A portrait of James Madison Tesh
Ten early photographs from Stokes County are now available in the Images of North Carolina collection on DigitalNC. Most of the photos were taken by James Madison Tesh, a photographer based in Danbury and Madison, N.C., in the early 1870s. There is also one portrait of Tesh. All of the photos are portraits of local people, with the exception of a carte-de-visite showing the Stokes County Courthouse around 1870.
The original photographs are in the collection of the
Stokes County Historical Society in Danbury. Several of the portraits in this collection are unidentified — if you recognize any of the individuals pictured here, please share your information in the comments section at the bottom of the page for that image.
New materials from the Rockingham County Public Library are now available on DigitalNC. This batch includes photographs, remembrance books, neighborhood histories, newspaper clippings, and a football schedule poster.
Photographs include the one above of Lowes Methodist Church, now Lowes United Methodist, in Reidsville, and one of Charlie Jackson Bennett laying in state in 1953. There are remembrance books for the same Bennett, as well as Carrie Lee H. Bennett and Sylvia Bennett Brown. The funeral home where Sylvia Bennett Brown was laid to rest also created a remembrance plaque, included in this batch of items.
Other items include a variety of materials documenting the history of Mayodan and Stoneville, North Carolina, mostly from the twentieth century. The Carolina Heights neighborhood in Eden, North Carolina, is also represented here by a leaflet sharing its history. Carolina Heights was formerly in Spray, which was consolidated into Eden in 1967. To see all materials on DigitalNC from Spray, click here.
DigitalNC is thankful to our partner, Rockingham County Public Library, for enabling access to these materials online. To learn more about the Rockingham County Public Library, visit their partner page here or their website here. To see all items in this batch, click here, and to see everything contributed by the library, click here.
Thanks to our partnership with The Ward House: Bethel Heritage Center in Bethel, North Carolina, DigitalNC recently added fifteen yearbooks from Bethel High School (1949-1970). These yearbooks shed insight into the lives and activities of white students in northern Pitt County in the mid-twentieth century, particularly before the school was integrated with Bethel Union High School in the late 1960s. The class of 1970 was the final graduating class from Bethel High School. The following fall, North Pitt High School opened for students of Bethel, Belvoir, Pactolus, Stokes, and Staton House. Click here to browse all of the yearbooks from Pitt County on DigitalNC.
Click this link to see all fifteen yearbooks added in this batch. To learn more about The Ward House: Bethel Heritage Center, visit their contributor page here. To view more high school yearbooks from throughout North Carolina, check out our list here.
From the booklet celebrating the 150th year of Madison, NC.
The Digital Heritage Center just finished digitizing a large batch of materials from Rockingham County Public Library as part of the collaborative Rockingham County Legacy project, which gathers materials from various contributors relating to the history and heritage of the county.
Chief among the items are local and family histories. One volume, entitled Roots and Branches, contains research from the Genealogical Society of Rockingham & Stokes Counties on various families in the region. However, the majority of the research was conducted and collated by local historian John T. Dallas.
Several new family histories have been added as well. The Alcorn/Alcon, Blair, Dallas, Downs, Gates, Grubb and Settle, Jarrell, Stephens, Thomas, and White families all have newly published volumes containing a profusion of Rockingham/Stokes county genealogical research.
Numerous advertisers dressed up in historic clothing to celebrate Madison’s long history.
Several town and other regional histories have also been published: Smithtown, Draper, Leaksville, Spray, the Mont View/Galloway Farm, and Sugartree Primitive Baptist Church in Virginia, which also contains information on the Dallas family and Wesley Chapel Church. Additionally, there is a Rockingham County employee directory from 1960, a book of employees of Marshall Field and Company Manufacturing Division who served in World War II, and the fifth volume of the history of Wentworth High School series. The booklet celebrating the 1968 sesquicentennial celebration of the town of Madison (pictured above) showcases the rich history of the town and includes many excellent historic photographs.
There is also a booklet on the history of the Saura, a small Siouan tribe who lived in the Rockingham and Stokes counties area. The booklet was written as an introduction to the Native American tribe for students in Rockingham county schools. The volume, though slightly dated, is nevertheless a useful resource for both the history of the tribe and as a record of how the history of Native people was taught to students in that time. The tribe itself is no longer extant but persists at least in name in the Sauratown mountains of Stokes county; the range includes the popular destinations Pilot Mountain and Hanging Rock State Park. For more information about the Saura, also known as the Cheraw, visit the NCpedia page.
Lastly, baseball! John Dallas compiled a two-volume history of Reidsville, NC’s short-lived minor league baseball team, the Luckies. They are also mentioned in the Sugartree Church volume, linked above.
To explore more items from the Rockingham County Legacy project, please see the exhibit page.
