The 1946 Front Cover of “The Torch” from East Spencer High School.
23 yearbooks from several high schools in Rowan County are now available on Digital NC. Included in the new collections of NC Yearbooks are “Spencerian” and “The Railroaders” from Spencer High, “The Torch” from East Spencer High, and “Crisp ‘N Curls” from Presbyterian Hospital School of Nursing. The high school and school of nursing yearbooks cover each high school from the early 1920s to the late 1950s, marking pivotal changes for many students during that time.
Special thank you to our partner Rowan Public Library. To see more yearbooks from Rowan Public Library on Digital NC, visit them here. Be sure to check out our massive collection of High School and College Yearbooks throughout North Carolina!
Nearly twenty years of yearbooks from Rowan County have now been digitized and are available on DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner Rowan Public Library. The yearbooks cover 1950 through 1969, come from Dunbar High School, the town’s Black high school, making them the first yearbooks digitized from the town of East Spencer, N.C. Originally named the East Spencer Negro School, which opened in 1900, the school changed its name to Dunbar High School in 1958.
These yearbooks include individual portraits, class portraits, and photographs of activities, clubs the students joined, and sports played. Some of the class portraits also included “ambitions” – jobs that the students wanted to be when they grew up, like stenographer, teacher, or social worker. A few of the yearbooks also include “last wills and testaments”, where classes would “bequeath” thanks or seats to future seniors, and “class prophecies”, where students imagined and wrote about where they might be in the future.
The Hi-Y club of 1959 at Dunbar High School.
Follow the links below to browse the various yearbooks from Dunbar High School included in this batch:
These yearbooks provide a valuable source of knowledge for what segregated school life in East Spencer, N.C. were like at that time. To learn more about the Rowan Public Library, visit their contributor page, or their website. You can also visit their website for the Edith M. Clark History Room. To see more yearbooks from across North Carolina, you can click here.
An exterior photo of Boyden High School (later Salisbury High) 1926.
DigitalNC is proud to welcome our new partner, the Rowan Public Library. Located in Salisbury in Rowan County, having their content online adds to our growing list of contributors who represent the Piedmont region of our state.
Their first contribution is nearly four dozen editions of The Echo, the school yearbook from Boyden High School in Salisbury. Stretching from 1921 to 1967, this collection covers a great transitional period in the school’s history. In 1926, the school had been renamed from Salisbury High School to Boyden High School after a new building was built. It used that name for nearly 50 years, until 1971, when it reverted back to the Salisbury High School name, where it still stands today.
Looking through the collection, it is fascinating to see the changes over time. While many of the first editions of Echo were smaller yearbooks, with the 1921 annual even calling itself a magazine, they expanded over time, including many more photographs and writing more about the students, their hobbies, and what they liked to do. For example, the 1940 yearbook includes a small note about how an overwhelming majority of the students prefer Glenn Miller’s swing music over all else, “accounting for the many jitterbugs.”
To learn more about the Rowan Public Library, visit their contributor page, or their website. You can also visit their website for the Edith M. Clark History Room. To see more yearbooks from across North Carolina, you can click here.
Thanks to our partner, Rowan Public Library, a batch containing new Rowan County high school yearbooks spanning from 1937 to 1961 are now available on our website. This batch adds three new schools to our Rowan County high school yearbooks list—Landis High School, Rockwell High School, and Granite Quarry High School.
Thanks to our partner, Rowan Public Library, a batch containing 36 yearbooks from Woodleaf High School, Cleveland High School, and Mount Ulla High School are now available on our website. These yearbooks range from 1942 to 1959.
Snapshots from The Keepsake, 1958.
To learn more about the Rowan Public Library, please visit their website.
For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.
Rowan Memorial Hospital, where the student nurses studied and worked, is located in Salisbury, NC, right in the middle of the state. The School of Nursing opened up in 1903 and the first class graduated in 1907 (The White Cap [1950], image 14). These yearbooks, appropriately titled The White Cap, reflect on the year’s activities, from clubs to nursing courses.
We have added nearly 50 yearbooks to our collection thanks to our partner Rowan Public Library. These yearbooks are from two Rowan County schools — Price High School in Salisbury N.C. and China Grove High School — and are especially unique in that they capture student life at two schools that existed only for a few decades.
