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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
