Selected early high school yearbooks from Alamance County are now available on DigitalNC in the North Carolina High School Yearbooks collection. The May Memorial Library in Burlington (part of the Alamance County Public Libraries) contributed 85 yearbooks from a number of different schools, ranging in date from the late 19th century through the early 1960s. Check the list below to see if your yearbook is one of the ones available online.
Here at DigitalNC, we digitize high school yearbooks that are at least 50 years old. We’re pleased to have added yearbooks from our long-time partner, Alamance County Public Libraries, filling in books from the mid-1960s that are now out of our “embargo” period:
These are the first books on our site from Western Alamance High School, which opened for the 1962-1963 school year. You can view all of the yearbooks that Alamance County Public Libraries has shared on DigitalNC via their contributor page.
A front page from August 1946. News included veterans’ furlough pay, farm credit bills in Congress, and the 20th anniversary of sound in movies
Twenty more years and almost 7000 pages of the Alamance Gleaner have been added to DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner, the Alamance County Public Libraries. Previously, issues of the Gleaner only covered from 1875-1882 and 1911 to 1926, but DigitalNC now includes January 1927 to January 1947. Based out of Alamance County, the Gleaner was published from 1875 through 1956, and it joins other Alamance County newspapers, including the Mebane Leader and the Burlington Twice-A-Week Dispatch.
A July 1927 article about a highway that would eventually become Route 66
The Gleaner was a weekly newspaper based out of Graham that offered local news, national news, international news, and short stories. One story that the Gleaner wrote about in 1927 was a plan to create a highway from Chicago to Los Angeles, thought of as a “Main Street of America”, a stretch that would eventually become Route 66. As time went on, the Gleaner also came to include a comics section, quizzes, and timely updates from the different campaigns in World War II.
With this new increase in pages from the Alamance Gleaner, DigitalNC becomes that much closer to having the entire published history of the newspaper in our collection. To browse other materials from Alamance County, take a look at their partner page, or visit their website.
More than 1,100 issues are now freely available to search and browse. The online issues cover the years 1875-1882 and 1911-1926. The Gleaner aimed a broad audience, including not just local news but stories, poetry, and illustrations from state, national, and international events. The issues from the 1910s and 1920s include increasingly elaborate designs and images, reflective of changing technology and taste in the newspaper business.
Combined with The Mebane Leader, covering some of the same years, researchers interested in Alamance County history and people in the early 20th century will find terrific resources on DigitalNC. The Gleaner was nominated for digitization by Alamance County Public Libraries.
Our partners at the Graham Historical Museum have contributed a new bound volume of 1924 maps of Burlington and the surrounding areas. These were created by the Sanborn Insurance Company, which produced massive numbers of maps to assess buildings for fire risk from 1867 to 1970. They depict building features in great detail, sometimes even by room. Sanborn often surveyed the same places multiple times, making their maps an incredibly helpful resource for tracking changes over time in cities and specific buildings.
This latest batch depicts Burlington, North Carolina and surrounding areas of Altamahaw, Glen Raven, Bellemont, Hopedale, Elon College, Ossipee, Glencoe, and Saxapahaw. The volume contains an index of streets and significant buildings, general information on population and economic activity, and specific information pertaining to fire insurance assessment. If you are a music lover, the Saxapahaw map may be of particular interest. Like most towns in Alamance County, Saxapahaw’s economy was based on textile production and most residents worked at the cotton mill. The cotton mill closed in 1994 and was eventually converted into apartments overlooking the Haw River. The adjacent former dye house is now the Haw River Ballroom, a state of the art music venue that hosts touring acts from around the country and the world.
A deindustrialization success story, Saxapahaw has undergone transformational changes since this map was published 100 years ago. Researchers can see how it and other Alamance County communities have evolved since 1924 by viewing the map here. More digitized Sanborn maps are available on DigitalNC, as well as through UNC Libraries. See all of our collections from the Graham Historical Museum at their contributor page and learn more by visiting their website.
Another 32 newspaper titles are up on DigitalNC this week! Three of these titles are from North Carolina towns that either changed their names or just don’t exist anymore.
