Thanks to our partners at the Watauga County Public Library, DigitalNC is proud to announce that brand new issues of the Blowing Rocket are now available online for the very first time! The new issues will bring DigitalNC’s collection of Blowing Rockets to an 89 issues, spanning from 1933 to 1950. Many of these issues have been preserved on microfilm, while others have been in the North Carolina Collection.

The Blowing Rocket covered local, state, and national new stories and served the greater Watauga County area in North Carolina for over three decades. While the paper received their namesake from Blowing Rock, other cities that received the paper included Boone, Valle Crucis, and Foscoe. Interestingly, the establishment of the publication precedes the space-race that captured the imagination and obsession of Americans in the last half of the twentieth century. Were the founders of The Blowing Rocket trendsetters, psychics, or did they just love puns? Read these issues and find out for yourself!

You can find the new issues of The Blowing Rocket online now on DigitalNC here. Interested in more materials from Watauga County? You can find our amazing partners at Watauga County Public Library online at their partner page on DigitalNC here, or at their website online here. Interested in more amusing paper names? You can find Ocracoke Island’s “Mullet Wrapper” online at NC Digital here, or a single issue of “Beans” online here.

Thanks to our amazing partners at the New Hanover County Public Library, DigitalNC is proud to announce that a brand new collection of The Wilmington Morning Star are now available online! These brand new issues cover the entirety of a single year, from sunrise of New Years Day to sunset of New Years Eve, 1923. These issues will join over twenty thousand historic issues of The Wilmington Morning Star already online on DigitalNC, which spans from 1867 to 1947.

The Wilmington Morning Star was a daily newspaper that served New Hanover County for over a century, reporting local and national news to coastal North Carolina. Each issue covers topics of national concern, features advertisements from businesses across the east coast, and reports on the daily occurrences of coastal Carolina life. This batch offers a unique opportunity to read the daily experience of a Carolinian from exactly a century ago. Interested in what The Wilmington Morning Star was reporting on a hundred and one years before your birthday? This batch has you covered! Curious about how twentieth century Tar Heels observed Groundhog’s Day, Arbor Day, or President’s Day? This batch has an issue on each of those days! A search of the author’s “birthday issue” (October 29!) featured this amazing story about a skunk army, possibly one of the coolest articles in the entire collection (in her unbiased opinion).

You can find each of these 363 issues online now at DigitalNC here. Interested in reading more of this historic newspaper? Find DigitalNC’s complete collection of The Wilmington Morning Star online here. Thanks again to our amazing partners at the New Hanover County Public Library for making these issues available. You can find their partner page at DigitalNC online here, or discover their website online here.

Thanks to our partners, Little River Historical Society and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as well as funding from the Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA), issues dating from 1956 to 1963 of The Zebulon Record are now available for viewing on DigitalNC.

Looking to connect Raleigh to Wilson, the Raleigh and Pamlico Sound Railroad (later named Norfolk and Southern Railroad) investors sought to lay track through the already established Town of Wakefield, but were turned down by property owners. Instead, the investors moved the connection site 1.5 miles south of Wakefield. From this connection site, the Town of Zebulon was born, receiving its charter on February 17, 1907. In addition to the train connection site, Zebulon’s increased growth can be attributed to its status as having the best soil for growing tobacco in eastern North Carolina as well as a tobacco market which opened in 1917. Tobacco, however, was not the only crop grown in Zebulon.

Originating in South or Central America, sweet potatoes have been grown in North Carolina since at least 1723. Linked to the decline in tobacco, North Carolina farmer began using their surplus land to grow sweet potatoes. Since then, North Carolina has risen to the largest producer of sweet potatoes in the United States. In 2021, the state produced 64% of America’s total production.

At a Zebulon Farm Bureau meeting in February 1955, Foster Finch proposed farmers grow sweet potatoes on the land that would be unused that season as a result of reduced tobacco allotments. Finch, the Wakelon Trading Corporation operator, even agreed to provide storage space for the sweet potatoes (minimum 15,000 bushels of course), along with taking responsibility for curing them. However, without a marketing outlet for the sweet potatoes at the time and lack of confidence that they would be able to produce the minimum bushels, farmers were timid to join the project.

To combat this, a marketing specialist from the North Carolina Department of Agriculture [May 13, 1955] as well as sweet potato and NC State Extension experts were brought to Zebulon to teach farmers the best growing techniques and discuss factors they should consider in producing and marketing their sweet potatoes. View our newly added issues from 1956 to 1963 of The Zebulon Record to learn more about the outcome of the sweet potato project.

To learn more about Little River Historical Society, visit their website here.

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

Information and images in this blog post not from DigitalNC was gathered from the following resources: Zebulon Chamber of Commerce, NC State University Libraries’ Rare and Unique Digital Collections, and the North Carolina History Project.

