Carolina Inn restores nod to tradition

CHAPEL HILL -- Don't tell Ken Zogry it's just wallpaper.

To Zogry, the historian of UNC-Chapel Hill's Carolina Inn, the four 5-by-7-foot "Scenes of North America" being restored this week were part of a 1940s redecorating scheme meant to appease critics of what has been called liberal creep.

"The university was under attack," Zogry said Wednesday.

President Frank Porter Graham had a progressive vision for UNC and the South. In the years after World War II, many considered his views on race relations too liberal, his social policies communistic.

And the wallpaper, which depicts billowy ships in Boston Harbor, Natural Bridge in Virginia and Niagara Falls?

That was Billy Carmichael's idea, Zogry says.

Graham had persuaded Carmichael, a veteran of New York's Wall Street and Madison Avenue, to come to Carolina as controller.

Carmichael saw the inn as the public face of the state's flagship university. He hired Otto Zenke, interior decorator to North Carolina's upper crust, to remake the inn in the style of a Southern plantation.

What better way, Zogry says, to subtly reassure lawmakers and alumni donors Carolina hadn't broken faith with traditional values?

But even tradition needs sprucing.

After decades of wear and tear, Michael Lee of Etherington Conservation Services has been restoring the wallpaper, first printed in 1834 by the French company Zuber et Cie and originally installed at the inn in 1946.

"It was actually difficult," Lee said Wednesday, surveying his crew's work.

The hallway was once a main entrance. Years of cigarette smoke, the weather and guests' fingers -- someone carved the name Richard into Boston Harbor -- had taken their toll.

"I've seen people touching it even while we're working here," Lee said, "which is a major no-no."

The wallpaper will next get a coat of varnish, a railing to discourage vandals and a plaque describing its significance.

Fitting, Zogry says, for one of the most historic wallpapers ever designed.

"This is not just wallpaper you buy at Lowe's."