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The 2023 issues of Pine Knoll Shores’s The Shoreline are now available on Digital NC, thanks to our partner The History Committee of the Town of Pine Knoll Shores. With the exception of 2003, Digital NC houses a complete collection of Shoreline papers, dating back from 1973. This recent batch of uploads celebrates the 50th anniversary of PKS, with each issue highlighting a different fun fact of the town’s history – making this a rich resource for researchers.
In this beach town’s monthly paper, you can find celebration of both the nature of the town and its residents. Some coverage of local events in 2023 include garden clubs, fashion shows, local do-gooders, and children’s activities, like Wave Chasers. The Shoreline also highlights local culture by showcasing visual artists and poets throughout its pages.
The Shoreline alsooffers great content for nature lovers of the North Carolina coast.
The best coverage this year is the Sea Turtle Report from the August issue onwards. See how volunteers of PKS work alongside a biologist to protect their sea turtle populations. Click here to learn more about conservation of sea turtle populations in North Carolina, from the North Carolina Aquariums.
To explore more issues of the Pine Knoll Shores’s paper, click here. To check out other local North Carolina newspapers, click here.
Our partners at the Graham Historical Museum have contributed a new bound volume of 1924 maps of Burlington and the surrounding areas. These were created by the Sanborn Insurance Company, which produced massive numbers of maps to assess buildings for fire risk from 1867 to 1970. They depict building features in great detail, sometimes even by room. Sanborn often surveyed the same places multiple times, making their maps an incredibly helpful resource for tracking changes over time in cities and specific buildings.
This latest batch depicts Burlington, North Carolina and surrounding areas of Altamahaw, Glen Raven, Bellemont, Hopedale, Elon College, Ossipee, Glencoe, and Saxapahaw. The volume contains an index of streets and significant buildings, general information on population and economic activity, and specific information pertaining to fire insurance assessment. If you are a music lover, the Saxapahaw map may be of particular interest. Like most towns in Alamance County, Saxapahaw’s economy was based on textile production and most residents worked at the cotton mill. The cotton mill closed in 1994 and was eventually converted into apartments overlooking the Haw River. The adjacent former dye house is now the Haw River Ballroom, a state of the art music venue that hosts touring acts from around the country and the world.
A deindustrialization success story, Saxapahaw has undergone transformational changes since this map was published 100 years ago. Researchers can see how it and other Alamance County communities have evolved since 1924 by viewing the map here. More digitized Sanborn maps are available on DigitalNC, as well as through UNC Libraries. See all of our collections from the Graham Historical Museum at their contributor page and learn more by visiting their website.
Thanks to our partners at the Chatham County Historical Association, DigitalNC is pleased to announce that several new issues of the North Carolina Anvil are now available online! The North Carolina Anvil was a local paper published in Durham during the late twentieth century. It was advertised as an “alternative” paper with a progressive, anti-war perspective.
Now, four new issues from 1970 and 1983 have been added to NC Digital’s collection. They join a collection of over three hundred already-digitized issues, and extend NC Digital’s coverage of the publication by three years. Interested in reading about North Carolina politics weekly from an angle “combative to the point that it was difficult to survive financially” (according to contributor Barry Jacobs)? You can find the complete collection of newspapers here. Interested in more Chatham County history? Learn more about the Chatham County Historical Association here.
There are many ways to educate people about fire safety. Greensboro Fire employed the famous duo Ember and flame to do the educate a variety of people about fire safety. Ember, the Dalmatian, was born July 04, 2000 and was only 8 weeks old when she began training to be a fire safety dog. Owner and trainer, Mitzi Rice aka Flame performed in more than 3,200 shows at schools, day cares and nursing homes. Ember and Flame have both passed on, but their impact on fire safety in and around Greensboro is not forgotten.
The information about Ember and Flame is from newspaper articles included in this most recent batch of materials. You can browse through the materials to learn more about Ember, Flame and the Greensboro Fire Department.
While Ember is the star of this article, the Greensboro Fire Fighters have a plethora of photographs, newspaper clippings and other information materials such as magazine issues and safety manuals for curious researchers at Digital NC.
Featured among these documents are the magazines published alongside both the Henredon Classic and the Planters Pat Bradley International golf tournaments. These golf tournaments were hosted annually at the Willow Creek Golf Club at High Point, and attracted world famous golfers from across the country. Each magazine featured notable competitors in each tournament, alongside columns by sports journalists analyzing the game of golf at large. Some issues even include profiles on the golfers and detailed maps of the courses they would play on. Of course, each magazine is a wonderful resource for advertisement from the eighties: local businesses and furniture manufacturers hold a key presence amongst the pages.
The latest batch also included large number of church bulletins from congregations within High Point. Churches included are Wesley Memorial Methodist, Oakview United Methodist, and Washington Street Methodist. Many of the church bulletins describe the construction and design of Wesley Memorial’s new chapel, allegedly one of the last gothic churches constructed in North America. One bulletin conducts a thorough art historical analysis of the symbolic decorations of the church, detailing the allusions carved into the walls of the church: a splendid resource for anyone interested in art history or planning to visit the historic site!
