Thanks to our partners at the Davidson County Public Library, we have made available a new batch of materials from Churchland School, Lexington High School, and various churches in Davidson County. These include yearbooks from Churchland School and Davidson County Community College, which give researchers a glimpse of life in mid-century North Carolina and may include familiar faces! Additionally, we have added new issues of The Lexhipep, Lexington High School’s student newspaper, as well as one 1944 issue of an anti-alcohol newspaper titled To-Morrow.
Thanks to our partner, Davidson County Public Library System, three batches of various materials are now available on our website. The first batch features eleven issues of the Erlanger Community paper from 1919 to 1922; a Robbins Elementary School 1931-1932 report card; Bylaws of Hopewell Council No. 1758 Royal Arcanum; and four new brightly colored Lexington Barbeque Festival posters. Batch two includes six new issues of the South Davidson High School yearbook covering from 1948 to 1952. The final batch contains 73 issues of the Thomasville Times, as well as student newspapers from Reeds High School, Denton High School, and Lexington High School.
36th Annual Lexington Barbeque Festival Poster
35th Annual Lexington Barbeque Festival Poster
To learn more about the Davidson County Public Library System, please visit their website.
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
More Davidson County yearbooks from the Northwestern Regional Library System are now available on DigitalNC.org. Joining over 50 other area yearbooks, these additions primarily represent Thomasville’s Fair Grove High School, which merged with another school and became East Davidson High School in 1962. The yearbook titles include The Twig and Tiger Roar, and range from 1948 – 1961. These volumes come from the Thomasville Public Library.
Many of the Fair Grove High School yearbooks feature hand drawings for their title pages. This is the case for the 1959 issue of The Twig, which also has an “Outer Space” theme and features staff as astronauts and class officers in spaceships.
The Twig [1959] – Fair Grove High School (Thomasville, N.C.)
Along with the Fair Grove High School yearbooks, we have also digitized the 1954 issue of The Lexicon from Lexington Senior High School, which was contributed by the Lexington Library.
Over 50 yearbooks from several branches of the Davidson County Public Library system, a new partner, are now online. These are the first high school yearbooks we’ve been able to present from Davidson County. The schools represented are listed below:
We also found several famous folks in the yearbooks above, including Richard Harrison of the Pawn Stars television series and the artist Bob Timberlake. The yearbooks above come from the Lexington Library and the North Davidson Public Library. You can view all of the yearbooks from Davidson County Public Library System on DigitalNC.
There are all kinds of clever covers for this intellectually themed, physiologically fitting title. View all Wake Forest School of Medicine yearbooks.
#4 “Hacawa” Lenoir-Rhyne University
“Hacawa” is a one-word abbreviation of Halls, Campus, Walls. In and around these centers the whole student life here. The Hacawa is an emanation from the work, play, joys, trials, and triumphs of the entire college for the year.” (1909 Hacawa, p. 8) View all Lenoir-Rhyne University yearbooks.
#3 “Quips and Cranks” Davidson College
“Haste thee nymph, and bring with thee
Jest and youthful Jollity,
Quips and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles…” – L’Allegro, by John Milton
We like this title because the students capitalized on the school name they were dealt. View all Burgaw High School yearbooks, courtesy the Pender County Public Library.
#1 “Ayantee” North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University
This photo shows the Davidson College football team in 1906, just 18 years after the first collegiate football game was played in North Carolina.
The action shot of a punter seems to be a popular subject for sports photographers. The photo at top is from the Braswell Memorial Library (Rocky Mount, N.C.); the one at bottom is from the Tufts Archives (Pinehurst, N.C.).
There are several good photos of high school football players and teams on DigitalNC. The top one here shows a player from Lansing High School in Ashe County; the one in the middle of the team from Davie County High School in 1961, and the photo at bottom shows the team from Waynesville Township High School in 1927.
These last three images above are shared by Ashe County Public Library (top), Davie County Public Library (middle), and Haywood County Public Library (bottom).
The festival was created out of a conversation in 1983 where Joe Sink, Jr., publisher of The Dispatch, discussed his love of festivals with BB&T officials. Together, Sink and BB&T hired Kay Saintsing, a local organization developer and manager, that completed a study of the feasibility of a new community event. After completing her research, Saintsing provided Sink and BB&T with recommendations that led to the creation of a new city festival.
Held in Lexington, North Carolina on October 27, 1984, Saintsing and her Saintsing Management Services staff (now Preferred Events) produced the city’s first Barbecue Festival. Its first year, the festival had approximately 30,000 people in attendance and 3,000 pounds of barbecue cooked. Ten years later, in 1994, the crowd was over three times as large with over 100,000 attendees and 11,000 pounds of barbecue cooked. In 2022, the festival had a record-breaking attendance of over 200,000 people. The festival continues to be produced by Saingsting’s company, which is now run by her daughter Stephanie, and held annually in Uptown Lexington on one of the last two Saturdays in October.
Thanks to our partner, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, over 45 years of The News-Journal (Raeford, N.C.) have been added to our website. This batch fills in previously large gaps between 1957 to 1967 and 1986 to 2021. Still active today, The News-Journal has been publishing articles covering news in North Carolina’s City of Raeford and Hoke County since 1905. Contents of the newspaper focus primarily on the coverage and accounts of notable resident accomplishments, community growth, issues, and local events.
One of the best times to visit Hoke County to experience their fun local events is in the autumn. Every autumn The News-Journal highlights the area’s traditions such as the Turkey Festival, Fall Festival, decorations around town, and the newspaper’s Halloween costume contest. In Hoke County, the Halloween costume contest is particularly popular with submissions totaling over 100 entries each year. Unable to resist the All Hallows’ Eve spirit, the NCDHC would like to share with you some of the cutest, most original, and funniest children’s costumes that have been submitted to the paper over the last 45+ years. Don’t worry about scary clowns, nothing but laughs and cuteness ahead!
Wild Child(ren)!
Dressed as some of the most adorable creatures you can find out in the wild, these three—Kentrell, Casey, and Tasheona—look excited to start trick or treating!
If there was a prize for the greatest number of most original awards given to one family the Hendrix Family would win by a landslide! Each child is dressed up as a familiar household item including a washing machine, bag of groceries, and a basket of laundry.
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.
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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.