From photos and papers documenting Albemarle schools to ledgers and scrapbooks of local citizens, we’ve uploaded more materials from the Stanly County Museum. One of our favorite items is the Marvin R. Stokes scrapbook, which has photographs related to his military service as well as action shots of motorcycle and car racing in Charlotte, like the one at right (page 9).
Yearbooks and School-Related Materials:
Scrapbooks:
Ledgers:
Ephemera:
There were also a number of photos added to those already available in the Images of North Carolina collection. You can also view all items from the Stanly County Museum.
Scrapbooks featuring newspaper clippings of Stanly County and Albemarle men and women in World War II are now available at DigitalNC.org. When families received letters or news of their soldiers, The Stanly Observer helped share the updates with the whole community. The majority of stories discuss promotions, furloughs, and training. Some highlights include news of men from the area in North Africa and reuniting with familiar faces and enjoying free cigarettes courtesy of a public program sponsored by Walter B. Hill Post of the American Legion. These scrapbooks are from the collections of the Stanly County Museum.
World War II scrapbooks from Stokes County and Wilson County are also available at DigitalNC.org.
This week we have the final 35 newspaper titles for this project up on DigitalNC! Over the past 11 months we have uploaded over 2.4 million pages of North Carolina newspapers – bringing our total number of newspaper pages on DigitalNC to 4,175,076 and our total number of titles on DigitalNC to 1,161 – all freely available to anyone! In this closing batch we have our first paper from Bower, North Carolina (which you may know as Clemmons today) and an article in the Union Republican about Stokes County’s would be Wright brother: Jacob A. Hill.
Jacob Hill, Winston-Salem Journal, March 9, 1902
Before Orville and Wilbur’s iconic first flight in 1903, the race to create a manned flying machine was fiercely competitive. One of the contenders was a man from Vade Mecum Springs named Jacob Hill. Hill was born 1862 in Davie County and had been fascinated by the flight of birds ever since he was a child. In 1901 he decided to take that curiosity a little further and solve “the problem of aerial navigation” by building his own dirigible.
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Union Republican, March 14, 1901
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Danbury Reporter, December 5, 1923
Mr. Hill’s machine could have been the first piloted aircraft, but we’ll never know for sure if it could actually fly and be controlled. Momentum ran out when Hill couldn’t secure funding for his invention. According to Thomas Parramore’s First to Fly, witnesses claimed the craft could get off the ground, but couldn’t do much more than hover in place. Even though Hill’s airship became something of a local joke for a time, the legacy of his wild aspirations continues to live on in North Carolina history.
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Danbury Reporter, December 15, 1904
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Business Guide, February 16, 1906
Over the past year, we’ve added 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, we have made 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.
This week’s additions include:
Belhaven
Bower
Charlotte
Greensboro
Kings Mountain
Kinston
Lenoir
Monroe
Mt. Airy
New Bern
- The Republic and Courier (New Bern, N.C.) – 1872-1874
- The True Republican, and Newbern Weekly Advertiser (New Bern, N.C.) – 1810-1811
- The Morning Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1807-1808
- Newbern Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1809-1810
- The North Carolina Circular, and Newbern Weekly Advertiser (New Bern, N.C.) – 1803-1805
- The Daily Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1868
- The Republican & Courier (New Bern, N.C.) – 1871
- Newbern Enquirer (New Bern, N.C.) – 1860
- The Daily Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1894
- New Berne Daily Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1894-1895
Salem
Salisbury
Shelby
Statesville
Swan Quarter
Taylorsville
Warrenton
Winston
Winston-Salem
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.
Faculty portraits in the 1963 Longhorn by Woodington High School.
More than 60 high school yearbooks provided by Eastern Carolina University are now up on DigitalNC. The schools represented are located across central and eastern North Carolina and include schools from Pitt County, Franklin County, Stokes County, Washington County, Hertford County, Lenoir County, Martin County, Halifax County, Wilson County, and Johnston County. The dates of these yearbooks range from 1927-1970. Together, they give an overview of secondary education across the state, with many of the editions covering the time surrounding desegregation efforts. These yearbooks include individual and class portraits as well photographs documenting activities, clubs, sports, and academics.
Senior portraits from the Kay Aitch Ess 1927 yearbook by Grainger High School
Follow the links below to browse yearbooks from the schools included in this batch:
To see more materials from our partner who provided these yearbooks, visit East Carolina University’s partner page, or take a look at their website.
Issues of The Danbury Reporter from 1872-1945 are now available on DigitalNC. A weekly paper published in Danbury, NC (Stokes County), the Reporter is a mix of local, county and national news, with an emphasis on farming and politics.
This title is part of our Newspaper Digitization project, and was selected by the Danbury Public Library, part of the Northwestern Regional Library.
Historic student yearbooks from the Stokes County town of King are now available in the North Carolina High School Yearbooks digital collection on DigitalNC. The online collection includes seventeen yearbooks from King High School, ranging in date form 1948 to 1964. The original yearbooks are in the collection of the King Public Library, which is a part of the Northwestern Regional Library system.
