A new set of maps, posters, and architectural plans from our partner, the Durham County Library, has been added to our site. They range in time from the late 1880s to the present, and many provide local insight to the culture of Durham.
Map of Durham, N.C., c. 1957
One of the most exciting maps that we’ve added is this mid-century Western States Publishing Co. Map—perhaps one of the last versions that documents Durham before I-85 (1958) and N.C. 147 highway were built (1967-1970). Comparing it to the city today, you can tell what was disrupted during construction.
Detail from the 1920 map of Durham County
Similarly, this map of Durham from 1920 notes the schools in the area and whether they served Black or White students. According to this map, many of the schools closest to the city center only served White students, while many of the Black schools are further out in the county.
Another neat item in this batch is this Historic Durham County Poster created by John B. Tomlinson. Around the drawn map of Durham County are illustrations of some of Durham’s famous and historic landmarks, including Duke University’s West Campus, NC Central University, and the County Courthouse. These and other annotations help identify some of the big moments in Durham’s history, such as the surrender of J.E. Johnston at Bennett Place.
In terms of more modern materials, take a look at these two bike maps: one from 1991, and one from 2010. The entire back side of the 1991 version is covered in safety information, like how to wear a helmet and 10 tips for “frustrating” a bike thief (No.8 is to “Engrave your social security number on expensive parts,” which doesn’t seem like common advice today.). Meanwhile, the back of the 2010 map is more like a typical city map, with directories of things in downtown Durham.
The 1963 Hillside High School Marching Band on a trip to Washington, D.C.
A new batch of yearbooks from Durham County are now available on DigitalNC, courtesy of a new partner, the Museum of Durham History. Included in this collection are two yearbooks from Hillside High School in Durham, the 1960 and 1963 editions of The Hornet. Hillside High School was the Black high school in Durham before integration and it remained a high school following integration, which was rare in North Carolina. The school today has a long, proud history.
These yearbooks contain individual student portraits, as well as class portraits and photographs of school faculty. The yearbooks also highlight aspects of the student life and student experience, including senior superlatives and class reminiscences. They also contain photographs and group portraits of student councils, clubs and activities like marching band and the school orchestra, the 1963 homecoming and a variety of sports teams. Finally, there is also a memorial in dedication to a student who passed away during the 1960 school year.
The 1960 Dramatics Club at Hillside High School
Follow the links below to browse the yearbooks included in this batch:
This new batch of yearbooks, the first of their kind from Hillside High School, is a valuable addition to DigitalNC. To see more from the Museum of Durham History, please check out their partner page or visit their website.
Durham has long been a center of the arts in the Triangle, with dance being no exception. The American Dance Festival (ADF) has been a part of the Durham community since 1978. The ADF began in 1934 at Bennington College in Vermont and moved to several other New England campuses, until it finally settled at Duke University, where it has remained for almost forty years. This event helped to foster the many dance and performance organizations in the area and increase the popularity of dance in the local Durham community, as well as around the Triangle.
The “Arts in Durham” television broadcast documented several studios and clubs that stemmed from this popularity during the late 1970’s. Although the ADF focused primarily on modern dance, many different genres were represented in these broadcasts, including disco, ballet, jazz, and clogging. Below are three “Arts in Durham” broadcasts from DigitalNC’s North Carolina Sights & Sounds Collection, highlighting the wonderful and weird dance styles from the Durham community.
Arthur Hall teaching technique at the American Dance Festival.
Arthur Hall, founder of the Dance Company with his name sake, came to the ADF from Philadelphia to teach techniques based in traditional African movements. Trained under a Ghanaian instructor, Hall dedicated his life to creating a space for Black dancers to practice and perform traditional and original choreography. Outside of dance, Hall created a museum, cultural center and archive in Germantown. He has been called the “father of the Black arts movement in Philadelphia,” and his techniques inspired the Durham Arts community during his time with ADF.
