Here we have materials spanning three decades from our partners over at the Granville County Public Library! These additions include issues of the Oxford Public Ledger, a student paper from Henderson High School, and yearbooks from Henderson and Dabney, N.C.!
With the start of the fall semester and football season here in North Carolina, marching bands are officially back on the field and in the stands supporting their teams and entertaining audiences with favorites such as Fight Song, Hey Baby, and You Can Call Me Al. While we all appreciate what marching bands adds to these sporting events, no school has shown as much appreciation for their marching band than Henderson High School.
In the school’s 1964 yearbook, an overwhelming amount of page space is given to the school’s band. Some of these photographs show the students rehearsing in the band room with band director W. T. Hearne, but a majority of them show the students in their full marching band and majorette uniforms. The photographs included in this post from the 1964 Pep Pac showcase the amazing size of their band as well as their snazzy uniforms.
To learn more about the Granville County Public Library, visit their website here.
This map of North Carolina, called “An Outdoor and Tourist Guide to North Carolina,” was probably created to lure visitors to our brand-new parks; the text alongside it reads, “State Parks in North Carolina are still under development, and at present accommodations and facilities are not completed, except at Fort Macon State Park, Carteret County.” It also lists R. Bruce Etheridge as the director of the Department of Conservation and Development (he served from 1933-1949).
A map of an army plot in Granville County from 1943
Another notable addition is this army map, supposedly used to train troops to read French maps during World War II. Although it shows an area of Granville County near Mountain Creek Church, most of the text is in French.
The other maps show different versions of Henderson, N.C. (one from 1882). They also note the major roads and land owners.
Students in the Library Club at Mary Potter High School, 1953
The other two yearbooks are from Bingham School (Mebane, N.C.) from 1908 and Oxford College, 1921. To see our full collection of North Carolina yearbooks, click here. To see all materials from the Granville County Public library, visit their partner page.
Thanks to our partner, Granville County Public Library, a batch containing yearbooks from Dabney High School, Henderson High School, Franklinton High School, J.F. Webb High School, and Zeb Vance High School ranging from 1938 to 1970 are now available on our website.
To learn more about the Granville County Public Library, please visit their website.
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
Issues from 8 NC student newspapers are now online at DigitalNC! The issues come from several schools in Granville County and cover news topics like sports, facility renovations, and school events, as well as creative works by students and advertisements for local businesses. The recent batch includes the following newspapers:
The Spectator – J.F. Webb High School – Oxford, NC – 26 issues – 1965-1972
The Tattler – Oxford High School – Oxford, NC – 1 issue – 1921
The Owl – Oxford High School – Oxford, NC – 22 issues – 1946-1962
The J.F. Webb High School Spectator, February 26, 1965
The newspapers listed above constitute a new addition to the significant number of Granville County Public Library materials already online at DigitalNC. Visit their DigitalNC partner page here or head to the Granville County Library System website for more information.
A photo of the 1962 football team at Franklinton High School.
A new batch of yearbooks from Granville County are now available on DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner, the Granville County Public Library. Included in this collection are several yearbooks from across Granville County in the 1940s and then later in the 1960s.
These yearbooks contain individual and class portraits, class and school histories, and honorifics of the students and assorted faculty members. Also included are photographs of school activities, class clubs, and student athletics. A few of the yearbooks also included “class prophecies,” descriptions of what they hoped they would be doing and how their lives would play out after graduation, and “last wills and testaments”, where they “bequeathed” their skills and abilities to future graduates.
An exterior shot of Franklinton High School, taken in 1965
Follow the links below to browse the yearbooks from the schools included in this batch:
A 10th grade typing class in 1967 at the G.C. Shaw High School class in Stovall, N.C.
Several new high school yearbooks from Granville County are now online on DigitalNC, provided by our partner Granville County Public Library. Included are two years of The Hornet by G.C. Hawley High School from 1967 and 1968, the 1967 Pep Pac by Henderson High School, the 1967 Wildcat by J.F. Webb High School, and the 1967 The Pirate by G.C. Shaw High School. The yearbooks contain individual school portraits, group portraits, and photographs of sports, activities and school groups.
