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.
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.
From the 1922 Rattler, Raleigh High School’s yearbook. Part of a photo essay of Raleigh.
The Digital Heritage Center partnered for the first time with the Olivia Raney Local History Library in Raleigh to digitize nearly a hundred Wake County school yearbooks, catalogs, reunion books, and graduation programs. The materials, which span 1909-2008, are windows into the daily lives and times of North Carolinians throughout the century.
Some of these yearbooks come from schools no longer in operation. Here, we’ve provided a brief history of each former school (when available), and a link to the volumes from that school (see section “Closed Schools” below). We also digitized yearbooks from schools that still exist today (see “Current Schools” section at end).
Closed Schools
Charles B. Aycock Junior High School (Raleigh, N.C.)
Aycock Junior High School Cheerleaders, 1969.
History: Junior high school in operation from 1965-1979, when its campus was absorbed by William G. Enloe High School, which was built in 1962. The building was and still is known as the “East Building” on Enloe’s campus. Its original students were from the recently closed Hugh Morson Junior High School (formerly Hugh Morson High School).
Volumes: Aycock [1967]; Charles B. Aycock Junior High School [1974]; six of The Owl’s Nest [1968-1973]; two of Owl’s Nest [1975-1976]
Fuquay Springs High School (Fuquay-Varina, N.C.)
Students of Fuquay Springs High School at work, 1953.
History: Three elementary schools in the area joined together to open Fuquay Springs High School in 1918. The was renamed Fuquay Varina High School in 1963 and operated until fall 1970, when it combined with Fuquay Consolidated High School to form the new Fuquay-Varina High School. That school is still in operation today (history from Fuquay-Varina High School website).
History: On September 2, 1925 the students of the overcrowded Raleigh High School moved into the brand new school called Hugh Morson. The school spanned the block of Morgan Street bounded by Person, Blount, and Hargett Streets. It was named for the long-time teacher and beloved first principal at Raleigh High School, Mr. Hugh Morson. Today, all that remains is a plaque and two gargoyles. The school newspaper was The Purple and Gold; its colors, purple and gold. These colors live on today as the colors of Needham B. Broughton High School (more details in this Good Night Raleigh post; history summarized from an excellent entry in Historical sketches of the Raleigh Public Schools by Mrs J. M. Barbee, 1943).
Hugh Morson High School was demoted to a junior high school in 1955 and operated until 1965, when it closed. Over winter break in 1965, the students were transferred to the new Charles B. Aycock Junior High School and the school was officially closed and demolished in 1966.
Volumes: 18 of The Oak Leaf [1927-1955]; Morson Memories [1962]; Hugh Morson High School Class of 1955 50th Year Reunion Memorial Directory [2005]
Hugh Morson Junior High School (Raleigh, N.C.)
Volumes: PTA Year Book [1963]; Morson Junior High [1964]
Raleigh High School (Raleigh, N.C.)
The Raleigh High School building on W. Morgan St, 1923. The school closed in 1929 and was later demolished.
History: Raleigh High School, which preceded both Hugh Morson and Broughton High Schools, was built in 1909 next to “the Raleigh water tower, across the street from fire station #1, on W. Morgan Street” (Good Night Raleigh post). The city of Raleigh decided to build a high school in 1905, reported the News and Observer. The paper also reported that the school’s principal would be Professor Hugh Morson, who ran a successful and well-known boys’ school. The West Morgan Street location was selected for its proximity to both the State and Olivia Raney libraries (the school had no library of its own). The school was built to contain 250-300 students in 1907, but enrollment was soon up to 500. The school built a two-story brick annex during 1921-1922, just east of the city water tower. But schools were soon closed during an influenza pandemic, and the buildings of the high school were used to house patients. In, fact, the school never re-opened. By 1928-1929, the building closed for good, as Hugh Morson and Needham B. Broughton High Schools had both been built. Later the building was used by the Salvation Army, and then divvied up and sold. (Note: history summarized from an excellent entry in Historical sketches of the Raleigh Public Schools by Mrs J. M. Barbee, 1943)
Volumes: seven of The Rattler [1909-1923]; Rattler [1913]; Cylinder [1924]
History: Wakelon School opened in 1908 in an “eclectic brick building” in Italian/Neoclassical style (National Register of Historic Places; the building was added in 1976). It was designed by C. E. Hartage, a Raleigh architect, and features a prominent center octagonal tower. The school’s construction was a big boon for the town of Zebulon, which was incorporated just a year before the school’s construction. Its construction was a result of the 1907 General Assembly act that also established Cary High School. It operated until it was merged with the integrated Zebulon Elementary. The last of the students graduated in the 1980s, and the building was sold to GlaxoSmithKline. It has since been bought back and is now a town hall.
History: In 1869, a school for African-American students was built at West South Street in Raleigh by the American Missionary Society of New York. The school was bought in 1875 by the city of Raleigh and organized as a public elementary school. The school grew, but by 1918 Shaw University and St. Augustine’s College had both discontinued their high school programs, leaving Black students nowhere to pursue education beyond the elementary level. In the fall of 1924, Washington Elementary and High School opened (Historical sketches of the Raleigh Public Schools by Mrs J. M. Barbee, 1943). It was designed by C. A. Gadsen Sayre in the Jacobean style, a popular style for school architecture in in the 1920s, and continued as the only public high school for African Americans in Raleigh from its inception until 1953 (Raleigh Historic Development Commission). The building now holds Washington Gifted and Talented Magnet Elementary School.
