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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.
Thanks to a thoughtful community member, we’ve recently digitized our first yearbook from the small Catholic school St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines, once located in Asheville, N.C. This yearbook, which was recovered from an estate, shows the close-knit students at the all-women’s school in 1942.
According to Carolina Day School’s history page (which apparently absorbed the school in the 1980s), St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines was originally formed by French nuns in 1908 (Genevieve is the patroness saint of Paris in the Catholic tradition). It morphed over the next few decades into a women’s junior college, then two separate schools for boys and girls (St. Genevieve’s Prep and Gibbons Hall), then again into the combined St. Genevieve-Gibbons Hall School. This yearbook is from the Junior College of St. Genevieve-of-the-Pines. Today, one of the few remaining landmarks of St. Genevieve’s is the grotto, which was transferred to Carolina Day School’s campus in 2008.
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.
Er-Lantern September, 1969
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.
Er-Lantern November, 1960
Charlotte News and Evening Chronicle February 21, 1917
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.
Two new scrapbooks have been added to Digital NC thanks to our partner, the Heritage Research Center at High Point Public Library. William Bencini served as the mayor of High Point, North Carolina in Guilford County from 1971-1973. In 1971 and 1972, Mayor Bencini and his wife were invited by Eastern Airlines and the City of Atlanta, Georgia to join their inaugural flights to Mexico and Jamaica out of Atlanta.
These scrapbooks depict these voyages through photographs, guest lists, itineraries, menus, and more. They provide interesting insight into air travel in the 1970s, document the activities of Mayor Bencini, and represent the history of the now-defunct Eastern Airlines. Additionally, the guest lists show some of the prominent figures in Atlanta and surrounding areas at the time. Through these images, researchers can witness the beaches, people, food, and tourist attractions that Mayor Bencini enjoyed on these trips. Perusing these scrapbooks, one feels transported to a bygone era as well as foreign countries. Access the scrapbooks here, and see more documents from the Heritage Research Center at High Point Public Library here.
Ten new diaries belonging to Mrs. Mary Kelly Watson Smith (c. 1831-1924) have been added to our site, thanks to our partners at Greensboro History Museum. Mary Smith was married to Reverend Jacob Henry Smith (1820-1897), who was the pastor of Greensboro’s First Presbyterian Church for over forty years. Rev. Smith was a popular preacher who greatly expanded the church’s membership during his tenure. The Smiths moved from Charlottesville to Greensboro, where they settled permanently and raised a large family of seven children. Possibly due to an attic fire in 1900, only the diaries from the latter years of her life survive, and they reflect the perspective of an experienced matriarch and active member of the greater Greensboro community.
The newly uploaded diaries, which cover the years 1904-1911, are concerned mainly with church events, local news, and the social landscape of Greensboro in the early twentieth century. She also delves into her personal and family life, as well as national politics and major figures of the era. The Smiths were active secessionists and Confederate supporters who enslaved people before Emancipation. Mary Smith repeatedly refers to “The Lost Cause” of the Confederacy with reverent nostalgia, and in 1911 describes a visit from Jim Henry, who was formerly enslaved by the Smith family.
These diaries are a valuable resource for anyone interested in early twentieth-century Greensboro, the First Presbyterian Church, or Southern history. Read more about Mary Kelly Watson Smith on the Greensboro History Museum website and view other materials from the Museum here.
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.
John W. Price standing with his dye tub innovation (February 1, 1923).
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.
M. W. Hayden with his blanket splitting and rolling machine (June 7, 1923).
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.
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.
From the June 24, 1999 issue of The Perquimans Weekly.
This year, the arrival of summer has brought another batch of The Perquimans Weekly newspaper from Hertford, N.C. These papers are available thanks to our partner, the Perquimans County Library, and thanks to our staff at our Elizabeth City State University (ECSU) location, who digitized them. This batch expands the digital availability of The Perquimans Weekly into the 21st century with issues from 1994-2003.
Since there are so many yearbooks in this batch, there is a wide assortment of creative yearbook titles—some of which are stronger than others. As an alumna of R.J. Reynolds High School, I’ll admit that I have some bias toward the Black and Gold, but even I have to acknowledge that it’s a pretty generic name (in this batch alone, we’ve also got The Maroon and Gold from Atkins, the Blue and White from Old Town High School, and the Blue and Gold from Griffith High School).
Rather than opt for the usual school colors-based title, here are the top five yearbooks that aimed for something a little different.
I like that this team of young yearbook editors took a philosophical approach to their title. Like looking through a keyhole, a yearbook can only give a limited picture of what the culture and experience of Rural Hall High School was like. They continue this slice-of-life theme on the inside of the yearbook as well with this comical drawing featuring some of their classmates.
There’s something so quintessentially high school about being assigned The Iliad, possibly reading it, and then using it as a metaphor for the obstacles you face (a move perhaps only topped by a comparison of your personal journey to The Odyssey). This literary homage is made even better by the fact that the mascot for Southwest was the Trojan, meaning that this yearbook likely describes the siege and fall of the school by means of wooden horse.
Third place on this not-at-all subjective list was initially selected because of its overlap with the editorial column of James Mackintosh Qwilleran, a fictional detective and journalist who writes “The Qwill Pen” in the mystery series The Cat Who… by Lilian Jackson Braun. However, based on the uniforms required for yearbook photos, it does also seem possible that the students of Salem Academy really were writing with quills.
As someone with no military experience, when I initially picked this title, I had a different mental image of what the “dress parade” might include. However, given the fact that students at Oak Ridge did have to wear their uniforms on display for the yearbook, it still seems like a really fitting title. Plus, this edition has some cool woodblock prints and this one inexplicably tiny photo of a gazebo.
I don’t even know where to begin with this absolute chef’s kiss of a yearbook title. I love the old-timey spelling. I love the idea that a yearbook is the modern equivalent of a person who yells out the town news. I love the font choice and the inclusion of “Ye.”
Old Town High School experimented with a couple of names before this (see Blue and White and The Log), suggesting that it might take a few tries before you can land on the perfect name. The icing on the cake is that every time I read it, I can hear the opening notes of Lil Nas X’s 2019 hit “Old Town Road” in my mind. (Sadly, Old Town High School was not located on Old Town Road, though such a road does exist in Winston-Salem).
Though this batch of yearbooks covers so many different eras of high school throughout the 20th century, one consistent element among several editions is a focus on uniforms. The 1970 edition of The Falcon, for example, shows a representative from the school’s various teams showing off their athletic uniforms. This 1970 cheerleading uniform is a bit of a departure from the cheerleading uniforms of the 1950s, as evidenced by this squad from Mills River High (though the dance teams’ preference for shiny uniforms seems to be evergreen).
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.
