The Montgomery County Public Library recently provided the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center with a wide variety of materials to digitize and publish on DigitalNC. Coming directly from the library is a photo album from the 1980s depicting the library’s various activities and programs, including arts and crafts, a quiz bowl, summer reading programs, and a library luncheon.
Summer reading program– “Book a Trip to Africa”
In our Images of North Carolina collection, we also recently added a few maps and blueprints of various areas of interest around Montgomery County, pictures related to prominent members of the community, and four photographs from Candor School of Miss Elizabeth Currie and her fellow faculty members and pupils. In the North Carolina Memory Collection there are two more items related to Miss Currie: a music recital program and a piano recital program. Also from a school in Montgomery County are two play programs put on by a class in Troy Elementary.
Survey map for a land dispute between Matilda Owens and Elijah Needham
Jewel Callicutt and friends outside of one of her greenhouses
A number of election returns from Montgomery County in the 1880s were included, and they show how the districts in Montgomery voted on such matters at what to do about public debt and who to elect for president, representation, and state officials.
Election returns from Montgomery County for State Officials
Furthermore, we have added booklets written by local historian Catherine Watkins McKinnon: History of Sharon and First Presbyterian Church, Mt. Gilead, 1795-1970 and The History of Big Oak Christian Church in Eagle Springs. For a bit of more recent history, we have a copy of a booklet printed by the American Legion listing all of the service men and women from Montgomery County who served in the World Wars. Also added in this batch are some items about the various activities of some of the clubs in Montgomery County. A number of yearbooks from the Woman’s Club of Biscoe list their events and programs throughout the year, and each one contains a copy of both their constitution and bylaws. There is also a program from the Charter Night for the Rotary Club of Star, North Carolina, sponsored by the Troy division of the Rotary Club.
Woman’s Club of Biscoe Yearbook, 1942-1943
Finally, the Montgomery County Public Library provided issues from the 1960s of The Smoke Signal (West Montgomery High School’s student newspaper), two funeral programs (for Othar C. Hunsucker and Juanita Auman Wallace) and some newspaper clippings about the town of Troy winning the Sandhills Area Development Association’s community development contest. For more information about the Montgomery County Public library and their materials, visit their contributor page on DigitalNC, the library’s website, or see these previous blog posts from DigitalNC.
Additional photographs and scrapbooks highlighting Montgomery County’s local history are now available online. Many of these items share subject matter with other materials already on DigitalNC.org.
Page 23 from the Marionette Scrapbook, featuring the January 1967 class.
A new Marionette Scrapbook joins the already published 13 scrapbooks that belonged to Helen Poole, who taught the puppets class to sixth graders at Troy Elementary for several years. This scrapbook features photographs and performance programs from 1955-1974. Other new scrapbooks include Troy Music Club scrapbooks from the mid to late 1960s, Troy Civic Council – the 1971-1972 addition to already available Civic Council scrapbooks, Troop #243 Scrapbook, and a page from the Biscoe Woman’s Club: The Beginnings.
Town of Biscoe Veteran Harvey T. Luquire
Several more Town of Biscoe Veterans photographs are now available, featuring servicemen and women from Biscoe, North Carolina and the surrounding areas. Other Town of Biscoe Photographs were added, which include historical buildings and businesses of Biscoe, North Carolina, and the photograph of Pallie Atkins and Willard Atkins who resided in the Love Joy community.
Programs on American Home: The Woman’s Club Year Book, 1936-1937
Lastly, we have added annual reports, a scrapbook, and some other items to the Montgomery County Public Library digital collection. The Woman’s Club Year Books are annual reports for the woman’s club from years 1935-1936, 1936-1937, and 1948-1949. There’s also several items related to the Word Magic! workshops. Held at the Montgomery County Public Library, Word Magic! was a summer workshop led by poet Phillip Shabazz about reading and writing poetry to 14 Montgomery County fourth and fifth graders. The scrapbook contains general information about the summer workshop. The Word Magic! Poetry Booklet contains a collection of poetry created by the session’s students, and the newspaper article features a short overview of the program as well as pictures of its participants.
To browse all of the materials from Montgomery County Public Library, please visit here.
Sixth graders create puppets in Helen Poole’s class. January 1968
Sixth graders performing with puppets they built, November 1973.
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center recently completed scanning a set of materials from Montgomery County Public Library. Included were several photograph albums featuring students at Troy Elementary School building and playing with marionettes. The albums belonged to Helen Poole, who taught the puppets class to sixth graders at Troy Elementary for many years. The albums span the 1960s-1970s.
Douglas W. Brooks Library building, before it was converted into a library. Drawn by Jim Reese, 1977.
Other materials from Montgomery County include several items related to the history of the libraries in the county, including plans for the Biscoe Public Library, the dedication program for Montgomery County Public Library in 1979, and a drawing of the original Douglas W. Brooks Public Library.
To view all materials on DigitalNC from Montgomery County Public Library, visit here.
Primary materials covering political canvassing efforts and election returns from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Montgomery County, North Carolina are now available at digitalnc.org.