Four yearbooks from T. Wingate Andrews High School and High Point Central High School were also included in the batch, with all books covering the early 1970s at the schools.
If we’ve piqued your interest, you can investigate all of our brand new documents here. Interested in learning more about High Point history? View more documents on our website here, or visit High Point Museum’s website here.
New issues from thirteen newspaper titles have been added to DigitalNC, thanks to The North Carolina Collection at UNC Chapel Hill. These date from the late 19th century and fill in gaps in our digital newspaper collections. Issues from Our Home, The Daily Record, The Morning Herald, and The Western Herald are the first of these titles on the site.
Below is a list of titles, their cities of publication, and the years from which the issues date.
Henderson Gold Leaf (Henderson, N.C.) – May 25, 1899
The Wilmington Messenger (Wilmington, N.C.) – Nov. 18, 1898
Thanks to our generous community partner, Olivia Rainey Local History Library, and at the request of our partner Wake Forest Historical Museum, the book Connections: 100 Years of Wake Forest History by Carol W. Pelosi is now available to read for free on DigitalNC. You can flip through the pages of Connections and find local history of Wake Forest, NC ranging from 1910-2008. Information covers topics like farms and crops, the railroad, local businesses, holiday celebrations, festivals, and local government leaders.
To learn more about what our community partners, Olivia Rainey Local History Library are up to please visit their website.
To view other materials made available by the Olivia Rainey Local History Library visit their contributors page.
To view more North Carolina historical items visit the North Carolina Digital Heritage Centers website DigitalNC.
Digital NC is happy to announce another issue of The Elkin Tribune is digitized online, thanks to our partners at the Western Regional Archives.
This 1914 edition of the paper is a great resource to delve into the local history of Elkin, as it celebrates local businesses, elected officials, and the industrial history of the town – such as the construction of a new railroad and a wooden suspension bridge that once held the title for longest in the world at 210 feet!
To explore other available issues on The Elkin Times on our website, click here. And to explore other North Carolina newspapers, click here!
Thanks to our partners at Edgecombe County Memorial Library, we are pleased to announce DigitalNC now has over two hundred new records to explore! Pore over records from Tarboro’s history of shipping and manufacturing, read through decades of magazine club programs, or get inspired by dozens of new recipes! This new batch covers a truly dazzling array of subjects, from as far back as 1878 to as recent as 2022. They include correspondences, legal ledgers, and even uniforms! Whatever your historical interest, this collection likely has something for you.
Locals from or around Tarboro will be pleased to find a great quantity of photographs, publications, and records relating to downtown Tarboro’s historic structures. Historians have taken painstaking efforts over the years to preserve the history of this beautiful town, and the fruits of their labor are now easily seen. Many storefronts, churches, and civic buildings have carefully curated profiles, containing detailed photographs, preserved newspaper clippings, and written histories. Perhaps the most detailed of these profiles is Tarboro’s old town hall building, which served as a fixture of community politics before it was demolished in the late-twentieth century. The destruction of the building is detailed in full, even including detailed photographs of its demolition!
Readers interested in women’s history will be elated to discover over a century’s worth of documents related to the Tarboro Magazine Club, a collective of women dedicated to intellectual growth and community. The Magazine Club has graciously provided decades of correspondences between members, detailed lists of membership records, and magazine subscription lists. A vast number of programs are also included, which list the annual theme of the club alongside a schedule of lectures and talks given by members of the Magazine Club. Educational “learn-at-home” courses were also used by the club, and even include materials from UNC Chapel Hill!
Locals may also fondly remember DeBerry’s Colonial Dining Room, a traditional southern kitchen that served the community for years before its unfortunate closing. Fortunately, our collection now includes a host of photographs, postcards, and menus from the dining room. We even have detailed photographs of the famous uniforms worn by the waitresses! Perhaps most tantalizing of all is the inclusion of over one hundred recipes carefully recorded by Ruby DeBerry, the matriarch of the restaurant. The recipes are an absolute gem, reflecting mid-century southern cuisine in a new way. Miss a dish? Now you can recreate it at home!
Hungry for more? You can find this collection (and more) here. Want to know more about Tarboro? Contact our partners at Edgecombe Memorial Library at their website here. Want to test some recipes? Let us know how they turn out!
Browse through this weekly paper to see the happenings of Boone over half a century ago! Weekly marriage announcements, birth announcements, and obituaries are sure to make this a rich resource for any genealogist, especially due to text-searchable pages.
Plus, who doesn’t want to fantasize about grocery prices being this cheap again:
Founded in 1888, the Watauga Democrat still reports on local news today. Check out their website here! To explore other issues of the Watauga Democrat on Digital NC, click here. And to search through other North Carolina newspapers in our collection, click here.
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.
