Front cover of the 1957 edition of The Tiger, the yearbook of Ninth Avenue School in Hendersonville, North Carolina.
You can see other yearbooks we’ve scanned for Henderson County Public Library on their contributor page. For more information about this partner, visit their website.
A new batch of yearbooks are now available and online at DigitalNC, courtesy of our partners, the Henderson County Public Library, and the Henderson County Genealogical and Historical Society. The first batch, from HCPL, includes issues of Hendersonville High School’s yearbook, the Laureate, from 1948 to 1961. The second, from the HCGHS, includes more issues of the Laureate, from 1962 to 1963, as well as a 1916 yearbook from Hendersonville High School, which was entitled The Mountaineer. These batches represent the first digitized items from both partners, and we are privileged to have them on our website.
The 1916 Mountaineer has a class poem, class prophecy, valedictorian address, “The A.B.C. of the H.H.S.”. Most others have class portraits, individual portraits, photos of faculty, class photos, sports teams, student clubs and activities, national honor society honorifics. 1956 Laureate also has a dedication for the students themselves at the very end.
These yearbooks are the first items from the Henderson County Public Library and the Henderson County Genealogical and Historical Society, and we are privileged to have them as contributing partners. Having their materials improves our knowledge of what Henderson County life was like for high schoolers in the 20th century.
To learn more from the Henderson County Public Library, please visit their partner page or check out their website. To see more from the Henderson County Genealogical and Historical Society, please take a look at their partner page or visit their website.
Here we have materials spanning three decades from our partners over at the Granville County Public Library! These additions include issues of the Oxford Public Ledger, a student paper from Henderson High School, and yearbooks from Henderson and Dabney, N.C.!
With the start of the fall semester and football season here in North Carolina, marching bands are officially back on the field and in the stands supporting their teams and entertaining audiences with favorites such as Fight Song, Hey Baby, and You Can Call Me Al. While we all appreciate what marching bands adds to these sporting events, no school has shown as much appreciation for their marching band than Henderson High School.
In the school’s 1964 yearbook, an overwhelming amount of page space is given to the school’s band. Some of these photographs show the students rehearsing in the band room with band director W. T. Hearne, but a majority of them show the students in their full marching band and majorette uniforms. The photographs included in this post from the 1964 Pep Pac showcase the amazing size of their band as well as their snazzy uniforms.
To learn more about the Granville County Public Library, visit their website here.
This map of North Carolina, called “An Outdoor and Tourist Guide to North Carolina,” was probably created to lure visitors to our brand-new parks; the text alongside it reads, “State Parks in North Carolina are still under development, and at present accommodations and facilities are not completed, except at Fort Macon State Park, Carteret County.” It also lists R. Bruce Etheridge as the director of the Department of Conservation and Development (he served from 1933-1949).
A map of an army plot in Granville County from 1943
Another notable addition is this army map, supposedly used to train troops to read French maps during World War II. Although it shows an area of Granville County near Mountain Creek Church, most of the text is in French.
The other maps show different versions of Henderson, N.C. (one from 1882). They also note the major roads and land owners.
Students in the Library Club at Mary Potter High School, 1953
The other two yearbooks are from Bingham School (Mebane, N.C.) from 1908 and Oxford College, 1921. To see our full collection of North Carolina yearbooks, click here. To see all materials from the Granville County Public library, visit their partner page.
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.
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.
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.
A 10th grade typing class in 1967 at the G.C. Shaw High School class in Stovall, N.C.
Several new high school yearbooks from Granville County are now online on DigitalNC, provided by our partner Granville County Public Library. Included are two years of The Hornet by G.C. Hawley High School from 1967 and 1968, the 1967 Pep Pac by Henderson High School, the 1967 Wildcat by J.F. Webb High School, and the 1967 The Pirate by G.C. Shaw High School. The yearbooks contain individual school portraits, group portraits, and photographs of sports, activities and school groups.
A collage of the 1967 senior class officers at G.C. Hawley High School.
Fifteen new years books from the Granville County Public Library are now available on DigitalNC. These yearbooks feature students and teachers from Epsom High School, Henderson High School, J.F. Webb High School, Oxford High School and the Oxford Female Seminary.
High school yearbooks on DigitalNC often feature interesting, and sometimes weird, traditions. From this batch of yearbooks, Henderson High School sets a new level for interesting traditions. The 1963 “Pep Pac” highlights the high school’s Key Club, which participated in activities to develop leadership skills in young men. Apparently, one of these activities was a Donkey Basketball game, in the high school gym. It appears that this event was hosted mainly to entertain community members, which it is still doing to this day.
Also of interest are the two catalogs from the Oxford Female Seminary from 1883 and 1905. They feature the strict rules and formalities that stand a sharp contrast to the other yearbooks in this batch, which come from the mid-1960s. Each could be useful for someone interested in genealogy of Granville County or Women’s Education in the late 19th to early 20th centuries.
To see more yearbooks from the Granville County Public Library, click here. To learn more about the Granville County Public Library please visit the contributor page or the website.
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.
