8 yearbooks from John Graham High School in Warrenton, NC are now online, thanks to partner Warren County Memorial Library. The yearbooks span the years 1947 to 1969 and provide a glimpse into the lives of high-schoolers in the northern portion of North Carolina. The school integrated in 1966 and the yearbooks from 1967, 1968, and 1969 show the newly integrated population of the school.
John Graham High School was originally the Warrenton Male Academy, one of the first schools in the state, which opened in 1786. In 1897, the school changed it’s name to Warrenton High School and in the early 1900s became coeducational. The school later became public and was known as John Graham High School, after the man who took over the school in 1897. John Graham High School during the 1900s was the white school in Warrenton, while John R. Hawkins High School was the school for Black children. During integration, the students of Hawkins High School were moved to John Graham High School. John Graham’s last graduating class was in 1981. After that, the school transitioned to a middle school and the high-schoolers moved to the new Warren County High School building. Several well known graduates have come from John Graham High School, including Frank Porter Graham, who became a US Senator and president of UNC and R.B. House, the first chancellor of UNC-Chapel Hill.
As their first contribution to DigitalNC, we are happy to publish several decades of TheWarren Record newspaper. The issues date from 1929-1938 and from 1959-1970 are available for research and exploration.
The Warren Record was a weekly community newspaper that offered stories from both local and national headlines. During the earlier decades, it also included a page that was dedicated to the interests of women. The paper often reprinted popular fashion articles and images that were fresh from the New York runways. Like the images presented above, they present a unique look into the styles that women were exposed to during the early twentieth century, even in rural areas of North Carolina.
Browse all the issues of the Warren Record that are available on DigitalNC here. To learn more about this new partner, the Warren County Memorial Library, please visit their contributor page or their website.
It may help to take a moment for context: 1972 was a big year for national an international news—against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, there was also the Watergate scandal, the launch of Apollo 16, and Bloody Sunday. Meanwhile, high school students were still dealing with the classic problems of being a teenager (trying out for sports, forming relationships, staying out of the principal’s office, etc.). Apparently, these elements combine to form one of the most exciting times to be a high school yearbook editor.
Thanks to our partners at the Warren County Memorial Library, we’ve added 13 new John Graham High School yearbooks to DigitalNC, bringing our total from this school to 22. We now hold each yearbook from 1947 until 1969, enabling digital access to resources on student life in Warrenton, North Carolina. The school integrated in 1966, so these recent earlier additions show the school when it’s population was all white students.
Our holdings of John Graham High School yearbooks were created by the school after it had become a coeducational, public high school. The original school, named Warrenton Male Academy, was founded in 1786 and was one of the first high schools in the state. John Graham High School of the 1900s was the white high school in town until integration with John R. Hawkins High School in the mid-1960s. The class of 1981 was the last graduating class of John Graham High School, which then became a middle school. Local teenagers moved to the new Warren County High School building. The building is now the John Graham Center for Warren County Family Services.
A 1986 article about a rise in black bear sightings in Warren County
Nearly twenty years and over 600 issues of the Warren Record have been newly digitized on DigitalNC. While our collection previously only included issues from the years 1929-1938 and from 1959-1970, this new addition includes over a dozen years stretching from 1970 to 1989, which helps our collection become that much closer to being complete. Published since 1896, the Warren Record is a weekly newspaper that serves the readers in Warrenton and Warren County, NC. Many of the articles include local news concerning citizens or Warren County. For example, the 1986 article above was about the alarming increase in black bear sightings in Warren County and advice for readers about what to do in case they see one.
A 1970 article about the changing census in Warrenton from 1960 to 1970.
Many articles written in this time period were about other municipal issues, like elections, political developments, and census data. In the August 1970 article on the left, the Record announced that Warrenton’s population had dropped 7%, from 1124 residents in 1960 to 1046 ten years later. Warren County’s population also heavily dropped that decade, with its 22% drop being the largest on a percentage basis of any county in the state.
A 1989 article about the advent of cable television coming to Warrenton and Norlina.
Other articles were simply about local developments that could interest residents of Warren County. In the May 1989 article on the right, the Record announced that Warrenton and Norlina would be receiving cable television within the next year. People living in nearby Henderson already had cable, and the same company would be rolling out 12 channels to customers at a cost of $8 per month, with an extra dollar for every additional television.
Dairy Princesses for Warren, Granville, and Vance counties are crowned in 1956.
Now available on DigitalNC are seven scrapbooks from Granville County Public Library. These volumes belong to the larger Hays Collection, a large collection of Oxford and Granville County scrapbooks compiled by local historian Francis B. Hays over the span of more than 75 years.
DigitalNC now has digitally published through volume 43 of the Francis B. Hays Collection. The items are grouped by topic: Oxford and Granville Men and Women, Granville County Family Histories, Granville County Marriages Oxford History, By or About Frances B. Hays, Granville County Histories, and Granville County Schools.
Photograph of Mystery Farm No. 43, which belonged to the Currin family.
The two topics most recently updated are Granville County History and Granville County Schools.
Granville County History: The fifth and final volume of general county history features a series of clippings from the local newspaper’s Mystery Farm contest. The newspaper would post aerial photographs of unidentified local farms, and members of the community would write in and give information about the farm. The newspaper would then run a story identifying the farm and the contest winner. For more mystery farms, see the volume starting at page 144.
Granville County Schools: Volumes I-VI trace the development and wide expansion of mostly public schools in Granville County from 1911-1958. The scrapbooks include newspaper clippings
Photographs from 1925 of the newly built Creedmoor School, Stem School, Stovall School, Wilton School, Berea School, and Oak Hill School in Granville County.
and photographs, as well as occasional memorabilia like the 1954 commencement program from Oxford High School. The latter pages of Volume VI cover Granville County church history, especially of articles and pamphlets from numerous Baptist churches in the region. It also includes the address by William A. Devin at the Grassy Creek Baptist Church Bi-Centennial Celebration in 1954.
For more information about the Francis B. Hays Collection or to browse by scrapbook topic, click here.
Granville County Public Library has contributed yearbooks and some manuscript volumes to DigitalNC, including the first yearbook on the site from Warren county.
Yearbooks
The Warrentonian [1949] John Graham High School, Warrenton, N.C.
Pep-Pac [1948] [1956] Henderson High School, Henderson, N.C.
Nahiscoan [1954] Nashville High School, Nashville, N.C.
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.
Union Republican, March 14, 1901
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.
Danbury Reporter, December 15, 1904
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.
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’ve added another 60 titles to DigitalNC. Included in this batch is the possible origin of a classic North Carolina ghost story!
The Maco Light story tells of a train conductor name Joe Baldwin who was decapitated in a tragic railway accident near the small community of Maco, North Carolina. Legend has it that the ghost of Mr. Baldwin could be seen walking the tracks at night, carrying a lantern and searching for his misplaced head, but once the railroad was removed in the 1970s he was never seen again.
The Southerner, January 12, 1856
As is the case with most folk tales, the story is passed down and embellished over the years and the origin becomes a little fuzzy. There is no record of a “Joe” Baldwin being involved in a wreck, but the January 12th, 1856 issue of The Southerner has an article detailing a train accident that took place just outside of Wilmington a week earlier. The deceased in this incident is Charles Baldwin, who suffered a fatal head injury during the crash. Given the similarities in these stories, it seems our ghost might have actually stayed in one piece.
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.