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.

To view more materials from the Greensboro Firefighters History Book Committee, please visit their contributor page linked here.

To learn more about the Greensboro Firefighters History Book Committee, please visit their website linked 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!

Thanks to our partner, the Greensboro Firefighters History Book Committee, additional photographs of Greensboro Fire Department individuals, stations, trucks; copy of the Spring 1979 North Carolina Professional Fire Fighter magazine, photographs of industry buildings in the city, and more are now available on DigitalNC! Featured in this batch are photographs of the Department’s yellow fire trucks.

In the early 1970s, studies reported that yellow fire trucks were more visible than red ones. Following the publication of these studies, yellow fire trucks began to appear on streets in cities such as Greensboro. Unfortunately, painting the trucks didn’t actually improve people’s awareness of them, but instead caused an increase in vehicular accidents. This was a result of the color’s association with utility company vehicles which led to less people registering the yellow fire trucks as emergency vehicles. Later, a different study was published that found that red and white were more associated with emergency vehicles, making yellow officially out as the color of future fire trucks.

The Greensboro Fire Department had several yellow fire trucks in use from in the 1970s. However, in the late 1980s, Chief W. Frank Jones declared the department’s trucks would be returning to red, saying, “fire trucks are supposed to be red, from what children say.” The yellow fire trucks continued to be used until they had to be replaced.

Information about the yellow fire trucks was gathered from page 60 of the September 23, 1990 issue of Greensboro News & Record along with previous Greensboro Firefighters History Book Committee batch materials.

To view more materials from the Greensboro Firefighters History Book Committee, please visit their contributor page linked here.

To learn more about the Greensboro Firefighters History Book Committee, please visit their website linked here.