Shepard-Pruden Memorial Library in Edenton has funded digitization of an additional 12 years of the Chowan Herald. This new content means that you can now search the entire run from the first issue in 1934 through December 2014. 

The new issues cover 2003-2014. The Herald is published in Edenton, one of North Carolina’s oldest historic cities. There are articles that describe moving the 1886 Roanoke River Lighthouse and the renovation and re-opening of the historic Chowan County Courthouse which was originally built in 1767. There’s also an article declaring a home on East Queen Street to be the oldest in the state after dating the wood timbers to 1718.

This area in particular felt the push and pull of development opportunities during this time. The paper covers pushback by residents as retailers like Wal-mart and Lowe’s scope out sites for stores. Many issues cover the potential development of an outlying landing field or OLF by the Navy, which drew criticism for its potential impact on the Pocosin Lake Wildlife Refuge. In the end the Navy withdrew plans for an OLF in North Carolina.

You can search and browse the entire run of The Chowan Herald on its landing page.  Other materials related to Chowan County that are available on our site, including newspapers, city directories, and more, can be searched and browsed on the county landing page.

Here we have issues of Lexington’s The Er-Lantern spanning from 1958 to 1971. Similar Spray’s Fieldcrest Mill Whistle and High Point’s Sew It Seams The Er-Lantern was a company paper depicting everyday life around the Erlanger Mills village.

Opened in 1914, Erlanger Mills was created by Charles and Abraham Erlanger as a source of cotton for their Baltimore underwear company, which originally produced the one-piece “union suits.” By the 1920s, the company’s 250-ace complex included over employee 300 houses, multiple churches and schools, a hospital, and even its own baseball team. The village was officially annexed into Lexington in 1942 and the mill was sold to Gastonia’s Parkdale Mill Inc. in 1972. In 2008, the village was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Photographer H. Lee Waters, who took many of the photos featured in the paper, has a collection of village-life snapshots on their website here.

These papers were provided to us by our partners at the Davidson County Public Library.

A new title has been added to our North Carolina Newspapers collection thanks to our partner, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as funding from the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA). Issues of The Arrow, a labor-focused paper from Spray, N.C., are now available on our site. These weekly issues span from 1923-24 and cover news related to local textile mills.

One of the frequent front-page features of The Arrow are announcements of new machines that made work in the mills a little more efficient. These stories are usually celebrations of regular employees who invented a helpful change. For example, this feature on John W. Price explains how he designed a mechanism that helped keep the warp from tangling during the dying process (warp yarns are the base threads into which the weft is woven to make fabric). The subheading of this article says, “Means great saving,” which seems to apply specifically to the time it will save other mill workers in their parts of the assembly line.

Another tech feature that makes its way onto The Arrow‘s front page is M. W. Hayden’s invention, which the paper calls “a labor saver and a time saver.” This machine rolled and cut blankets (a process that mill workers were previously doing by hand), creating “increased accuracy in the splitting process” and automatically rolling them onto brass bars. The article claims that the machine “turns out forty yards of cloth per minute” and that the splitting knife rotates 800 times in that same span. Hayden was also apparently the inventor of a similar paper rolling machine.

To see more mill tech features (including a “mixing and blending machine“), you can check out all available issues of The Arrow. You can also browse our entire collection of digital newspapers by location, type, and date in our North Carolina Newspapers collection. To see more materials from UNC Chapel Hill, you can take a look at their partner page and their website.

We have added issues of the Martin County Enterprise & Weekly Herald and the Bertie Ledger-Advance thanks to Martin Community College and the Bertie County Public Library. Coverage includes December 2019-December 2020 issues of the Enterprise & Weekly Herald and January 2022-November 2022 issues plus a special edition issue from March 15, 2000 of the Ledger-Advance.

The majority of newspapers on our site date from the early to mid-19th century, so we’re always interested in adding more recent issues when possible. In the Enterprise & Weekly Herald issues shared today you can read about the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and how a more rural county navigated national, state, and local regulations and concerns.

The issues of the Ledger-Advance cover a later date and talk about the lingering effects of COVID-19. The last issue in this batch mentions Bertie County’s Tricentennial celebrations in November 2022. Bertie County, originally part of Chowan County, was one of the first formed in the state as larger counties were split into smaller portions. Also included in this batch is a special edition from March 15, 2000 that offers reflections on recovery from Hurricane Floyd.

Click on these links to view all issues we have available online of the Martin County Enterprise & Weekly Herald and the Bertie Ledger-Advance.