Thanks to our partners at the Harnett County Public Library, DigitalNC is proud to announce over a hundred new issues of the Harnett County News are now available online! Over one thousand pages across 116 issues cover nearly a decade of developments across Harnett County, chronicling the years from 1953 to 1958.

The Harnett County News has been published in Lillington, North Carolina weekly for over a hundred years. Its initial issues were published by Henderson Steele, and the paper gradually evolved to cover not only Harnett County, but Sampson, Johnson, and other surrounding counties as well. The new issues of the title will cover a critical gap in DigitalNC’s coverage of the paper, which stretches from its inception in 1919 to as recently as 1979. They will provide a critical community perspective on the economic prosperity witnessed by Harnett County residents during the period. Hot topics found in these papers include the end of the Korean War, the arrest of Rosa Parks, and Dwight D. Eisenhower visiting Salisbury.

You can find every issue of the Harnett County News online now at DigitalNC here. Interested in learning more about the history of Harnett? Our partners at the Harnett County Public Library have an abundance of records available for your perusal online now at DigitalNC. You can find their partner page here, or visit the library’s website online here.