Senior superlatives from the 1964 The Robin yearbook.
Graham County Public Library, one of our westernmost partners, has contributed our first Graham County yearbooks to DigitalNC. There are now 11 yearbooks from Robbinsville High School (1950-1967) available online. In addition they provided two from Tri-County Community College (1979-1982) in Murphy, NC (Cherokee County).
In June, the staff from the NC Digital Heritage Center drove over 5 hours – almost to the Tennessee border! – to spend a few days scanning on site at the Graham County Public Library. A beautiful part of the state, we not only enjoyed meeting our new partner, seeing their collections, and even getting to sit in on a mountain music lesson at the library, but also getting to know a part of NC we don’t often get to. The majority of materials we scanned for Graham County were photographs of the logging industry and dam building that built up the western part of the state in the early to mid 20th century and the people who built the towns that supported these operations.
Man standing on a bridge near Cheoah Dam
Train hauling logs
With these scans now online, we have added a new partner and new county to DigitalNC! To learn more about Graham County Public Library visit their partner page.
8 yearbooks from John Graham High School in Warrenton, NC are now online, thanks to partner Warren County Memorial Library. The yearbooks span the years 1947 to 1969 and provide a glimpse into the lives of high-schoolers in the northern portion of North Carolina. The school integrated in 1966 and the yearbooks from 1967, 1968, and 1969 show the newly integrated population of the school.
John Graham High School was originally the Warrenton Male Academy, one of the first schools in the state, which opened in 1786. In 1897, the school changed it’s name to Warrenton High School and in the early 1900s became coeducational. The school later became public and was known as John Graham High School, after the man who took over the school in 1897. John Graham High School during the 1900s was the white school in Warrenton, while John R. Hawkins High School was the school for Black children. During integration, the students of Hawkins High School were moved to John Graham High School. John Graham’s last graduating class was in 1981. After that, the school transitioned to a middle school and the high-schoolers moved to the new Warren County High School building. Several well known graduates have come from John Graham High School, including Frank Porter Graham, who became a US Senator and president of UNC and R.B. House, the first chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill.
A page from Hill’s Burlington and Graham City Directory [1957]
These directories are a great primary source for learning about the folks living Alamance County, North Carolina during the mid 1930’s through the ’60s. These directories provide the names, addresses and phone numbers for residents and businesses in Burlington and Graham City. City directories are a fantastic genealogical resource for researchers. All directories are text-searchable.
To view the directories, follow the links below
An advertisement for Burling Coca-Cola Bottling Company Inc.
This photo, from the 1955 edition of The Wag, is called “Jubilant Conference Champions,” since this team was the Eastern AA champion of 1954 and the runner-up to the state championship.
It seems like the 1954 Red Devils were a bit stronger than the 1949 team, which published its season of scores in the 1950 edition of The Wag. Even though the team was victorious against Siler City, Draper, Mebane, Hartsel, Durham County, and E.M. Holt, they also took some tough losses against Roxboro and Oxford. 1949 was also apparently the year that the team faced off against Trinity in the Hosiery Bowl.
Thanks to our partner, Granville County Public Library, a batch containing yearbooks from Dabney High School, Henderson High School, Franklinton High School, J.F. Webb High School, and Zeb Vance High School ranging from 1938 to 1970 are now available on our website.
To learn more about the Granville County Public Library, please visit their website.
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
Thanks to our partners at the Warren County Memorial Library, we’ve added 13 new John Graham High School yearbooks to DigitalNC, bringing our total from this school to 22. We now hold each yearbook from 1947 until 1969, enabling digital access to resources on student life in Warrenton, North Carolina. The school integrated in 1966, so these recent earlier additions show the school when it’s population was all white students.
Our holdings of John Graham High School yearbooks were created by the school after it had become a coeducational, public high school. The original school, named Warrenton Male Academy, was founded in 1786 and was one of the first high schools in the state. John Graham High School of the 1900s was the white high school in town until integration with John R. Hawkins High School in the mid-1960s. The class of 1981 was the last graduating class of John Graham High School, which then became a middle school. Local teenagers moved to the new Warren County High School building. The building is now the John Graham Center for Warren County Family Services.
Over 100 new images of Alamance County are available on DigitalNC, thanks to our partners at Alamance County Public Libraries. The collection of photographs and postcards was compiled by Don Bolden, author of several books about Alamance County. They document various towns including Burlington, Alamance, Graham, Saxapahaw, Elon, Gibsonville, Mebane, and Whitsett.
The images range in date from around 1880 to 1936. Many focus on the communities’ rich industrial heritage, though other subjects shown include education, local businesses, and railroads, even a parade to celebrate the end of World War I. The town made a replica of L’Arc de Triomphe for the occasion, shown below.
