Thanks to our partners at the New Hanover County Public Library, we have just added 36 new school yearbooks to DigitalNC! This substantial addition ranges from 1921-1973 and represents New Hanover High School, Wilmington High School, and John T. Hoggard High School, as well as the James Walker Memorial Hospital School of Nursing which closed in 1966. These volumes are a rich resource for researching the history of Wilmington and New Hanover County, and we are excited that they are now available for online perusal. Looking through the pages, one can easily imagine being a student in these bygone days.
Researchers can see all of our materials from New Hanover County Public Library here. To view more yearbooks from other schools across North Carolina, visit The North Carolina Yearbook collection linked here.
Thanks to our partner, Cape Fear Museum, a batch containing new issues of yearbooks from James Walker Memorial Hospital School of Nursing, Cape Fear Academy, Williston Senior High School, Wilmington High School, and New Hanover High School are now available on our website.
To learn more about the Cape Fear Museum, please visit their website.
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
Thanks to our partner, Haywood County Public Library, a batch containing new issues of yearbooks from Bethel High School, Canton High School, Pisgah Senior High School, Waynesville High School, Tuscola High School, Clyde High School, and Crabtree Iron Duff High School are now available on our website. This batch includes yearbooks from the years 1943 to 1970.
The Mountaineer 1962 cover
To learn more about the Haywood County Public Library, please visit their website.
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
176 issues of The Wilmington Sun are now available for browsing on DigitalNC. This a brand new addition to our newspaper collection and we would like to thank our partners at New Hanover County Public Library for making this possible.
Spanning October 1878 to May 1879, these newspapers give insight into the happenings of the late 19th century. During this time, The Sun published issues daily except for Mondays and select holidays. As Wilmington was quickly becoming the largest city in North Carolina at the time, each issue covered a wide range of topics, from the international to the local.
Notably, Wilmington had a thriving shipping port and railroad industry in the mid to late 1800s, so The Sun included a Markets and Shipping section. These sections list out the market activity of materials such as cotton, rosin, tar, spirits turpentine, and crude turpentine while also noting the arrival and clearance of national and international goods.
To take a look at all the new issues of The Wilmington Sun, click here. For more information about New Hanover County Public Library, you can visit their homepage here.
A blueprint of the North Shore of Wrightsville Beach, with buildings, pipes, and pump stations marked in red.
Over four dozen historical maps, blueprints, and more have been digitized and added to DigitalNC, courtesy of our new partner, the Wrightsville Beach Museum of History. These maps, some dating back to as early as 1923, cover many different parts of the Wilmington and Wrightsville Beach areas and really illustrate to us how wide and varied the geography of New Hanover County really is.
Many of the blueprints detail buildings around Wrightsville Beach, while others show plots of land and city streets. Several of the maps are designed to show specific buildings and building sites, such as the former Babies Hospital at Mott’s Creek in Wilmington. Others are geological cross sections, showing tide lines, jetty locations, and inlets along the coast. These are invaluable blueprints for tracking the coastline, as well as illustrating how the beaches and the towns around them have changed over time.
A photo taken during the mid-scanning process of one of the larger, composited maps of Wrightsville Beach
Many of these maps are massive, with some stretching to nearly 6 feet in length. A few of the aerial shots of Wrightsville Beach were even longer, requiring a small team to handle the map just to make sure it could be documented. As a result, it was a slow process for us to roll out these maps and blueprints, scan them using our overhead camera, composite them into complete shots, and prepare them for production. We have posted an instructional video on our Flickr page to show and explain how we scanned them. Many of them, including the aerial view of Wrightsville Beach, took 3 and sometimes 4 individual shots to stitch together, resulting in images that were sometimes over 8000 pixels high and over 10000 pixels wide.
A portion of a 1956 map from the A.S.C.S. showing Moore Inlet and Mason Inlet.
These maps were in excellent condition, and we are honored in being able to digitize them and host them for everyone to see. To learn more about the Wrightsville Beach Museum of History, please visit their contributor page or their website.
