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The color slides beautifully capture Temple’s shows! This is from a production of A Christmas Carol
Thanks to our partner Temple Theatre in Sanford, a new set of photographs, slides, and scrapbooks are now available online. Highlights from this collection include a series of black-and-white photographs from the theater’s renovation in the 1980s, over seventy slides from Temple Theatre’s grand reopening, and a scrapbook recording the theater’s early days as a movie venue. These fantastic records will join a pre-existing collection digitized early last year, which also includes scrapbooks, slides, and more!
Many pages have a variety of theater programs, stories, and ads!
The new scrapbook is an amazing record for anyone interested in film history. Within this book’s pages are meticulously collected newspaper clippings, licensing deals, and advertisements for movies released in the golden age of Hollywood cinema. Everything from classic noir to old-school westerns were featured at Temple Theater, and there were even rotating seasons of live performances. Reports on fiddling contests often share pages with advertisements for the newest Charlie Chaplin routine, and movies are often advertised with corresponding news reels or comedy routines. There’s even an extensive collection recording when Leo, the Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer lion, visited Sanford! Apparently he stayed in the town for a few days, and performed on-stage live as part of the studio’s partnership with the local movie theater.
You can find the new scrapbook, as well as the brand new photographs, online now at DigitalNC here. Interested in learning more about the historic Temple Theatre? You can find their partner page online at DigitalNC here, or visit the theater’s webpage here.
Thanks to our partners at Person County Museum of History, we are excited to announce a wealth of new materials are now available on DigitalNC. Included in this collection are numerous high school commencement programs and reunion booklets from High Plains School, Person County Training School, Person County High School, and Roxboro High School. Additionally, meeting minutes from the Person County Board of Education, economic development reports, and local business publications are also now available. Photographs from the early 20th century document special historical events like military memorial ceremonies for President Harding, and provide a glimpse of what everyday life looked like at the time, which included having oil delivered by a horse-drawn wagon.
Historical gems also include two Official Postmasters’ Account & Record Books from 1900 to 1903 and 1903 to 1906 that document local and US Postal Service history. The ledgers were kept by postmaster Nathaniel T. Williams, who ran the Push Post Office that served the unincorporated Push community located in Person County’s Flat River Township. The fourth-class post office was only operational from March 16, 1900, to August 15, 1908, after which the Push community sent and received their mail through the Roxboro Post Office, which had been servicing Person County residents since 1892.
In addition to the Post Office ledgers, one of the more unexpected histories found in this diverse collection of new materials are told by two additional ledgers that originate over a hundred miles away from Person County. The 1887 to 1889 and 1889 to 1890 record books kept by Reuben M. Hearne, an agent for the Old Dominion Steamship Company, illuminate a long past era in North Carolina history when steamboats and river travel were in their golden age. Each ledger contains meticulous logs chronicling the daily passengers and trips of the R. L. Myers, a river steamboat that traveled between the cities of Greenville (Pitt County, N.C.) and Washington (Beaufort County, N.C.). The R. L. Myers was just one of the many river steamers that would traverse the Tar River throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries as they transported goods or passengers between the coastal and inland regions of the state. The Tar River begins on the eastern edge of Person County, adding the age of river travel and steamboats as yet another rich history of Person County.
Alongside the historic ledgers, photographs, and publications found in this new batch of material from the Person County Museum of History, dozens of new issues of local and student newspapers are also now available on DigitalNC. Included issues are from the following newspapers:
More information about our partner, the Person County Museum of History, can be found here.
More materials, including yearbooks, photographs, maps, and additional newspaper issues can be found on the Person County Museum of History’s contributor page linked here.
This group of student newspapers begins by shedding its previous title, The Carolina Journal, and reintroducing itself as The 49er Times. The new name is symbolic; the editors created a space to foster inclusivity, discourse, and news for UNC Charlotte students and faculty. While every rendition of the paper has featured an opinions section, the new 49er Times returned the “Left/Right” column from earlier editions. This piece features arguments between two editorial board members from opposing liberal and conservative political views.
The first edition of “Left/Right” in the new 49er Times, June 30, 1982
These insightful and occasionally comical columns highlight the realities of college students and the pressing political issues of the early 1980s. The debates in “Left/Right” range from the rights of labor unions to prayer in public schools and the potential reelection of President Ronald Reagan in the 1984 election. These students’ succinct and powerful arguments reflect the polarizing times they lived in, with the Cold War and conservatism still present in everyday life.
“The 49er Times” embraces the free press, publishing op-eds regarding the campus bookstore policies and the fear of a nuclear war. The newspaper became a venue for critical thinking, debate, and prose for students and faculty as they grappled with changes across campus and around the world.