The State Democratic Executive Committee in Raleigh, NC asked Chairmen in each township to fill out Canvass Books to determine the “political condition of affairs in his County; whether or not there is any dissatisfaction or luke-warmness, and the cause or causes”. The names of voters were recorded along with their political affiliation and race, a category for ‘Doubtful’ was also included. The Committee met weekly to discuss the results and plan how to ensure a Democratic victory.
Loose lists of election returns from Montgomery County during the 1840s – 1890s have also been digitized. Votes were cast on a range of topics including Prohibition, Special Taxes, and members of Legislation.
These materials are shared online by the Montgomery County Public Library.
There are lots of things you can learn in higher ed—and based on our latest batch of materials from Montgomery Community College, MCC is a great place to explore some of those niche interests. In this latest batch of materials, we’ve got scrapbooks from 1968-1983 and catalogs and student handbooks from 1967-2020. These materials document some of the ways that Montgomery students have been able to explore their passions and find success in surprising areas.
From the 1989-1990 scrapbook
One interesting article from the 1989-1990 scrapbook tells of seven MCC students and two instructors who competed in a taxidermy competition in Apex, N.C.
“The pride in their achievement was evident as they returned home with a total of 27 awards,” the article says.
Much of the team’s success should probably be credited to instructor Mike Gillis, who received the highest state award as well as several category awards in the professional division that year.
A plate from the collection of pottery instructor Mike Ferree
Another art form that Montgomery CC students excelled in was ceramics. In this article from the 1989-1990 scrapbook, pottery instructor Mike Ferree describes the way that Seagrove (in neighboring Randolph County) has become known for its ceramic arts.
“Pottery started in Moore and Montgomery counties because of the good clay,” he explained.
In the Spring 2020 catalog (one of the most recent available), the pottery program is going strong; students can choose from studio pottery, beginner handbuilding, beginner wheel throwing, beginner Raku, glass and salt pottery, and beginner pottery design.
All of the scrapbooks in this batch are available here; all of the student handbooks and course catalogs from this batch can be found here. To see more from Montgomery Community College, you can visit their partner page or check out their website.
Thanks to our new partner, Montgomery Community College, nine catalogs covering years from 1969 to 1992 and a publication that details the college’s 50 year history (1967-2017) are now available on our website.
Montgomery Community College (originally the Montgomery Technical Institute) was established on September 7, 1967 in Troy, North Carolina. Due to the Montgomery County’s status of one of the most rural, least populated, and isolated counties in North Carolina the college faced tremendous challenges to get started and chartered. According to Montgomery Community College: 50 Years of Success there was a delay of several years to have the college established due to state leaders thinking it would not succeed. The citizens of Montgomery County proved them wrong. The campus currently includes facilities of approximately 134,400 square feet on 153 acres of land and over 400 enrolled students.
To learn more about Montgomery Community College, please visit their website.
The Stanly County Museum and Montgomery County Public Library recently asked us to add some items they digitized to DigitalNC. There are a range of items, from late 18th century business documents in the Forrest Family Manuscript Collection to ledgers from stores in Montgomery County, to this striking panoramic photograph of Lillian Mill.
Here’s a list of the other items. You can also view everything from Stanly County Museum or Montgomery County Public Library.
Fairview Memorial Park Brochure
Forrest Family Manuscript Collection
Norwood Elementary School Signature Book of Ronnie Melton
Images
East Main Street, Albemarle, NC
Farmers and Planters Hotel, South Third Street, Albemarle, NC
John Odom Ross
Panoramic View of Lillian Mill and Group Portrait
Stanly County Public Library
Sid Austin House
Miller Family Bible Page
Ledgers
John B. and H. Martin’s Rocky Springs Store Ledger or Day Book
Blacksmith’s Ledger
Ledger of a Store on the Little River, Montgomery County, NC [1829-1830]
Ledger of a Store on the Little River, Montgomery County, NC [1831-1838]
Stanly County School Ledger for District 47
New materials have been added to the Dr. Francis Joseph Kron Collection, a rich manuscript collection from the Stanly County Museum. Most of the documents pertain to people enslaved by Dr. Kron’s daughters, although he himself is mentioned in a few of them.
Tax receipt of James Kron, 1869
One of the batches of documents contains tax record receipts. Many of these receipts show the amount of state, county, and poll taxes paid. The other batches, one covering the years between 1855 and 1889, the other from the years 1869 to 1905, are primarily financial documents, although there are some letters of correspondence between family members. There are a number of interesting documents in these collections that lay out the terms of sharecropping agreements.
Detail of signatures on a sharecropping contract between James Kron & Lewis Brutton.
Dr. Francis Joseph Kron was a resident of Montgomery County, and he owned sizable amounts of land both there and in Stanly County. He had a variety of interests and in the course of his life he was a teacher, physician, plantation owner, and horticulturalist. For more information about Dr. Kron, visit the Stanly County Museum’s website. There are more papers from Dr. Kron available on DigitalNC’s website, as well as in the Southern Historical Collection in Wilson Library at UNC-Chapel Hill.
We’ve recently completed a number of items from Montgomery County Public Library that document the communities of Biscoe and Troy, NC.