Volumes: three of Catalogue [1925-1927], a course catalog and campus publication with photographs of the classes and details of the curriculum; yearbooks: The Chsite [1920]; Chsite [1924], six of The Yrac [1952-1962]
St. Mary’s School (Raleigh, N.C.)
Volumes: The Muse [1917]; five of The Stage Coach [1927-1945]
North Carolina State School for the Blind and the Deaf (Raleigh, N.C.)
Volumes: 21 of The Latipac [1931-1964]; Needham Broughton High School Classes of 1939-1940 Reunion XXXXV [1984]; Perspectives: 50th Reunion, Class of 1958 [2008]; Journeys: NBBHS Class of 1959 50th Reunion [2009]
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.
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.
Thanks to our new partner, the Friends of Wakelon, we now have several yearbooks from Wakelon High School on our website. These yearbooks are from the years 1949-1970.
The cover of the 1960 edition of the Wak-igh-an yearbook, from Wakelon High School in Zebulon, N.C.
Wakelon School was built over one hundred years ago between the towns of Wakefield and Zebulon in Wake County. The school building was recently converted into a town hall for Zebulon. The school existed until the 1980s when pharmaceutical company Glaxo bought the structure. The town of Zebulon repurchased it in 2007 for $5 million.
The cover of the 1957 edition of the Wak-igh-an yearbook, from Wakelon High School in Zebulon, N.C.
For more information about the Friends of Wakelon, visit their website.
We love filling in gaps in the DigitalNC yearbook collection as new volumes are uncovered. Today’s post mentions three such volumes from Wayne and Wake Counties.
Wayne County Public Library contributed the 1922 Tarpitur, one of the earliest volumes on our site from Goldsboro High School. You can also view all of the yearbooks we have available for Goldsboro High School.
We’ve also added the 1945 Latipac from Needham B. Broughton High School and the 1958 E’corde from Cardinal Gibbons High School, both in Raleigh.
Looking on the High School tab on our Yearbooks page is an easy way to discover what years we might be missing. Contact us if your institution can help fill in gaps!
Carolina Baptist newspaper masthead from September 2, 1857.
Thanks to our partner, Wake Forest University, there are 19 new newspapers added to DigitalNC. Dating from 1857 to 1925, these newspapers were written for Christian communities from the mountains to the Piedmont to the coast of North Carolina.
Most of the newspapers are affiliated with the Baptist denomination, and their audiences vary in size and geography. Some were published for specific churches, like the Broad Street Worker “Devoted to the interests of Broad St. Baptist Church” in Winston, N.C. Others were published for a wider audience by regional, state, or national organizations, like the North Carolina Baptist Missionary Worker and The Gospel Herald published by the Boards of the Baptist State Convention, and the Conflict published by the Anti-Evolution League of America.
To look through the 58 issues of these publications, click the links below:
Four scrapbooks featuring baseball players who went into the big leagues from Wayne County are now online on DigitalNC.
From Sunday Star Sports, a Washington, D.C. paper on April 17, 1949. President Harry Truman threw the opening pitch at the game that day.
Two of the scrapbooks feature Ray Scarborough (1917-1982), a pitcher from Mount Olive, NC who played for the Chicago White Sox, Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers, and Washington Senators, and he served as a scout for the Baltimore Orioles. During his time on the Yankees, they went to the 1952 World Series and Scarborough was a scout with the Orioles when they went to the World Series in 1966. The scrapbooks have a mix of materials from his baseball career and as a boy growing up in Wayne County and as a student at Wake Forest University. The materials in the scrapbook are a mix of photographs, letters, and newspaper clippings and cover the 1940s through 1980s.
Tim Talton and his rival for top batting average in the Eastern League Pedro Gonzalez in 1960.
The other two scrapbooks feature Marion (Tim) Talton of Pikeville, N.C., who played as catcher for the minor league teams the St. Cloud Rox in Fargo, ND and the Springfield Giants in Springfield, MA. Known for his exceptional hitting, Talton had the second highest batting average in the Eastern League in 1960 with a .331. One scrapbook covers his time on the St. Cloud Rox in 1959 and the other, his time on the Giants in 1960. Talton moved up to the major leagues in 1966 and played for the Kansas City Athletics.
The scrapbooks were made available through Wayne County Public Library. To view more baseball materials in DigitalNC, visit here.
Vaiden Whitley, now East Wake High School, is located in Wendell, N.C. in Wake County. These yearbooks show the school back in 1971-1973, also known as some of the most fashionable years for both yearbooks and student basketball uniforms.
While these games may not have been quite as exciting as some of the ones in this year’s NCAA tournament, they do illustrate North Carolinian’s longstanding cultural obsession with the sport. In 1971, the Vaiden Whitley men’s team only came out on top in 8/19 games—not quite as good as the women’s team, which won 7/13. Still, the coaches called it a “profitable season.”
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.
