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.
