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New editions of The Laurel yearbook from Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North Carolina, are now online at DigitalNC. They span from 1955 to 1969, and were provided by our partner Olivia Raney Local History Library.
A photo of the Millbrook High School class of 1958.
Millbrook High School was opened in the fall of 1922. More buildings were added to it in the 1930s and 1940s, and it still operates in Raleigh today. These yearbooks contain student portraits, class portraits, sports photos, and photos of activities and school groups. They also have class histories, and class prophecies, where the students imagined they would be in the future. Like all yearbooks on DigitalNC, they are full text-searchable.
Click here to view the rest of the yearbooks from Millbrook High School. To learn more about the Olivia Raney Local History Library, visit their partner page and take a look at their website.
Thanks to our generous community partner, Olivia Rainey Local History Library, and at the request of our partner Wake Forest Historical Museum, the book Connections: 100 Years of Wake Forest History by Carol W. Pelosi is now available to read for free on DigitalNC. You can flip through the pages of Connections and find local history of Wake Forest, NC ranging from 1910-2008. Information covers topics like farms and crops, the railroad, local businesses, holiday celebrations, festivals, and local government leaders.
To learn more about what our community partners, Olivia Rainey Local History Library are up to please visit their website.
To view other materials made available by the Olivia Rainey Local History Library visit their contributors page.
To view more North Carolina historical items visit the North Carolina Digital Heritage Centers website DigitalNC.
From the 1929 Oak Leaf
Did your high school graduating class have a class poem? It might’ve been borrowed from a famous poet, or it could have been written by one of your classmates. Class poems seem to be especially popular in yearbooks from the 1920-1930s, and we’ve got some good one thanks to our latest batch of yearbooks from our partner, the Olivia Raney Local History Library.
From the 1930 Latipac
The 1930 Latipac‘s poem from Raleigh High School was written by class poet Alice Beaman, who decided to focus on the bittersweet feeling of nostalgia in her poem.
“‘Tis true school days were happiest, / But they passed too quickly by,” she writes in the last stanza. Whether or not most high school students today would agree with that sentiment is up for debate.
Perhaps a feeling more relatable to graduates today appears in the first stanza: “Ah! Tho’ our hearts be sad at parting, / They will all with gladness swell, / At our victory in attaining / The goal for which we fought so well.”
From the 1929 Oak Leaf
Less concerned with rhyme scheme than Beaman was class poet Lula Belle Highsmith, who wrote the class poem for the 1929 graduating class of Hugh Morson High School (Raleigh, N.C.).
Highsmith’s poem takes a more somber tone; she writes, “And we half regret departing, / Wish we might step back a little, / But no, no, the door is closing— / We are pushed into the Future— / Let us go with lofty courage, / Ready for the work before us.”
Considering that less than 5% of students completed four years of college in 1940, these poems reflect the feelings that many young people had at the end of their formal education. The feeling of loss, or of learning yet to be had, runs parallel to the well-known poem “The School Where I Studied,” by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai. One line reads, “All my life I have loved in vain / the things I didn’t learn.”
To see more class poems and all the yearbooks in this batch, click here. To see all materials from the Olivia Raney Local History Library, visit their partner page or their website. All of our North Carolina Yearbooks can be found here.
Thanks to our partner, the Olivia Raney Local History Library, we now have volume 1 of Wake, Capital County of North Carolina on our website.
The title page of Wake, Capital County of North Carolina, Volume 1: Prehistory through Centennial.
This volume of Wake, Capital County of North Carolina focuses on the history of the region from the prehistoric era through the late 19th-century celebration of the centennial of the county’s founding. However, the bulk of the book starts with the history of eighteenth-century Wake County history. The work discusses Wake County’s role and experiences through its own history and in the context of major national and international events such as the Revolutionary War and the Civil War and Reconstruction periods.
Image from Wake, Capital Country of North Carolina, Volume 1: Prehistory through Centennial.
The Olivia Raney Local History Library is a branch of the Wake County Public Library system. It houses a host of research materials on a variety of historical and genealogical topics related to Wake County. For more information about the Olivia Raney Local History Library, please visit their website.
Thanks to our partner, Olivia Raney Local History Library, the Wake County Public Libraries: A Souvenir Centennial History: 1901-2001 is now available on our website. In this book, Roy C. Dicks outlines the one hundred year history of the Olivia Raney Library and establishing of the Wake County Public Libraries.
To learn more about the Olivia Raney Local Historical Library, visit their site here.
The Olivia Raney Local History Library in Raleigh has contributed three new tax books from 1891, 1895, and 1898 that are now available on DigitalNC! The Olivia Raney Library specializes in materials that facilitate local history and genealogy research, and holds an extensive collection of Wake County tax records. These books are valuable resources for anyone seeking to research specific individuals or property ownership statistics in Raleigh at the turn of the century. We are excited that they are now available digitally for researchers to peruse from anywhere.
