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Chatham County Scrapbooks Document Cultural Moments of the 1950s

Newspaper clippings describing a "weird incident" of "mental telepathy" during the Civil War. The article was published in the Sanford Herald in 1952.
Newspaper clippings from Chatham County Scrapbook [Book 1]. The article was published in the Sanford Herald on July 14, 1952.

Two more scrapbooks on the history of Chatham County are now available on our site thanks to the Chatham County Historical Association. These scrapbooks primarily include newspaper clippings from The Sanford Herald and The Chatham Record, many of which are authored by Esther Womble Adickes. These articles recount local events and histories, several of which are retrospective.

One of the striking things about this collection of articles is how often they reflect on the Civil War in a romanticized way. Adickes sometimes refers to it as the “war between the states” and reminisces about some of the institutions of Chatham county before the war, including the Taylor Plantation. These kinds of articles are significant because they are from the 1950s—almost 100 years after the Civil War ended—documenting a resurgence of racism during the Jim Crow era.

This kind of rose-tinted retrospection has been in the news recently in relation to Confederate statues and monuments, many of which were erected during the early 20th Century. These newspaper clippings give some context to the historical moment in which many of these monuments were constructed.

You can see both scrapbooks in this batch here. To see more from the Chatham County Historical Association, you can visit their partner page and their website.


Mill Photos, Yearbooks & Family Video Show Scenes of Life in Chatham County

An adult tending to a large piece of machinery in a fabric mill.

Some photos from the Chatham County Historical Association include scenes of the Odell cotton mill that was formerly on the Haw River in Chatham County. Purchased by J.M. Odell in 1886, the mill was once at the heart of Bynum, N.C., and some of the mill’s satellite structures are still standing. The photos from this batch show the river pouring over a dam, as well as some of the machinery that was used to spin the cotton.

According to our partner, these photographs were taken in the 1950s by Arthur Hill London III, grandson of Arthur Hill London Sr. (1974-1969), who was the secretary and treasurer of the Odell Manufacturing Company at the time.

Several adults in dresses and hats talking to one another as they walk out of a house.
A still from the Siegrist family home movie, c. 1933.

These photos are only part of a batch from our partner, which also includes a set of yearbooks and an early home movie of the Siegrist family on a visit in Pittsboro around 1933. The movie shows some of the centennial celebration of the St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, scenes of a cemetery, and some footage of people gathering at a family member’s home.

One yearbook in this batch is the 1940 edition of The Seniorogue yearbook from Siler City High School. It is the second-oldest edition in our digital collection so far (after the 1939 edition), and it has a surprising amount of information about each student along with their picture, including the names of their parents.

You can see the photographs, The Seniorogue and the home video here, and the rest of the yearbooks can be found here. To see more materials from the Chatham County Historical Association, you can visit their partner page and their website. You can browse all of our North Carolina high school yearbooks by school and date in our North Carolina Yearbooks collection.


Additional Chatham County Architectural Photographs and Funeral Programs Now Available on DigitalNC

Thanks to our partner, Chatham County Historical Association, over 600 architectural images of Chatham County and 64 funeral programs are now available to view on our website. The architectural images are particularly interesting. They cover a broad variety of building types and ages including houses, businesses, churches, masonic lodges, and schools all the way back to the 16th century. Below is a small sample of the different types of buildings that were photographed in Chatham County.

Built circa 1850, the Haughton-McIver House is a beautiful two-story home. Some of its features include a five-bay facade, six-over-six sash windows, symmetrically molded corner boards, and a central entry composed of paneled double-leaf doors framed by transom and sidelights.

The Chatham County courthouse, built in the 1880s and still standing today, is a two-story rectangular brick structure. The structure’s dominant feature is a classical two-story portico crowned with distinctive three-stage cupola.

The former Hinton-Beckwith School, built around 1930 near Farrington, is an especially important landmark for the area’s Black community. Beginning in the earliest part of the 20th century and continuing for 40 years, the school served as a place where Black individuals in the community would go to learn. The building’s rectangular structure is set off by three recessed double-leaf entrances that are surmounted by transom and framed by rows of tall nine-over-nine sash windows. Other features include a main entrance marked by sidelights and protected by a portico.

To learn more about the Chatham County Historical Association, please visit their website.

To view more architecture materials available on DigitalNC, please click here.

To view more funeral programs from the Chatham County Historical Association, please view our Chatham County Funeral Program Exhibit.


Additional yearbooks from Chatham County Show Teacher Personalities

Thanks to our partner, Chatham County Public Libraries, we now have seven more yearbooks available from Chatham Central High School and Jordan-Matthews High School. Together, these yearbooks span from 1958-1971, a period when many high school yearbooks began to find their distinctive styles.