First, we have the North Carolina National from Company Shops, North Carolina. Company Shops was a community formed around the railroad car construction and maintenance industry in Alamance County, between Graham and Gibsonville. Due to growing anti-railroad sentiments, the community of Company Shops decided to appoint a committee to change the name of the town in 1887. This committee decided on the name ‘Burlington.’
Next up is Our Home from Beaver Dam, North Carolina. It’s hard to determine exactly where Beaver Dam would have been, but knowing that the paper is from Union County, it seems possible that it was located near Beaverdam Creek, just south of Wingate and Marshville, North Carolina.
Lastly, we have The Hokeville Express from what was once known as Hokeville, or ‘Lincoln Factory,’ North Carolina. It seems likely that the community was named after the affluent Hoke family of Lincolnton. Col. John Hoke was one of the owners of the profitable Lincoln Cotton Mills. Col. Hoke died in 1845 and passed ownership on to his son, also named John Hoke. The factory burned down in 1862, and the following year the Confederate Army began constructing a laboratory on the site to manufacture medicines, such as ether, chloroform, and opiates. Since then the community has gone by the name ‘Laboratory.’
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.
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.
177 new issues between 2012-2018 of Elon University student newspapers The Pendulum and The Edge are now available for online browsing. These new resources are available on DigitalNC thanks our partners at Elon University.
Elon University is a private university located in Elon, Alamance County, North Carolina. Originally founded in 1889 as Elon College, Elon University obtained it’s current name in 2001. Elon University’s first student-run newspaper, Maroon and Gold, began publication in 1919 but was discontinued in 1970. The campus news outlet was eventually reinstated in 1974 as The Pendulum. In addition to the many audio and visual news shows Elon University now provides, The Pendulum continues weekly publications to this day. As it is a student-run newspaper, they follow the academic calendar year, which means issues fall off during the winter, spring, and summer breaks.
Holding multiple awards from the Associated Collegiate Press, The Pendulum informs both the campus and local community of news within and beyond the university. Besides updates on sports and campus initiatives, students actively use this space to voice opinions on topics ranging from politics to religion to activism. These recent uploads cover the before, during, and after effects of the 2016 U.S. presidential election on Elon University’s student population, highlighting the many intersections of student experience.
The Edge, formerly known as Elon Edge, is a supplemental magazine affiliated with The Pendulum. Much of the content covered in the Edge is focused on entertainment, such as music, fashion, local events, and interest pieces.
Students dream of a star-studded faculty in the 1958 April Fools’ issue.
Six Issues of The Barker, the student paper from Walter Williams High School, are now available on DigitalNC. Walter Williams High School is located in Burlington, North Carolina, and The Barker is still published by the school’s journalism class during the spring semester.
Issues from this batch date from the 1957-1958 academic year and were published on a monthly basis. Included in each issues are news articles related to school happenings, event notices, and pictures of student life. A special April Fools’ issue lets the students’ sense of humor shine through as they take a break from their usual routine.
To learn more about our partner Alamance County Public Libraries, who provided these materials, take a look at their DigitalNC partner page, or visit their website.
The following microfilmed newspapers were selected for digitization in 2017-2018. Thanks to supplemental funding from the State Library of North Carolina, we were able to complete more reels than in previous years. Reels were chosen from nominations according to our Criteria for Selecting Newspapers to Digitize from Microfilm.
About six months ago we asked our partners to help us increase the diversity of voices shared on DigitalNC. We had an outpouring of interest, and partners have shared a number of rich collections from the African American and LGBTQ communities. Here’s an update of what has been added to DigitalNC as a result of this call.
This 1903 Census Report for Morton Township, Alamance County, lists names, ages, and the names of parents of African American students.
Diversifying DigitalNC isn’t a one-time event – it’s ongoing every day. If your institution has or will be targeting collections that document racial, ethnic, or geographic communities who are underrepresented on DigitalNC, and you’re interested in sharing these materials online, get in touch.
This blog is maintained by the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center and features the latest news and highlights from the collections at DigitalNC, an online library of primary sources from organizations across North Carolina.
