Cover of a ledger/scrapbook from the Cumberland County Public Library, 1873-1875
A trio of nineteenth-century business ledgers from the Cumberland County Public Library are now online at DigitalNC. The ledgers date from the 1830s, the 1850s, and the 1870s, respectively, and can help teach us more about the daily lives of North Carolinians during the nineteenth century. Particularly interesting is the first ledger, which dates from 1832-1834 and documents the business dealings of the merchants Womack and Goodwin in Pittsboro. Operating as general merchants, the firm served the local community with wares ranging from lace, to nails, to sugar, and everything in between.
Page From the Womack and Goodwin Business Ledger, 1832
The second ledger dates from 1852 to 1854 and documents the transactions of an unidentified merchant who conducted business in Cumberland County, Randolph County, and elsewhere. It includes transactions with several prominent Randolph County personalities, including Isaac Holt Faust (1818-1864), a wealthy estate owner who enslaved people, and Pinckney Davenport II (1811-1867), a local moonshine distiller. A selection of papers from the family of Foust’s daughter can be found in the Harris and Foust Family Papers, part of the Southern Historical collection at UNC’s Wilson Library.
Isaac Holt Foust Account in the 1852-1856 Ledger
The third ledger includes more account information, attributable either to one JB Hockaday or one NA Stedman Jr. of Fayetteville, and dates from 1873-1875. The first 21 pages of this ledge are pasted over with unidentified drawings and newspaper clippings, mainly consisting of prose and poetry.
For more materials from the Cumberland County Public Library, please visit their website or their contributor page here at DigitalNC.
Artist Aaron Wallace casts the hand of veteran Will A. Harrison from Guilford County.
Veteran Timothy Morton from Stanly County pictured with the cast of his hand at the North Carolina Veterans Park.
Materials from our new partner, the Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County, are now available on DigitalNC. These materials document the creation of installations for the North Carolina Veterans Park. The park is located in downtown Fayetteville, and was formally dedicated on July 4, 2011. Installations and plazas in the park explore the theme a “Veteran’s Journey: life before, during, and after service.”
The materials on DigitalNC concern the creation of the Oath of Service Wall and the Community Columns that are located in the Community Plaza of the park. The Oath of Service Wall includes
Materials from each county are represented individually on DigitalNC, and include information about the veterans, community members, and artists that facilitated the casting. Many include photographs of the hand molding process and biographical details.
To browse materials in the North Carolina Veterans Park collection, click here. To learn more about the Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County, take a look at their partner page, or visit their website.
Page 56 from the 1969 Smithsonian
A superlative from the 1963 LAFAMAC
14 more Fayetteville yearbooks and 12 more city directories from our partner Cumberland County Public Library are now available on DigitalNC. The yearbooks include 7 editions of The LAFAMAC by Fayetteville High School from 1963-1969, and 7 editions of The Smithsonian by E. E. Smith Senior High School from 1956, 1963, 1964, and 1966-1969. These yearbooks join previously digitized editions. The city directories in this batch cover Fayetteville from 1937, 1939, 1941, 1954-1955, 1957, and 1963-1969.
The LAFAMAC shows a glimpse at student life at the primarily white Fayetteville High School (now called the Terry Sanford High School) with The Smithsonian doing the same at the primarily Black E. E. Smith Senior High School. Both yearbooks include student portraits, superlatives, events, and activities. Both schools continue to serve the Fayetteville area today.
To browse through materials from Cumberland County Public Library take a look at their partner page. To learn more about Cumberland County Public Library visit their website.
Several local history materials have just been added to our site thanks to our partner, the Harnett County Public Library. This batch includes three sets of cemetery records, which may be of particular interest to family genealogists, and three decades of local library newsletters.
Graves after a storm, Harnett County
The three collections of cemetery records document are from the Colonial Dames of America in Wilmington. The Cemetery Records of Cumberland, Harnett, and Iredell Counties is a compilation of records from 1939; this copy of the Richmond County Graveyard Record is from 1969. The Cemetery Records of Mecklenburg County are undated, but the records seem to begin in the 17oos and extend into the late 1800s.
