Entrance to Brevard Music Center, 1959
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center has added another new partner, the Brevard Music Center. Materials from the Center that are now available online include photographs that date back to the Center’s origins as a music camp at Davidson College and every issue of Overture, the program for the camp and festival that has occurred every year since 1945.
Brevard Music Center was started by James Christian Pfohl as Davidson Music School for Boys in 1936. The school moved to it’s present location in Brevard in 1944 and became coeducational and named the Transylvania Music Camp. In 1946, a music festival was added along to the summer camp and in 1955 the school and festival became the Brevard Music Center. Over the years has trained hundreds of students in music, from playing instruments to singing. Many big names have played at the Center, including Midori Ito and its’ current artistic director, Keith Lockhart. The NCDHC is excited to add such an important part of North Carolina’s music education history to DigitalNC for a wide audience to enjoy.
To learn more about the Brevard Music Center and view the resources that have been digitized, visit their contributor page here.
The Transylvania Times, May 3, 1956.
Thanks to our partner, Transylvania County Library, new issues of The Transylvania Times are now available on our website. This batch includes issues from the years 1941 to 1975, adding over 1,000 issues. Published weekly, the paper focuses on education updates (such as at Brevard College and high school), music camps and performances, local and national news, and community events. Featured articles and topics from this batch include the end of World War II and the fight against polio.
Present in many issues of The Transylvania Times are advertisements and articles highlighting polio—information on the disease, how to keep your household safe and sanitized, and March of Dimes fundraisers. In 1955, the poliomyelitis (polio) vaccine was made available in the United States. In the same year, the March of Dimes organization had one of its largest fundraising efforts with the hopes of raising enough money to vaccinate nine million 1st and 2nd graders throughout the United States. In the Brevard branch of the organization, citizens were encouraged to donate what they could and to donate again. The more that the community donated to the organization, the more doses of the vaccine could be created and distributed across the country. Unfortunately the Cutter Incident (where some batches of the vaccine contained live polio virus) significantly decreased the distribution and the American people’s faith in the vaccine. Eventually that faith was restored with a revamped system of regulating vaccines and development of more polio vaccines such as the Sabin oral vaccine. Twenty-four years after the release of the first vaccine, in 1979, the United States was declared polio-free.
The Transylvania Times, January 9, 1964.
To learn more about the Transylvania County Library, please visit their website.
To view all issues of The Transylvania Times, please click here.
To view more newspapers from around North Carolina, please click here.
