Front Page of “The Sandhill Citizen”, January 7th, 1954

Digital NC now has new issues of The Sandhill Citizen thanks to our partners, the Moore County Library and the Moore County Genealogical Society. Published on Fridays, the newspaper covered news in Southern Pines (1919 – 1925) and Aberdeen (1949 – 1954).

Local stories included stories about small organizations such as events for the March of Dimes, which took on the initiative of helping citizens affected by Polio. In January of 1954, the organization raised $1,000 to help with its initiatives.

To see other issues of  The Southern Pines, visit here.

Special thanks to the Moore County Public Library and the Genealogical Society for their support in helping to digitize these newspapers.

Be sure to check out DigitialNC’s extensive North Carolina newspaper collection here.

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.

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.

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.

This week’s additions include:

Belhaven

• The Belhaven Pilot (Belhaven, N.C.) – 1948-1957

Bower

• The Olive Leaf (Bower, N.C.) – 1904

Charlotte

• The Weekly Observer (Charlotte, N.C.) – 1886

Greensboro

• The Daily Workman (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1883
• The Greensboro Review (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1881
• The Guilford Herald (Greensboro, N.C.) – 1896

Kings Mountain

• The Kings Mountain Herald (Kings Mountain, N.C.) – 1914-1919

Kinston

• The Daily Free Press (Kinston, N.C.) – 1920-1922

Lenoir

• The Lenoir Topic (Lenoir, N.C.) – 1890-1894

Monroe

• The Monroe Express (Monroe, N.C.) – 1881
• The Monroe Register (Monroe, N.C.) – 1890

Mt. Airy

• The Mt. Airy Watchman (Mt. Airy, N.C.) – 1880
• The Mt. Airy Times (Mt. Airy, N.C.) – 1876-1877

New Bern

• The Republic and Courier (New Bern, N.C.) – 1872-1874
• The True Republican, and Newbern Weekly Advertiser (New Bern, N.C.) – 1810-1811
• The Morning Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1807-1808
• Newbern Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1809-1810
• The North Carolina Circular, and Newbern Weekly Advertiser (New Bern, N.C.) – 1803-1805
• The Daily Herald (New Bern, N.C.) – 1868
• The Republican & Courier (New Bern, N.C.) – 1871
• Newbern Enquirer (New Bern, N.C.) – 1860
• The Daily Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1894
• New Berne Daily Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1894-1895

Salem

• The Farmers’ Reporter (Salem, N.C.) – 1832
• The Salem Observer (Salem, N.C.) – 1867

Salisbury

• North Carolina Herald (Salisbury, N.C.) – 1885-1888

Shelby

• The Highlander (Shelby, N.C.) – 1914-1919
• The Aurora-Highlander (Shelby, N.C.) – 1917

Statesville

• Statesville Christian Advocate (Statesville, N.C.) – 1887-1890

Swan Quarter

• The Hyde County Herald (Swan Quarter, N.C.) – 1941-1956

Taylorsville

• The Mountain Scout (Taylorsville, N.C.) – 1907-1917

Warrenton

• The Indicator (Warrenton, N.C.) – 1867-1868

Winston

• The Union Republican (Winston, N.C.) – 1874-1918
• The Twin-City Daily (Winston, N.C.) – 1889

Winston-Salem

• The Twin-City Daily Sentinel (Winston-Salem, N.C.) – 1916

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.

Front page of the June 26, 1969 issue of The Northampton Times-News.

Thanks to our partner, Northampton County Museum, issues spanning 1967 to 1969 of The Northampton County Times-News are now available on our website.

Published squarely in the middle of the desegregation of North Carolina schools, these issues detail county officials’ efforts at maintaining segregation through a policy entitled “Freedom of Choice.” Though this push back against desegregation mirrors the history of many other counties in the state, the Times-News has really detailed local reporting on the topic and doesn’t shy away from talking about race-related tensions.

In 1967, the U.S. Attorney General brought a lawsuit against Northampton County schools claiming the county failed to desegregate them as required. The lawsuit cited the continuing separation into all white and all Black schools, the latter of which were inferior in resources and infrastructure.  This front page from August 1, 1968 announces the resulting court order that mandated desegregation. With an enrollment of 74.5% Black and 25.5% white students, Northampton County Schools were required to assign students to schools based on geography. Faculty were also desegregated, and the local Black high school, Willis Hare, was closed. After the partial integration of the high schools, a plan for lower grades followed in June 1969 (above).

To view all issues issues of the Northampton County Times-News available on our website, please click here.

To view more newspapers from around North Carolina, please visit our North Carolina Newspapers Collection here.

To learn more about the Northampton County Museum, please visit their website.

Another newspaper title has been added to our Newspapers of North Carolina collection courtesy of our partner, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. This batch of The Scottish Chief, presumably named for the part of Maxton, N.C., that lies in Scotland County, contains issues from 1915 to 1956.

One of the ongoing columns in the paper is “This Week in Washington,” which recaps national news from the Capitol. Some of the articles are all business, like the April 5, 1933 column describing President Roosevelt’s efforts to aid farmers. Others are more light-hearted; the one from December 24, 1934 that begins:

“Lest the reader of this column get the impression that nothing but serious matters of weighty moment are talked about in Washington, here are a few paragraphs of casual gossip heard in the corridors of public buildings and on the street corners.”

The gossip edition also has a section called “Interesting Women” that lists some of the jobs women in Washington were doing, such as advocating for uniform labor laws across states, increasing job opportunities for women, and selecting the supply of books sent to sea with the Navy. 

To see more of “This Week in Washington” and other news from Maxton, you can look at all digitized issues of The Scottish Chief here. You can also browse our entire Newspapers of North Carolina collection by location, type, and date. To learn more about UNC Chapel Hill and its collections, visit the UNC Libraries website and their partner page.