Chapel Hill is a town in Orange County, North Carolina, United States and the home of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), the oldest state-supported university in the U.S. The population was 48,715 at the 2000 census; its population was listed at 54,492 in the Census Bureau’s 2007 estimates.
Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh make up the three corners of the Research Triangle, so named in 1959 with the creation of Research Triangle Park, a research park between Durham and Raleigh.
Chapel Hill is located in the southeast corner of Orange County, with municipal boundaries extending slightly into Durham County to the east and to Chatham County to the south. It is bounded on the west by the town of Carrboro and on the east by the city of Durham. However, most of Chapel Hill’s borders are not contiguous to any other municipality and instead are adjacent to unincorporated portions of Orange County and Chatham County.