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A third batch of photos provided by the Oliver Nestus Freeman Round House Museum have been digitized and added to DigitalNC. These photographs and newspaper clippings are about the athletes and coaches in Wilson, including teams from Darden High, Speight High School, and Frederick Douglass High School, as well as hall of fame members. The Oliver Nestus Freeman Round House Museum is located in Wilson, North Carolina and has artifacts relating to the contributions of African Americans to Wilson.
Past blog posts about items from the museum can be seen here and here. You can view more from the Oliver Nestus Freeman Round House Museum on their contributor page and learn more about them on their website.
Darden High “Trojans” 1938-1941.
A second batch of images from the Oliver Nestus Freeman Round House Museum of Wilson, NC, has been added to DigitalNC.
Many of the images document civic clubs and sororities in Wilson. Included is an image of Booker T. Washington with the Wilson Men’s Club.
We’re also pleased to present four very fragile scrapbooks from the Museum. The first three are full of portraits and family scenes. Although the photos are labeled with a good number of first names or familial titles, we have very little definitive information about the people inside. (If you know more, contact us.) The fourth scrapbook has a collection of pressed leaves.
Forty-five photographs from the museum are now available online, in addition to a number of other documents and items related to Freeman and others in Wilson. You can view all of the items here.
Yesterday the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center staff visited the Oliver Nestus Freeman Round House Museum in Wilson, N.C. The museum celebrates African American history in Wilson County and honors the memory of Oliver Nestus Freeman, a local stonemason and builder who had a fascinating life and career.
Stone dinosaur created by Oliver Nestus Freeman; Round House Museum in the background. Photo by Kristen Merryman.
Freeman was a Wilson County native, born in 1882. He attended the Tuskegee Normal School where he gained experience in construction and masonry. He returned to Wilson in the 1910s and worked as a mason for decades. He worked on many projects, incorporating a distinctive style using a variety of stones of different shapes and sizes. Many of his projects are still standing in Wilson today.
In addition to his masonry work, Freeman was also known for the animals he kept at his house. The yard was filled with wild birds, rabbits, a goldfish pond, and several small bears. It became a sort of a tourist attraction with residents and visitors stopping by to give peanuts to the bears.
One of Freeman’s most distinctive buildings was the round house he built in the 1940s to rent to veterans returning from World War II. The house had fallen into disrepair by the 1990s when it was chosen by local citizens to serve as a new African American history museum. The house was moved in 2001 to its current location at the intersection of Nash and Hines streets near downtown Wilson. The museum contains photos and documents commemorating African American pioneers and leaders in Wilson and includes a nice display of photos and artifacts from Freeman’s life.
The museum is open for visitors and is well worth a visit next time you’re in or passing through Wilson. There is more information on the their website.
Learn more about Freeman’s work on the North Carolina Architects & Builders site from the North Carolina State University Libraries.
Statue of a Seated Man, Oliver Nestus Freeman
We’ve recently partnered with the Oliver Nestus Freeman Round House Museum to add items from their collection to DigitalNC. We visited the Museum back in June, and learned about Mr. Freeman and the impact he had on Wilson, NC. Freeman, a local builder and stonemason, incorporated found materials into many of the objects and structures he created. A number of these still exist around town. Among them is the Round House, which is now a museum dedicated to local African American history and culture.
A photographer in Wilson Library’s Digital Production Center shot a number of tools and objects from the Museum. We also scanned photographs of Freeman, his family (including one of Freeman’s bears, Topsy), and his creations.
Another interesting item included in this batch was an 1907 recommendation for Freeman based on his work as a stonemason at The Presidio in San Francisco. In it, Freeman is described as “Reliable and a strictly temperate man who [the recommender, J. K. Dalmas] would employ in Preference to nine tenths of the Mechanics who have worked here.”
The Museum holds a photocopy of a rare issue of an African American newspaper from 1897 – The Wilson Blade. Our friends in Wilson Library’s North Carolina Collection helped us try to find out more details about this paper. We believe it was only published for a few years (perhaps 1897-1900), by S. A. Smith. We also believe this was the same S. A. Smith who was elected principal of the Wilson Colored Graded School in 1896 (The Daily Times, Wilson, NC, 1896-05-29). The issue contains items typical of papers from this time period: state, local, and personal news; advertisements; a train schedule. There’s also an article on a meeting of the Freedman’s Aid Society and Southern Education Society.
Special thanks goes to Wilson County Public Library, whose staff helped facilitate getting these items online. You can view all of the items digitized for the Museum on DigitalNC.
We love being sent or just stumbling upon, projects on the web that utilize materials digitized through the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center. We thought since they have done such a great job highlighting us, it’d only be fair to turn around and highlight a few we’ve found recently.
Today’s featured website is “Black Wide-Awake” which highlights “documents of historical and genealogical interest to researchers of Wilson County, North Carolina’s African American past.”
The site, written by Lisa Henderson and with posts dating back to 2015, utilizes a wide variety of digitized historical resources to document everything from African-American schools in the Wilson area, wills, correspondence, and newspaper articles related to the enslaved people in Wilson County, to official records including marriage, birth, and death records from the Black community.
Some of the DigitalNC resources that are featured on Black Wide-Awake include many of the photographs and other materials from the Oliver Nestus Freeman Round House Museum’s collection.
Shoe shine kit from the Oliver Nestus Freeman collection, featured in this post on Black Wide Awake.
Wilson City Directories
Photograph from the 1947-1948 Wilson City Directory, featured in this post on Black Wide Awake.
Yearbooks from Darden High School, made possible by our partner Wilson County Public Library
Senior page from the 1948 Charles H. Darden High School yearbook, the first yearbook from the school, featured in this post on the website.
Many newspaper article clippings from DigitalNC are also included. A post discussing the white supremacist views held and pushed by editor of the Wilson Advance, Josephus Daniels, is a recent post that connects directly to the current commentary going on regarding Black Lives Matter and reassessing how we look at our history.
Post on Black Wide Awake pointing out the racist statements the editor and publisher of the Wilson Advance, Josephus Daniels, made regularly in a call to take down any statue or other dedication marker to him in North Carolina.
The work done on this website is a fascinating look into how resources on DigitalNC can really help illuminate a North Carolina community’s past. Thanks for using us Ms. Henderson! We encourage anyone with an interest in genealogy and local history, particularly for the Black community in North Carolina, to visit the site.
If you have a particular project or know of one that has utilized materials from DigitalNC, we’d love to hear about it! Contact us via email or in the comments below and we’ll check out. To see past highlighted projects, visit past posts here.
