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Screenshot from the video “Preparing Foods that were Eaten by our Ancestors” which included women discussing their cooking.
29 oral histories collected in the early 2000s by the African American Historical and Genealogical Association of Surry County are now online thanks to our partner the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History. Thanks also to our colleagues in the Southern Folklife Collection, these audiovisual materials were digitized utilizing funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The interviews are mostly on video and discuss many topics about being Black and growing up in Mount Airy and Surry County area during the first half of the 20th century.
We also scanned many maps and architectural drawings for the museum in this batch and those are available here. The drawings include a lot of buildings around Mount Airy.
To learn more about our partner Mount Airy Museum of Regional History visit their partner page here.
To hear more oral histories on DigitalNC, go here.
Workers atop a large piece of granite at the North Carolina Granite Corporation
A new batch of over 150 photos from the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History is now online at DigitalNC. The photos document the operations of the North Carolina Granite Corporation of Mount Airy, NC roughly between 1900 and 1970. The NCGC, which operates what has been recognized as the largest open-faced granite quarry in the world, was founded over 125 years ago. Most of the photos originate in the period during which John Davis Sargent served as the superintendent and later president of the company (1910-1945). He is present in many of the depicted scenes.
The newly digitized images fall into four major categories: quarry operations, aerial views, quarry personnel, and building projects. Perhaps the most striking of the four are the aerial photos, which give one a sense of the scale of operations at the NCGC.
Aerial view of the North Carolina Granite Corporation, circa 1915-1945
The personnel and operations photographs are fascinating as well, for they allow one a glimpse into the backbreaking and dusty world of stonework during early 20th century.
Quarry workers at the North Carolina Granite Corporation
The NCGC constituted an important source of white granite in the Eastern US throughout the 20th century and the stone produced at the Mount Airy quarry can be seen in countless buildings and monuments in the area. Some prominent examples include Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills, NC (pictured below), the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and the Arlington Memorial Bridge, which bridges the Potomac River between Washington, DC and Arlington, Virginia. Many houses, churches, monuments, and municipal buildings across North Carolina also feature Mount Airy granite, photos of which constitute a major portion of those now online at DigitalNC.
The Wright Brothers National Memorial at Kill Devil Hills, N.C.
For more information, please see the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History website or visit their contributor page here at DigitalNC.
A photo of the 1967 annual staff of the Stripes yearbook from the Martin Memorial School of Nursing
A new batch of yearbooks from Surry County are now digitized and available on DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner, the Mount Airy Regional Museum of History. Included in this collection are nearly two dozen yearbooks from schools across Mount Airy and Surry County, dating from the 1920s to the 1960s.
These yearbooks contain individual portraits, class photos, as well as photographs highlighting student activities and clubs, sports teams and events like Homecomings, faculty, and student activities. Some of the yearbooks also include class and school histories. Readers can also find in some of these yearbooks “last wills and testaments”, where the graduating class leaves behind objects, memories, and skills to the next class. There are also class prophecies, where the students imagined where they would be years down the road.
Follow the links below to browse the yearbooks from the schools included in this batch:
A 1958 photo of the Franklin High School football team in front of the school.
These yearbooks represent a valuable addition to DigitalNC, as they show what life was like across Mount Airy and Surry County throughout the 20th century. To see more from the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History, please visit their partner page, or check out their website.
A new batch of yearbooks courtesy of the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History are now live. These yearbooks are the first materials on DigitalNC from this partner and they are chock full of personality.
A very distinct staff page from the 1954 edition of Franklin High School’s Maroon and Grey.
These yearbooks span from 1939 to 1961 and encapsulate student life in Surry County through these decades. Schools included are Franklin High School, Pilot Mountain High School, White Plains High School, Dobson High School, and Copeland High School.
Copeland High School’s 1961 “Best Sport” superlative winners.
To learn more about Mount Airy Museum of Regional History, visit their website or partner page. Links to yearbooks are organized by school and listed below.
21 new oral histories detailing the lives of those who lived in Mount Airy and Surry County are now online thanks to our partners Mount Airy Museum of Regional History and Surry Community College. The digitization of the oral histories from Mount Airy Museum was done by our colleagues in the Southern Folklife Collection and the work was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
First page of the transcript from the Margaret Leonard, Evelyn Coalson, and Esther Dawson interview. The women are sisters and were interviewed in 1997.
The participants were primarily interviewed in the 1990s about their lives in the Mount Airy and Surry County region dating from around 1910 until 1970s. The Spanish Flu pandemic, World War I, World War II, race relations, the Civil Rights movement, and the Great Depression are all topics covered in these oral histories, which feature men and women and Black and white people.
While these oral histories were digitized last fall and winter, with the COVID-19 situation this spring, they provided a very useful option for enhancement while our staff worked from home. We have been able to add transcripts for each of the oral histories that didn’t have them, as well as enhanced metadata, making them even more accessible than before for our users.
To learn more about our partners on this, visit their websites at Surry Community College and Mount Airy Museum of Regional History. To learn more about our partnership with the Southern Folklife Collection, visit our post here. And to view and listen to more oral histories on DigitalNC, visit our North Carolina Oral Histories exhibit.
The North Star from North Surry High School, 1962
Nine new Surry County yearbooks from the 1950s and 1960s are now available on DigitalNC, thanks to our partners at the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History.
The batch includes seven Windswept Echoes from Copeland High School in Dobson, which adds to five existing yearbooks. We now host a complete set from 1950 to 1961 for this school.
Two North Stars from North Surry High School in Mount Airy (from 1961 and 1962) are also included in this batch. We previously held one from that school from 1960.
These yearbooks represent two of thirteen high schools from Surry County represented on DigitalNC. Click here to browse them all.
Click here to see all nine yearbooks from this batch. To see all materials from the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History, click here. To learn more about them, visit their partner page here or their website here. DigitalNC is very thankful for their partnership in making these yearbooks accessible online.