Our collection of The Bessemer City Record has just expanded, thanks to our partners at the Bessemer City History and Arts Society. Since 1995, The Bessemer City History and Arts Society has preserved and shared the town’s history, and we are excited to help make these newspapers available digitally for anyone to read. With this newest addition, DigitalNC now hosts complete runs of the paper from 1964-1967, 1969, 1971, 1972, 1979-1981, as well as various issues from 1958-1960, 1968, 1970, 1972-1977, and 1994. Additionally, this batch includes a single issue of The Gastonia Gazette from December 4, 1968. With thirty years now at least partially covered on the site, researchers and genealogists can take advantage of the amazing resource that is The Bessemer City Record to gain insight into the local and national issues that concerned Bessemer City residents.

See all digitized issues of The Bessemer City Record here, and visit the Bessemer City History and Arts Society contributor page here to learn more. To browse all of the newspapers we have available on DigitalNC, you can find them here.

We have just added issues of the Tryon Daily Bulletin from 1951-1953, 1980-1982, 1990-1992. These join the issues already on our site from 1928-1951. Contributed by the Polk County Public Libraries, the issues from the 50s were added from microfilm. In addition, the Libraries’ staff scanned print issues from the 80s and 90s to add to our site. “The World’s Smallest DAILY Newspaper” is a true example of a local paper, with contents created locally and confined mostly to county or regional news.

Published 5 days per week, the Bulletin from these different time periods have things in common! On the left side of every front page is the column “Curb Reporter.” Starting with the day’s weather, it has brief snippets of local to international news.

In all decades, you’ll find classified ads, committee and government meeting reports, and personal notes and mentions that have all but dropped off of newspapers today.

View all issues of the Tryon Daily Bulletin on the newspaper’s home page.

Thanks to Buncombe County Public Libraries, we have added issues of the North Carolina Citizen newspaper to DigitalNC. Digitized from microfilm, these papers include the North Carolina Citizen, The Weekly Citizen, and two surprise issues of the Asheville Spectator, and the curiously named The Exlavigator.

In 1883, the Citizen covers the establishment of Asheville’s Free Library. Free libraries were an increasingly popular idea in a time where use of many libraries required a paid membership. For the Asheville Free Library, memberships were encouraged to support the purchase of books, the rent, and the librarian’s salary, but were not required for use of the library. The articles mention the purchase or donation of Scientific American, Harper’s, and other long-standing periodicals. Calls for support like the one in the image below mention the sentiment that even if contributors never set foot in the library, the presence of one improved their community as a whole. This sentiment is still shared by many today.

Another fun find is a picture of the proposed Central Methodist Church (now Central United Methodist Church) found on the front page of the August 2, 1901 issue of the Citizen. R.H. Hunt, the architect, had recently presented plans to the congregation. The article describes the proposed church in detail, including the various rooms and the materials to be used. If you’ve been to Asheville, this church is a striking part of downtown near Pack Square.

On July 25, 1889, The Weekly Citizen published an illustrated edition which focused entirely on highlighting the beauty of western North Carolina along with Asheville’s development. The sketches, some of which are below, feature Hickory Nut Gap, Mount Mitchell, a viaduct near Round Knob, Asheville Female College, and Arden Park.

You can view additional newspapers from Asheville by using the filters on our newspapers home page. For all of the materials on DigitalNC for Buncombe County, try the county page.

A new batch of student newspapers from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte is now available on DigitalNC, thanks to our partners at UNC Charlotte! This recent addition includes 44 issues from August 1978 through April 1979, a testament to the paper’s prolific output. Readers can peruse the volumes to gain insight into the issues with which students were most concerned. While many of the stories featured in the paper are local to campus and the surrounding Charlotte area, articles also cover state-wide and national news.

Visitors to the site can view all of our newspaper issues from UNC Charlotte here. To view other student newspapers, navigate to “Browse Newspaper Titles” and select the “Student Papers” filter. See all of our materials from UNC Charlotte, including yearbooks, catalogs, photographs, and more newspaper titles at their contributor page here.

Thanks to our partner at the Shepard-Pruden Memorial Library, DigitalNC is proud to announce that over a hundred brand new issues of The Chowan Herald have been digitized by our team in Elizabeth City. Many of these issues are from recent history, spanning from 2017 to 2019, with one special issue coming from 2003. They will join over four thousand issues of The Chowan Herald already online at DigitalNC, reaching back to the paper’s very first issue in 1934.

The Chowan Herald serves the city of Edenton and Chowan County in eastern North Carolina, on the banks of the Albemarle Sound. The paper serves a vital role in the function of Chowan County life; recording local events, letters from community members, and changes in county infrastructure and business. Highlights from this batch include the “Pets of the Week” section (included in each issue), the weathering of Hurricane Isabel in 2003, and the celebration of “Ye Olde Halloween on the Green” in 2019.

In addition to these physical papers scanned in house by the DigitalNC satellite staff, we also added issues of the Chowan Herald from microfilm covering 2015 to 2017, thanks to funding by the folks at Shepard-Pruden.

You can find every issue of The Chowan Herald online at DigitalNC here. Interested in learning more about Chowan County History? Look at “Chowan County” online at DigitalNC here, or find the Shephard-Prudent Memorial Library partner page online at DigitalNC here.