Covering stories in and around Chapel Hill and Carrboro, NC, the Chapel Hill News Leader frequently spoke on events at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial segregation in public schools and in 1955 federal courts ordered the admission of Black undergraduates to UNC. The Chapel Hill News Leader, leading with a now famous photo, noted the admission of Leroy Frasier, John Lewis Brandon, and Ralph Frasier, the first Black undergraduate students at UNC, on their first day of school, September 15, 1955.
To view all issues of the Chapel Hill News Leader, click here. To learn more about the Chapel Hill Historical Society, please visit their website here.
DigitalNC is happy to announce that we now host 29 issues of the Chapel Hill High School student newspaper, Proconian, from the years 1944 and 1945. Along with the newspapers, this upload includes 3 Chapel Hill High School yearbooks, Hillife, from the years 1969, 1970, and 1971. This brings our collection of Hillife yearbooks to 42. We would like to thank our partners at the Chapel Hill Historical Society for making these additions possible.
The Proconian issues focus on high school life, often with attention to the Chapel Hill High School Wildcats sports events and highlights. Other school events and faculty are frequently spotlighted. As the issues encompass the end of World War II, there are brief mentions of wartime activities, such as students entering the armed forces and chemical warfare demonstrations.
Covering a completely different generation of Chapel Hill High School students, the Hillife yearbooks depict the usual fare, including photos of the graduating class, clubs, sports, and popular yearly events.
To view all the Hillife yearbooks, from 1925 to 1971, click here. To take a look at the Proconian issues by front page, click here. And to learn more about the Chapel Hill Historical Society, you can visit their home page here.
Thanks to our partners at the Chapel Hill Historical Society and their volunteer Julie Wiker, over 200 new photos were recently added to DigitalNC. Wiker is a student at UNC-CH’s School of Information & Library Science and she generously spent Fall 2019 scanning the photos and preparing their metadata to provide access online.
Thanks to recent work by our neighbors at the Chapel Hill Historical Society, we are pleased to announce that an additional eleven early yearbooks from Chapel Hill High School have been digitized and are now available on DigitalNC.
The earliest added was from 1925, labeled “Volume I,” most likely the earliest high school yearbook available for Chapel Hill. It contains a lengthy history of the school. The new additions also include a few volumes from the early 1960s, showing a much different school, recently integrated and on the verge of moving to a larger, modern building away from Franklin Street. There are now 37 issues of “Hillife,” spanning the years 1925-1965, available in the North Carolina High School Yearbooks collection on DigitalNC.
Betsy Bowman (center): Sponsor of the S.S. Chapel Hill Victory
The Chapel Hill Historical Society has recently provided for digitization a photo album and the preserved champagne bottle from the christening of the S.S. Chapel Hill Victory in 1944. The photo album pictures the christening event and also provides information on the making of Victory and LST ships during World War II in the Bethlehem-Fairfield Shipyard in Baltimore, Maryland. Betsy Bowman, pictured above and below, was the sponsor for the S.S. Chapel Hill Victory, and so she was invited to Baltimore to perform the christening on December 4, 1944.
The christening of the S.S. Chapel Hill Victory by Betsy Bowman
Before the christening took place, the sacrificial bottle of champagne was placed in a brightly colored bag so that no pieces of glass would be lost during the christening. The bottle was then smashed against the bow of the ship, and the S.S. Chapel Hill Victory was ready to be launched! After the ceremony, the champagne-covered bag was allowed to dry, and is now in the care of the Chapel Hill Historical Society.
The sacrificial bottle of champagne from the christening of the S.S. Chapel Hill Victory
The Robert Brown papers are housed in Wilson Library as part of the Southern Historical Collection. The collection contains correspondence with politicians, activists, and even comedian Bill Hicks. The paper is now available via DigitalNC thanks to our partner Chapel Hill Historical Society.
To celebrate 14 years of NCDHC (on May 12, 2009 our first blog post went live with our first scanned collection), the staff of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center have all picked a favorite item from the collection to share. Check them out below – and then we invite you to visit digitalnc.org and find some favorite NC items yourself!
