After seeing excellent “Dog Days of Summer” blog posts from our friends at NC State and Duke, we couldn’t resist following up with a few of our favorites from the many dog photos on DigitalNC.
No North Carolina-related dog feature would be complete without a Plott Hound. This photo from the Haywood County Public Library shows not just any Plott Hound, but the original: “Dan” was the first Plott Hound to be registered after the United Kennel Club recognized the breed in 1946.
The prize for cutest dog photo on DigitalNC has to go to this one, puppies in a basket, from the William Hoke Sumner collection at UNC-Charlotte.
This young man with a pack of Basset Hounds is heading to a dog show in Pinehurst in 1935. Photo from the Tufts Archives.
No hunting party would be complete without a dog. This photo, from the Davie County Public Library, shows a group at the Coollemee Plantation.
As this 1951 photo from the Braswell Memorial Library in Rocky Mount attests, there is no better reading companion than a dog.
And no dog loved books more than Jim the Library Dog, a fixture on the front seat of the Rockingham County Bookmobile as it traveled around the county in the 1930s. Photo from the Rockingham County Public Library. You can see Jim in action in the silent film showing the bookmobile that we recently shared online.
But our favorites have to be the dogs we spot occasionally in old yearbooks. Apparently UNC-Chapel Hill was a hotbed of canine education in 1977. We found two dogs in the Yackety Yack from that year. The photo at top is identified as Sarah Abercrombie, a senior from Dixmont, Maine, while the bottom photo shows Poco Medford, a graduate student from Carrboro. We trust that both Sarah and Poco put their education to good use and went on to long and distinguished careers.
Governor Robert W. Scott receives a “Bob Jr.” license plate in this footage of his inauguration and subsequent celebrations. Contributed by the State Archives of North Carolina.
Almost one year ago, we asked our partners for nominations of audio and video media from their collections to digitize, using funding from the Digital Public Library of America. From all corners of North Carolina came suggestions for moving images and sound. Some items were well documented, with descriptions or finding aids [?] in tow. Others were accompanied with the words “We think this is … but we really have no idea.” Thanks to George Blood, L. P., who digitized these items for us, and Andrea Green, our former Community Digitization Manager, we ended up with over 140 physical items digitized from 11 institutions.
Here’s an overview of what’s been added to DigitalNC to our new Sights and Sounds collection (some of our partners will be posting their digitized media on their own digital collection sites instead). Stay tuned over the next few weeks for more posts taking a closer look at some of our favorites.
Braswell Memorial Library
Throughout the 1990s, Mary Lewis Deans spearheaded an ambitious and well-documented oral history campaign in Nash County. She and her colleagues spoke with long-time residents about rural farming life, military service during World War II, segregation, and family traditions. Deans was businesslike yet friendly, no-nonsense and yet genuine. Listen to and read Deans’ oral histories.
From Davie County Public Library comes a two-part series on Davie County History, and a home video of local personality Louise Graham Stroud, who performed monologues as her self-created character, “Miss Lizzie.”
Cynthia Watts (left) interviews actress Joan Bennett in one of the Arts in Durham films contributed by the Durham Public Library.
Durham Public Library
Love Durham? Love the Arts? Love the late 70s? Some of our staff favorites come from Durham Public Library’s collection of “Arts in Durham” films. Produced by the Durham Arts Council, these films showcase local bands, dance groups, visual artists, and more. We’ll definitely be blogging about our favorite moments. Durham Public Library also contributed a taped lecture by Dr. Charles Watts on the history of Lincoln Hospital, and two-part coverage of the Durham County Centennial Parade of 1981.
Edgecombe Memorial Library
Tobacco Perspectives is an amateur recording of a two-night event in the early 1980s during which a historian, a political scientist, and representatives from farm, industry, and public health agencies lectured on the tobacco industry both past and present.
Rockingham County Public Library
We’ve already announced the bookmobile film from Rockingham County, but we’re still looking for someone who can identify the school that’s shown. In this film boys and girls eagerly peruse and check out books from local librarians. It’s even got Jim, the library dog.
State Archives of North Carolina
We were pleased to join for the first time with the State Archives during this project, as they chose a number of films that document the state’s history. Among the films from the Archives that we’ve added online are coverage of Governor R. W. Scott II’s inauguration and U. S. Coast Guard Appreciation Day (1970).
No Handouts for Mrs. Hedgepeth, 1968, documented a Durham family living below the poverty line. Contributed by the North Carolina Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill.
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
From 1962-1965, the North Carolina Film Board produced films tackling some of the most pressing issues in North Carolina: race relations, education, and economic opportunity. Eight of those films join others from the North Carolina Collection and Southern Historical Collection at UNC-Chapel Hill on DigitalNC. As might be expected, some are about UNC and Chapel Hill. Fans of the Hugh Morton Collection will also see several films believed to have been filmed by Morton or his colleagues. There’s even footage of Mildred the Bear.
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
In 1960, Dr. Bertha Maxwell-Roddey became the first chair of what is now the Department of Africana Studies at UNC-Charlotte, which contributed three items related to her career. A scholar, educator, and community icon, one of these shows children in a classroom being taught by Maxwell-Roddey’s students. The others show a night of live poetry and music.
Title page from the 1956 Buccaneer, from East Carolina College, the most popular item on DigitalNC.org in 2014.
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center had a great year in 2014. We continued to work with partners around the state on digitization projects and added a wide variety of material to DigitalNC.org, making it easier than ever for users to discover and access rare and unique materials from communities all over North Carolina.
