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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.”
Alamance County Prison Farm Inmates use Bookmobile
More than 30 new objects are now available on DigitalNC thanks to our partner, Alamance County Public Libraries. Items in this collection are more additions within the 6 month in-depth digitization effort documenting underrepresented communities in North Carolina.
Charles Richard Drew: Alamance County Memorial, page 3
This batch of materials tells important and powerful stories from Black communities in Burlington, Graham, and other townships in Alamance County. Below are highlights from the batch.
Several documents in the batch tell the story of Dr. Charles Richard Drew and his tragic connection to Alamance County. Drew was an internationally-renowned Black physician credited for developing improved blood storage techniques, which was important for establishing large-scale blood banks during World War II. He was considered to be the most prominent African American in his field and actively protested racial segregation in blood donation as it lacked any scientific foundation.
Tragically, Drew was killed in a car accident, while driving through the Haw River area of Alamance County in 1950. Many myths surrounded his death, all of which are covered in some of the materials in this batch. Learn more about Dr. Drew, his life, death and memory through the links below:
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 affected many communities in North Carolina ,especially with regard to school integration. This batch also includes several primary and secondary sources relating to the desegregation in Alamance county. Linked below, you can find a copy of the letter sent to parents of students in Burlington City Schools, announcing the upcoming change. In addition, there are several newspaper articles that document some of the lasting reactions. These items could be excellent tools for teachers who are looking for documents to support curriculum goals. Learn more about integration in Alamance County at the links below:
Responses to change are not always peaceful, as was the case in Burlington after integration. This batch also includes a selection of newspaper clippings that document the violence that occurred in May, 1969. A night of riots resulted in the death of 15 year old Leon Mebane, which is documented in several of the articles below. Material like these and others from this batch tell the important stories of many community members who are often underrepresented in mainstream formats. These items and all of the new additions are full-text searchable and available for research and teaching. Learn more about Leon Mebane, his family, and the Burlington race riots below:
Other highlights from this batch also include information about Alamance County Bookmobiles, Alex Haley’s Roots and connections to the county, genealogy in the African American community, and the legacies of segregated high schools in the area. Browse these materials at the links below:
To learn more about about the items included in this batch and other materials from Alamance County Public Libraries, please visit the contributor page or the website. To learn more about DigitalNC’s current digitization effort focusing on underrepresented communities in North Carolina, please view this blog post.
Granville County Public Library has contributed yearbooks and some manuscript volumes to DigitalNC, including the first yearbook on the site from Warren county.
Yearbooks
The Warrentonian [1949] John Graham High School, Warrenton, N.C.
Pep-Pac [1948] [1956] Henderson High School, Henderson, N.C.
Nahiscoan [1954] Nashville High School, Nashville, N.C.
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.