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• 1 media/Picture1.jpg 2020-12-04T09:59:47-08:00 1826 - Caroline and Nicholas Hentz 7 Nicholas Marcellus Hentz (1797-1856) is elected professor of modern languages and belles lettres at UNC, a position he held until 1830. His wife, Caroline Lee Hentz (1800-1856), was a prolific and popular writer of short stories, poems, plays, and novels published from 1832 through 1857, many of them defending the antebellum south and the institution of slavery. plain 2021-09-01T07:25:49-07:00 10/01/1826 Nicholas Marcellus Hentz (1797-1856) was elected professor of modern languages and belles lettres at UNC, a position he held until 1830. In addition to teaching French, he was also America’s first arachnologist, collecting spiders in the evenings. His wife, Caroline Lee Hentz (1800-1856), was a prolific and popular writer of short stories, poems, plays, and novels published from 1832 through 1857, many of them defending the antebellum south and the institution of slavery. Caroline Hentz also encouraged George Moses Horton (born c. 1798), an enslaved African American poet who resided in Chatham County, to publish his first poem, “Liberty and Slavery” in the Lancaster [Massachusetts]Gazette.
  
  Though little is known about the role faculty wives played in the early history of the University, Caroline Hentz seems to be exceptional. Most faculty wives confined their activities primarily to domestic duties. They managed the household, which in some cases included students who received their room and board in faculty members’ homes. They were also called on to open their homes to guests, especially during the holidays and the annual University commencement, and sometimes took in and nursed students who were too ill to remain in the dormitories. Selina Wheat, wife of Rhetoric and Logic Professor John Thomas Wheat, was known for her nursing skills and prompted the University to build a two-room infirmary for sick students on the corner of their family’s property, now the site of Spencer Residence Hall (Henderson 177).  
  
  
  
  
  
  SOURCES
  Henderson, Archibald. The Campus of the First State University. Chapel Hill, N.C.: U of North Carolina P, 1949.
  Horn, Patrick E.  “The Literary Friendship of George Moses Horton and Carolina Lee Hentz.”  North Carolina Literary Review,  28 (2019): 134-143. ProQuest, http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/2239044225?accountid=14244.
  Kelley, Mary. “Hentz, Caroline Lee Whiting.” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, edited by William S. Powell.  U of North Carolina P, 1988. Rpt. in NCPedia, https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/hentz-caroline.
  Walser, Richard. “Hentz, Nicholas Marcellus.” Dictionary of North Carolina Biography, edited by William S. Powell.  U of North Carolina P, 1988. Rpt. in NCPedia, https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/hentz-nicholas-marcellus.