As news of the 2024 presidential election ramps up, more issues of The Mooresville Enterprise added to our site bring us news from a 100-year-old primary race. This batch of the Enterprise, spanning from 1910-1917, was made available thanks to our partner, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as funding from the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA).

As divisive as our current political landscape looks, the presidential election of 1912 might give it a run for its money. The seated president, William Howard Taft, was a Republican that succeeded the popular Theodore Roosevelt (with Roosevelt’s blessing). However, Taft was apparently too conservative of a president for Roosevelt’s taste, so Roosevelt decided to challenge him in the Republican primary—with no success.

The Enterprise article begins, “The Republican National Convention at Chicago Saturday night at 9:10 nominated President Taft as the candidate for president on the first ballot, the Roosevelt forces having declined to vote in the convention. The scenes depicted in the telegraph dispatches indicate that the Taft forces had everything their way from the beginning.”

So, instead of running as a Republican, Roosevelt split off and ran as the candidate for his new party, the Progressive party. The Progressives later became known as the Bull-Moose party, perhaps in relation to Roosevelt’s attempted assassination, after which he spoke for 90 minutes with a bullet in his chest and declared, “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot, but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”

On the other side, Democrats nominated New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson. Wilson was able to unseat Taft and win the presidency in a landslide with 435 electoral votes (Roosevelt bested Taft 88-8). And, in the background of the race—with no electoral votes—was Socialist candidate Eugene V. Debs. Debs continued to rally against Wilson after his defeat, especially once Wilson brought the U.S. into the First World War. As a pacifist, Debs was put in prison under the federal Espionage Act for “anti-war” speeches, and he campaigned for president again from his cell in 1920.

While this election was clearly full of drama, contemporary voters might laugh at some of the top national issues at stake in 1912. Some of the listed tenets of the Republican platform included “Favors limiting hours of labor of women and children and protection of wage earners in dangerous occupations,” “Favors parcel post,” “Believes that federal government should assume part control of Mississippi river and help prevent flood disasters,” and “Favors ample equipment of life saving on ships.” Both the Democrats and Republicans seemed to be on the same page about trust-busting and monopolies, one of the biggest issues of the early 20th century (though Democrats criticized Republican’s anti-trust record). And the Progressive/Bull Moose party seemed to be based on whatever Theodore Roosevelt wanted—including women’s suffrage, which he may have understood as his path to a third term.

You can see all available issues of The Mooresville Enterprise here and explore all of our digital newspapers by location, type, and date in our North Carolina Newspapers collection. To see more materials from UNC Chapel Hill, you can visit their partner page and their website.

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.

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.

One of the enduring qualities of this paper is the way it focuses on “Perquimans County and its people,” as the masthead claims. In this span of years, the paper’s sections include “Community,” “Perspectives,” “Religion,” and “Schools,” almost all of which are comprised of hyper-local stories, including “Fifth graders study ways to prevent pollution” and “Cable service poor, residents say.” There’s even a prominent business feature on three young entrepreneurs selling lemonade in front of the courthouse. As mentioned in a previous blog post, there is also frequent coverage of baseball star Jim “Catfish” Hunter, a pitcher for Kansas City and then the New York Yankees from 1965-1979.

You can see all available issues of The Perquimans Weekly here, and you can browse all of our digital newspapers by location, type, and date in our North Carolina Newspapers collection. To see more materials from the Perquimans County Library, you can visit their partner page and their website.