Thanks to our partner, Caswell County Public Library, we now have several issues of yearbooks from Caswell County on our website. The yearbooks are from Bartlett Yancey High School in Yanceyville, N.C. and Cobb Memorial High School in Ruffin, N.C. and cover the years 1947-1969.
Cover of the 1953 yearbook for Bartlett Yancey High School in Yanceyville, N.C.
Cover of the 1957 yearbook for Cobb Memorial High School in Ruffin, N.C.
To view more North Carolina Yearbooks, visit our exhibit page here and for more about Caswell County Public Library, visit their website.
An exterior shot of Walter Williams High School in 1968.
A new batch of yearbooks from Alamance County is now available on DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner, the Alamance County Public Libraries. Included are nearly 20 yearbooks from schools across Alamance County during the middle of the 20th century. This batch also includes a 2002 booklet to commemorate and reminisce about the Class of 1944 at Aycock High School, assembled by Rachel Hawkins Cole.
These yearbooks contain individual and class portraits, class histories, honorifics and photographs of school activities, class clubs, and athletic teams. Some of the yearbooks also include important or notable events throughout the school year, poems or songs dedicated to the class, and pages dedicated to certain classes.
The booklet dedicated to the Aycock High School Class of 1944 is also included. It details the history of Aycock High School, honors various teachers and administrative figures present at the school at that time, and includes photographs of classmembers taken from that time period. It also included a program taken from a commemorative service in 2002 where classmates were invited to come together to remember their classmates and time spent at Aycock High School.
Follow the links below to browse the yearbooks from the schools included in this batch:
Various issues of four newspapers published in Burnsville, North Carolina, are now available on DigitalNC. These papers are made available thanks to our new partner AMY Regional Library System. We are pleased to provide access to:
Each paper shares news from Yancey County, especially from the Burnsville area, but also from a national and even international perspective. The papers share everything from lists of names of men drafted to serve in World War II, to social news about individuals throughout the area, to advertisements, to news of national politicians. Below are some sample clippings from the papers:
Ervin’s column stands out today for how it differs from contemporary political propaganda. For one thing, it was published in local papers, which tend to focus on local and regional news. For example, one column from the September 13, 1963 issue runs next to a news brief headlined, “Sea Hags Will Meet,” referring to a local fishing club.
Another notable quality of Ervin’s column is that it is… relatively boring. Rather than employing inflammatory language or focusing on hot-button issues, Ervin tends to give technical overviews of the mechanisms of the Senate. In the column published on October 18, 1963, the Senator references a “controversial Foreign Aid Bill” and then writes, “Present prospects are that there may be no action taken by the Senate as a whole on the tax bill. There is a growing feeling that action on the tax measure should be postponed until after the President’s Budget message to Congress the first of the year.” Even though it is presumably written for a general audience, Ervin often chooses to use technical language and focus on bureaucratic details rather than argue for a bigger picture or stance.
You can read more of Ervin’s unexpected (by contemporary standards) columns and more of The Coastland Times in this latest batch of issues. You can also browse all of our digital newspapers in our North Carolina Newspapers collection. To see more materials from the Dare County Library, visit their partner page and their website.
Another 32 newspaper titles are up on DigitalNC this week! Three of these titles are from North Carolina towns that either changed their names or just don’t exist anymore.
First, we have the North Carolina National from Company Shops, North Carolina. Company Shops was a community formed around the railroad car construction and maintenance industry in Alamance County, between Graham and Gibsonville. Due to growing anti-railroad sentiments, the community of Company Shops decided to appoint a committee to change the name of the town in 1887. This committee decided on the name ‘Burlington.’
Next up is Our Home from Beaver Dam, North Carolina. It’s hard to determine exactly where Beaver Dam would have been, but knowing that the paper is from Union County, it seems possible that it was located near Beaverdam Creek, just south of Wingate and Marshville, North Carolina.
Lastly, we have The Hokeville Express from what was once known as Hokeville, or ‘Lincoln Factory,’ North Carolina. It seems likely that the community was named after the affluent Hoke family of Lincolnton. Col. John Hoke was one of the owners of the profitable Lincoln Cotton Mills. Col. Hoke died in 1845 and passed ownership on to his son, also named John Hoke. The factory burned down in 1862, and the following year the Confederate Army began constructing a laboratory on the site to manufacture medicines, such as ether, chloroform, and opiates. Since then the community has gone by the name ‘Laboratory.’
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.
Back in August, we announced our annual call for microfilmed newspaper digitization. We asked institutions throughout North Carolina to nominate papers they’d like to see added to DigitalNC. As it is every year, it was an incredibly tough choice – we are typically able to choose between 40-60 reels out of hundreds or thousands nominated. This year we’ve chosen the following titles and years.
