From the 1950-1976 scrapbook
The reverse side of the postcard
Our latest batch of materials from the Wayne County Public Library includes some seriously cool scrapbooks that document almost a century of the library’s history. Ranging from 1910 to the 1990s, these seven scrapbooks contain detailed minutes, photographs, newspaper clippings, event paraphernalia and other ephemera.
One of the most exciting sections is the collection of letters from North Carolina authors—who also happen to be mostly women—in the 1950-1976 scrapbook. Several writers seem to have been invited for readings and events at the library, and they wrote letters back to library staff about their experiences.
From the 1950-1976 scrapbook
One of the most famous writers that visited was Betty Smith, who is probably best known for her novel A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (there are several materials about her already on DigitalNC, including this video interview). Although she was born in New York, Smith adopted Chapel Hill as her home town later in life and is still buried in the Chapel Hill Memorial Cemetery. Along with the card that she sent to library staff (pictured above), the scrapbook includes a newspaper clipping with an interview of Smith where she encourages Chapel Hill to resist the push for industry and to preserve its small-town character.
“I hate to see commercialism,” she said. “They come in and tear up trees that took 200 years to grow, and pile them up and burn them to get rid of them. Then they stick out little trees—with wire holding them up. Why couldn’t we have a shortage of bulldozers!”
The second half of a letter from Doris Betts
Another well-known author included here is Doris Betts, who served as an English and creative writing professor at UNC Chapel Hill. Betts was born in Statesville, attended UNC Greensboro and eventually settled in Pittsboro. In her literary career, she produced six novels, three short story collections, a Guggenheim Fellowship, three Sir Walter Raleigh Awards and the N.C. Medal for Literature. Her archive is now part of the UNC Chapel Hill Southern Historical Collection at Wilson Library.
Other authors included in the 1950-1976 scrapbook include Inglis Fletcher, Bernice Kelly Harris, Mebane Holoman Burgwyn, Bernadette Hoyle, and Mertie Lee Powers.
You can see the full collection of scrapbooks here. To see more materials from the Wayne County Public Library, you can visit their partner page and their website.
This week we have another 34 titles up on DigitalNC! While this batch focuses heavily on newspapers from Hendersonville, Goldsboro, and Greensboro, it also includes Fayetteville, Henderson, Albemarle, Clinton, Burlington, and our first addition from Bush Hill. Bush Hill (renamed Archdale in 1886) was home to the Annie Florence Petty, who was the first professionally educated and trained librarian in the state of North Carolina. Petty (born 1871) was a founding member of the North Carolina Library Association and, in keeping with her Quaker upbringing, she was also the first secretary of the North Carolina Friends Historical Society. After her prosperous, four-decade long career building the library at the North Carolina State Normal and Industrial School (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and other libraries across the state, she retired in 1933 and moved into the family home she shared with her equally successful, chemist sister, Mary Petty.
Mary (left) and Annie Petty in 1952. Image via uncghistory.blogspot.com
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.
This week’s additions include:
- The News Dispatch (Clinton, N.C.) – 1909-1917
- The North Carolina Prohibitionist (Bush Hill, N.C.) – 1886-1888
- The Observer and Gazette (Fayetteville, N.C.) – 1885-1887
- The Stanly Enterprise (Albemarle, N.C.) – 1898-1902
- The Twice-A-Week Dispatch (Burlington, N.C.) – 1913
- Border Review (Henderson, N.C.) – 1879-1880
- The Tobacconist and Review (Henderson, N.C.) – 1881
- The Henderson County Advertiser (Hendersonville, N.C.) – 1874
- The Henderson Times (Hendersonville, N.C.) – 1864
- The Western Courier (Hendersonville, N.C.) – 1878
- Independent Herald (Hendersonville, N.C.) – 1881-1882
- The Hendersonville News (Hendersonville, N.C.) – 1921-1922
- The Daily Rough Notes (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1861
- Goldsboro’ Daily Rough Notes (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1868
- Goldsboro’ Telegraph (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1850
- North Carolina Telegraph (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1850-1855
- Goldsboro’ Tribune (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1862
- Goldsboro’ Patriot (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1849
- The New Era (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1853-1855
- The Goldsboro Bulletin (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1883-1884
- The Daily News (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1865
- Goldsboro’ Daily News (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1866
- Goldsboro Mail (Goldsboro N.C.) – 1879
- Daily Morning Star (Goldsboro, N.C.) – 1867
- The Republican (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1870
- Daily Southern Citizen (Greensboro, N.C.) -1864
- The Topic (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1869
- Greensboro Union Register (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1869
- The Daily Battle-Ground (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1881
- The Daily Bugle (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1882-1884
- The True American (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1855
- The Southern Democrat (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1890
- Republican Gazette (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1869
- The Labor News (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1908-1909
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.
