Thanks to our partners at Northampton County Museum, new issues of the Northampton County Times-News are available on our website DigtalNC! These include issues from 1970-1971 and 1972-1973. You can also view other issues of Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald using keyword(s) and date.
To browse all of our newspapers by location, date, and type, take a look at our North Carolina Newspapers collection. To see what other materials they have contributed, visit the Northampton County Museum partners page. To learn more about what Northampton County Museum has been up to, check out their website.
Front page of the June 26, 1969 issue of The Northampton Times-News.
Thanks to our partner, Northampton County Museum, issues spanning 1967 to 1969 of The Northampton County Times-News are now available on our website.
Published squarely in the middle of the desegregation of North Carolina schools, these issues detail county officials’ efforts at maintaining segregation through a policy entitled “Freedom of Choice.” Though this push back against desegregation mirrors the history of many other counties in the state, the Times-News has really detailed local reporting on the topic and doesn’t shy away from talking about race-related tensions.
In 1967, the U.S. Attorney General brought a lawsuit against Northampton County schools claiming the county failed to desegregate them as required. The lawsuit cited the continuing separation into all white and all Black schools, the latter of which were inferior in resources and infrastructure. This front page from August 1, 1968 announces the resulting court order that mandated desegregation. With an enrollment of 74.5% Black and 25.5% white students, Northampton County Schools were required to assign students to schools based on geography. Faculty were also desegregated, and the local Black high school, Willis Hare, was closed. After the partial integration of the high schools, a plan for lower grades followed in June 1969 (above).
To view all issues issues of the Northampton County Times-News available on our website, please click here.
To view more newspapers from around North Carolina, please visit our North Carolina Newspapers Collection here.
To learn more about the Northampton County Museum, please visit their website.
DigitalNC is happy to announce that additional newspapers from Northampton County, N.C. are ready to view online. With the contributions from our partners, Northampton County Museum, we were able to fill gaps and add a new title, The Northampton County Times-News, to our online collection. Specific additions include:
While we shed light onto the The Patron and Gleaner and Roanoke-Chowan Times in a recent blog post, we have yet to expand on one of the succeeding titles, The Northampton County Times-News.
In circulation from 1960 to 1974, The Northampton County Times-News published from Rich Square and Jackson every Thursday, but served all towns in Northampton County. Highlighting both local and global news, this title served its various communities with periodicals such as the Farm Review & Forecast and consistently updated (not to mention wittily titled) want ads. Football reigned in this area as a popular sport for all ages and genders to participate in and, as such, was frequently reported on.
For a full view of all Northampton County titles mentioned, click here. To view more of The Northampton County Times-News, click here. And if you would like information on the Northampton County Museum, you can visit their homepage here.
This front page of the January 2, 1919 Roanoke-Chowan Times includes a poem for World War I casualties.
One of our goals is to increase representation of counties and communities that are under-represented on DigitalNC. Most recently we’ve been focusing on around 10 counties; one of these is Northampton County. Today we’re happy to have added newspapers from that county, thanks to an inquiry from the Northampton County Museum.
We’ve added two titles, the Roanoke Patron (9 issues from 1883-1891) and the Roanoke-Chowan Times (1,237 issues from 1892-1926). The latter actually encompasses a few predecessor titles, including The Gleaner and The Patron and Gleaner.
The Roanoke Patron was published in Potecasi, N. C. and it targeted farmers who were members of the North Carolina Grange organization. The issues we have available report on Grange events and exhort its readers to support the Grange’s leaders and causes.
The Roanoke-Chowan Times and its predecessors were published alternatively in Lasker and Rich Square N.C. This is a traditional community newspaper, with personal news from around the county, state news, and syndicated anecdotes and stories. The years we’ve added include the turn of the century and World War I.
Right now these are the only newspapers we have available from Northampton County but we hope to see more online in the future. You can search and browse all of our newspapers on our newspaper browse page.
Thanks to our partner the Northampton County Museum, we now have three additional years of The Roanoke-Chowan Times. These issues, from 1926-1928, feature local news from Rich Square, Roxobel, Seaboard, Potecasi, and Kelford, N.C., as well as other nearby towns.