Our digital collections include nearly 200 records from Olivia Raney, including yearbooks, scrapbooks, newspapers, and catalogs. Browse all of our Olivia Raney Local History Library materials on their partner page here, and visit their website here.
Washington High School Homecoming Queens, 1945
Two yearbooks from Washington High School in Raleigh, N.C. have been added to our site thanks to our partner, the Olivia Raney Local History Library. One is a standard edition of The Echo from 1943; the other is a special edition, The Echo Nostalgic Reflections, from 1977.
Among the pages of Nostalgic Reflections are a few spreads of Washington High School royalty: homecoming queens throughout the years. Some of the listed winners are Margaret Smith Cooper (1941), Daisy Debnam (Miss Washington High 1946), Ressie Curry (Miss Washington High 1947), Juanita Freeman (1948), Lula Poe (1949), Sarah Frances Sewell (1950), Mary E. Williams (1951), and Mildred McKay (1952).
Miss Margaret Smith Cooper, Queen 1941
Mildred McKay, Queen 1942
Next to the homecoming spreads are photos from the alumni dance (1976), as well as championship game information from the school’s football program.
Curiously, there doesn’t seem to be any information about who succeeded Mildred McKay as homecoming queen in 1943 in The Echo—school events seem to have been a lower priority for the yearbook’s editors than academics, clubs, and favorite poems.
You can see all yearbooks from Washington High School here. To find out more about Olivia Raney Local History Library, visit their partner page or the Wake County website.
Coverage of the Jesse L. Jackson Presidential Campaign in 1988.
DigitalNC now has new issues of The Carolinian from 1988 to 1992. The Raleigh, NC based newspaper was a popular source of information for the African American Community in the RDU area. Each Monday and Thursday, The Carolinian informed the African American community of issues and news that affected their daily lives.
The new issues include the 1988 Presidential campaign coverage of Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, along with covering local stories from the Historical Black Colleges (HBCU) in the area, Shaw University and North Carolina Central.
Coverage of the Shaw University Divinity School Heritage Event in 1988.
Still in print today, The Carolinian provides the African American community with news that takes place on the national, regional, and local levels. To see what The Carolinian looks like today, please visit their website. To view other African American community newspapers in North Carolina, visit our website here and click on African American Papers.
Special thanks to our partner the Olivia Raney Local History Library for their assistance. Visit their homepage by clicking here.
The April 13, 1968 front page of The Carolinian, reporting on the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination.
The newest issues to DigitalNC of one of Raleigh’s African American newspapers, The Carolinian, cover the most turbulent years of the Civil Rights Era. Recently added are issues from 1959-1962, 1965-1972. These join issues from 1945-1958, 1963-1964, which are already available on our site.
Within these new additions you will find coverage of the sit-ins in Greensboro and throughout the state, North Carolina’s protracted battle over school integration, the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.. There is ongoing reporting about both local and national efforts of the NAACP, KKK demonstrations and counter-protests, and news about boycotts and protests at the state’s historically Black colleges and universities.
The paper covers local news – achievements of adults and children alike, events, crime. Milestones of integration appear as well, like the first known birth of an African American child at Rex Hospital in Raleigh.
Thanks to Olivia Raney Local History Library in Raleigh for securing permission to share The Carolinian online. You can view all of the issues currently available, as well as everything we’ve scanned for Olivia Raney on their contributor page.
Today on the blog we’re happy to announce the addition of The Morrisville & Preston Progress, published in Morrisville from 1995-1999. This newspaper was contributed for digitization by Olivia Raney Local History Library, part of Wake County Public Libraries.
The Progress is a really interesting view into an area that has changed a lot in the last thirty years. During the span published in The Progress you can see a focus on development and growth, with articles describing the diminishing farm economy and the development around RDU airport and RTP. The article below, taken from the front page of the January 31, 1996 issue, talks about land being sold at a premium thanks to Morrisville’s convenient location.
The paper also covers Preston, a community in Cary. Most of that news centers around golf; Prestonwood is a large country club with an extensive course. The September 1998 issue highlights a celebrity golf tournament, the Jimmy V Classic, that brought players like Mia Hamm, Scott Wolf, and Michael Jordan among others.
Many of the early issues include a feature entitled “Our Neighbors Speak,” which posed a current events question to Morrisville and Preston residents to get their take. Topics range from proposed federal income tax changes, to college athletics, to more local concerns. In the example below from November 1995 a number of white residents were asked their opinion about rapid growth after the population of the Triangle surpassed one million.
Read about Morrisville local politics (and drama!), commercial and residential development, and ongoing cultural changes in The Progress, or take a look at all of the materials we’ve digitized for Olivia Raney Local History Library on their contributor page.
