Front page of the June 17, 1937 issue of the Wallace Enterprise covering both Eleanor Roosevelt’s visit to the town and a better than ever Strawberry Festival that year.

Thanks to our new partner, the Thelma Dingus Bryant Library in Wallace, NC (Duplin County), twenty years of the local paper The Wallace Enterprise is now online.  Over 1,000 issues covering 1931 to 1955 were digitized from microfilm.  The paper covers many local topics of the day in Duplin County and wider eastern North Carolina and had the tagline “Devoted to the Best Interests of the People of Wallace and Duplin County.”  The local strawberry festival which brought in crowds from all over the state to “the largest strawberry market in North Carolina” was covered yearly, as were local elections, school board discussions and lots of coverage of agriculture topics, including crop control measures, which directly affected the largely agricultural workforce in the area.  Eleanor Roosevelt visited in 1937 and gained a lot of glowing coverage when she came.  

To view all the issues of the paper, visit here.  To look at all our newspapers, visit our North Carolina Newspaper Collection.  

To Celebrate 100th Birthday!

Thanks to our partner New Bern-Craven County Public Library and funding from the State Library of North Carolina through IMLS’ LSTA program nearly 600 issues spanning 1976 to 1987 of our newest newspaper, The Pamlico News, is now available on our website.

The paper was first published in the late 1960s as The Pamlico County News, but in 1977 the paper’s name was changed to The Pamlico News. The newspaper is still published under this name today.

Published weekly in Bayboro, North Carolina, the paper focuses on local and broader North Carolina news including topics on community history, events and festivals, citizen accomplishments, education, and more.

A frequent feature of the paper is celebrating older citizens of Pamlico County’s birthdays. One article featuring Mr. Frank Styron’s 100th birthday is especially fascinating. The piece includes a picture of Mr. Styron as well as information on his family history.

To learn more about New Bern-Craven County Public Library, please visit their website.

To view more newspapers from around North Carolina, please click here.

This week we have almost 30 newspaper titles added to DigitalNC. These titles include a Raleigh paper about agriculture and it’s “kindred arts,” an employee paper for North Carolina shipbuilders during World War II, and plenty of others from Wilmington, Raleigh, and New Bern!

Over the next year, we’ll be adding millions of newspaper images to DigitalNC. These images were originally digitized a number of years ago in a partnership with Newspapers.com. That project focused on scanning microfilmed papers published before 1923 held by the North Carolina Collection in Wilson Special Collections Library. While you can currently search all of those pre-1923 issues on 

Newspapers.com, over the next year we will also make them available in our newspaper database as well. This will allow you to search that content alongside the 2 million pages already on our site – all completely open access and free to use.

This week’s additions are the following:

• The North-Carolina Gazette (New Bern, N.C.) – 1751-1774
• Wilmington Gazette (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1816
• The Newbernian (New Bern, N.C.) – 1849-1853
• The Daily Carolinian (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1871-1872
• The Daily Era (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1872-1873
• The Carolina Era (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1871
• The Farmer and Mechanic (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1899
• New Berne Times (New Bern, N.C.) – 1873
• The People’s Press and Wilmington Advertiser (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1835-1841
• The Daily Herald (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1856-1857
• The Sun (New Bern, N.C.) – 1908-1914
• Eastern Carolina Republican (New Bern, N.C.) – 1850-1851
• Republican and Patriot (New Bern, N.C.) – 1851-1852
• Daily Progress (New Bern, N.C.) – 1862-1863
• The Democratic Signal (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1843-1844
• North Carolina Christian Advocate (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1856-1858
• New Berne Weekly Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1882-1883
• New Bern Semi-Weekly Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1914
• The Daily Wilmington Herald (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1865-1866
• The Daily Dispatch (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1867
• The Evening Dispatch (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1895-1916
• New Berne Journal (New Bern, N.C.) – 1882
• The Arator (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1855-1857
• The North Carolina Shipbuilder (Wilmington, N.C.) – 1942-1946
• The Star (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1808-1815
• The Star and North Carolina Gazette (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1816-1834
• Daily Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.) – 1875-1884
• Daily State Journal (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1862-1865
• The Raleigh Sentinel (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1876

If you want to see all of the newspapers we have available on DigitalNC, you can find them here. Thanks to UNC-Chapel Hill Libraries for permission to and support for adding all of this content as well as the content to come. We also thank the North Caroliniana Society for providing funding to support staff working on this project.