New to our site is a sizable collection of yearbooks and other campus materials from Greensboro. These items came to us from our partners at the Greensboro History Museum and Greensboro Public Library, and mark the beginning of our partnership with Greensboro Public Library.
Drivers Education at Page High School was clearly not for the faint of heart, as evidenced here in the 1965 Buccaneer.
Included in this batch are 31 yearbooks from Greensboro, Smith, Walter Hines Page, and Bessemer High Schools spanning from 1916 to 1967. There is also a hand-written roster kept by Greensboro Senior High School that contains the names and other information such as colleges attended, marital status, and addresses of the school’s graduates from 1922 to 1966.
The inside cover of the 1954 edition of Whirligig, Greensboro High School’s Yearbook, shows “The Setting of the GHS Story 1953-1954.” This setting includes the bunny hop, a fact-filled science building, the fountain of youth, and many references to Greensboro native O. Henry.
Alongside the yearbooks are student literary magazines from Greensboro High School. These student publications — titled Greensboro High School Magazine, The Sage and Homespun — include poems, plays, stories, and more. The earliest of these digitized in this batch is from 1907 and the most recent from 1960.
The covers for Greensboro High School’s Student Literary magazine — Homespun — creatively depict the theme of each edition. Shown here are four covers of the magazine printed between 1927 and 1931.
Materials from Greensboro History Museum can be found here, and the materials from the Greensboro Public Library here. For more information about Greensboro History Museum, visit their website or partner page. For additional information on Greensboro Public Library, check out their partner page or website.
The James J. Dallas home in Rockingham County.
The newest batch of materials from our partner, Rockingham County Public Library, includes two yearbooks, three books, a vertical file, several newspaper issues, and two short films. The yearbooks, from 1967 and 1968, were created by Madison-Mayodan Junior High School. The books cover the stories of Rockingham county notables John D. Robertson and James J. Dallas, as well as the Greensboro Telephone Exchange. The vertical file contains materials related to Smyrna Presbyterian Church’s centennial celebration, and the newspapers include more issues from the Fieldcrest Mill Whistle.
Lastly, video footage in this batch includes two films converted from 8mm format. The first shows the 1969 Madison Christmas Parade filmed in downtown Madison, NC. The second is a film created by Macfield Inc. that details their continuing education program for employees.
Serious student government officials seen in the 1968 Madison-Mayodan Junior High School yearbook.
To browse through the items in this batch, click the links below.
To see more materials from Rockingham County Public Library, check out their DigitalNC partner page, or take a look at their website.
North Carolina institutions with digital collections can now have their content added to the Digital Public Library of America through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center.
With over 5 million records and counting, the DPLA is a national digital library that brings together metadata from digital collections around the country into a single, searchable website. It also makes that metadata available to developers through an API (application programming interface), enabling reuse for all kinds of purposes – from visualization to data mining.<
North Carolina’s participation was announced last night at DPLA Fest in Boston. With over 120,000 items, these North Carolina institutions were partners in the initial launch:
New issues from thirteen newspaper titles have been added to DigitalNC, thanks to The North Carolina Collection at UNC Chapel Hill. These date from the late 19th century and fill in gaps in our digital newspaper collections. Issues from Our Home, The Daily Record, The Morning Herald, and The Western Herald are the first of these titles on the site.