Visitors can view more issues of The 49er Timeshere.
Visitors to the site can view all of our newspaper issues from UNC Charlotte here.
To browse our entire collection of student newspapers, select the “Student Papers” filter on our “Newspaper Titles” search page linked here.
Interested in learning more about the War of 1812? Thanks to our new partners at the North Carolina Society Daughters of 1812, now you can! For the first time ever, six scrapbooks chronicling historic preservation, research, and reenactment are now available. Each scrapbook records written histories, historic banquets, and a variety of materials gathered by daughters of War of 1812 veterans in or around North Carolina. The scrapbooks date from as far back as 1940, to as recently as 2012, covering almost a century of historic engagement.
Each scrapbook contains a variety of records related to the operation of a historic preservation society. These range from letters written by Senators, to awards granted to members for their service in historic programming and outreach. A personal highlight are the colorful photographs of the Daughters’ reenactment events, where each member would dress in period-appropriate attire (often including their husbands, children, or even grandchildren!). Each members’ dress is evidence of their breathless devotion to historical accuracy, as well as their skill in sewing and tailoring!
The written histories in each scrapbook are also an amazing way to find out more about North Carolina’s involvement in one of the lesser recognized aspects of American history. North Carolina witnessed several historic battles during the course of the war, and its coast bore witness to a rogues’ gallery of privateers, pirates, and buccaneers. Many histories are concerned with one Johnston Blakely, captain of the Wasp. During the War of 1812, Captain Blakely captured many British boats and disrupted countless others. He was a graduate of the University of Chapel Hill in its early days, and remained in North Carolina after his service. Another prominent name mentioned in the scrapbooks is Theodosia Burr, the daughter of Aaron Burr. Theodosia went missing off the coast of the Carolinas around the War of 1812, and several oral histories in the scrapbooks speculate on her fate.
You can read these histories and discover North Carolina’s involvement in the War of 1812 online now here. Thanks again to our amazing partners at the North Carolina Chapter of the Daughters of the War of 1812 for making this collaboration possible. You can find their partner page on DigitalNC here, or visit their website online here.
With the help of our partners at Alamance County Public Libraries, we are pleased to announce the addition of several scrapbooks on DigitalNC. These scrapbooks include newspaper clippings dating back to the late 1960s and 1970s, and were compiled by Alamance County Recreation and Parks Department (also known as Alamance Parks). The clippings collected related to community services, events, and news related to the parks and public spaces managed by Alamance Parks.
DigitalNC visitors can browse the newly available Alamance County Recreation and Parks Department Scrapbooks by clicking the blue, hyperlinked titles below.
Current information about Alamance County Recreation and Parks Department can be found on their Alamance Parks website here.
More information about our partner, Alamance County Public Libraries, can be found here.
More materials, including yearbooks, photographs, maps, and four newspaper titles can be found on the Alamance County Public Libraries’ contributor page linked here.
Thanks to our partner, the Sanford Woman’s Club, six new scrapbooks with materials related to the Sanford Woman’s Club, Sanford Junior Woman’s Club, and community projects in Sanford are now available to view online.
From 1952 to 1959, cities and towns in Carolina Power and Light Company (CP&L) service areas—including South Carolina—competed with one another for cash awards in the Finer Carolina community improvement contest. In the seven years it was active, the competition incited 4,600 projects aimed at attracting new industry, improving cultural opportunities, upgrading municipal facilities, and more. These improvements were typically documented by the community’s Finer Carolina committee (or similar group) in the form of a scrapbook. Over the years we have digitized several of these scrapbooks, including several from Burgaw and Asheboro. We are excited to share that with our latest batch we now have the Finer Carolina scrapbook for the first ever winner of CP&L’s Finer Carolina contest in North Carolina—Sanford!
For the first Finer Carolina contest, participants had one year—from November 1, 1951 to November 1, 1952—to make their community improvements. Sanford selected construction of new buildings, public school improvements, recreational improvements, industrial and commercial expansion, and improvements initiated by community effort and a program of clean-up and beautification as their broad categories of improvement. Under each of these were several projects headed by one to two community members. A newspaper clipping in the 1951-1952 Finer Carolina Project Sanford Scrapbook lists the proposed projects for each category:
Construction of new buildings: construction of an addition to Lee County Hospital, new woman’s club building, and Central High School library building, along with the landscaping for the buildings.
Public school improvements (all at Central High School): completion of the football stadium, initial effort of developing a botanical garden, construction a new baseball field, and landscaping.
Recreation improvements: installation of irrigated grass greens on Sanford Municipal golf course, construction of a recreational park at the municipal swimming pool, development of McIver Park, and persuading the state highway commission to extend Washington Avenue to give access from what was the “colored residential areas of the city to the colored playground.”