For Lillington community members and library lovers, these issues of The Bookbag (from 1977-2007) are full of local stories and excellent library programming. One program that deserves a shoutout is the pet memorial project from 2002, where patrons could donate to the library in honor of a beloved pet and have their pet’s name inscribed on a bookplate. Of course, this raises the timeless issue of whether your pet shares your last name (looking specifically at Bee Bee Davis and Crook Tail Rosser here).
From the January-March 1984 issue of The Bookbag
The library newsletters also give a historic glance into popular technology over the last few decades, as evidenced by this article on the “New Microfiche Printer/Reader” from the January-March 1985 issue.
The full batch of materials is available here and under all of the materials from Harnett County Public Library. To see even more materials from Harnett County, check out their partner page and their website.
Yearbooks covering 1963 to 1969 from Fayetteville Technical Community College are now online. Fayetteville Tech started in 1961 as the Fayetteville Area Industrial Education Center (IEC) to provide adult education and industrial training to those in Cumberland County and the surrounding area, with a particular draw for former military members, which have a large presence in that area of the state due to Fort Bragg. In 1963 the institution joined the North Carolina Community College system and became the Fayetteville Industrial Institute, which is remained until becoming Fayetteville Tech in 1988.
Photographs from the Air Conditioning Technology program in the 1963 yearbook
To view more materials from Fayetteville Technical Community College, visit their partner page. To view more materials from North Carolina community colleges, visit our NC Community College collection here.
This holiday season join us here on the blog for the 12 Days of NCDHC. We’ll be posting short entries that reveal something you may not know about us. You can view all of the posts together by clicking on the 12daysofncdhc tag. And, as always, chat with us if you have questions or want to work with us on something new. Happy Holidays!
Day 10: Community Scanning Days
Community scanning days are a popular way for many of our partners to bring historical materials into their collection from their community without needing to take physical possession of the objects. Instead, the community is invited to come in with their personal collections related to the town, or a particular historic event, or from a particular group, and have it photographed or scanned. Information about the object, as well as information about the owner, is recorded at the time of scanning as well. Then, depending on the infrastructure at the institution, the digital files and associated metadata are saved for research in the reading room or somehow made accessible online. Community scanning days are often a really good way to engage the community with their local history collection while at the same time filling in holes in that collection.
Where does the NCDHC come in? Well, we can help with these events in a variety of ways. One way is to come and offer technical support the day of the event, including bringing our scanners and doing a lot of that work. We are also happy to consult with partners who are planning such events and pass along metadata templates and scanning specifications we would suggest using. We can take the images and metadata from the scanning day and host those on DigitalNC. If you are interested in us hosting the materials, we do ask that you talk to us before your scanning day so we can be sure the image quality and metadata collected fit with our system. This page on our site is a good run down of what we’ll provide during and after scanning days.
We have had the pleasure of working with several institutions already with community scanning days, including the Hmong Keen Kwm: Hmong Heritage Project by Catawba County Library and the Massey Hill Heritage Discovery Project by the Arts Council of Fayetteville/Cumberland County.
If your institution is looking to do a similar scanning project, please get in touch!
Check back on Friday as we reveal Day 11 of the 12 Days of NCDHC!
Here at the Digital Heritage Center, we’re able to scan or photograph almost all kinds of two dimensional items and even a goodly number of those in three dimensions. However, audiovisual materials are sent off site for digitization to a vendor and, as such, it’s a service we’ve only been able to offer annually. We just concluded our second round of audiovisual digitization and, like last year, our partners came forward with a wide variety of film and audio nominations documenting North Carolina’s history. This is the first in a series of posts about the accepted nominations, with links to the items in the Sights and Sounds collection.
Belmont Abbey College
Unidentified man, presumably from Gaston County and interviewed for the Crafted with Pride Project in 1985.
