Thanks to our a-MOO-zing partners at the Davidson County Public Library and the Lexington Library, DigitalNC is proud to announce that a brand new collection of directories, newsletters, and student newspapers are now available online! This varied and unique collection includes the student newspapers of Lexington and Thomasville High School, the 1957 directory of First Presbyterian in Lexington, and a MOO-nique newsletter from the Erlanger Dairy Community!
Titled the “Dairy Number,” this exciting newsletter was written by the Erlanger Cotton Mills Company in 1922—over a century ago! The newsletter advertises the unique opportunities that dairy farming provides to a community, from novel access to “milk as a beverage,” to the important nutritional value of calcium. For those reticent or intolerant of dairy as a beverage, this newsletter recommends a variety of vintage solutions: from adding sarsaparilla and raspberry to your milk, to soda fountain drinks such as egg creams (which contain neither eggs nor cream). The recipes, along with other articles on history and nutrition, offer a calf-tivating glimpse at the ways in which an industry can suffuse each part of a community’s life.
Indeed, the pride of Erlanger’s dairyman suffuses each page of this newsletter: poems are penned to the overseer of the mill, outstanding employees are profiled, and news from across town is communicated in the pages of the newsletter. It’s not just human employees that are honored, either: this newsletter is chockablock with notable bovine. Photos of newborn calves are treated with equal import to the Erlanger Baby Page. Chief dairy cows are photographed, along with their names and record-setting statistics. My personal favorite bovine is Mr. Romeny of Maple Grove, the distinguished senior herd sire of the mill; but other readers may form their own attachments to other charismatic cattle like Victoria and Double Finance.
If you’d rather STEER clear of The Erlanger Dairy, you can find a more traditional historic record in the pages of the Thomasville and Lexington student newspapers. The Thomasville Student News (also known as Facts & Fun) make their digital debut in this collection, and range from 1953 to 1956. This paper is especially concerned with the school’s gridiron team, whose Bulldogs frequently found a staunch rival in the Lexington High School Yellow Jackets. In light of the football rivalry, these student papers compliment each other in amusing fashion — when the Yellow Jackets trounce the Bulldogs, you’re sure to find conflicting editorials the following week.
You can find the two new newsletters (moo-sletters?) online now on DigitalNC here.
If you’d like some classic mid-century gridiron instead, you can find the Thomasville High School Student Newspaper here, and the Lexington High School Student Newspaper here.
DigitalNC is dairy excited to have this collection online—thanks once again to our fantastic partners at the Davidson County Public Library and the Lexington Library for making these pieces of history available. You can find more information about the Davidson County Public Library at their DigitalNC contributor page here, and you can discover more records from the Lexington Library here.