One fun thing from the 1961 Phantomaire from Jordan-Matthews is a slight twist on a yearbook feature that has lasted until the present day: senior quotes. While many yearbooks ask seniors to give a line or two of reflection on their time in school, the Phantomaire staff decided to preserve some of the famous words of their teachers. 

Two yearbook portraits of teachers.

It’s clear that these quotes were picked (mostly) out of love based on what teachers were known for. For example, there’s Mr. Poindexter, who was apparently known for starting sentences with the phrase, “Now, it seems to me…” Perhaps appropriately, Ms. Lane the librarian seemed to be more concerned about the volume of conversation.

Two yearbook portraits of two teachers.Some of the other teacher quotes are a bit more cryptic, such as the one word attributed to Ms. Brewer: “Throw!”

In contrast, P.E. teacher Mr. Charlton decided to stick with a classic.

 

The full list of yearbooks in this batch include:

Jordan-Matthews High School:

Chatham Central High School:

You can see the full batch of yearbooks here or browse all the yearbooks by school name in our North Carolina Yearbooks collection. For more materials from Chatham County Public Libraries, you can visit their partner page or their website


William Hooper Court Summonses and Additional Chatham County High School Yearbooks Now Available on DigitalNC

Thanks to our partner, Chatham County Historical Association, batches containing three Moncure and Pittsboro High School yearbooks as well as court summonses signed by William Hooper are now available on our website. These court summonses, created three years before the American Revolution began, are some of the oldest primary source documents available on DigitalNC.

During his position as Chatham County’s first Clerk of Court, William Hooper executed a myriad of legal documents. Over the years, three of these legal documents were donated to the Chatham County Historical Association where they were held until 2022. In March 2022, the historical association learned that the Hooper court summonses should have originally been transferred to the State Archives since they are responsible for the preservation of records from all counties, state agencies, and government offices in North Carolina—no matter how old the material. After contacting the State Archives, a representative came to collect the three court summonses from the association. At the State Archives the court summonses are being curated and properly preserved. To learn more about the Chatham County Historical Association’s experience with the State Archives, please read the association’s post here

William Hooper was one of North Carolina’s three signers of the Declaration of Independence and the North Carolina representative member of the Continental Congress from 1774 to 1777. After graduating from Harvard College in 1760 at the age of 18, Hooper went on to study law under James Otis. In 1764, he temporarily settled in Wilmington, North Carolina to begin practicing law. Popular with the people of the area, he was elected recorder of the borough two years after his arrival in 1766. From May 1771 to November 1772, Hooper served as Chatham County’s first Clerk of Court despite never living in the county. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, Hooper traveled across North Carolina as a lawyer, was appointed deputy attorney general of the Salisbury District, and officially entered into the political world when he represented the Scots settlement of what is currently named Fayetteville in the Provincial Assembly in 1773. In the years leading up to the American Revolution, Hooper traveled across North Carolina as a lawyer, was appointed deputy attorney general of the Salisbury District, and officially entered into the political world when he represented the Scots settlement of what is currently named Fayetteville in the Provincial Assembly in 1773.

On July 21, 1774, he was elected chairman and presided over the selection of a committee to a call for the First Provincial Congress. When the Congress met, Hooper was chosen as one of three delegates that would represent the state of North Carolina at the First Continental Congress. Over the next two years Hooper served as a delegate for both the Provincial and Continental Congress on various committees including one that was in charge of stating the rights of colonies, one that reported on legal statutes affecting trade and commerce in the colonies, Thomas Jefferson’s committee to compose the Declaration of Independence, a committee for the regulation of the secret correspondence, and many more. Despite Hooper’s triumphs in the political sphere early in the revolution, his return to Wilmington in early 1777 due to contracting yellow fever began a steady decline for his political career and, consequently, his health.

Hooper attended the General Assembly, serving on multiple committees as the member for Wilmington each year from 1777 until the city was taken over by the British in 1781. Considered a fugitive by the British, Hooper hopped to various friends houses in the Windsor-Edenton area while his wife Anne and children fled to Hillsborough. Reunited in 1782 in Hillsborough, the family was permanently removed to the backcountry where they remained out of touch with national and state current events. In that same year, Hooper’s election to General Assembly as member for Wilmington was declared invalid (presumably since he was now in Hillsborough). The following year, he ran for the General Assembly’s Hillsborough seat and lost. In spite of this loss, Hooper ran again in 1784 and was this time elected. He would serve in the General Assembly as a representative for Hillsborough until 1786.

Although he enjoyed some political success since he left Philadelphia in 1777, Hooper was devastated when he was not elected a delegate to the 1788 Constitutional Convention. Certainly adding to his feelings of discontent, the convention met at Hillsborough’s St. Matthew’s Church, which was within sight and sound of Hooper’s house. As a result of what he saw as a failure, Hooper began to drown his feelings of disappointment in rum. At the age of 48, Hooper died the evening before his daughter’s marriage in 1790.