In an earlier post, we wrote about Helen Poole’s elementary school class and the marionettes she used as a teaching tool over the course of three decades. In addition to the items mentioned in that earlier post, we now have more photographs showing the different types of dramatic productions Poole’s classes created. We have almost no information on the children in these photographs; if you or someone you know went to Troy Elementary in the 1950s-1970s and could supply more information, we’d love to have it.
We have also added photographs of World War II veterans, and a scrapbook documenting the Biscoe community from 1952-1954. The scrapbook includes newspaper clippings showing Biscoe’s growth and social life during that time.
Finally, we’re pleased to help the Library share a considerable number of records of the Troy Rotary Club, from the 1930s to the 1980s. This collection includes attendance records, minutes, rosters, ephemera, and hundres of issues of the club bulletin (“The Wheel Horse”).
“The Wheel Horse” is replete with personal news of the club’s members: birthdays, marriages, births, jobs taken, travel, illnesses, events, and hyperlocal goings-on (one issue discussed someone moving to a new office, and admiration of a particular Christmas tree). We were entertained by the fact that these news tidbits are freely interspersed with factoids, poems, pithy jokes, and groan-worthy puns, many of which showcase a fair bit of 1950s-1970s sexism.
The salesman sat down in the motel restaurant and told the waitress: “Gimme a charred egg burnt toast, a cuppa coffee and then sit down and nag me, I’m homesick.” [April 1968]
Some of these just left us scratching our heads:
At the end of the year an abnormal eel that could swim well, run, climb, and fly a little was made valedictorian. [February 1968]
With all of its names and personal events, this collection could be helpful as well as interesting to a genealogist or local history researcher with an interest in Troy.
You can view all of Montgomery County Public Library’s items on DigitalNC.
This week we have another 34 titles up on DigitalNC! In this batch we have an article from the Durham Tobacco Plant describing the construction of a new factory being built by W. Duke, Sons & Co., which contained a machine that would revolutionize their tobacco business: The Bonsack machine.
Durham Tobacco Plant, July 16, 1884
In 1881, Virginia native James Bonsack created the first industrial cigarette rolling machine, a task that was done meticulously by hand up until this point. Bonsack partnered with W. Duke, Sons & Co. in 1884 and supplied them with one of his machines that could roll 250,000 cigarettes in a single day, the equivalent of 48 employees. While this acquisition would make the Dukes the leading cigarette producer in the country, the automation of the process forced many skilled rollers out of work.
W. Duke, Sons & Co. 1884 factory. Image via opendurham.org
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 North Carolinian (Elizabeth City, N.C.) – 1869-1903
- The Yadkin Valley News (Mt. Airy, N.C.) – 1880-1895
- The Index (Wilkesboro, N.C.) – 1880-1881
- The News Reporter (Whiteville, N.C.) – 1912-1924
- The Montgomery Vidette (Troy, N.C.) – 1886-1891
- The Southern Vidette (Norwood, N.C.) – 1891-1892
- Carter’s Weekly (North Wilkesboro, N.C.) – 1920-1922
- The Alexander County Journal (Taylorsville, N.C.) – 1887-1888
- Washington Progress (Washington, N.C.) – 1892-1913
- The Chronicle (Wilkesboro, N.C.) – 1890-1911
- The Wilson Mirror (Wilson, N.C.) – 1887-1894
- Windsor Public Ledger (Windsor, N.C.) – 1887-1889
- Windsor Ledger (Windsor, N.C.) – 1889-1915
- The Daily Southerner (Tarboro, N.C.) – 1889-1922
- The Carolina Mountaineer and Waynesville Courier (Waynesville, N.C.) – 1917-1923
- Raleigh Christian Advocate (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1914
- The Elizabeth-City Star (Elizabeth City, N.C.) – 1822-1824
- The Elizabeth-City Star and North-Carolina Eastern Intelligencer (Elizabeth City, N.C.) – 1825-1833
- The North-Carolinian (Fayetteville, N.C.) – 1839-1864
- The Greensboro Patriot (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1888
- Durham Tobacco Plant (Durham, N.C.) – 1872-1885
- The Enquirer (Tarboro, N.C.) – 1871-1873
- The Times (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1856-1861
- Halifax Compiler (Halifax, N.C.) – 1818
- Halifax Minerva (Halifax, N.C.) – 1829-1830
- The Edenton Gazette, and North-Carolina Advertiser (Edenton, N.C.) – 1806-1809
- The Edenton Gazette (Edenton, N.C.) – 1809-1813
- The Edenton Gazette, and North-Carolina General Advertiser (Edenton, N.C.) – 1814-1822
- Edenton Gazette (Edenton, N.C.) – 1827-1831
- The N.C. Republican, and Civil Rights Advocate (Weldon, N.C.) – 1884
- The Weldon Patriot (Weldon, N.C.) – 1852-1859
- Railroad Ticket (Weldon, N.C.) – 1881
- The Semi-Weekly State (Weldon, N.C.) – 1867
- Webster’s Weekly (Reidsville, N.C.) – 1881-1916
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.