The hyper-local news sections from these issues is a big part of their charm. Often, the front page is divided into columns with the name of the town at the top. The news items range from newsworthy (as we would think of that term today) to the intimate. Here are three examples from the September 2, 1926 issue:
Although the personal items are fun to read in retrospect, it’s probably a relief that this kind of journalism is less common today.
Another interesting characteristic of this paper is it’s adoption of the first line of the North Carolina state song in its masthead: “Carolina, Carolina, heaven’s blessings attend her.” The paper speaks to the song’s widespread popularity in the state; the lyrics were written by North Carolina Supreme Court Judge William Gaston in 1835, but the song wasn’t officially adopted until 1927. The first instance in our records where the first line appears is in the April 23, 1903 issue—more than 20 years before it was made official.
This batch of papers is particularly exciting for us because it’s the first set of papers scanned on the new equipment at our satellite location, NCDHC East at Elizabeth City State University.
You can see all of our issues of The Roanoke-Chowan Times here and our entire collection of digitized newspapers in our North Carolina Newspapers collection. To learn more about the Northampton County Museum, you can visit their partner page or their website.
This week we have another 30 newspaper titles up on DigitalNC! In the September 3, 1891 issue of Boone’s Watauga Democrat we have an article describing the terrible train wreck of Bostian’s Bridge in Statesville. This fatal accident sparked a legendary North Carolina ghost story, but perhaps even scarier are the boogeymen railroad companies would often create to avoid accountability: train wreckers.
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Watauga Democrat, September 3, 1891
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News and Observer, July 7, 1898
By 1891 the railroad system in America had exploded, allowing for easier cross-country travel and bringing with it fresh new paranoia about disasters and scary strangers coming to your town. Blaming a wreck on some shady character was a lot easier than paying a fortune on settlements due to negligence. Almost immediately after the August 27, 1891 accident, the Richmond & Danville Railroad Company put out ads offering a $10,000 reward for the apprehension of the perpetrator, leading to many being accused and arrested (conveniently with the help of a railroad detective).
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News & Observer, September 4, 1891
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Greensboro Workman, September 16, 1891
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Asheville Citizen, October 15, 1891
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Wilmington Messenger, February 3, 1892
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News & Observer, August 29, 1897
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Durham Daily Globe, September 26, 1891
The editor at Statesville’s Landmark provides us with an incredibly detailed account of the accident and the recovery effort, complete with interviews from survivors and witnesses where they describe rotten cross-ties and rail workers throwing this evidence into the creek below the bridge. Many of those interviewed make a point to mention that there were no signs of robbery after the crash, which doesn’t exactly support the idea of this being some dastardly deed by a bandit.
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:
Asheville
Boone
Burlington
Chapel Hill
Durham
Fayetteville
Fairfield
Gastonia
Holly Springs
Jackson
Kinston
Lexington
Lincolnton
Pittsboro
Raleigh
Salisbury
Tarboro
Winston
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.
An issue of The Carolinian (Raleigh) newspaper from November 6, 1948.
It’s time to announce our annual round of microfilmed newspaper digitization! As in previous years, we’re asking cultural heritage institutions in North Carolina to nominate papers from their communities to be digitized. We’re especially interested in:
- newspapers covering underrepresented regions or communities, and
- newspapers that are not currently available in digital form elsewhere online.
If your institution is in one of these counties, please consider nominating! These are counties that currently have little content represented on DigitalNC. Bertie, Bladen, Camden, Caswell, Clay, Gates, Hoke, Jones, Northampton, Onslow, Pamlico, Swain, Tyrrell.
If you’re interested in nominating a paper and you work at a cultural heritage institution that qualifies as a partner, here’s what to do:
- Check out our criteria for selecting newspapers, listed below.
- Verify that the newspaper you’d like to see digitized exists on microfilm. Email us (digitalnc@unc.edu) if you’re not sure.
- Be prepared to talk with the rights holder(s) to gain written permission to digitize the paper and share it online. We can give you advice on this part, if needed.
- Send us an email with the name of the newspaper you would like to nominate, along with your priority years for scanning. Please talk briefly about how the paper and your institution meet the criteria below.
Nominations will be taken on an ongoing basis, however don’t wait! We typically get many more requests than we can accommodate. Please contact us at digitalnc@unc.edu with questions. We’re looking forward to hearing from you.
