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Company H, WWI, 1st North Carolina Infantry of the National Guard, departed Waynesville’s train depot on June 26, 1916. They guarded the Mexican border and returned to Waynesville in February 1917. In July 1917 they then were sent to France during WWI. Courtesy of Haywood County Public Library.
Last Thursday, April 6, 2017, marked the 100th anniversary of the United States’ entry into World War I. Over the next year, many cultural heritage institutions around the country are highlighting the materials they hold related to the “Great War.” We wanted to highlight some of the fantastic local North Carolina materials we have digitized for our partners that document the World War I perspective from North Carolinians’ eyes.
Service records, photographs, news clippings and letters back home from communities across the state are digitized here on DigitalNC. From Wilson County, we have a set of records from 70 men that served in the war that the United Daughters of the Confederacy collected and a scrapbook that includes letters from a Robert Anderson before he was wounded in action and died in France. From Stanly County, we have an enlistment record that includes the amount Harvey Jarvis Underwood was paid to serve, and a history of the service records of Stanly County men who served in the war. From the Grand Lodge of the Ancient, Free, and Accepted Masons of North Carolina, the NCDHC digitized a list of all the North Carolina masons who died in World War I.
Several scrapbooks from Elon University detail the students’ view of the war as well as what college life during World War I looked like here in North Carolina.
Headline from Page 2 of the April 12, 1917 edition of the Roanoke News
The richest source of information on World War I and North Carolina on DigitalNC may very well be the many local newspapers we’ve digitized that contain the local perspective on the war, including some quite subdued headlines announcing the US’s entry. DigitalNC also hosts several World War I camp and hospital newspapers including the Trench and Camp from Camp Greene and the Caduceus, the paper of the Base Hospital at Camp Greene. Both are from Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.
To view more materials from World War I, check out a search of our collections here. And to learn more about World War I materials from across the state, visit the institutions highlighted in this blog post from our colleagues over at the State Archives of North Carolina.
Group of Soldiers Posed with Firestone Officials, from the Gaston Museum of Art & History.
This Veterans Day, we thought we’d mention some best bets for finding and searching materials on DigitalNC related to military history. Some time periods and subjects have better representation than others, so we’ve focused on the five wars that have the most related materials. This post has been updated in 2022 to show the most recent systems for our content.
Tip 1: Search by Subject
To isolate materials that are predominantly about a particular war, you can use the subject specific links listed below.
You can use the Advanced Search (see below where to find in the search window) to narrow your search.
Use the Advanced Search to further narrow your query
If you click one of the links above and then go into the Advanced Search, you can use more terms to further narrow your search. Using “partial phrase” is the best option to get the widest set of options that might fit that term. (see the graphic below that illustrates this)
You can also do a full text search that combines (1) your research interest (perhaps a name, a topic, or an event) in conjunction with (2) the name of a particular war. This may yield a lot more results, depending on your research interest, but it could also zero in on your target faster.
Only interested in photographs? Try this search, which is limited to photos that contain the word “military” or “soldiers” as a subject.
Tip 2: Search by Date Range
Another tactic is to search or browse items that were created during a particular war. These don’t always have that war as a subject term, but they often deal with wartime issues or society regardless.
A list of alumni and students killed or missing in action, from the 1944 UNC-Chapel Hill Yackety Yack yearbook, page 12.
Keep in mind that doing a full text search will be ineffective about 98% of the time when it comes to handwritten items on our site, as most do not have transcripts. This is just to let you know that you may need to read through handwritten items pulled up in one of the searches above if you believe they may contain information you’re interested in.
Our partners have shared a lot of yearbooks on DigitalNC and, while they may not be the first thing that comes to mind for military history, many colleges and universities recognized students who served. Especially for the Vietnam, Korean, Gulf, and Afghan wars, yearbooks document campus reactions and protests. You currently can’t search across all of the yearbooks available on DigitalNC; our site has high school yearbooks published up through the late 1960s, and college and university yearbooks and campus publications through 2015.
Tip 3: Newspapers!
Searching the student and community newspapers on DigitalNC can yield biographical information about soldiers, editorials expressing local opinions about America’s military action, as well as news and advertisements related to rationing and resources on the homefront.
The Newspapers Advanced Search is your friend here! You can target papers published during specific years. You can also narrow your search to specific newspaper titles.
Screenshot of the Newspapers Advanced Search page, with the search phrase “Red Cross” and limiting the results to papers published from 1914-1918.
We now have so many military newspapers on our site, we have a whole exhibit dedicated to them, which you can view by going to our Military Newspapers in North Carolina page.
The titles include:
- Air-O-Mech, published by servicemen stationed at Seymour Johnson Field, 1943-1944
- Cloudbuster, published at UNC-Chapel Hill to share news about the Navy pre-flight school held on campus, 1942-1945
- Hot Off the Hoover Rail, published by the community of Lawndale for servicemen from their city, 1942-1945
- The Caduceus, published by the Base Hospital at Camp Greene (Charlotte, N.C.), 1918-1919
- The Caromount, published the community at Caromount Mills in Rocky Mount “solely for the benefit of all former Blumenthal employees now in the service of our country,” 1943-1955 (later years published for the mill community itself rather than those in the military)
- The Home Front News, published by the Tarboro Rotary Club for servicemen from their city, 1943-1945
- Trench and Camp, published by The Charlotte Observer for Camp Greene, 1917-1918
Bonus Resource: Wilson County’s Greatest Generation
One of the largest exhibits on our site is Wilson County’s Greatest Generation, an effort by the Wilson County Historical Association to document the service men and women of Wilson County, North Carolina who served in World War II. Documentation is organized by individual, and includes personal histories, photos, clippings, and other ephemera.
We hope this information can guide you through researching military history on DigitalNC. If you have any of your own tips or questions, please let us know by commenting below or contacting us.
The latest batch of materials from Charlotte Mecklenburg Library includes an interesting look at life during World War I in North Carolina–documented through newspapers. The Caduceus, published from the Base Hospital at Camp Greene, gives a detailed look at the goings on of soldiers, doctors, and nurses during their time stationed in Charlotte.
Camp Greene held more than 40,000 troops, rapidly approaching the population of the entire city of Charlotte (46,000 in 1920). The Base Hospital was a 2000 bed complex, staffed by many doctors and nurses. Many of these enlisted personnel wrote articles for the paper, which was published every Saturday. Funded through the advertisements purchased by local businesses, publishers encouraged those living at the camp to patronize businesses located nearby.
What sets the Caduceus apart from other camp newspapers during the period is its documentation of events happening at the camp specifically, as opposed to the national and war updates given by other papers. From baseball games verses local teams to the performances of soldiers’ choral groups, the Caduceus documents many of the weekly activities of those based at the camp. The images below represent some of the many types of materials published in the paper.
Caduceus, August 24th, 1918; page 15
Caduceus, June 8th, 1918; page 6
Another fascinating feature of this batch is the weekly section authored by nurses serving at the camp. The “Army Nurse Corps News” offers a look into the lives of the many women who also served their county during WWI. These sections of the paper published news, poetry, and biographical information about nurses who were on the base, especially the new arrivals. This could be an excellent resource for researchers studying women’s roles in WWI, even outside of North Carolina.
Caduceus, November 23rd, 1918; page 15
To learn more about Camp Greene, check out the Trench and Camp and the corresponding blog post, another newspaper from the camp during WWI, available on DigitalNC.
Caduceus, November 23, 1918
To learn more about the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library, please visit their contributor page or the homepage. To see more newspapers from North Carolina, including those that cover WWI in our state, please visit the North Carolina Newspapers Collection.