Industrial and commercial expansion: construction of a new industrial building for Schneierson Co., modernization of storefronts, landscaping of grounds of Saco-Lowell shops, and creation of a special committee to obtain new industries for the Sanford area.
Cleaning up and beautification: put up attractive signs advertising Sanford on the highway, sponsorship of civic clubs of a clean-up campaign among property owners and residents, clean-up of city and county-owned property, railroad and bus station property clean-up and special clean-up of service stations, hotels, and stores, and installation of guide curbs and safety zones in front of service stations.
View more progress and finished products in Sanford that won them the Finer Carolina contest, like the building of the new Sanford Woman’s Club building seen above, in the 1951-1952 Finer Carolina Project Sanford Scrapbook.
Thanks to our new partners at Franklin County Library System, we are excited to announce that nearly a thousand new funeral programs and obituaries are now available on DigitalNC. The funeral programs and obituaries are divided by name and date and can be found in three records on our site:
These funeral programs and obituaries, dating from 1944 to 2022, represent generations of history for many African American families from or associated with Franklin County. The majority of these programs can be found divided among Franklin County Funeral Programs, Alston to Kingsberry, and Franklin County Funeral Programs, Alston to Kingsberry – both of which include indexes at the beginning that list the individuals included in the record.
To easily search for names within each record, users can locate the search bar titled “Search within this record:” at the bottom of the record viewer and type in the last name of the individual(s) they are looking for. Although many last names are found in several programs and obituaries, this search feature is still a great place to start narrowing down a search. The location of the search bar is indicated by a yellow arrow in the screengrab to the right!
More information about our partner, Franklin County Library System, can be found on their website here.
Visitors can find all collections contributed by the Franklin County Library System on their partner page here.
Visitors can also browse funeral programs and related items from other partners across the state here.
Thanks to our spectacular partners at Queens University of Charlotte, DigitalNC is pleased to announce a brand new collection of scrapbooks, newspapers, and newsletters are now available online! The records stretch from as far back as 1921 to as recent as 2005, and encompass a vast experience of student life at one of Charlotte’s most historic campuses. Two hundred issues of student newspapers will join a pre-existing collection already hosted online at NC Digital, extending our digital coverage of the publication by almost a decade!
The newspaper, then known as the Queen’s Blues, span from 1920 to 1931, during the period when Queen’s University was a private Christian woman’s school. Both the paper’s articles and advertisements position themselves at this historic intersection, serving the needs of yesteryear’s college girl. Front-pages are often arranged in order to feature articles on Sunday seminars alongside opera reviews, and ads for charity-drives frequently feature alongside flash sales for the fanciest flapper fashions. A Queen’s girl is portrayed as both demure and mindful, but also modern and urbane. Of particular interest is the Queens Jester section on the back page of each issue, which includes a column of student-submitted jokes and humorous observations. While some may not have aged well, many still elicit a sensible chuckle.
Issues of The Queen’s Chronicle are also included in this collection. These are fourteen issues of student newsletters published nearly eight decades after issues of Queens Blues. Ranging from 2002 to 2005, the pages of the newsletter reflect the similarities and differences of student life at Queens’ campus through the decades. Particularly noticeable is the addition of male students’ voices featured within the newsletters’ pages, as well as an increased focus on sports such as lacrosse, soccer, and basketball.
You can read issues of both The Queens’ Chronicle and Queens’ Blues, as well as five new scrapbooks, online now at DigitalNC. Interested in learning more about Queens University? You can find their partner page online at DigitalNC here, or navigate to the university’s website here. Thanks again to our amazing partners for making this collection possible.
DigitalNC is excited to introduce a new primary source teaching set on urban development and renewal in North Carolina. While urban renewal impacted communities across the United States and North Carolina, this set focuses on how two neighborhoods in Durham and Raleigh experienced loss and displacement as a result of redevelopment. Additionally, this set discusses other community “revitalization” trends in North Carolina, such as the Finer Carolina contest of the 1950s.
Like our other primary source sets, this urban renewal set is made up of various written (newspaper articles, pamphlets) and visual (maps, scrapbooks, government records) materials. Other sections include discussion questions, outside resources, background information, and a timeline, as well as context statements for each item. Here’s a closer look at the Urban Development and Renewal primary source set:
The passing of the Housing Act in 1949 allowed the federal government to provide funding for cities across the United States to seize and demolish “blighted” or “slum” neighborhoods. “Urban renewal” was the term used to describe this process, as these programs promised to construct better housing, invite in new industries, and generally improve urban areas. Redevelopment programs often targeted neighborhoods with a high percentage of Black residents, many of whom were displaced as a result of urban renewal. Despite the positive assurances made to these communities, many areas never received the promises made by their cities’ redevelopment commissions. Low-income housing, revitalized business, and most other plans made never materialized, even many years after urban renewal began.