Criteria for Selecting Newspapers to Digitize from Microfilm
Titles to be digitized will be selected using the following criteria:
- Does the newspaper document traditionally underrepresented regions or communities?
- Does the newspaper include significant coverage of the local community or largely syndicated content?
- Does the newspaper come from an area of the state that has little representation on DigitalNC? (Titles that have not previously been digitized will be given priority. Here’s a title list and a map showing coverage.)
- Are the images on microfilm legible, or is it difficult to read the text?
- Is the institution willing to obtain permission from the current publisher or rights holder(s) to digitize issues and make them freely available online?
- If the newspaper is selected for digitization, will the nominating institution promote the digital project through programs and announcements?
*Updated 8/9/2019 to add county list.
Have you been interested in working with the Digital Heritage Center but find it difficult to get to Chapel Hill, or have concerns about having your materials off site? We want to come to you! We’ll be working with two or three cultural heritage institutions over the next nine months to try out on-location scanning. If you’d like to nominate your institution, read on and use the nomination form linked at the end of this post.
What We Do
Here’s what nominated institutions will receive as part of this process.
- We will bring our scanners, computers, and staff to your institution to digitize and describe materials from your collections. We would be there for one full weekday, at a minimum.
- We’ll host the scanned images and associated metadata on DigitalNC.org, and give you copies of the original scans to use in any non-profit context.
- Optionally, we can do a presentation for staff and/or the public related to any of the following topics:
- The Digital Heritage Center’s services (for staff at your institution and/or other local cultural heritage institutions)
- A demonstration of what we’re doing while we’re there (for staff at your institution)
- The variety of resources you can find on DigitalNC.org and other fantastic digital collections in North Carolina (staff or the public)
What We’ll Need from Partners We Visit
If you’re chosen, we’d need:
- At least one conference call before arrival to clarify expectations, work with you on scheduling, and talk through the materials you’d like scanned.
- Description and a light inventory of the items we’ll be scanning, if there isn’t one already available.
- Some assembly and preparation of the materials you’ve chosen. This might include physically pulling all of the content together before we arrive and removing staples if the materials are stapled at the top corners.
- A designated staff contact regularly available to ask questions regarding what we’re scanning while we’re there, and to help with logistics like getting equipment in and out of the building, etc.
- An indoor location that has:
- at least two power outlets,
- internet connectivity,
- a work area large enough for 2 scanners and 4 laptops as well as extra room for materials handling,
- seating for four people, and
- is away from the public so we can get the most scanning accomplished in our limited time (ideal but not required).
Additional Guidance for Nominations
- We’ll be giving priority to nominations from institutions furthest from Chapel Hill and to new partners. If you are a prospective partner, please check to make sure you’re eligible.
- The materials have to be owned by your institution.
- The materials should cover North Carolina subjects, events, and people.
- For these on-location sessions, we’re accepting nominations for the following types of items:
- photographs (prints) and/or postcards
- looseleaf print materials up to 11×17”
- bound items may be considered, but in very limited numbers and only if transporting them to Chapel Hill would be impossible
- Materials can be fragile but should be stable enough to withstand gentle handling and placement on a flatbed scanner.
We’ll review nominations according to the following criteria, so you may want to address these in your nomination form:
| Category |
Point Value |
| New partner |
1 |
| New town |
1 |
| New county** |
2 |
Materials document an underrepresented
community or population |
1 |
| Materials are well described/inventoried |
5 |
| Majority of materials date from 1945 or earlier |
1 |
| Materials are believed to be unique |
1 |
** We have yet to work with any institutions in the following counties: Alexander, Bertie, Bladen, Camden, Caswell, Chowan, Clay, Currituck, Dare, Gates, Graham, Greene, Henderson, Hoke, Jones, Mitchell, Northampton, Onslow, Pamlico, Swain, Tyrrell, Yancey
Use this nomination form to submit!
We’ll start reviewing nominations on September 30 and will notify selected institutions shortly thereafter. If a selected institution ends up not being able to host us, we’ll continue down the list.
We’re excited about trying out this new service. Please contact us with any questions and share this with any institutions you think might be interested.
