Southwestern Community College Materials Showcase Student Talents

A black-and-white illustration of a campus building against a mountain range.

A batch of materials from our new partner, Southwestern Community College, is now online. This collection includes photographs of the school when it was known as Southwestern Technical Institute, scrapbooks from campus organizations, blueprints for some of the school’s buildings, yearbooks, and issues of the student literary magazine.

Southwestern Community College is based in Sylva, N.C., in Jackson county. Today, it advertises itself as the only community college with a scientific partnership with NASA. The materials in this batch also show its history of teaching technical skills, especially on this poster showing students modifying a car into a limousine. They also feature some of the academic accomplishments of students in the Phi Theta Kappa organization, a college honor society. The Alpha Eta Nu chapter at Southwestern had the opportunity to travel around the country for conferences, evidenced by the memorabilia in their 1985 scrapbook.

An illustration of a woman with curly hair dabbing.
From “Pen and Ink,” 1991

The artistic and literary talents of past Southwestern students and faculty are also on display in the issues of the school’s literary magazine. One poem, written by Eugenia L. Johnson and apparently published in World Treasury of Great Poems (1980), is called “Me.” It begins: “Me, me, me, / Who am me / I know me.”

Amazingly, it is accompanied by this illustration of a person dabbing, a reminder that the dance move was popular long before Cam Newton (quarterback for the Carolina Panthers) did it in 2015.

You can see all of the photos, scrapbooks, blueprints, and other Southwestern CC memorabilia here, and you can browse all of the yearbooks and literary magazines here. To learn more about Southwestern Community College, you can visit their partner page and their website.


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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.

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