Captain Raleigh T. Harrington

Thanks to our partner Martin Community College and funding from the State Library of North Carolina through IMLS’ LSTA program, new issues of The Enterprise are now available on our website. This batch adds over 1,000 issues from 1943 to 1954.

The Enterprise was published biweekly and focused primarily on community news such as town meetings, citizen’s achievements, deaths, festivals, and more. A frequent feature in issues published during the World War II years are articles highlighting Martin County citizens who joined the war effort and their accomplishments while in the service.

To learn more about Martin Community College, please visit their website.

To view more newspapers from around North Carolina, please click here.

Frontpage of the News of Orange County Newspaper in 1945.

Thanks to our partnership with Orange County Public Library, we now have additions of The News of Orange County now available on Digital NC. The new additions include the years 1944 to 1964. Issued out to the community on Thursdays, The News of Orange County discussed news out of Hillsborough, North Carolina, and other parts of Orange County as well. 

Many of the issues cover a special section about members of the armed forces from Orange County as they fought in World War II. 

To see the other issues of The News of Orange County, visit them here. 

To view more from our partner, Orange County Public Library, visit them here. 

Make sure to check out the rest of our NC Newspaper collection, here. 

We’re pleased to share that you can now search more issues of the Elkin Tribune on DigitalNC, thanks to a nomination from the Elkin Public Library. The years added span 1916-1949, but the majority of the issues are from 1942-1949, with only a few scattered issues from the earlier years.

In the issues added from 1931 you’ll see a lot of coverage of the new Hugh Chatham Memorial Hospital, which still operates in Elkin today. The issues from 1942-1949 cover World War II and its immediate aftermath. There are lists of individuals who served from both Surry and Yadkin counties in the May 8, 1945 issue linked at the beginning of this post. 

You can view all of the issues we’ve published from The Elkin Tribune on the newspaper’s landing page. To view all of the items we’ve worked on relating to Surry County, check out the county’s landing page. 

Thanks to our partner Cleveland County Memorial Library and support from the North Caroliniana Society, issues of The Shelby Daily Star from 1923 to 1936 and 1945 are now available on our website.

Originally named the Shelby Review, the newspaper has provided Shelby, North Carolina with local and national news since 1894. Since its first issue, the paper has gone through several name changes. In the late 1890s, the name was changed to the Cleveland Star, which it remained until 1936 when it was then changed to The Shelby Daily Star. After nearly 50 years, the paper was renamed to The Shelby Star in 1984. In 1998, the paper was renamed a final time to The Star, which it still goes by today.

New York City’s Time Square VE Day Celebration, May 7, 1945.

Two particularly interesting articles from this paper come from 1945 on Victory in Europe (May 8) and Victory Over Japan (August 15) Day. Instead of just providing information on the celebrations of the end of the war in large cities such as New York City, these articles provide the reader with a unique and interesting look into how small towns such as Shelby celebrated VE and VJ Day.

Victory Over Japan Day, August 15, 1945

Victory in Europe Day, May 8, 1945

As the May 8th article mentions, Victory in Europe Day was “celebrated calmly and prayerfully in Shelby,” with no “boisterous noise-making like that which marked the close of World War I.”  Many people in the town congregated in churches and auditoriums to sing and pray.

The Victory Over Japan Day article on August 15 presents a different scene in the Town of Shelby. After Japan’s surrender was announced, the courthouse square in Shelby, “was a rootin’ tootin’, yelling, laughing, crying mixture of hilariously happy folk and overloaded automobiles. […] The celebration continued far into the night, and business was at a standstill today with stores, banks, and public buildings closed. Most industrial plants closed down last night soon after the victory signal was received.” Other articles discussing the war and the effects it had on the town can be found in the 1945 issues of the newspaper.

To learn more about the Cleveland County Memorial Library, please visit their website.

To view more newspapers from across North Carolina, please visit our newspapers collection.