The batch also includes images of several local mills, such as Elmira Cotton Mill, May Hosiery Mill, Aurora Cotton Mills, Whitehead Hosiery Mills, Daisy Hosiery Mill, and others.
Additionally, there are several photos of the Whitsett Institute, a co-ed school in Whitsett, North Carolina. Image subjects include students, teachers, the baseball team, the orchestra, and others.
To see all of the photos and postcards in this batch, click here. To learn more about the Alamance County Public Libraries, visit their partner page here, or their website here. To browse Don Bolden’s publications, click here.
An exterior shot of Walter Williams High School in 1968.
A new batch of yearbooks from Alamance County is now available on DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner, the Alamance County Public Libraries. Included are nearly 20 yearbooks from schools across Alamance County during the middle of the 20th century. This batch also includes a 2002 booklet to commemorate and reminisce about the Class of 1944 at Aycock High School, assembled by Rachel Hawkins Cole.
These yearbooks contain individual and class portraits, class histories, honorifics and photographs of school activities, class clubs, and athletic teams. Some of the yearbooks also include important or notable events throughout the school year, poems or songs dedicated to the class, and pages dedicated to certain classes.
The booklet dedicated to the Aycock High School Class of 1944 is also included. It details the history of Aycock High School, honors various teachers and administrative figures present at the school at that time, and includes photographs of classmembers taken from that time period. It also included a program taken from a commemorative service in 2002 where classmates were invited to come together to remember their classmates and time spent at Aycock High School.
Follow the links below to browse the yearbooks from the schools included in this batch:
We are one of 29 finalists for the Institute of Museum and Library Services 2018 National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Now through April 13, IMLS is asking the people who have been impacted by the Digital Heritage Center to share their stories. If you have a story you’d like to share, we’d love to hear from you! Please contact us or share via social media by tagging us on Facebook (@NC Digital Heritage Center) or on Twitter (@ncdhc).
Today’s story comes from Ross Cooper, Adult Services and Reference Librarian at Watauga County Public Library. We’ve worked with Watauga County Public Library to digitize a wide variety of photographs from their “Historic Boone” collection. They have steadily increased their local capacity for digitization and now make collections available to a broader audience at Digital Watauga.
Boone Elementary School Students, 1913 (Detail), Shared by Watauga County Public Library
“As a Reference Librarian at the Watauga County Public Library in Boone, North Carolina, I was fortunate to have been present when, with the help of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, our institution became first involved with historic preservation and digitization. A local group called Historic Boone wished to bequeath the historic images which their group had gathered, described, and cared for over several decades into the caretaking of our library, some ten years ago. Our then-County Librarian accepted the items and made a space for them. I was privileged at about the same time to attend a North Carolina Library Association annual conference presentation in which Nick Graham and Lisa Gregory of the University of North Carolina and the State Library of North Carolina presented on the ways that small public libraries and other institutions with limited resources might take some small steps towards preservation, scanning, and digitized sharing of materials within their collections which hold historical significance. This led us to a few small first attempts, including a blog-format web site with a few, piecemeal, scanned images. The offer of off-site digitization by the NC Digital Heritage Center which was additionally presented at this conference eventually led our library to transport the entire photograph archives of the Historic Boone society to the University of North Carolina to be digitized and shared online via www.digitalnc.org.
“The wide-spread community interest engendered by this undertaking and by the readily-accessible web presence was followed by the successful application by our new Regional Director for an EZ Digitization grant funded by the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA). The NC Digital Heritage Center provided invaluable support, advice, and encouragement as we used this generous funding opportunity to purchase scanning and computing equipment and to fund a year-long temporary part-time position for a digitization technician. Our community was fortunate at this time to have a historian, Dr. Eric Plaag, move to our area and immediately begin actively and tirelessly working with our town, our library, and the local historical society on a number of projects involving preservation and dissemination of historical material. With his generously-volunteered expert advice, the steps which we had undertaken thanks to the NC Digital Heritage Center have now taken root and grown into a locally-based initiative, Digital Watauga, which is a cooperative venture between the Watauga County Historical Society and the Watauga County Public Library. Other local organizations, including the Junaluska Heritage Association, representing our county’s oldest historically African American community, and numerous interested individuals, have contributed to making this new and growing effort a success, on behalf of all of our area’s people. It was only through the expertise, assistance, and support of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center that any of this work ‘left the ground’! As just one small portion – perhaps the small, rugged, mountainous, Northwestern portion – of the vast array of resources which have been preserved and shared by NC Digital heritage – the strides which we have made in saving and sharing our local history are a testament to the greater work which this institution has done throughout our state, an effort which extends far beyond our local area and our state’s boundaries. I cannot highly enough express my appreciation, personally and as a community member, and I sincerely and heartily endorse the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center as a perfect exemplar of the ideas and ideals which are recognized by the IMLS National Medal for Museum and Library Service.”
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.
