I’ve just been looking through some of the early Chowan College (now Chowan University) yearbooks that are now available online. One thing stood out to me: the clubs. They had the standard clubs that you usually see on college campuses, like a glee club and an art club, but in the early days at Chowan, there were a whole lot more, like the Air Castle Builders Club, the Taffy Club, and the Canoodlers Club. The names changed every year, and all had comical pages in the school yearbook. Here are a few of my favorites: the Societa Italiana (1914), the Toasters’ Club (1916) and the Cooking Club (1917).
Viewing entries posted in 2010
Least Likely to Succeed?
Most of the yearbooks in the North Carolina College and University Yearbooks collection have sections for senior (or other) class superlatives. These are the folks voted to categories like “Hardest Worker” or “Most Likely to Succeed.” These are for the most part positive distinctions, with the exception of the 1920 Yackety Yack from the University of North Carolina (now the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), which included awards for “Ugliest” (Otto Bryant) and “Laziest” (Luke Umstead).
Unfortunately for Bryant and Umstead, the class of 1920 looks to have been pretty prescient in some of its selections. The pick for “Best Business Man” was Ben Cone, who would become an executive at the Cone Mills Corporation and serve a term as mayor of Greensboro, while the pick for “Best Writer” was Thomas Wolfe, who would go on to write Look Homeward, Angel and You Can’t Go Home Again.
Making Shoes at the Oxford Orphanage
The Images of North Carolina collection features many fascinating images from the Sallie Mae Ligon Museum & Archives & Masonic Home for Children at Oxford. One of my favorites is a 1922 album containing a series of photos taken around the campus. The orphanage in the 1920s looked like a pretty self-sufficient place, with its own bake shop, livestock, printing press, and shoe shop. The photos here show one of the boys at work on a pair of brogans and, below, the impressive results of their labor.
Campbell University Yearbooks Now Online
Seventy-four volumes of the Pine Burr, the yearbook of Campbell University in Buies Creek, N.C. are now available online through DigitalNC.org.
The volumes available run from 1912, when the school was known as Buie’s Creek Academy, through 2009.
Orange County Historical Museum Quilts
Some of the most impressive — and certainly the largest — items shown on DigitalNC are a group of antique quilts from the Orange County Historical Museum in Hillsborough. These four quilts include an 1883 crazy quilt (shown here), another crazy quilt and a log cabin quilt from around 1900, and a World War II quilt honoring men from this area who served in World War II.
Gaylord Perry Before the Spitball
This photo, from the 1959 Pine Burr, shows Gaylord Perry, one of North Carolina’s greatest baseball players, and a member of the Campbell College (now Campbell University) class of 1960. The Hall of Famer, a native of Williamston, N.C., is probably baseball’s best-known spitballer (his 1974 autobiography is called Me and the Spitter: An Autobiographical Confession). I wondered whether it was the folks at Campbell who taught him the illegal pitch, but according to Perry, he didn’t learn how to throw a spitball until 1964.
Early East Carolina Yearbooks Available Online
Early volumes of “The Tecoan,” the yearbook of East Carolina Teacher’s College (later East Carolina University) are now available online.
UNC-Chapel Hill Yearbooks through 1966 now available online
The Hellenian (1890-1900) and the Yackety Yack (1901 – present), student yearbooks from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, are now available online at DigitalNC.org. Due to a change in how the yearbook photographs were copyrighted, we are only able to make the volumes through 1966 available at this time.
Durham Urban Renewal Records to be digitized
A large collection of urban renewal records from Durham County Library’s North Carolina Collection will be digitized by the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and published on DigitalNC.org. These records include property appraisals and photographs taken in the 1960s and 1970s, and include a significant amount of information about Durham’s historically Black neighborhoods, including Hayti.
Appalachian State University yearbooks now available online
Over eight decades of student life at Appalachian State University are documented in the Rhododendron, the student yearbook. Digital versions of the Rhododendron from 1923 to 2006 are now available online at DigitalNC.org.
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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.