Below is a list of titles, their cities of publication, and the years from which the issues date.
- Henderson Gold Leaf (Henderson, N.C.) – May 25, 1899
- The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, N.C.) – Nov. 18, 1898
- The Home Rule (Raleigh, N.C.) – Oct. 20, 1898
- The Western Herald (Jefferson, N.C.) – June 20, 1899
- The Morning Herald (Durham, N.C.) – Feb. 6, 1898, Sept. 18, 1898, Oct. 2, 1898, and Feb. 12, 1899
- The Lincoln Journal (Lincolnton, N.C.) – Aug. 26, 1898
- The Milton Herald (Milton, N.C.) – Feb. 3, 1898
- The Daily Record (Greensboro, N.C.) – Feb. 15, 1898, May 4, 1898, and June 8, 1898
- Salisbury Daily Sun (Salisbury, N.C.) – Aug. 10, 1898 and Dec. 28, 1899
- Our Home (Marshville, N.C.) – Aug. 16, 1898
- The Raleigh Times (Raleigh, N.C.) – May 26, 1898
- Winston-Salem Journal (Winston-Salem, N.C.) – May 25, 1898
- King’s Weekly (Greenville, N.C.) – March 24, 1899
Search or browse all of our newspapers here.
This week we have the final 35 newspaper titles for this project up on DigitalNC! Over the past 11 months we have uploaded over 2.4 million pages of North Carolina newspapers – bringing our total number of newspaper pages on DigitalNC to 4,175,076 and our total number of titles on DigitalNC to 1,161 – all freely available to anyone! In this closing batch we have our first paper from Bower, North Carolina (which you may know as Clemmons today) and an article in the Union Republican about Stokes County’s would be Wright brother: Jacob A. Hill.
Jacob Hill, Winston-Salem Journal, March 9, 1902
Before Orville and Wilbur’s iconic first flight in 1903, the race to create a manned flying machine was fiercely competitive. One of the contenders was a man from Vade Mecum Springs named Jacob Hill. Hill was born 1862 in Davie County and had been fascinated by the flight of birds ever since he was a child. In 1901 he decided to take that curiosity a little further and solve “the problem of aerial navigation” by building his own dirigible.
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Union Republican, March 14, 1901
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Danbury Reporter, December 5, 1923
Mr. Hill’s machine could have been the first piloted aircraft, but we’ll never know for sure if it could actually fly and be controlled. Momentum ran out when Hill couldn’t secure funding for his invention. According to Thomas Parramore’s First to Fly, witnesses claimed the craft could get off the ground, but couldn’t do much more than hover in place. Even though Hill’s airship became something of a local joke for a time, the legacy of his wild aspirations continues to live on in North Carolina history.
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Danbury Reporter, December 15, 1904
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Business Guide, February 16, 1906
Over the past year, we’ve added 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, we have made 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.
This week’s additions include:
Belhaven
Bower
Charlotte
Greensboro
Kings Mountain
Kinston
Lenoir
Monroe
Mt. Airy
New Bern
- The Republic and Courier (New Bern, N.C.) – 1872-1874
- The True Republican, and Newbern Weekly Advertiser (New Bern, N.C.) – 1810-1811
- The Morning Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1807-1808
- Newbern Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1809-1810
- The North Carolina Circular, and Newbern Weekly Advertiser (New Bern, N.C.) – 1803-1805
- The Daily Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1868
- The Republican & Courier (New Bern, N.C.) – 1871
- Newbern Enquirer (New Bern, N.C.) – 1860
- The Daily Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1894
- New Berne Daily Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1894-1895
Salem
Salisbury
Shelby
Statesville
Swan Quarter
Taylorsville
Warrenton
Winston
Winston-Salem
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.
This week we have another 40 newspaper titles and thousands of issues up on DigitalNC, including over 1,000 issues from The Messenger and Intelligencer from Wadesboro, the birthplace of Piedmont blues musician Blind Boy Fuller (read a brief biography about Fuller here). In this post we have some interesting new information regarding the blues legend’s birth!
