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In partnership with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library we’re pleased to share this 1968 film entitled Discover Charlotte – A City in Motion. Created by the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce and narrated by famous journalist and North Carolinian Charles Kurault, this promotional film boasts about Charlotte’s industrial and economic growth.
In color with an upbeat soundtrack, Discover Charlotte lauds the motion of Charlotteans, beginning with a look at the city’s role in trucking, rail, and air transport. Turning to the banking industry, the film shows people processing large amounts of checks and cash and using adding machines at lightning speed. Shots of the Charlotte Record newspaper offices include coverage of Record employees learning via Teletype that Gene Payne, the Record’s cartoonist, had won a Pulitzer. You’ll see pilots and passengers at the Charlotte Douglas airport, Arthur “Guitar Boogie” and the Crackerjacks playing at the WBT station, computers whirring in a new data processing center, workers constructing a Duke power complex, and researchers examining newly woven textiles.
Most of the film features scenes of middle and upper class white Charlotteans in work, social, or religious settings. In Charlotte, there is “a church for every man” and there are brief views of a number of religious institutions including Covenant Presbyterian Church, Dilworth Methodist Church, Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral. Other events and activities shown in the film include
- Festival in the Park at Freedom Park,
- the Mint Museum Drama Guild rehearsing a play,
- a wedding reception for an unnamed white couple,
- a Carolina v. NC State basketball game,
- a Charlotte Checkers hockey game, and
- a NASCAR stock car race.
There are also views of two university campuses, Johnson C. Smith and the relatively new UNC-Charlotte.
Filmed during the Civil Rights movement, there are only brief allusions to racial tensions. There is a snippet of white police officers talking about “riding with Negro officers,” which cuts to a group of black men and officers talking about a local march. The end of the film describes Charlotte’s participation in the Model Cities initiative and its “total attack on poverty,” efforts that were meant to eradicate urban blight that, as in many cities in America, ended up displacing and/or destroying minority-owned homes and businesses. The film ends with drawings of a planned expressway, widened streets, parks, new hotels and high rises.
This is one of a number of items Charlotte Mecklenburg Library has shared on DigitalNC. You can see more on their contributor page or learn more about their North Carolina collections on their website.
Tomahawk Yearbook, West Mecklenburg HS, 1966
We have a 50 year embargo for high school yearbooks on DigitalNC, to be considerate to alumni privacy concerns. In practice, this means that each year we can inch forward with a new round of volumes.
The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library recently brought us six yearbooks from six different high schools all dating from 1966.
And don’t miss the rest of an extensive set of yearbooks and other materials that Charlotte Mecklenburg Library has already shared online at DigitalNC, as well as The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Story, their own rich site of Charlotte history.
The West Charlotte Orchestra, from The Lion 1965.
More yearbooks from Charlotte, N.C. have been added to DigitalNC. These seven yearbooks from the 1960’s come from several different schools and were provided by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library. The yearbooks provide insight to student life in the 1960’s, depicting clubs, sports, activities, and awards. They include:
You can view more materials from the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library on the DigitalNC page and visit their homepage. Additionally, you can view more yearbooks from Charlotte here.
From King’s College, Kastle 1965.
Myers Park High School yearbook, Mustang, 1958 spread on school spirit.
Additional Charlotte, N.C. yearbooks, provided by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, are now digitized and available on DigitalNC.
Two yearbooks come from Myers Park High School, which opened in 1951. The yearbooks, titled “Mustang” are from 1958 and 1959. Fifteen of the digitized yearbooks come from Charlotte Technical High School, the years 1929 (the school’s first yearbook), 1931, 1940-1946, 1949, and 1951-1954. The yearbooks include photos of students and staff as well as clubs, sports, and other activities around campus.
These are the first yearbooks we have digitized and uploaded from both Myers Park High School and Charlotte Technical High School. You can view all of Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s yearbooks here.
The Charlotte Mecklenburg Library sent us quite a few yearbooks from the early 20th century. The majority come from Presbyterian College for Women (later Queens College and Queens University), Elizabeth College, and Mecklenburg Female College. These yearbooks highlight the friendships built among the young women, as well as their concerns and interests.
Git-More Chafing Dish Club, Presbyterian College for Women, 1905.
These 21 yearbooks, dating from 1904-1934, come to us from Queens University of Charlotte and its several precursor schools. According to NCpedia, the women’s school in Charlotte was founded in 1857 and known in sequence as: Charlotte Female Institute, Seminary for Girls, Presbyterian College for Women, and Queens College. It merged with the South Carolina school Chicora College in 1930 and was known as Queens-Chicora College for almost a decade. The school began accepting both genders in 1946, and in 2002 became Queens University of Charlotte.
The yearbooks are full of personality, with delightful drawings and quirky clubs. Some favorites: Git-More Chafing Dish Club, Gitchimanito Club (i.e. “get ye a man or two”), The Suffragettes, Old Maids’ Club, Babes in the Wood, Tom Thumb Crowd (for students who measured five feet or less), the Red-Headed Stepchildren, and Witches’ Club. Many volumes also include delightful drawings.
Witches Club, Presbyterian College for Women, 1910.
Jockey Club, Presbyterian College for Women, 1908.
Mustard Pickles, The Elizabethan, Elizabeth College, 1914.
Elizabeth College, founded in 1897, was another early women’s college in the Queen City. The school merged with Roanoke College for Women in 1915 and moved to Salem, Virginia until 1921, when it burned and was never re-established. The Elizabeth College buildings in Charlotte endured, housing Presbyterian Hospital and the School of Nursing until it was torn down in 1980. Two yearbooks, 1914 and 1915, add to the existing eight yearbooks on DigitalNC dating from 1901. These two most recent The Elizabethan yearbooks are as charming as they are informative. Like The Edelweiss volumes from Presbyterian College for Women/Queen’s College, the club descriptions and photographs show the women both playfully and earnestly asserting their personalities, friendships, and interests. Some favorite clubs are Anti-Fat Club, Do As You Please, and Mustard Pickles. There’s also some analysis of how the women of the class of 1914 conformed (or not) to Victorian standards.
- Mecklenburg Female College
This 1868 volume is part yearbook, part literary magazine, as is characteristic of many early campus publications. This 1868 volume is both the first and penultimate volume; the school for women was only in existence for two years. The buildings were rented from the North Carolina Military Institute (later the Carolina Military Institute, also called the Charlotte Military Institute). For more information on the former Mecklenburg Female College, a broadside distributed by the college and digitized by DocSouth is particularly useful.
Several other items were also digitized from Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, including yearbook volumes 1961 and 1963 from King’s College, a small school in Charlotte founded in 1901.
Adding to our high school yearbook collection, East Mecklenburg High School years 1953 and 1954 are now available on DigitalNC. Long Creek High School, 1947 is also available.
The final item from Charlotte Mecklenburg Library is a program from the 16th Women’s History Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony by the Charlotte Club of the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Clubs, Incorporated. The four inductees were Carolyn A. Flowers, Shirley L. Fulton, Vi A. Lyles, and Joyce D. Waddell. The program also includes a list of all members of the the Women’s History Hall of Fame.
You can view all of the items digitized for Charlotte Mecklenburg Library on DigitalNC here.
If you’re in the Charlotte area and interested in local history and digital libraries, please mark March 30 on your calendars: we will be holding an event to celebrate and explore digital library efforts in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. Here are the details:
Event: Digital Charlotte: Celebrating and Exploring Local Digital Library Projects
Date: March 30, 2015
Time: Talk at 6:30, followed by a reception
Location: UNC Charlotte Center City Campus, 320 E. 9th St.
Parking information: http://www.charlottecentercity.org/transportation/parking/
Admission: Free and Open to the Public
Questions?: Write digitalnc@unc.edu or call 919-962-4836
“Digital Charlotte” will feature a talk by Julie Davis, Project Director, Digital Loray, and Public Historian in Residence at the Loray Mill, who will speak about the role of public history in the redevelopment of the Loray Mill in Gastonia. The talk will be followed by a reception during which guests can see demonstrations of digital projects from local libraries including UNC-Charlotte, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, Johnson C. Smith University, and Davidson College. This will be a terrific opportunity for local genealogists and history buffs to learn more about the rapidly-growing number of online resources devoted to local history. We are also encouraging Charlotte-area librarians, archivists, and students to attend and participate.
