to be your newspaper.
See you next week. —Kirk Ross & Robert Dickson

Web Archive

© 2025 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme