Founded in 1964 Southwestern Community College is located in Sylva, NC. The materials in this batch includes over 40 year of commencement ceremony programs dating back to 1965 up until 2008. There are a variety of ceremonies including Fall, Spring, Summer and specialized ones for majors like Nursing. The programs list out the names of graduates and the degree they received. It is to be noted that the schools name changed throughout the decades and that can be seen in the graduation commencement programs. You can also find annual reviews of the college, newsletters and newspaper clippings.
DigitalNC is happy to announce a new set of Southwestern Community College materials have been uploaded to the site! This is our fourth batch of SWCC records since welcoming them as a partner earlier this year, and this latest addition builds substantially upon our preexisting collection of SWCC materials. Located in Sylva, N.C. in Jackson County, SWCC has been operating for over fifty years and today offers over forty academic programs.
The college has historically been a major force in its community and has been heavily involved in the economic development of surrounding counties. As such, the bulk of this collection comprises SWCC annual reports from 1969-2000 and county development surveys from Jackson, Macon, and Swain counties dating from 1965-2002. These reports are comprehensive and incredibly informative for anyone seeking to know more about the economic and demographic situation in Western North Carolina in the twentieth century. More documents from Jackson County, including an annual report, Chamber of Commerce publication, a 1992 county study, and a genealogy book on the Richard McDowell Wilson descendants provide further insight into the region.
Additionally, this new batch includes many records relating directly to the college, including course catalogs, student handbooks, newsletters with student profiles, promotional literature, and much more. We are also excited to digitize commemorative materials for the college’s fortieth and fiftieth anniversaries, as well as a student-published literary magazine from 2023! Read more about the history of SWCC in our previous blog posts or on their website.
Thanks to our partner, Southwestern Community College (SCC), a new batch of materials are now available on DigitalNC! This batch has over 190 new records that include a Great Smoky Mountains trail map, local histories, previous course catalogs, various newsletters, SCC program pamphlets, over 100+ photograph slides showcasing the college campus and nearby beautiful mountain views.
Located in the beautiful mountains of North Carolina, Southwestern Community College held its first classes on December 1, 1964 under the name “Jackson County Industrial Education Center.” During that time, the school was a satellite of Asheville-Buncombe Technical Institute. In September 1967, however, the satellite became an independent school and was renamed Southwestern Technical Institute (STI). The school’s name changed once more in 1979 to Southwestern Technical College before becoming Southwestern Community College in 1988.
The years following STI’s independence from Asheville-Buncombe Technical Institute were filled with construction of buildings, receiving accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, their first on-campus commencement ceremony, establishment of the Cherokee Center, and much more. Today, SCC has facilities across several counties as well as on the Qualla Boundary, is the only community college in the nation to enter into a cooperative science agreement with NASA, and offers over 40 academic programs for students to choose from.
Southwestern Community College is based in Sylva, N.C., in Jackson county. Today, it advertises itself as the only community college with a scientific partnership with NASA. The materials in this batch also show its history of teaching technical skills, especially on this poster showing students modifying a car into a limousine. They also feature some of the academic accomplishments of students in the Phi Theta Kappa organization, a college honor society. The Alpha Eta Nu chapter at Southwestern had the opportunity to travel around the country for conferences, evidenced by the memorabilia in their 1985 scrapbook.
The artistic and literary talents of past Southwestern students and faculty are also on display in the issues of the school’s literary magazine. One poem, written by Eugenia L. Johnson and apparently published in World Treasury of Great Poems (1980), is called “Me.” It begins: “Me, me, me, / Who am me / I know me.”
Amazingly, it is accompanied by this illustration of a person dabbing, a reminder that the dance move was popular long before Cam Newton (quarterback for the Carolina Panthers) did it in 2015.
As their website notes, the impact of Southwestern CC is widespread in the southwestern mountain communities of North Carolina. Based in Sylva, the college has a wide alumni base, especially in Jackson, Macon, and Swain counties. It is the second-most western community college in North Carolina (after Tri-County Community College in Murphy), and it is the only community college with a scientific partnership with NASA.
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.