This event is being held as part of our work on a recent grant from the Digital Public Library of America. The grant funding has enabled us to expand our services for libraries, archives, and museums around the state. The DPLA is the primary sponsor of the Digital Charlotte event. Additional support is being provided by the Olde Mecklenburg Brewery.
Please contact us if you have any questions. We hope to see many of you in Charlotte!
From the 1912 Elizabeth College Yearbook, “De Hooligans”
We’ve just finished working with the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library to include several additional high school yearbooks as well as yearbooks from Elizabeth College on DigitalNC.
You’ll now find the 1964 yearbooks of South, East, and West Mecklenburg High Schools, as well as West Charlotte, Harding, Myers Park, and Garinger on our site. (To help with privacy concerns, we generally have a 50-year embargo on posting high school yearbooks online. So, as the new year rolls over, we can begin including another year’s worth.)
Also in this latest batch are 1905-1913 yearbooks from Elizabeth College. Elizabeth College was located in Charlotte from 1897-1915, at which point it moved to Virginia. Its records were mostly destroyed in a fire in 1921, so we’re glad the information in these volumes is now available online. The 1901 volume is also on our site, contributed by UNC-Chapel Hill.
View all of Charlotte Mecklenburg Library’s items.
From Harding High School’s 1941 Acorn
Left: Superlatives, Right: Athletics
Over 100 yearbooks from eleven high schools in the Charlotte Metro area are now available on DigitalNC. Included are yearbooks from Charlotte’s first high school, Charlotte High School, with yearbooks dating from 1909.
The collection also includes six yearbooks from two African-American high schools: West Charlotte’s The Lion and York Road’s Wapiti.
West Charlotte High’s 1960 band from the Lion
The yearbooks are available courtesy of Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School System, and all the schools that are available are listed in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools Yearbooks digital exhibit. To view more North Carolina High School yearbooks, visit DigitalNC.
The North Carolina Whig, a newspaper published in Charlotte in the 1850s and 1860s, is now available on DigitalNC as part of the North Carolina Newspapers collection.
The
Whig began publication on January 26, 1852, declaring in its first issue support for the Presidential ticket of incumbent Millard Fillmore for President and North Carolinian William A. Graham as Vice President. The editors confess their inexperience and ask for patience from readers and critics: “And, as this is our first adventure in an enterprise of this nature as helmsman, we ask that the storms of criticism and party spirit may lie still, until we have cleared the rocks and reefs of the port from whence we sail. Our freight is Truth, Justice, Honesty, Patriotism, Good Faith, the Rights of the Constitution, and of the People, as developed in the administration of Millard Fillmore.”
Fillmore’s efforts to remain in office fell short when he failed to receive his own party’s nomination, but the North Carolina Whig lived on, publishing at least until 1862.
The North Carolina Whig was nominated for digitization by the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.
The Jeffersonian was a staunchly Democratic paper, and a strong supporter of North Carolina native James K. Polk in his successful bid for the Presidency in 1844. In addition to the editorials and long excerpts from political speeches, the Jeffersonian includes the myriad notices, advertisements, and general miscellany that make these old papers such fascinating and valuable resources.
I especially like the distinctly Charlottean logo, featuring a flag bearing the date of the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence and a beehive.
In color with an upbeat soundtrack, Discover Charlotte lauds the motion of Charlotteans, beginning with a look at the city’s role in trucking, rail, and air transport. Turning to the banking industry, the film shows people processing large amounts of checks and cash and using adding machines at lightning speed. Shots of the Charlotte Record newspaper offices include coverage of Record employees learning via Teletype that Gene Payne, the Record’s cartoonist, had won a Pulitzer. You’ll see pilots and passengers at the Charlotte Douglas airport, Arthur “Guitar Boogie” and the Crackerjacks playing at the WBT station, computers whirring in a new data processing center, workers constructing a Duke power complex, and researchers examining newly woven textiles.
