DigitalNC is happy to welcome a new partner– the Anson County Historical Society!
The Anson County Historical society is an organization devoted to providing access to Anson County’s rich history through educational, cultural, and recreational resources. This includes the preservation of physical items, like this map from 1904. An excellent resource for genealogists or local historians, this map documents family names and property locations in addition the other intricate details, like schools, cemeteries, businesses, railroads, and homesteads. Maps with this much detail are rare and serve as excellent research tools.
For more information about the Anson County Historical Society, please visit the contributor page or the website. For maps of North Carolina on DigitalNC, please search the Images of North Carolina Collection and limit by “maps.”
Educational robot from Anson Technical College’s 1984 yearbook.
The Digital Heritage Center recently uploaded a sole (but wonderful) yearbook from Anson Technical College, now South Piedmont Community College. This 1984 volume contains informative photographs of the students and community, as well as description of the programs and specialties offered. It even includes a full-page photograph of the school’s HERO robot (which stands for Heathkit Educational RObot).
Additional maps or plats surveyed and drawn by Frank S. Clarke were also added, joining those already online. These recent additions depict properties in and around Lilesville, a town near Wadesboro in Anson County.
To view all items from South Piedmont Community College, click here.
T.C. Coxe Farms – September 30, 1947
In October 2014, we published 48 maps from the 1940s through the early 1970s that are held by the library at South Piedmont Community College in Polkton, N.C.
We have now added 30 more maps from the same date range. As before, the majority of the maps detail the boundaries of specific properties, including factories, churches, cemeteries, and farms.
These maps join the over 150 maps available from various institutions on DigitalNC.
Detail from a 1961 map of downtown Wadesboro, N.C.
We’ve recently finished work on group of mid 20th-century town and property maps from Anson County. The maps are held by the library at South Piedmont Community College in Polkton, N.C.
There are 48 maps now available online, ranging in date from the 1940s through the early 1970s. A few of the maps show the town of Wadesboro, but the majority detail the boundaries of specific properties, including factories, churches, cemeteries, and schools.
Thanks to our partner, Anson County Historical Society, a batch containing 40 new yearbooks from Wadesboro and Anson High School are now available on our website. These yearbooks range from between 1922 to 1967.
Wadesboro High School was built in 1922. Over a span of 45 years, new structures were slowly added to the original building. These structures included a new wing in 1950, a detached cafeteria in 1953, and a gymnasium in 1961. Six years after the addition of the gymnasium, in 1967, Wadesboro High School became a middle school.
Wadesboro High School 1936 Girls’ Basketball Team
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
To learn more about the Anson County Historical Society, please visit their website.
Thanks to our partner, South Piedmont Community College, a batch containing catalogs from South Piedmont Community College and Anson Community College covering the years from 1991 to 2000 and 2018 to 2021 are now available on our website. The catalogs include information on academic policies, student support services, student life, community organizations, administrators, faculty, various programs of study, and course descriptions.
Anson Community College began as the Ansonville Industrial Education Center in 1962. After the appointment of a Board of Trustees by the Board of Education and Anson County Commissioners in 1967, the Center became the Anson Technical Institute. Twelve years later in 1979, the name was again changed to Anson Technical College in order to better reflect the offerings of the school. The name of the college was changed for the last time to Anson Community College in 1987 before consolidating with the Union Technical Education Center.
On August 3, 1999 the South Piedmont Community College was created from the consolidation of Anson Community College and Union Technical Education Center to better serve Anson as well as Union County residents. The college today continues to grow and expand its operations, but still strives to maintain providing hands-on experience as well as one-on-one instruction to its students.
To learn more about South Piedmont Community College, please visit their website.
To view more South Piedmont and Anson Community College catalogs on our website, click here.
Thanks to our partner, Anson County Historical Society, a batch containing Morven High School yearbooks are now available on our website. This batch includes four yearbooks from the years 1964 to 1967.
To learn more about the Anson County Historical Society, please visit their website.
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
Over forty years worth of campus catalogs from South Piedmont Community College are now online at DigitalNC. They cover admissions, student registration for classes, financial aid, scheduling, and the lists of programs and classes.
The Anson Technical College Catalogue for 1981-1983.
These campus publications range from 1972 to 2017. In the 1970s, it was still called Anson Technical Institute, but the name was later changed to Anson Technical College in 1979 and Anson Community College in 1987. In 1999, South Piedmont Community College was created out of Anson Community College and Union Technical Education Center, in order to serve both Anson County and Union County, where the campuses still serve today. Also included is a commemorative program for Donald Altieri, who served as former President of the college from 1993-2003.
Click here to browse through the SPCC catalogs. To learn more about South Piedmont Community College, visit their partner page, or take a look at their website.
Thanks to our partner, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, new issues from five North Carolina newspapers are available on our website. These include:
There are also new issues of Oxford Public Ledger, courtesy of our partner Granville County Public Library, and The Yadkin Ripple, thanks to Yadkin County Public Library.
To browse all of our newspapers by location, date, and type, take a look at our North Carolina Newspapers collection.
This week we have another 40 newspaper titles and thousands of issues up on DigitalNC, including over 1,000 issues from The Messenger and Intelligencer from Wadesboro, the birthplace of Piedmont blues musician Blind Boy Fuller (read a brief biography about Fuller here). In this post we have some interesting new information regarding the blues legend’s birth!
Via John Edwards Memorial Foundation Records (PF-20001), Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library
Blind Boy Fuller was born Fulton Allen to parents Calvin Allen and Mary Jane Walker in Wadesboro, North Carolina, but the actual date of his birth is very much up for debate. The date of July 10 seems to be generally agreed upon, but the actual year tends to differ. While there are some sources that put it at 1904, folklorist Bruce Bastin puts Allen’s date of birth at July 10, 1907 based on statements from the North Carolina State Commission for the Blind, the Social Security Board, and the Durham County Welfare records. However, his 1941 death certificate states that he was 32 years old when he died, putting the year of his birth at 1908.
Rockingham Post-Dispatch, July 28, 1921
What we found makes things a little interesting. After the family relocated to Rockingham sometime in the early 1900s, his father posted a notice in the July 28, 1921 issue of the Rockingham Post-Dispatch that would suggest that none of these are accurate. The notice supports the idea of a July birthday but implies that, being 16 years old, he would have actually been born in 1905.
Bruce Bastin is the author of Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast and Early Masters of American Blues Guitar: Blind Boy Fuller with Stefan Grossman. The Bruce Bastin and Stefan Grossman Collections are housed here at UNC as part of the Southern Folklife Collection.
Over the next year, we’ll be adding millions of newspaper images to DigitalNC. These images were originally digitized a number of years ago in a partnership with Newspapers.com. That project focused on scanning microfilmed papers published before 1923 held by the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Special Collections Library. While you can currently search all of those pre-1923 issues on Newspapers.com, over the next year we will also make them available in our newspaper database as well. This will allow you to search that content alongside the 2 million pages already on our site – all completely open access and free to use.
This week’s additions include:
Charlotte
Edenton
Greensboro
High Point
Lexington
Milton
New Bern
Raleigh
Rocky Mount
Salem
Salisbury
Wadesboro
Wilmington
Winston
Winston-Salem
If you want to see all of the newspapers we have available on DigitalNC, you can find them here. Thanks to UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries for permission to and support for adding all of this content as well as the content to come. We also thank the North Caroliniana Society for providing funding to support staff working on this project.