Via John Edwards Memorial Foundation Records (PF-20001), Southern Folklife Collection, Wilson Library
Blind Boy Fuller was born Fulton Allen to parents Calvin Allen and Mary Jane Walker in Wadesboro, North Carolina, but the actual date of his birth is very much up for debate. The date of July 10 seems to be generally agreed upon, but the actual year tends to differ. While there are some sources that put it at 1904, folklorist Bruce Bastin puts Allen’s date of birth at July 10, 1907 based on statements from the North Carolina State Commission for the Blind, the Social Security Board, and the Durham County Welfare records. However, his 1941 death certificate states that he was 32 years old when he died, putting the year of his birth at 1908.
Rockingham Post-Dispatch, July 28, 1921
What we found makes things a little interesting. After the family relocated to Rockingham sometime in the early 1900s, his father posted a notice in the July 28, 1921 issue of the Rockingham Post-Dispatch that would suggest that none of these are accurate. The notice supports the idea of a July birthday but implies that, being 16 years old, he would have actually been born in 1905.
Bruce Bastin is the author of Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast and Early Masters of American Blues Guitar: Blind Boy Fuller with Stefan Grossman. The Bruce Bastin and Stefan Grossman Collections are housed here at UNC as part of the Southern Folklife Collection.
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.
This week’s additions include:
Charlotte
Edenton
Greensboro
High Point
Lexington
Milton
New Bern
Raleigh
Rocky Mount
Salem
Salisbury
Wadesboro
Wilmington
Winston
Winston-Salem
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.
From the 1958 Goldsboro Business and Professional Women’s Club Scrapbook
Thanks to our partner, Wayne County Public Library, we’ve got several additional scrapbooks from the Wayne County Business and Professional Women’s Club. The scrapbooks range from 1948 to 1974-75 and document many of the club’s leaders, events, and impacts in the area.
From the 1950 Goldsboro Business and Professional Women’s Club Scrapbook
The Business and Professional Women’s Clubs of North Carolina (BPW/NC) began in 1919 with representatives from Asheville, Charlotte, Greensboro, Raleigh, Salisbury, and Winston-Salem. It grew to encompass several more chapters, including one in Goldsboro. The clubs advocated for women’s interests in the state, like money for a women’s dormitory at UNC-CH and the ratification of the 19th Amendment, and they protested against discrimination, such as that against unaccompanied women in hotels. Today, the BPW/NC still works to “promote the general advancement of working women in North Carolina.”
In addition to photographs, the scrapbooks hold a selection of newspaper clippings, financial records, organizational literature, event programs, and ephemera. You can see the full batch of scrapbooks and club minutes here. To see more materials from the Wayne County Public Library, visit their partner page or their website.
This week we have another 45 newspapers added to DigitalNC including our first titles from Ridgeway, North Carolina!
In the June 15th, 1920 issue of the Asheville Citizen we have an article celebrating UNC’s class of 1920 where recent graduate, and Asheville native, Thomas Wolfe reads the class poem and presents the class gift at an alumni event. It would be almost a decade until his iconic debut novel, Look Homeward, Angel, is published.
Asheville Citizen, June 15, 1920
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.
This week’s additions include:
Asheville
Concord
Durham
Fayetteville
Greensboro
Highlands
Kinston
Laurinburg
Lenoir
Louisburg
Mocksville
Nashville
New Bern
- The North Carolina Circular, and Newbern Weekly Advertiser (New Bern, N.C.) – 1803-1805
- The Morning Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1807-1808
- Newbern Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1809-1810
- The True Republican, and Newbern Weekly Advertiser (New Bern, N.C.) – 1810-1811
- The Carolinian (New Bern, N.C.) – 1815
- The Hornet’s Nest (New Bern, N.C.) – 1847
- Newbern Enquirer (New Bern, N.C.) – 1860
- The Daily Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1868
- The Campaign Anti-Radical (New Bern, N.C.) – 1870
- The Daily Liberal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1872
Pittsboro
Polkton
Raleigh
Randleman
Reidsville
Ridgeway
Rockingham
Wadesboro
Winston-Salem
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.
