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.