Although ADF showcased professional dancers and choreographers, professional dance was not all that existed during this period in Durham. C’est La Vie Disco embraced the disco craze of the seventies in a way that amateurs and professionals alike could enjoy. Located in Durham’s old Five Point Neighborhood, C’est La Vie Disco was housed in a restaurant that made room for DJs and dancers in the evenings. The broadcast features several professional teachers, demonstrating disco techniques, but the true highlights are the intro and concluding pieces that showcase community members busting some moves.
Probably the most entertaining of all of the dance-related audiovisual material on DigitalNC, this broadcast features the New Performance Dance Company, once located on Chapel Hill Street in Durham. The company choreographed and performed in the area and taught classes of various styles. The broadcast features several modern performances, disco choreography, and children’s classes. Many of these dance styles are quite unique and definitely worth watching!
You can see all of the dance-related moving images at the links below or continue exploring the Arts in Durham . Many thanks to the Durham County Library for contributing these pieces of history from the Triangle.
Thanks to our partners at the Raleigh Fire Museum, NC Digital is pleased to announced that even more records from the Raleigh Fire Department are now available online! These records cover an amazing variety of aspects to the daily life and operation of Raleigh’s firefighters, including financial and municipal reports, fire academy graduation programs, and certificates of award. They will almost double our coverage of the Raleigh Fire Department, which ranges from as far as 1947 to as recent as 2002.
Without a doubt, the highlight of this batch is an issue of The N.C. Fire Service News, a state-wide publication created by and for North Carolina’s firefighters. The pages of this magazine are absolutely full of articles covering fire news, including stories on an antique model T fire engine, the annual fire conference in Asheville, and a story on firefighters in Durham “only” working 56 hours a week! Reading N.C. Fire Service News is a fascinating glimpse into a community of dedicated and passionate professionals supporting each other with advice on how best to protect the public. And, perhaps more superficially, the aesthetics of the 70’s make the pages of the magazine even more engaging.
You can read N.C. Fire Service News, along with the rest of the new records from the Raleigh Fire Museum, online at NC Digital here. Interested in learning more about the history of fire safety? Take a look at our partner pages for Raleigh Fire Museum and the Greensboro Firefighters History Book Committee online at NC Digital!
This photo, from the 1955 edition of The Wag, is called “Jubilant Conference Champions,” since this team was the Eastern AA champion of 1954 and the runner-up to the state championship.
It seems like the 1954 Red Devils were a bit stronger than the 1949 team, which published its season of scores in the 1950 edition of The Wag. Even though the team was victorious against Siler City, Draper, Mebane, Hartsel, Durham County, and E.M. Holt, they also took some tough losses against Roxboro and Oxford. 1949 was also apparently the year that the team faced off against Trinity in the Hosiery Bowl.
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.
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.
It’s DigitalNC.org’s 10th birthday! Though we had hoped to be in the office celebrating, we’re still taking time to look back at years of hard work and the collaborative spirit that makes the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center (NCDHC) what it is!
To date, NCDHC has partnered with 273 libraries, museums, alumni associations, archives, and historic sites in 98 of North Carolina’s 100 counties and we’re growing all the time. Our website currently includes 4.2 million images and files. We share this accomplishment with every institution we’ve worked with. We’d never have gotten to 10 years without staff (permanent, temporary, and student!), our partners, or the network of colleagues all over North Carolina who have encouraged, advised, and supported our work.
As we approached our anniversary, we realized that our website lacked a synopsis of how NCDHC came to be, and our history. So read on for a brief look at how we got started and our major milestones.
Our History
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center was one outcome of a comprehensive effort by the state’s Department of Cultural Resources (now the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources) to survey and get a broad overview of the status of North Carolina cultural heritage institutions. That effort was entitled NC ECHO (North Carolina Exploring Cultural Heritage Online) and was funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (which also supports us – thanks IMLS). A major goal of NC ECHO was a multi-year needs assessment. NC ECHO staff visited hundreds of cultural heritage institutions throughout the state to collect data and interview curators, librarians, volunteers, archivists, and more. Many of our partners still remember their visits!
