1,691 issues of The Asheville-Gazette Newsare now available on the site, thanks to our partners at Buncombe County Public Libraries. This paper was published daily and is an incredibly rich resource for information on life in early 1900s Asheville. 1904-1909 were years of rapid growth, as Asheville grew from a small mountain town to a major hub for the region. The arrival of railroads in the 1880s transformed Asheville into a popular resort town for travelers seeking the healthful mountain air and beautiful landscapes. Just a few years before these issues were published, George W. Vanderbilt’s Biltmore Estate was completed as the largest private residence in the United States, cementing the city as both a tourist destination and a desirable place to live. While trains and electric cars still reigned as the main method of transportation, these newspapers show the advent of the automobile and its early adoption by some residents.
Making the case.
One of many railway company advertisements.
The city was growing in population, commerce, and technological advancement. Asheville in the early 1900s was maturing into a real urban center, with 14,000 permanent residents in 1901. As such, the issues in these newspapers are concerned with matters ranging from hyper-local to international. Readers could see which of their neighbors was traveling and to where, and on the next page get the latest updates on the 1905 Russian Revolution. Elections, both regional and national, were covered in The Asheville-Gazette News. Advertisements reveal the many businesses operating in town and speak to the needs and interests of residents, including many promoting various elixirs and compounds for healing illness. The content in these newspapers is wide-ranging and reveals a great deal about the history of Western North Carolina and its place in the world.
Local issues of the day.
An early incidence of coal mining and labor conflict.
Researchers can view all of The Asheville-Gazette News issues on DigitalNC here. See all of the materials contributed by Buncombe County Public Libraries here, and visit the digital collections on their site here. Lastly, visitors to our site can see all of our digitized newspapers on the North Carolina Newspapers page.
This week we have another 70 newspapers up on DigitalNC! These titles span 32 towns and almost as many counties! This batch also includes our first additions from the towns of Waco, Pores Knob, La Grange, Leaksville, Mount Olive, and Manson!
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.
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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.