Despite the often harmful consequences of these programs, urban renewal generated a broader trend of redevelopment in North Carolina. In the 1950s, the Carolina Power and Light Company created the Finer Carolina contest, in which cities and towns across the state competed for cash awards by “beautifying” and making improvements to their communities. Although Finer Carolina programs did improve infrastructure and attract new industry in North Carolina towns, many contest scrapbooks show that historic buildings were destroyed in the process due to their “shabby” or “unsightly” appearances.
Teacher, students, researchers, and anyone interested in learning more about urban renewal in North Carolina can find the primary source set on our resources page. If you would like to give us feedback on the sets, please contact us here.
Excerpt from the Carolinian on the origins of the Greensboro Sit-in. Contributed by the Olivia Raney Local History Library.
In addition to our recently developed WWII primary source sets, we are introducing two sets on the history of Jim Crow in North Carolina and a set centering on the community organizing in response to this racial oppression. Included in the source sets are 15 primary sources to explore, along with various discussion questions to kick start an analysis of the sources and additional resources related to the sets. These sets feature a variety of materials, including newspapers, photographs, oral histories, and films, among others.
The set also provides general background information on the history that led to the Jim Crow era of the South and a brief review of this time in history and the legacy of organizing for racial justice. Each primary source has received a brief context statement, some including links to learn further about specific events or people mentioned in the primary source. The sources can be arranged on a timeline with additional dates of major events mentioned in the background information and that were impactful for North Carolinians in relation to Jim Crow, Southern organizing, and life in North Carolina. Due to this, there is harmful and disturbing content and references to racial violence in these sources, please proceed with care when examining sources and see DigitalNC’s Harmful Content statement for further information. Below are brief description of each primary source set in this series.
Pictured is a classroom at the Hill Street School shared by two teachers in Asheville, NC. Contributed to DigitalNC by the University of North Carolina at Asheville.
This set covers the realities of life in North Carolina post-Civil War as the area transitioned from the Reconstruction Era to the Jim Crow South period. While the time post-Civil War did see some social progress, it also saw the rise of white supremacist groups and quickly building racial violence in response to the beginning of an integrated society. A stark example of this is Wilmington Massacre, extreme acts of white supremacist violence upon the Wilmington community in response to a newly elected interracial town government. This set features reports from historically Black newspapers, white-run newspapers, photographs, a scrapbook, and a poll tax receipt to show the lives and beliefs of people in North Carolina during the beginning of Jim Crow to the 1930’s.
This photograph of Bernice Sills Britt accompanied her oral history interview, which detailed her memories of growing up in rural North Carolina during Jim Crow. Contributed to DigitalNC by Braswell Memorial Library (Rocky Mount, N.C.).
A collection of photographs, newspaper articles, oral histories, a book, and blueprints show how Jim Crow operated in North Carolina during the 1930’s-1950’s. In addition to historically Black newspapers, this set provides records of segregationist efforts to divide public spaces, like with the park now known as the William B. Umstead State Park. Thew two oral histories included in this set describe the lives of people who lived through Jim Crow and they help us to remember the individual impacts of these racist policies and racial violences. They also describe how communities came together to withstand and push back during these times.
This photograph circa 1965 shows protesters against segregation and Jim Crow marching in Winston-Salem, NC. Contributed to Digital NC by Winston Salem African American Archive.
While the other source sets describe efforts during their time period for organizing against Jim Crow, this set focuses its attention on understanding the Civil Rights Movement in the context of the Southern Freedom Movement in North Carolina during the mid-1950’s to the early 2000’s. While many people think of the Civil Rights Movement as officially concluded, these efforts were part of a broader social movement for racial, economic, and social justice in the South, and that social movement continues to organize against white supremacy and racial violence today. This set includes videotapes, newspaper articles, photographs, oral histories, and a presentation on the conditions of this time, the individuals and organizations working for racial justice, and the legacy of these efforts. It also covers how Black liberation movements connect to other oppressed groups and social justice movements, like Indigenous communities and anti-war movements.
These primary source sets can be found on our resources page, along with our other primary sources sets and resources for teaching with primary sources, managing digital collections, and contributing materials to DigitalNC. Feedback on these primary source set can be submitted through our contact form.
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.
![People are shown marching together as a demonstration in the street, in front of a public building. Signs are shown that read ‘Join our March For Freedom’ and ‘Black and W[hite] Together.’ Protesters are wearing business attire and coats.](https://www.digitalnc.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/wsaaa_civilrights_DSC01782-1024x694.jpg)
