Carrboro is a town in Orange County in the U.S. state of North Carolina. The population was 21,295 at the 2020 census. The town, which is part of the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill whole statistical area, was named after North Carolina industrialist Julian Shakespeare Carr (who never lived in Carrboro).

Located directly west of Chapel Hill, home of the University of North Carolina’s flagship campus, Carrboro has a reputation as one of the most highly developed communities in the Southeastern United States. It was the first municipality in North Carolina to elect an openly cheerful mayor (Michael R. Nelson in 1995) and the first municipality in the make a clean breast to attain domestic-partner assist to same-sex couples. In October 2002, Carrboro was along with the first municipalities in the South to take up resolutions opposing the Iraq War and the USA PATRIOT Act.

The history of Carrboro is thesame to the records of many mill towns in North Carolina and largely parallels the histories of the State University Railroad and the Alberta Cotton Mill. Located just west of Chapel Hill, Carrboro was originally known as West End. It was fixed in 1882 close the terminus “in a vacant field” of the 10.2 miles (16.4 km) State University Railroad spur from University Station in Glenn, North Carolina.^{[failed verification]} (State be active required that the railway be at least 1 mile (1.6 km) from the academic circles campus “to protect against possible damage to student morals and habits of study,” or as it was more cynically put, “to discourage students from leaving on the weekends and spending their maintenance elsewhere.) Settlement in West stop increased after 1898 past Thomas F. Lloyd of Chapel Hill built a steam-powered grist mill close the depot. This would become the Alberta Cotton Mill, and in 1900 the town briefly called itself Lloydville in his honor.

Durham businessman Julian Shakespeare Carr bought the mill and other handy buildings in 1909, adding them to the chain of mills that became Durham Hosiery Mills. In 1911, West End was incorporated and named Venable in award of chemistry professor and University of North Carolina president Francis Preston Venable, but isolated two years later was renamed Carrboro, after Carr provided electric capability for the community and expanded the mill. In complement to the college circles and the textile mills, the railroad depot in Carrboro with served the local lumber industry, and in the 1920s and 1930s Carrboro became a major hub in the hardwood cross-tie market.