Price High School’s main building from the 1960 edition of the Pricean.
The 1943 Pricean Yearbook was dedicated to two teachers who joined the U.S. military.
Price High School was Salisbury’s African-American high school from 1932 until 1969, when integration led to the closing of the school and the opening of today’s Salisbury High School. Included in this batch of yearbooks are seventeen editions of The Pricean, the annual from Price High School. These yearbooks include the usual contents of high school yearbooks — superlatives, group photos, class poems — but also notable graduates and the final class’ words of farewell and gratitude to the school. They also encapsulate notable events that occurred between 1943 and 1969.
One such historic event was World War Two, which was emphasized by the 1943 Pricean’s dedication. The yearbook was dedicated to Auxillary Ruth E. Miller and Seargeant James C. Simpson, both of whom were graduates of and teachers at Price High School before joining the U.S. Army. Ruth E. Miller was the first Black member of Salisbury’s Women’s Army Auxillary Corps while James C. Simpson was the first teacher from Price High School to join the U.S. army.
China Grove High School’s yearbook, The Parrot, captures some of the early years of the merging of the Rowan County Farm Life School with the city’s main high school that took place in the summer of 1921. According to the Eura Jones, a member of China Grove High’s 1924 class, China Grove High School “was the largest rural high school in the state” in 1921, and only continued to grow. She goes on to detail the school’s continued growth, boasting “two music departments, a teacher training department, glee clubs, four societies, a dramatic club, ball teams, a home economics club, athletics, agriculture, and most of all, the construction of a new three story building to house the growing school.” The yearbooks added to our digital collection span the years from 1923 to 1961.
Plans for China Grove High School’s Expanding Campus, completed by Architect Charles C. Hook.
These yearbooks are only a fraction of the materials we have digitized for the Rowan Public Library. To learn more about the Rowan Public Library, check out their partner page or their website.
Price High’s Driver’s Education Class, Cheering Squad, and First Year Industrial Arts Class from the 1956 Pricean.
Thanks to our partner, Rowan Public Library, Boyden High School and Livingstone College yearbooks are now available on our website. This batch includes yearbooks from 1941 for Boyden High School and 1930, 1946-1947 for Livingstone College.
Livingstone College is a historically Black college located in Salisbury, North Carolina. In 1879, the college was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church and was just a single building on 40 acres of land. In 1887, the school was renamed from Zion Wesley College to Livingstone College in honor of David Livingstone—a philanthropist, explorer, and Christian missionary. Today, the college consists of more than 15 buildings on over 300 acres of land with over a thousand enrolled students.
In 1904, Salisbury High School was founded in to educate children of the area. Twenty-two years after its founding, in 1926, the school’s name changed to Boyden High School after a new school building was built. The school remained Boyden for almost 50 years until the name was reverted back to Salisbury High School in 1971.
To learn more about Rowan Public Library, please visit their website.
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.
This week we have another 60 titles up on DigitalNC! While these papers cover all of North Carolina, almost one third are from Statesville alone!
In the October 3rd, 1902 issue of Elizabeth City’s Tar Heel, there is an interview with Reginald Aubrey Fessenden’s assistant, Professor Saint Marie. Fessenden was a pioneer in early radio, or “wireless telegraphy,” and was conducting experiments at Manteo on Roanoke Island. In the interview, Prof. Saint Marie seems somewhat pessimistic about the process and its possibilities, which might be due to Fessenden abruptly ending their contract with the Weather Bureau the previous month after conflict arose over ownership of the patent.
Tar Heel, October 3, 1902
However, less than two months later The News and Observer reported that Fessenden’s invention had greatly improved and could now send transmissions to Washington, D.C. On Christmas Eve, 1906, he conducted the first radio broadcast by reading a bible verse and then playing ‘O Holy Night’ on his violin for the ships off the coast of Massachusetts. By 1909, according the the Charlotte Evening Observer, he had perfected the process for which he laid the foundation on the Carolina coast.
News and Observer, November 23, 1902
Evening Chronicle, April 14, 1909
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.
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.
![Two pages from The White Cap [1968] with portraits of some of the graduating class. They are all wearing their nurse uniforms.](https://www.digitalnc.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Screen-Shot-2021-05-14-at-12.05.54-PM-1024x504.png)