For our selection criteria, we prioritize newspapers that document underrepresented communities, new titles, papers that come from a county that currently has little representation on DigitalNC, and papers nominated by new partners. After selection, we ask the partners to secure permission for digitization and, if that’s successful, they make it into the final list above.
We hope to have these titles coming online in mid-2019. If your title didn’t make it this year don’t despair! We welcome repeat submissions, and plan on sending out another call in Fall 2019.
Logo image courtesy the Braswell Memorial Library! “Ricky in Toy Car”
Have you been interested in working with the Digital Heritage Center but find it difficult to get to Chapel Hill, or have concerns about having your materials off site? We want to come to you! We’ll be working with two or three cultural heritage institutions over the next nine months to try out on-location scanning. If you’d like to nominate your institution, read on and use the nomination form linked at the end of this post.
What We Do
Here’s what nominated institutions will receive as part of this process.
We will bring our scanners, computers, and staff to your institution to digitize and describe materials from your collections. We would be there for one full weekday, at a minimum.
We’ll host the scanned images and associated metadata on DigitalNC.org, and give you copies of the original scans to use in any non-profit context.
Optionally, we can do a presentation for staff and/or the public related to any of the following topics:
The Digital Heritage Center’s services (for staff at your institution and/or other local cultural heritage institutions)
A demonstration of what we’re doing while we’re there (for staff at your institution)
The variety of resources you can find on DigitalNC.org and other fantastic digital collections in North Carolina (staff or the public)
What We’ll Need from Partners We Visit
If you’re chosen, we’d need:
At least one conference call before arrival to clarify expectations, work with you on scheduling, and talk through the materials you’d like scanned.
Description and a light inventory of the items we’ll be scanning, if there isn’t one already available.
Some assembly and preparation of the materials you’ve chosen. This might include physically pulling all of the content together before we arrive and removing staples if the materials are stapled at the top corners.
A designated staff contact regularly available to ask questions regarding what we’re scanning while we’re there, and to help with logistics like getting equipment in and out of the building, etc.
An indoor location that has:
at least two power outlets,
internet connectivity,
a work area large enough for 2 scanners and 4 laptops as well as extra room for materials handling,
seating for four people, and
is away from the public so we can get the most scanning accomplished in our limited time (ideal but not required).
Additional Guidance for Nominations
We’ll be giving priority to nominations from institutions furthest from Chapel Hill and to new partners. If you are a prospective partner, please check to make sure you’re eligible.
The materials have to be owned by your institution.
The materials should cover North Carolina subjects, events, and people.
For these on-location sessions, we’re accepting nominations for the following types of items:
photographs (prints) and/or postcards
looseleaf print materials up to 11×17”
bound items may be considered, but in very limited numbers and only if transporting them to Chapel Hill would be impossible
Materials can be fragile but should be stable enough to withstand gentle handling and placement on a flatbed scanner.
We’ll review nominations according to the following criteria, so you may want to address these in your nomination form:
Category
Point Value
New partner
1
New town
1
New county**
2
Materials document an underrepresented
community or population
1
Materials are well described/inventoried
5
Majority of materials date from 1945 or earlier
1
Materials are believed to be unique
1
** We have yet to work with any institutions in the following counties: Alexander, Bertie, Bladen, Camden, Caswell, Chowan, Clay, Currituck, Dare, Gates, Graham, Greene, Henderson, Hoke, Jones, Mitchell, Northampton, Onslow, Pamlico, Swain, Tyrrell, Yancey
We’ll start reviewing nominations on September 30 and will notify selected institutions shortly thereafter. If a selected institution ends up not being able to host us, we’ll continue down the list.
We’re excited about trying out this new service. Please contact us with any questions and share this with any institutions you think might be interested.
Volumes 44 through 52 of Mr. Francis B. Hays’s Granville County scrapbooks are now available online. These new volumes contain a number of newspaper articles, histories written by Mr. Hays and others, letters, and event programs concerning various churches and schools in Granville County. The scrapbooks cover a wide variety of topics, from honor roll students to teacher salaries and plans for church buildings, and much more.
Title Page of Granville Baptist Churches Vol. 49
Title Page of Schools General and Miscellaneous Educational Notes Vol. 45
The scrapbooks are part of the Hays Collection at the Granville County Public Library. Mr. Hays was a local historian and avid collector, as these volumes make clear. He collected materials on a variety of subjects, including schools, churches, marriages, and genealogies. For more materials in this collection as well as more information about Mr. Hays, see the Francis B. Hays Collection on DigitalNC or visit the Granville County Public Library website’s listings of his works.
Newsletter inserted into Volume 49
Newspaper article from Volume 45
In addition to the Hays material, the Granville County Public Library has supplied a school master’s ledger from 1790. This ledger contains a number of useful tables concerning basic mathematics and measurements. It also contains a number of letters and other documents concerning the Yancey family.
Page with a table of apothecaries’ weights
About
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.
