In December 1889, the trustees of what was then North Carolina State College authorized six hundred and fifty dollars for periodicals and books. The collection went into a single room of Holladay Hall, overseen by the university's first English professor. By 1890 it held fifteen hundred volumes, most of them reflecting the literary tastes of one man. By 2014, the system had passed five million volumes. The room that started it all became the D. H. Hill Jr. Library, named for that same English professor, who would later serve as president of the college and whose son's name was finally added to the building in 2019 to stop people from confusing him with his Confederate general father.
For decades, the library was an afterthought. The annual library expenditure in 1892 was one hundred dollars. By 1916, when Hill retired as college president, the collection numbered just eight thousand volumes, and ranked last among fifty land-grant institutions. The University of North Carolina across the state had ten times as many books. Duke had nearly eleven times as many. In 1924 a fire destroyed the entire library catalogue. James Gulledge, hired the previous year as the first professionally trained head librarian, started over. A dedicated library building, designed in a post-colonial style by Hobart Upjohn and reminiscent of Monticello, opened in 1926. The next director, Charles Kellam, reorganized everything into five departments and started the University Archives in the college's fiftieth year, 1939.
Harlan Brown took over the day World War II broke out. When he left for the army in 1942, reference librarian Reba Davis Clevenger ran the place. By 1945 she and the library committee were demanding three things: a new building, more money for books, and better-paid staff. Construction on a new D. H. Hill began in 1952 on the Brickyard. The four-story East Wing opened in 1954 with nine hundred seats. The Erdahl-Cloyd Student Union, designed by architecture professor W. H. Deitrick, went up next door in 1955. When the student union moved to Talley Center in 1972, that building became the West Wing. Between them, the ten-story Bookstack North Tower opened in 1971, adding 1.2 million volumes of capacity. The eleven-story Bookstack South, completed in 1990, fronts the Brickyard today.
In 1962, Edward Walker became the library's first full-time African-American staff member, hired as a mail clerk. He retired in 1992 as the bookstack supervisor. The following year librarians were granted faculty status. In 1970, William V. Frazier became the library's first African-American librarian. The library was not always quiet. In the summer and fall of 1967, thieves stole at least sixteen sets of journals and bibliographical works, including a hundred bound volumes of eighteenth and nineteenth-century botany. A security checkpoint went up at the bookstack entrance in 1968. The 24-hour service that current students take for granted began in 1996. By 2014 the system had passed five million volumes and added Hunt Library on Centennial Campus.
Walk into D. H. Hill today and you find a building that has become something its 1953 architects could not have imagined. The Hill of Beans coffee shop opened in 2002. The Creamery, serving Howling Cow ice cream made by the food science department, opened in 2009. A renovated 2011 silent reading room overlooks an outdoor terrace built in 1954 for student union dances, then abandoned for forty years, now restored with umbrella-topped tables and writable glass walls. The 2019-2020 renovation reopened the Hillsborough Street entrance that had been closed since 1990. The library that once held fifteen hundred volumes in a single room circulates a million volumes a year from its tower. Its name finally got the Jr. it deserved after a century, separating one professor's quiet scholarship from a father he barely resembled.
D. H. Hill Jr. Library stands at 35.788°N, 78.670°W on the north edge of NC State's main campus along Hillsborough Street. The eleven-story Bookstack South tower is the tallest structure on North Campus and a clear landmark from approach corridors into Raleigh-Durham International (KRDU), four miles northwest. From 2,500 feet AGL the library forms one corner of the Brickyard plaza, with Talley Student Union and the Bell Tower visible nearby.