As we look back on our work over the past year, I wanted to share some of what we’ve learned by looking at our website usage statistics. Like many libraries, the Digital Heritage Center uses Google Analytics to capture information about what’s being used on our website, who’s using it, and how they got there. While there are still lots of questions remaining about usage of DigitalNC, these stats do give us a lot of valuable information.
In 2014, more than 250,000 users visited DigitalNC.org, resulting in more than 1.8 million pageviews. While people visited our website from computers located all over the world, the greatest number by far came from North Carolina. That’s what we expected and hoped to see. More than 200,000 sessions originated in North Carolina, with the users coming from 388 different locations, ranging from over 18,000 sessions in Raleigh and Charlotte to a single visit from the town of Bolivia in Brunswick County (user location is determined by the location of their internet service provider, so this may not tell us exactly where our users are located, but it’s going to be close in most cases).
What did people use on DigitalNC? We were not surprised to find that the most popular collection remains our still-growing library of yearbooks. The North Carolina Yearbooks collection received more than 125,000 pageviews alone, followed by newspapers (44,000) and city directories (11,000). And we were pleased to learn that at least somebody is reading this blog, which received nearly 2,500 pageviews last year. The most popular blog post was our announcement about the digitization of a large collection of Wake County high school yearbooks.
The variety of subjects, locations, and time periods in these photos is representative of the wide-ranging content available in North Carolina’s cultural heritage institutions and on DigitalNC.org. We are honored and excited to have a role in making this content accessible to everyone and look forward to sharing even more of North Carolina’s history and culture online in 2015.
The Cooleemee Journal was a weekly community paper. We’ve added issues from 1965-1970. The later issues are especially full of large and candid photographs of local events and citizens. The entire run contains local Cooleemee news.
Front page, Cooleemee Journal, September 23, 1970
Cooleemee Picnic, August 1970
The Erwin Chatter was a publication of The Erwin Cotton Mills Company. Like many company newspapers, it describes the activities of the employees both at the mill and beyond – with reports from the different departments alongside announcements of marriages, events, and local school news. We’ve posted monthly issues from 1944 until the Chatter was discontinued as a cost-cutting measure in March, 1954.
Headline in the Roanoke News, May 28, 1908 From the Halifax County Library
94 years ago today, on January 17, 1920, the United States officially became a dry country, as the 18th Amendment banning the sale, production, importation, and transportation of alcoholic beverages went into effect. However, in North Carolina, it had little effect as the state had enacted prohibition via a referendum vote twelve years earlier on May 26, 1908, becoming the first in the south to ban alcohol.
Moonshine still being destroyed in Davie County, 1912 From Davie County Public Library
Prior to the full country being under Prohibition, North Carolinians would drive to Virginia or South Carolina to procure their alcohol and bootlegging quickly became good business in the state and those early bootleggers who fixed up their cars to be as fast as possible laid the ground for race car driving and eventually, NASCAR. Once full prohibition was in effect across the country, moonshiners also did quick business. In DigitalNC there are several photographs and newspaper articles about those who were caught by police attempting to make or transport liquor and many more expressing editorial opinions for and against prohibition.
Sheriff captures 126 gallons of bootleg whiskey in Rockingham County, NC From Rockingham Community College
While nationwide prohibition ended with the 21st Amendment’s passage in 1933, North Carolina did not ratify the amendment and it was not until 1937 when the Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) system was set up in North Carolina counties to sell alcohol that prohibition officially ended in North Carolina. However, many counties still remained dry well after 1937 and post prohibition moon-shining and bootlegging was still a common occurrence in the mid 1900s. Today, Graham County remains as the only fully dry county in the state. To learn more about prohibition in North Carolina, check out this post from the North Carolina Collection and this article in NCpedia.
Officers in Spray pour illegal whiskey down the storm drain in the 1950s. From Rockingham Community College
We found this ad in an issue of the Sylvan Valley News, published in Brevard on August 10, 1906. The “novelty” of creating custom postcards was a widespread phenomenon, resulting the creation of many thousands of rare and often unique images that seem especially striking when we come across them today. Photographic or “real photo” postcards are actual photographic prints produced on postcard backs, enabling the users to mail them as they would a normal postcard. While the act of simply mailing a snapshot doesn’t seem like a big deal today, it was in the early twentieth-century, as people around the country shared scenic and personal photos with ease.
There are several real photo postcards in the Images of North Carolina collection on DigitalNC, and even more in the North Carolina Postcards collection published by the North Carolina Collection. Here are a few of my favorites:
Dora Mayberry, Cooleemee (Davie County Public Library).
John T. Etheridge of Rocky Mount (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill). Note the raccoon skin on the wall behind him.
Fisherman repairing a net in Morehead City (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
Susie Sharp family photo, Reidsville (North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
This photo shows the Davidson College football team in 1906, just 18 years after the first collegiate football game was played in North Carolina.
The action shot of a punter seems to be a popular subject for sports photographers. The photo at top is from the Braswell Memorial Library (Rocky Mount, N.C.); the one at bottom is from the Tufts Archives (Pinehurst, N.C.).
There are several good photos of high school football players and teams on DigitalNC. The top one here shows a player from Lansing High School in Ashe County; the one in the middle of the team from Davie County High School in 1961, and the photo at bottom shows the team from Waynesville Township High School in 1927.
These last three images above are shared by Ashe County Public Library (top), Davie County Public Library (middle), and Haywood County Public Library (bottom).
The Tour de France is underway, due to finish in Paris later this month. I’m sure there are some fine cyclists in the race, but I wonder how many of them could keep up with these guys?
This blog is maintained by the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and features the latest news and highlights from the collections at DigitalNC, an online library of primary sources from organizations across North Carolina.