 

To learn more about the Chatham County Historical Association’s experience with the State Archives, please read the association’s post here.

To learn more about the Chatham County Historical Association, please visit their website.

For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.

To learn about William Hooper’s life in more depth, please view NCpedia’s entry on William Hooper.

Information in this blog post was taken from the NCpedia William Hooper entry.


Mid-1800s Chatham County Superior Court Minute Docket Now Online

DigitalNC is proud to host the entire contents of a Chatham County Superior Court Minute Docket that spans from October 10, 1839 to December 3, 1866. This minute docket was provided by our partners at Chatham County Historical Association.

This minute docket is a primary source of legal cases from Chatham County, N.C. in the mid-1800s, including names of those who were called to court and what the disputes covered. Notably, this record was saved from the Chatham County Courthouse fire that occurred on March 25, 2010.

Also, you may be wondering what the object at the left corner of the docket image is; it’s a bone folder! We use bone folders to assist with digitization. In this case, you’ll find it gently holds back the pages that wouldn’t stay flat. You’ll also find weighted strings doing the same work on several other pages.

To look at the entire Chatham County Superior Court Minute Docket, click here. To learn more about the Chatham County Historical Association, you can view their homepage here.


Chatham County Funeral Programs added to Digital Exhibit

The Chatham County Funeral Programs digital exhibit grew recently as we added 72 more programs, thanks to our partners at the Chatham County Historical Association. The new programs document the lives of African Americans from Chatham County who passed on from 1967 until as recently as 2018. The majority of these funerals took place in or near Goldston, though others were in Siler City, Pittsboro, and other towns. Several of these individuals were from the Alston, Bynum, Dark, Headen, Hooker, Turner, and Wicker families.

The funeral program collection from Chatham County Historical are a great resource for family history research and for research on the Black community in the central part of the state.  To see all Chatham County funeral programs, check out our digital exhibit here. To learn more about the Chatham County Historical Association, visit their contributor page here or their website here.


New Chatham County Photographs and the Story of Navigation on the Cape Fear and Deep Rivers

Thanks to our partners at the Chatham County Historical Association, DigitalNC now hosts nearly 100 new photos of Chatham County, as well as a profile of the Cape Fear and Deep River Slack Water Navigation from 1851 and the story of the Cape Fear and Deep River Navigation Company.

The Cape Fear and Deep River profile and its story are DigitalNC’s first additions to provide insight into North Carolina’s inland navigation system, though this information is complemented by several photos of the Cape Fear river on our site. The Deep River, along with the Haw River, is a tributary of the Cape Fear River. The two rivers meet just south of Jordan Lake in Chatham County, near Moncure and Haywood, North Carolina. The Cape Fear and Deep River Navigation Company was organized in 1849 in Pittsboro, NC, to enable steamboats to traverse the rivers. The company ensured navigation of the rivers by building dams and locks as a slack water system of navigation. To learn more about the company, visit Wade Hadley, Jr.’s history of the organization from 1980.

This batch of materials also includes nearly 100 new photographs of twentieth century Chatham County. Several showcase local high schools, activities at the Gilmore Hunting Lodge, dam construction, the Carolina Power and Light Company, churches in Mount Vernon, and other subjects.

To learn more about the Chatham County Historical Association, visit their contributor page here or their website here.


1950s and 1960s yearbooks from Chatham County Public Library are now online

Black and white photograph of the lunch room at Pittsboro High School in 1965

The cafeteria at Pittsboro High School in 1965

20 new yearbooks from Chatham County Public Library are now online here. The yearbooks come from Pittsboro High School, Chatham Central High School, Jordan-Matthews High School, and Goldston High School and cover the 1950s and 1960s.  These yearbooks join the already 25 yearbooks from Chatham County schools on DigitalNC.  

To learn more about our partner Chatham County Public Library, visit their partner page here and their website here.  To see more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbooks page here.  


More Chatham County High School Yearbooks now online

The Seniorogue [1947], page 54

The Seniorogue [1947], page 54

Thanks to the Chatham County Public Library, seventeen yearbooks from high schools in Chatham County are now available online.

The yearbooks date from 1939-1966 and feature high schools from Siler City and Bonlee. They document the lives of students and teachers from these communities.

High Schools in this batch include:

To learn more about the Chatham County Public Library and its collections, please visit their contributor page or the website. To browse digitized yearbooks from your high school community, visit the North Carolina Yearbooks Collection and filter by High School Yearbooks.

 

The Seniorogue [1957], page 83

The Seniorogue [1957], page 83

The Treasured Leaves [1958], page 47

The Treasured Leaves [1958], page 47


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