The “Crafted with Pride” project, led by several cultural heritage institutions and businesses in Gaston County in 1985, sought to record and bring public awareness to the textile industry’s impact in Gaston County. During the project, a number of oral histories were collected from those who had worked in textile mills and lived in mill villages in towns like Belmont, Bessemer City, Cherryville, Dallas, Gastonia, High Shoals, McAdenville, Mount Holly, and Stanley. Belmont Abbey College has shared these oral histories on DigitalNC, as well as images and documents from the project. The oral histories touch on the toil of mill work, especially during the Great Depression, and the positive and negative cultural and social aspects of mill villages in North Carolina during the early 20th century.
Cumberland County Public Library
An unidentified girl wearing tartans at festivities surrounding Cumberland County’s Sesquicentennial in 1939.
Silent footage of the 1939 sesquicentennial parade in Fayetteville, N.C. combines Scottish customs, local history, and military displays from Cumberland County. This film was nominated by the Cumberland County Public Library, along with a brief advertisement soliciting support for renovation of Fayetteville’s Market House.
Duke University Medical Center Archives
Scene from “The Sound of Mucus,” performed by Duke Medical School students in 1989.
The films and oral histories nominated by the Duke University Medical Center Archives describe the history of Duke Hospital and Duke University’s School of Medicine. Included is a Black History Month Lecture by Dr. Charles Johnson, the first Black professor at Duke Medicine, in which he describes his early life and his work at Duke. You can also view “The Sound of Mucus,” a comedic musical created and performed by Duke Medical students and faculty in 1989. Two interviews conducted with Wilburt Cornell Davison and Jane Elchlepp give first hand accounts of Duke Hospital and Medical School history.
We’ll be posting several more blog posts in the coming weeks which will introduce the other films from our partners now viewable on DigitalNC.
Early student yearbooks from three Cumberland County schools are now available in the North Carolina High School Yearbooks collection on DigitalNC. The schools included are:
The following newspapers were digitized from microfilm in 2011 and 2012.
| Title |
Years |
Nominating Institution |
| The Mebane Leader |
1911-1915 |
Alamance County Public Library |
| Highland Messenger (Asheville) |
1840-1851 |
Buncombe County Public Library |
| The Standard (Concord) |
1888-1898 |
Cabarrus County Public Library |
| Daily Concord Standard |
1895-1899 |
Cabarrus County Public Library |
| Mecklenburg Jeffersonian (Charlotte) |
1841-1849 |
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library |
| Miners’ and Farmers’ Journal (Charlotte) |
1830-1834 |
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library |
| Catawba Journal (Charlotte) |
1824-1828 |
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library |
| Western Democrat (Charlotte) |
1856-1868 |
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library |
| North Carolina Whig (Charlotte) |
1852-1863 |
Charlotte Mecklenburg Library |
| Fayetteville Observer |
1851-1865 |
Cumberland County Public Library |
| The Carolina Times (Durham) |
1951-1964 |
Durham County Library |
| The Lincoln Republican (Lincolnton) |
1840-1842 |
Gaston County Public Library |
| The Lincoln Courier (Lincolnton) |
1845-1895 |
Gaston County Public Library |
| The Roanoke News (Weldon) |
1878-1922 |
Halifax County Public Library |
| The Marion Progress |
1916, 1929, 1940 |
McDowell County Public Library |
| Marion Record |
1894-1895 |
McDowell County Public Library |
| Marion Messenger |
1896-1898 |
McDowell County Public Library |
| The Pilot (Southern Pines) |
1920-1945 |
Southern Pines Public Library |
| Sylvan Valley News |
1900-1911 |
Transylvania County Library |
| The Pinehurst Outlook |
1897-1923 |
The Tufts Archives |
| The Goldsboro Headlight |
1887-1903 |
Wayne County Public Library |
| The Elm City Elevator |
1902 |
Wilson County Public Library |
| The Wilson Advance |
1874-1899 |
Wilson County Public Library |
Issues of the
Fayetteville Observer from 1851 to 1865 are now available on DigitalNC.org. The
Fayetteville Observer has long been one of the most important papers in North Carolina, covering the entire Cape Fear region. Over 1,300 issues are now online, an invaluable resource for anyone studying the Civil War era in North Carolina.
This title was nominated for digitization by the
Cumberland County Public Library, home to an excellent local and state history collection at its main branch in Fayetteville.
