Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States

🇺🇸 Chapel Hill is a town in Orange, Durham and Chatham counties in the U.S. state of North Carolina. Chapel Hill is the 15th largest city in the state. Chapel Hill, Durham, and the state capital, Raleigh, make up the corners of the Research Triangle, officially called the Raleigh–Durham–Cary combined statistical area.

The town was founded in 1793 and is centred on Franklin Street, covering 21.3 square miles (55 km²). It contains several districts and buildings listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UNC Health Care are a major part of the economy and town influence. Local artists have created many murals.

History The area was the home place of early settler William Barbee of Middlesex County, Virginia, whose 1753 grant of 585 acres from John Carteret, 2nd Earl Granville was the first of two land grants in what is now the Chapel Hill-Durham area. Though William Barbee died shortly after settling there, one of his eight children, Christopher Barbee, became an important contributor to his father's adopted community and to the fledgling University of North Carolina.

Geography Chapel Hill is located in the south-east corner of Orange County. It is bounded on the west by the town of Carrboro and on the north-east by the city of Durham. However, most of Chapel Hill's borders are adjacent to unincorporated portions of Orange and Durham Counties rather than shared with another municipality. According to the United States Census Bureau, the town has a total area of 21.3 square miles (55.1 km²), of which 21.1 square miles (54.7 km²) is land and 0.15 square miles (0.4 km²) is covered by water. University Lake is part of the town's public water supply.

Education Founded in 1789, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is a public research university and is the flagship of the University of North Carolina system.

Transport: Bus Chapel Hill has intracity bus service via Chapel Hill Transit. Go Triangle provides connection to the rest of the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, and Hillsborough), of which the Hillsborough service is operated by Chapel Hill Transit, and supplemented mid-day by a county shuttle.

Light rail The Durham–Orange Light Rail line, which would have run between Chapel Hill and Durham, entered planning and engineering phases in August 2017. The project was discontinued in April 2019.