DigitalNC is happy to welcome a new partner, the Margaret and James Harper, Jr. Library. Located in Southport, Brunswick County, this partner adds to our growing list of contributors representing coastal communities.
This partner’s first contribution is a decade of editions of a community newspaper. The State Port Pilot documents community life in Southport and the surrounding areas from 1935-1945. The paper could be an excellent resource for those interested in agriculture at the coast, with many of the stories, advertisements, and images dealing with tobacco farming in that part of the state. This resources is also full-text searchable, allowing for quick research by name and location.
The Pilot also is unique in its advertising techniques, especially during the 1930’s. Full page ads address readers directly with clean simple statements that changed each week.
Thanks to our partners at the Margaret and James Harper, Jr. Library and the Southport Historical Society, over a decade of the State Port Pilot‘s issues are now available! This collection stretches from 1962 to 1976 and features notable news and topics both around Southport and across the country. We previously uploaded issues from 1935 to 1961, meaning there are now over two thousand issues to explore!
The publication was founded in 1928 by Bill Keziah, who ran the company until his death in the fifties. The Pilot has run continuously since its founding and publishes a weekly issue every Wednesday. Within their pages are the lives of Brunswick County: obituaries, marriages, job postings, and advertisements. Anyone interested in Southport’s history or the sixties and seventies would be well served looking at this collection.
This November 15, 1961 front page of The State Port Pilot has a picture of the catch from a local fishing trip and an image of a Kingtown Community Directory sign that lists the names of Kingtown N.C. residents.
Issues of The State Port Pilot newspaper dating from 1950-1962 have been added to DigitalNC.org thanks to funding provided by the Southport Historical Society. These join issues from 1935-1949.
The State Port Pilot, “a good newspaper in a good community,” documents Brunswick County NC life. Agriculture (especially tobacco) and fishing are frequent front page topics during this time period, and there are “local catch” photos at least every month. Front page news often includes information about local development, such as the construction of the Sunny Point army depot. You will also find coverage of some of the county’s most devastating events of this timer period, including Hurricane Hazel in 1954, and a National Airlines plane crash that killed 34 people in 1960.
On the front page of issues from through April 1957 you’ll find a regular column entitled “Our Roving Reporter.” This column was written by W. B. Keziah, also known as Bill Keziah, and it was published right up until his death. According to his obituary Keziah was the newspaper’s founder who transitioned to a local reporter known for his commentary and deep love for Brunswich County. Keziah’s columns include everything from the blooming of local camellias, to visits from state and local dignitaries, to gossip, to little-known county and town history. He was a native of Waxhaw and, as a deaf individual, had attended the NC School for the Deaf in Morganton. Numerous comments about his contributions to the county can be found in issues of the Pilot published around the time of his passing.
A 1928 plot of land carved out to be “light burned” annually
Over 350 new photos have been digitized and uploaded to DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner, the Forest History Society. Located in Durham, North Carolina, their organization is dedicated to the preservation of materials about forest history and conservation. While their mission is to promote and collect materials about forest and environmental preservation around the world, these photos are specifically about North Carolina’s history of forest and wildlife conservation.
The back of a firefighting truck
A photo of firefighters creating a firebreak, a strip of open space that slows or stops the spread of a fire
These newly digitized photographs were taken from the late 1920s to early 1940s, by various photographers for the NC Department of Conservation and Development. They include images of fire control conferences and forester’s meetings, fire lines and fire line equipment, and much more. Many of the later photographs include construction of lookout towers across the state and angles from the top of those towers. Taken in dozens of counties across the state, these photographs give us views of the state and views of firefighting that we don’t often get to see, and show us how dangerous firefighting was at that time. For example, in the photo on the right, the men creating a firebreak were dressed in suits and ties instead of fire-protective gear.
A 1940 photo of CCC Camp P-73 from the Riegel Tower in Brunswick County
To browse through these materials, visit the Forest History Society’s partner page, or check out their website.
Title page from the 1956 Buccaneer, from East Carolina College, the most popular item on DigitalNC.org in 2014.
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center had a great year in 2014. We continued to work with partners around the state on digitization projects and added a wide variety of material to DigitalNC.org, making it easier than ever for users to discover and access rare and unique materials from communities all over North Carolina.
As we look back on our work over the past year, I wanted to share some of what we’ve learned by looking at our website usage statistics. Like many libraries, the Digital Heritage Center uses Google Analytics to capture information about what’s being used on our website, who’s using it, and how they got there. While there are still lots of questions remaining about usage of DigitalNC, these stats do give us a lot of valuable information.
In 2014, more than 250,000 users visited DigitalNC.org, resulting in more than 1.8 million pageviews. While people visited our website from computers located all over the world, the greatest number by far came from North Carolina. That’s what we expected and hoped to see. More than 200,000 sessions originated in North Carolina, with the users coming from 388 different locations, ranging from over 18,000 sessions in Raleigh and Charlotte to a single visit from the town of Bolivia in Brunswick County (user location is determined by the location of their internet service provider, so this may not tell us exactly where our users are located, but it’s going to be close in most cases).
What did people use on DigitalNC? We were not surprised to find that the most popular collection remains our still-growing library of yearbooks. The North Carolina Yearbooks collection received more than 125,000 pageviews alone, followed by newspapers (44,000) and city directories (11,000). And we were pleased to learn that at least somebody is reading this blog, which received nearly 2,500 pageviews last year. The most popular blog post was our announcement about the digitization of a large collection of Wake County high school yearbooks.
The variety of subjects, locations, and time periods in these photos is representative of the wide-ranging content available in North Carolina’s cultural heritage institutions and on DigitalNC.org. We are honored and excited to have a role in making this content accessible to everyone and look forward to sharing even more of North Carolina’s history and culture online in 2015.
Five more years of The State Port Pilot, a newspaper from Southport, North Carolina, are now on DigitalNC. These issues span the years 1945-1949, and were provided by our partner, the Margaret and James Harper, Jr. Library. They join previously digitized issues published from 1935-1945.
The State Port Pilot was established in 1935 and physical and digital copies continue to be distributed to this day. The newly digitized issues include articles pertaining to local news. As Southport is located in the coast, many articles concern fishing and boating. Other topics covered include local politics, the local economy, and events and happenings in the community. One weekly column includes investigations by “Our Roving Reporter.”
To browse through all digitized issues of the State Port Pilot, click here. To learn more about the Margaret and James Harper, Jr. Library, visit their partner page or take a look at their website.
Materials from 200 partner institutions across North Carolina are now officially online through DigitalNC, with the publication of The Brunswick Beacon. Thanks to our 200th partner institution, the Rourk Branch Library in Shallotte, N.C., we now have newspaper coverage of the southern North Carolina coast. You can read more about our 200 partner celebration on our blog or on our celebration page.
Rourk’s first addition to the collection helps us build the North Carolina Newspaper collection, with almost a decade of issues from The Brunswick Beacon. The Beacon is a unique community newspaper with issues dating from 1985 to 1994. The newspaper contains many creative ads (like the one below) and stories relevant to the area. The paper is an excellent resource for those interested in researching the activities of coastal areas in North Carolina or for genealogists.
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.
