Thanks to our partner at High Point Museum, DigitalNC now includes over thirty new programs, playbills, and brochures produced by the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival, starring local actors and directors. Supporting this amazing cast of records are six ledgers from local High Point businesses and schools. In all, the collection spans from 1905 to 1999, covering the breadth of Guilford County’s history during the twentieth century.
Few batches in recent memory have been as colorful and varied as the North Carolina Shakespeare Festival programs. Each issue finds new ways to breathe light into the Bard’s works, often featuring beautiful photographs, thoughtful essays, or fantastical illustrations. Some even play with the format of the typical brochure, cleverly unfolding to reveal gorgeous maps of High Point or witty quotes from featured scripts. One of the most colorful examples of this postmodernist outreach is a full tabloid advertising strange events from Shakespeare’s scripts. Headlines penned in bright yellow and pink inks shout “MAN WITH HEAD OF A DONKEY IN NORTH CAROLINA” (referencing Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream) and “THREE PEOPLE SPEAK FROM THE GRAVE” (Thornton Wilder’s Our Town). A deep and enduring love of theater permeates each page of these programs, even through four decades of separation. Each program is a stellar representation of the community support and participation that makes North Carolina arts and culture stand out.
The same community essence is represented in the six ledgers and scrapbooks included in this collection. These amazing records of High Point history record different aspects of life during the first twentieth century: two ledgers hail from High Point furniture manufacturers, another from a local school, and the last two from local shops. The pages of each of these ledgers are suffused with hand-writing that records the daily minutiae of each institution, including employee payroll, students’ grades, and the recipes of the local pharmacists’ tonics. Eagle-eyed viewers may spot many of the same names repeated across different ledgers, as some students graduated and began working at local shops, or bought sweets from the local grocer. The true spirit of High Point community, however, is best represented in a scrapbook commemorating the construction of a new hospital for Guilford County’s polio-stricken. Each page of this scrapbook records concerned citizens organizing to fund-raise for the hospital, marching through the town or organizing city-wide auctions. Time Magazine even reported on the stunning accomplishment of the community’s success, and in a total full circle moment, you can find clippings of the story IN THE SCRAPBOOK!
You can find all of the new books, programs, and more online now at DigitalNC here. Interested in learning more about the star-studded lives of Guilford County residents? You can find its location page on DigitalNC here. You can learn more about High Point Museum online at their website here, or on their partner page at DigitalNC here.
