Thanks to our partners at the Davidson County Public Library, we have made available a new batch of materials from Churchland School, Lexington High School, and various churches in Davidson County. These include yearbooks from Churchland School and Davidson County Community College, which give researchers a glimpse of life in mid-century North Carolina and may include familiar faces! Additionally, we have added new issues of The Lexhipep, Lexington High School’s student newspaper, as well as one 1944 issue of an anti-alcohol newspaper titled To-Morrow.
Thanks to our partner, Davidson County Public Library System, three batches of various materials are now available on our website. The first batch features eleven issues of the Erlanger Community paper from 1919 to 1922; a Robbins Elementary School 1931-1932 report card; Bylaws of Hopewell Council No. 1758 Royal Arcanum; and four new brightly colored Lexington Barbeque Festival posters. Batch two includes six new issues of the South Davidson High School yearbook covering from 1948 to 1952. The final batch contains 73 issues of the Thomasville Times, as well as student newspapers from Reeds High School, Denton High School, and Lexington High School.
36th Annual Lexington Barbeque Festival Poster
35th Annual Lexington Barbeque Festival Poster
To learn more about the Davidson County Public Library System, please visit their website.
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
More Davidson County yearbooks from the Northwestern Regional Library System are now available on DigitalNC.org. Joining over 50 other area yearbooks, these additions primarily represent Thomasville’s Fair Grove High School, which merged with another school and became East Davidson High School in 1962. The yearbook titles include The Twig and Tiger Roar, and range from 1948 – 1961. These volumes come from the Thomasville Public Library.
Many of the Fair Grove High School yearbooks feature hand drawings for their title pages. This is the case for the 1959 issue of The Twig, which also has an “Outer Space” theme and features staff as astronauts and class officers in spaceships.
The Twig [1959] – Fair Grove High School (Thomasville, N.C.)
Along with the Fair Grove High School yearbooks, we have also digitized the 1954 issue of The Lexicon from Lexington Senior High School, which was contributed by the Lexington Library.
Over 50 yearbooks from several branches of the Davidson County Public Library system, a new partner, are now online. These are the first high school yearbooks we’ve been able to present from Davidson County. The schools represented are listed below:
We also found several famous folks in the yearbooks above, including Richard Harrison of the Pawn Stars television series and the artist Bob Timberlake. The yearbooks above come from the Lexington Library and the North Davidson Public Library. You can view all of the yearbooks from Davidson County Public Library System on DigitalNC.
A new family genealogy history from Gaston County has been added to DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner, the Gaston County Museum of Art & History. The book, Our Kin, Being a History of the Hoffman, Rhyne, Costner, Rudisill, Best, Hovis, Hoyle, Wills, Shetley, Jenkins, Holland, Hambright, Gaston, Withers, Cansler, Clemmer and Lineberger Families, was originally published in 1915, but has been reprinted by the Gaston County Historical Society several times since and is now digitally available for all to read.
A photo of author Laban Miles Hoffman (center) and his family, undated
The book focuses on the individual families of Gaston County, including their common ancestors dating back to the 18th century. Many of the family members noted have long descriptions of who they were, what they accomplished in life, how their family names changed over the years, and more. This copy is quite special, as it has retained notes and highlighted terms that one of the authors made in his original edition, preserved in this reprinted version.
Written by Laban Miles Hoffman of Dallas, North Carolina, this book was conceived as a history of his own family, but rapidly grew into an exploration of the histories of all the associated families in his genealogy. He includes a short preface of his own personal story, how he grew up in Lowell, North Carolina, studied at Davidson College, and later went to work in Raleigh under Governor Holden before moving to Arkansas.
As a record of ancestors for over a dozen local families, it is a valuable resource for Gaston County historians, Gaston County residents, and family descendants. We are privileged to make it available on DigitalNC. To learn more about the Gaston County Museum of Art & History, visit their partner page or their website.
A bond certificate addressed to Jonathan D. Johnson, who purchased $100 Confederate dollars in March 1864.
Over three dozen 19th century and early 20th century Presbyterian Church sermons delivered by Robert Zenas Johnston are now digitized and available on DigitalNC. Also included are reports from 19th century Presbyterian Churches, documents from Rufus Johnston, and correspondence from Mary Gibson, both citizens of Mecklenburg County. All of these documents come to DigitalNC courtesy of our partner, Davidson College as part of their Andrew W. Mellon Foundation funded “Justice, Equality, Community: Reimagining Humanities Curricula” project, which is a three-year, campus-wide initiative. All materials digitized for the project by DigitalNC can be found on the exhibit page Nineteenth Century Family Papers and Plantation Records of Davidson College Trustees.
The cover of one of the notebooks used by the Presbyterian Churches of Mecklenburg County, made in roughly 1876.
Johnston’s sermons (over 550!) stretch from 1859 to 1907, until just before his death in 1908. He delivered them all across the state, from Asheville to Shelby, in different cities around Mecklenburg County, and even at the Unity Church in South Carolina. Approximately 61 of those sermons are undated, but they most likely date from the 1800s as well. In many of the earlier sermons, he discussed the Civil War on the local towns. We also have several of his student notebooks, a contract for a teaching position and pastoral position that Johnston was offered, and more.