A collage of the 1967 senior class officers at G.C. Hawley High School.
DigitalNC is happy to publish seven new additions to one of our staple exhibits, the Frances B. Hays Collection. Contributed by our partner, the Granville County Public Library, the Hays Collection documents the detailed history of Oxford, Granville County, and North Carolina on the whole.
Several interesting highlights from this batch include North Carolina Colleges and Schools, which documents various newspaper clippings and magazine articles about North Carolina’s institutions of higher learning. You will find articles about the organization and history of the University of North Carolina, Duke University, Peace College, Meredith College, and many more.
For any of our users who are familiar with this collection, the Oxford Newspapers and Oxford Newspapers II scrapbooks may be particularly interesting. As many know, all of the 150 Francis B. Hays scrapbooks are also most entirely composed of newspaper clippings; thus these items may be the most “meta” objects in the collection.
All of the scrapbooks highlight interesting news topics and popular information from the mid-twentieth century and are excellent resources for genealogists, historical researchers, or those simply interested in the history of our state.
You can view all of the newest additions to the exhibit below:
To learn more about the Francis B. Hays Collection and to see the other 100+ scrapbooks, please visit the exhibit page. To learn more about the Granville County Public Library, please the contributor page or the home page.
The Oxford Orphan Asylum in 1911, from Hays Scrapbook Vol. 98: Oxford Orphanage.
New scrapbooks contributed by Granville County Public Library have been digitized and are now on DigitalNC. Five of these scrapbooks are from the Francis B. Hays Collection, joining the 92 previously digitized scrapbooks made by Hays about Oxford and Granville County, North Carolina. The scrapbooks are focused on topics such as pharmacies in Granville County, the bar and lawyers, medicine and sexuality, mayor and board elections, and the Oxford Orphan Asylum. We have also digitized three new scrapbooks by Johnnie and Floyd Parker, which include cards, newspaper clippings, obituaries, weddings, graduations, World War II news, postcards, diary entries, and photographs. The 1968 scrapbook focuses on UNC basketball in particular, including the Parkers’ trip to Los Angeles for the championship game. Johnnie Parker consistently wrote down scores and updated brackets for basketball games. Following are the links to the newly digitized scrapbooks.
The Parkers’ photograph of the UNC vs UCLA championship game, 1968.
The contributor page of Granville County Public Library has more materials from them, including scrapbooks, photographs, yearbooks, and newspapers. There is an exhibit page dedicated to the Francis B. Hays Collection, where you can browse by topics like Oxford and Granville County church histories, families, marriages, obituaries, schools, and businesses. You can learn more about the Granville County Public Library through their website.
Ticket to 1968 National Collegiate Basketball Championships, from Parker Scrapbook.
Fifteen new years books from the Granville County Public Library are now available on DigitalNC. These yearbooks feature students and teachers from Epsom High School, Henderson High School, J.F. Webb High School, Oxford High School and the Oxford Female Seminary.
High school yearbooks on DigitalNC often feature interesting, and sometimes weird, traditions. From this batch of yearbooks, Henderson High School sets a new level for interesting traditions. The 1963 “Pep Pac” highlights the high school’s Key Club, which participated in activities to develop leadership skills in young men. Apparently, one of these activities was a Donkey Basketball game, in the high school gym. It appears that this event was hosted mainly to entertain community members, which it is still doing to this day.
Also of interest are the two catalogs from the Oxford Female Seminary from 1883 and 1905. They feature the strict rules and formalities that stand a sharp contrast to the other yearbooks in this batch, which come from the mid-1960s. Each could be useful for someone interested in genealogy of Granville County or Women’s Education in the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
To see more yearbooks from the Granville County Public Library, click here. To learn more about the Granville County Public Library please visit the contributor page or the website.
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.