Data collected at these site visits was combined with survey responses to reveal a “state of the state,” summarized in a 2010 report, cover pictured at right. The assessment revealed a lot but, specific to digitization, staff found that nearly three-quarters of the 761 institutions who completed the survey had no digitization experience or capacity. Members of the Department of Cultural Resources (which includes the State Library, State Archives, and multiple museums and historic sites) began brainstorming with other area institutions about a way to help efficiently and effectively provide digitization opportunities. While the NC ECHO project offered digitization grants, workshops, and best practices, an idea emerged of a centralized entity that could assist institutions that didn’t have the capacity to do the work in house. The State Library of North Carolina and UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries joined together to create such an entity: the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. The Center would be located in Chapel Hill, taking advantage of its central location and the digitization equipment and expertise already available in Wilson Special Collections Library. The State Library would provide funding, guidance, and ongoing promotion and support of the Center’s services.
At its beginning, the Center’s staff digitized small collections of college yearbooks, needlework samplers, postcards, and photographs and made them available through DigitalNC.org. They went to speak with organizations interested in becoming partners, and began taking projects for digitization. Here’s a list of NCDHC’s earliest partners, who came on board during late 2009 and 2010.
Though we’re not positive of the exact date, we believe DigitalNC.org launched on or near May 12, 2010. Here’s a look at that original site!
In 2011, word about the Center spread. Staff started responding to demand from partners, incorporating newspaper digitization. In late 2012, also in response to popular demand, the Center began digitizing high school yearbooks. Yearbooks and newspapers are some of the most viewed items on DigitalNC, and they remain a significant portion of our work to this day.
In 2013, NCDHC joined the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) as North Carolina’s “service hub.” The DPLA collects information from digitized collections all over the nation and provides it together in one searchable interface at dp.la. Because of our participation, users can browse and search for collections from North Carolina alongside items from institutions around the country.
Throughout the years, we’ve tried to expand services to fit our partners’ goals. In 2015, we trialed an audiovisual digitization project that incorporated the first films into DigitalNC. Today, we partner with the Southern Folklife Collection at Wilson Special Collections Library to provide audio digitization on an ongoing basis. In 2016, we added a new partner category – alumni associations – to support more digitization of African American high school yearbooks and memorabilia. The following year, we announced a focus on digitization of items documenting underrepresented communities. We also started going on the road with our scanners! For institutions that don’t have the staff time or resources to travel to Chapel Hill, we offer to come for a day or two and scan on site.
2018 and 2019 saw several major milestones. We were nationally recognized as an Institute of Museum and Library Services National Medal finalist, and we began a major software migration. Both were a tribute to the size and extent of our operation, though in different ways. As we’ve approached our 10th anniversary we’ve focused on working with partners in all 100 of North Carolina’s counties. Whether you’re rural or metropolitan, we believe your history is important and should be shared online.
One of the ways we’re commemorating this anniversary is to ask our partners and stakeholders how they think we’ve impacted them and their audiences. Join us here on the blog in the second half of 2020 as we share these brief interviews, reflect, and celebrate. Thank you for reading, enjoy the site, and here’s to another 10 years of making North Carolina’s cultural heritage accessible online!
Over 90 issues spanning nearly the entire run of Lambda, UNC Chapel Hill‘s LGBQT student newspaper, are now online at DigitalNC. Publication of Lambda started in 1976 and ran until at least 2013. The paper began as simple newsletter for the UNC gay community, but later appeared in a number of formats, from an “activist newspaper” (Lambda January 1993), to a “LGBTIQ-Affirming Magazine” (Lambda Spring 2004), and finally to an online blog.
The issues now online constitute a valuable resource for those interested in LGBQT history at UNC Chapel Hill, in the greater Triangle area, and in the United States as a whole. Most of the writing within deals with topics like sexuality, identity, and politics at all of these levels. Many notable events, such as the deadly anti-gay assaults at Little River in Durham in April 1981, as well as the national debates around the issue of same-sex marriage in the early- to mid-2000s, are covered in detail.