Also included in this new collection of documents are financial records of Rufus Johnston, including receipts, bonds, and bills of payment. We also received correspondence and letters from Mary Gibson, one of which tells her brother Robert what she would like done with her property towards the end of the Civil War.
Another folder contains a few documents about Davidson College itself. One document was written by Reverend Jethro Rumple, reminiscing about life at the college in the 1840’s. Included is a small handwritten biography by Reverend Rumple about Reverend John Bunyan Shearer, the eighth president of Davidson College from 1888 to 1901. These documents help give us all a greater idea of what living as a student in those times was like. Also included in this batch is a letter written by Rumple to Brother McLaughlin about an 1878 Concord Presbytery Meeting in Statesville, North Carolina.
This collection also includes various reports to and about Presbyterian Churches across the state. A few letters are addressed to synods, while others are reports on new developments within the church. There are also several notebooks, copybooks, and ledgers used by the church.
An 1855 receipt from Rural Hill Plantation promising payment of $50.12 due the next day.
Finally, DigitalNC also received folders of papers and documents about several Mecklenburg County plantations. Stretching from the 1820s to the 1860s, many of the folders contain financial records and receipts from Rural Hill, a plantation in Huntersville that was built in 1788 by Major John Davidson. There are also documents from his grandson, Adam Brevard Davidson, who later became a Trustee of Davidson College, and financial records, ledgers and booklets from the Mt. Tirzah Plantation in Lincoln County.
To browse through these materials, feel free to visit Davidson College’s partner page, or check out their website.
Here we have issues of Lexington’s The Er-Lantern spanning from 1958 to 1971. Similar Spray’s Fieldcrest Mill Whistle and High Point’s Sew It Seams The Er-Lantern was a company paper depicting everyday life around the Erlanger Mills village.
Er-Lantern September, 1969
Opened in 1914, Erlanger Mills was created by Charles and Abraham Erlanger as a source of cotton for their Baltimore underwear company, which originally produced the one-piece “union suits.” By the 1920s, the company’s 250-ace complex included over employee 300 houses, multiple churches and schools, a hospital, and even its own baseball team. The village was officially annexed into Lexington in 1942 and the mill was sold to Gastonia’s Parkdale Mill Inc. in 1972. In 2008, the village was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
Er-Lantern November, 1960
Charlotte News and Evening Chronicle February 21, 1917
Photographer H. Lee Waters, who took many of the photos featured in the paper, has a collection of village-life snapshots on their website here.
The festival was created out of a conversation in 1983 where Joe Sink, Jr., publisher of The Dispatch, discussed his love of festivals with BB&T officials. Together, Sink and BB&T hired Kay Saintsing, a local organization developer and manager, that completed a study of the feasibility of a new community event. After completing her research, Saintsing provided Sink and BB&T with recommendations that led to the creation of a new city festival.
Held in Lexington, North Carolina on October 27, 1984, Saintsing and her Saintsing Management Services staff (now Preferred Events) produced the city’s first Barbecue Festival. Its first year, the festival had approximately 30,000 people in attendance and 3,000 pounds of barbecue cooked. Ten years later, in 1994, the crowd was over three times as large with over 100,000 attendees and 11,000 pounds of barbecue cooked. In 2022, the festival had a record-breaking attendance of over 200,000 people. The festival continues to be produced by Saingsting’s company, which is now run by her daughter Stephanie, and held annually in Uptown Lexington on one of the last two Saturdays in October.
This week we have an astounding 80 titles up on DigitalNC! These papers span all across the state, covering 22 of North Carolina’s 100 counties! We have papers from smaller communities, like The Free Press from the town of Forest City (Fun fact: Forest City was originally named “Burnt Chimney” after a house that burned own in the area, leaving only a charred chimney behind). We also have well-established papers from Raleigh, such as The Raleigh Times and Evening Visitor, giving us a cross section of the entire state.
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.
A collage of photos showing events and crowds at the Barbecue Festival
Posters advertising and commemorating the Annual Barbecue Festivals in Lexington, NC, are now digitized online at DigitalNC. There are nearly twenty of these posters included, stretching from 1998 to 2017, with most of these starring the barbecue and pigs around town that Lexington is known for. Local businesses that sponsored the events are featured prominently on the posters.
The poster announcing the 2001 Barbecue Festival
The Barbecue Festival is an annual event held in Lexington and is one of the country’s most popular festivals dedicated to food. Lexington, home of Lexington-style barbecue, uses a red sauce seasoned with ketchup, vinegar, and pepper, using only the pork shoulder. Beginning in 1984 and bringing in around 30,000 people that year, it is a celebration of all things barbecue, including hundreds of exhibitors selling handmade craft goods, a 50-ton pig-themed sand sculpture, and chances to watch expert cooks work their magic. 2014 had a record number of attendees, with an estimated 200,000 people coming to celebrate.
To learn more about the Barbecue Festival, you can visit the festival’s website. To see more of the items from Davidson County Public Library, visit their partner page or visit their website.
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.
