The cover of the 1950 edition of The Impersonator, the yearbook from Francis Garrou High School.
You can view all of the materials we’ve digitized for Burke County Public Library on their contributor page. For more information about the Burke County Public Library, please visit their website.
To learn more about the Burke County Public Library, please visit the contributor page or the homepage. To see more high school yearbooks like these, please visit the North Carolina Yearbooks Collection. Perhaps you’ll find yearbooks from your high school!
One thing that many of the Burke county yearbooks have in common is a shared admiration for animal mascots. In addition to the adorable tiger seen on the 1956 edition of the Impersonator from Valdese High School, you can’t overlook the endearing little guy on the front of the 1965 Calvacade from Drexel High School. (Though you may think he is a funny bear or perhaps a fox, further investigation reveals he is, in fact, a wolverine.) This set also includes a fighting eagle, a turkey, wildcats, bulldogs, and one fancy horse giving a knight a lift.
Thanks to our partner, Burke County Public Library, 15 new yearbooks from four Burke County high schools are now available on our website. This batch expands our current yearbook holdings for Glen Alpine, Morganton, Salem High School, and Oak Hill High School to include issues between 1949 to 1971.
Thanks to our partner, Burke County Public Library, a batch containing yearbooks from Oak High School, West Concord High School, Glen Alpine High School, and Morganton High School are now available on our website.
To learn more about Burke County Public Library, please visit their website.
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
Burke County Public Library has contributed nine additional yearbooks from Burke County high schools to their online yearbooks collection, which now spans the 1940s to the late 1960s. These latest yearbooks come from Drexel High School, Francis Garrou High School, Morganton High School, Oak Hill High School, and the first yearbook in the collection from West Concord School.
Capping ceremony in the 1960 edition of The Silver Cross.
A variety of yearbooks from our partner Burke County Public Library are now online. This batch includes the 1960-1963 editions of The Silver Cross by Grace Hospital School of Nursing, the 1958 edition of The Jacket by Olive Hill High School, the 1953 and 1967 editions of Belles Memoirs by Oak Hill High School, the 1967 edition of Cat’s Tale by Morganton High School, and the 1950 edition of The Pines by Salem High School.
Students ready for the operating room in the 1961 edition of The Silver Cross.
A bit of silliness in the 1960 edition of The Silver Cross.
The Grace Hospital School of Nursing offered three year nursing degrees, and used Grace Hospital in Morganton, North Carolina as its clinical site. The Silver Cross yearbooks feature photographs of capping ceremonies and portraits of student in their uniforms. It also shows photographs of the nurses-in-training working in different medical departments at the hospital.
To see The Silver Cross and the other newest yearbook additions, click the links below.
Civic Groups in the community gathered to create food baskets for the needed in December 1938.
Digital NC is happy to announce the new addition to the newspaper collection, The Valdese News. Issues from 1938 – 1950 cover small community of Valdese, North Carolina, located in Western North Carolina. Locals were able to receive the newspaper on weekly on Thursdays until 1949 when the newspaper made a switch to a Wednesday delivery.
Local stories in The Valdese News included stories about the local schools, major improvements within the community and even community service opportunities. In December 1938, local civic groups gathered to create food baskets for the needy within the community. Organizations such as the Colonial Theatre, the Valdese Lions Clubs, and the Valdese Boy Scouts, donated items to help create the baskets for local community members. Community members were also given a special show at the Colonial Theatre as a thank you for their support.
To see other issues of The Valdese News, visit them here.
To view more from our partner, Burke County Public Library, visit there here.
Don’t forget to check out extensive collections of NC Newspapers here.
Back in August, we announced our annual call for microfilmed newspaper digitization. We asked institutions throughout North Carolina to nominate papers they’d like to see added to DigitalNC. As it is every year, it was an incredibly tough choice – we are typically able to choose between 40-60 reels out of over 300+ nominated. This year we’ve chosen the following titles and years.
For our selection criteria, we prioritize newspapers that document underrepresented communities, new titles, papers that come from a county that currently has little representation on DigitalNC, and papers nominated by new partners. After selection, we ask the partners to secure permission for digitization and, if that’s successful, they make it into the final list above.
We hope to have these titles coming online in the first half of 2022.
This week we have another 38 newspaper titles up on DigitalNC! In this batch, we have issues spanning 33 years from Oxford, N.C. paper Oxford Public Ledger. In addition to being the county seat for Granville County, Oxford is also home to the first female parachutist and inventor of the ripcord: Georgia “Tiny” Broadwick.
Georgia was born April 8, 1893 and weighed only three pounds at birth, earning her the nickname “Tiny.” She was married at age 12, had a child at 13, and was widowed before she was 15. In 1907, her life changed forever when she saw The Broadwicks and their Famous French Aeronauts perform aerial stunts at the North Carolina State Fair. She left home, joined the Broadwicks travelling show, and was legally adopted by the show owner, Charles Broadwick, making her “Tiny” Broadwick.
Georgia ‘Tiny’ Broadwick, 1911. Via Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum.
In an exhibition in Chicago the week of September 16, 1912, Broadwick became the first woman to parachute from a plane. In 1914, jumped into Lake Michigan, making her the first woman to parachute into a body of water. Also in 1914, she debuted the ripcord in a parachuting demonstration for the U.S. Army, performing the first planned free-fall jump from an airplane. By the end of her career she is said to have performed over 1,100 jumps.
Wilmington Star, January 10, 1914
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.
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.
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.
![The Turkey Tail [1964], page 66](https://www.digitalnc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/turkey_1964_66.png)
![Belles Memoires [1966], page 28](https://www.digitalnc.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/belles_1966_28.png)