Front Page of Lambda, Spring 2004
In browsing the paper’s many issues, one gets a distinct sense of the scope of the LGBQT movement throughout its history as well as the identities involved. This is exemplified by the progression of organizations that sponsored the paper over the years. Beginning with the Carolina Gay Association in 1976, the paper later became the voice of the Carolina Gay and Lesbian Association; the Carolina Bisexuals, Gay men, Lesbians and Allies for Diversity (B-GLAD); The Queer Network for Change; and finally the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transsexual Student Association.
The newly digitized issues of Lambda are another addition to the already considerable amount of UNC Chapel Hill materials currently hosted at DigitalNC. For more information about Lambda and the various LGBQT student associations that form an important part of UNC history, visit The Carolina Story and its exhibit on UNC student organizations.
The only issue we have (so far) of a Carver High School newspaper. Mount Olive, NC, May 1950.
From our estimation, DigitalNC shares more digitized historical North Carolina African American newspapers than any other source. Contributors range from our state’s HBCUs to local libraries and museums. To help pull these titles together, we created an exhibit page through which you can search and browse eleven community papers and nine student papers. There are also links to more available on other sites.
Below we’ve re-posted the essay from the exhibit, giving you a brief history of these papers. We hope that we’ll hear from others who may be interested in sharing more of these rare resources online.
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Since the publication of Freedom’s Journal in 1827 in New York City, African American newspapers have had a long and impactful history in the United States. Begun as a platform to decry the treatment of enslaved people, the earliest African American newspapers appealed to whites, who were politically enfranchised. After the Civil War, as newly freed African Americans claimed the right to literacy, the number of African American newspapers around the country grew exponentially and the editors began addressing Black people instead of whites. Papers turned their focus from slavery to a variety of subjects: religion, politics, art, literature, and news as viewed through the eyes of African American reporters and readers. Communication about Black political and social struggles through Reconstruction and, later, the Civil Rights movement, cemented newspapers as integral to African American life.
In North Carolina, the first African American papers were religious publications. The North Carolina Christian Advocate, which appears to be the earliest, was published from 1855-1861 by the North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, followed by the Episcopal Methodist, a shorter-lived publication produced during the Civil War by the same organization. After the Civil War, the number of African American newspapers continued to grow in North Carolina, reaching a peak during the 1880s and 1890s with more than 30 known titles beginning during that time.
The longest running African American paper established in North Carolina is the Star of Zion, originating in Charlotte in 1876 and still being produced today. Other long-running papers in the state include the Charlotte Post (begun 1890), The Carolina Times (Durham, begun 1919), the Carolinian (Raleigh, begun 1940), Carolina Peacemaker (Greensboro, begun 1967), and the Winston-Salem Chronicle (begun 1974). Many of these long running papers powerfully documented Black culture and opinion in North Carolina during the 1960s-1970s, with numerous editorials and original reporting of local and national civil rights news.
Occasionally overlooked sources for African American newspapers are North Carolina’s Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and, before integration, African American high schools. You’ll find links on DigitalNC to newspapers from eight of North Carolina’s twelve current and historical HBCUs as well as two African American high schools.
While many African American newspapers have found their way into archives and libraries, it’s common to see broken runs and missing issues. You can find a great inventory of known papers from the UNC Libraries. If you work for a library, archive, or museum in North Carolina holding additional issues and would like to inquire about digitizing them and making them available online, please let us know.
Gladstein’s men’s clothing shop, formerly located at 209 W. Mangum Street, was owned and operated for many years by the Gladstein family of Durham, N.C. According to a recent article from the Herald Sun, Gladstein’s used to be THE place to buy Levi’s blue jeans. If the mural in this photograph from the Durham Urban Renewal Records project is to be trusted, you could get your Lee’s there as well. The building was demolished during the 1970s, and the spot where it stood is now a parking lot.
The stories of some members of the Gladstein family, who came to Durham from New York through an association with tobacco magnate Buck Duke, are told in a new publication from UNC Press, Down Home: Jewish Life in North Carolina by Leonard Rogoff, as well as a corresponding exhibit at the North Carolina Museum of History.
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.