Lisa Gregory, Program Coordinator for the NCDHC
When pressed to pick one item (!) I have to go with the September 26, 1874 issue of the Fayetteville Educator. The Educator ran for a single year and was published by W. C. Smith who went on to publish a later title, the Charlotte Messenger. A few years ago while researching Black newspapers in North Carolina, I happened to run across a reference to the Educator as the earliest known Black newspaper in the state. Other sources generally cite the Star of Zion, which began a short time later and is still published today. With the help of some of our partners we were able to locate and add the Fayetteville Educator to DigitalNC. I picked this item because many 19th and 20th century newspapers written by and documenting the Black community are no longer extant or are extremely rare. For me, the fact that we can now share this online on behalf of our partners really encapsulates why we do what we do at NCDHC.
The educator (Fayetteville, N.C.) 1874-1875, September 26, 1874, Image 1, presented by the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center in partnership with The Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture and Charlotte Mecklenburg Library.
Stephanie Williams, NCDHC Programmer
Still from Wadesboro, 1938 film by H. Lee Waters
Movies of Local People (H. Lee Waters): Wadesboro, 1938
H. Lee Waters traveled around the state in the 1930s and 1940s setting up a camera on streetcorners and filming townspeople. There are a handful of these films available on DigitalNC, and one of my favorites is from Wadesboro in 1938. Waters captured people just going about their daily business, which is fun for so many reasons–but my favorite part is seeing peoples’ personalities, and realizing that the way we react when we realize we’re on camera hasn’t changed in 85 years.
Kristen Merryman, Digital Projects Librarian
“Adult feeding bear by Fontana Lake”
Adult feeding bear by Fontana Lake
This is a photograph in our collection I always come back to because it really pulls together many things I love – bears, the gorgeous lakes of the NC mountains, and a good cookout in a park. This obviously portrays something many a park ranger would shun but I love the NC Variety Vacationland vibes it gives off! We digitized this photograph as part of a larger batch from the Graham County Public Library in Robbinsville, NC when we were there for an onsite scanning visit in 2018 and ourselves got to enjoy many lovely views of Fontana Lake and the surrounding mountains.
One of the things I love about our site is how many yearbooks, student handbooks, and students newspapers we have—I love seeing family and friends’ photos from when they were in school. These materials are where I see my own life reflected the most because they capture so many familiar places and people. It’s interesting to see how our schools have changed over the last century but also how so many things are apparently inherent to being a teenager. While I think all of our student publications are fantastic, this handbook is special to me for a few reasons. Not only is it a glimpse at my alma mater (go Deacs!), but it also features an excellent photo of one of my favorite professors in his early years of teaching.
Geoff Schilling, Newspaper Technician
Cat’s Cradle The DigitalNC item I chose is of a Chapel Hill location that means a great deal to me. The first four photos in this set are of the Cat’s Cradle’s early to late ‘80s location at 320 W. Franklin St. (now The Crunkleton), but the last three images are the reason I’m sharing it. Down this alley is their previous location at 405 1/2 W. Rosemary St., which they started occupying around 1971. In 1983, after the Cradle moved out, it became a venue called Rhythm Alley and they stuck around until 1987. At the end of that year the Skylight Exchange took over the space and in 2003 the one-and-only Nightlight came into existence. The Nightlight is an experimental music oasis where you can see everything from outsider folk legend Michael Hurley to Detroit techno heavyweight DJ Psycho. In addition to being my favorite venue in the world, it’s also the preferred stop of touring musicians from all over the country. The landscape of this “Rhythm Alley” has barely changed over the last half-century (save for a healthy amount of graffiti), but its legacy has grown with each new chapter.
Last year I had the opportunity to digitize some amazing slide images that were taken during several Chapel Hill Boy Scout Troop 835 and Girl Scout Troop 59 trips over the years courtesy of our partner Chapel Hill Historical Society. Many of the slides from these trips feature beautiful scenery and fun, but this particular photograph from the August 1973 Quebec trip is one of my favorite items on our site. In addition to being a great candid, I think it’s the individual’s sense of jollity and peacefulness portrayed in this moment of the trip that really makes it a top-pick of mine.
Thanks to our partner, Chapel Hill Historical Society, a batch containing three scrapbooks and over 100 slides featuring trips and experiences of Chapel Hill Boy Scout Troop 835 and Girl Scout Troop 59 are now available on our website.
Front Page of the Lincoln High School Echo, February 1953
Several fragmentary issues of The Lincoln Echo, the student newspaper of Chapel Hill’s Lincoln High School, are now online at DigitalNC. The copies in this batch, most of which only include one or two pages of a given issue, span the time period between 1944 and 1964. The school served the Black community in Chapel Hill prior to integration. While incomplete, the materials within provide interesting insights into the concerns of Chapel Hill high school students during this pivotal moment in North Carolina history. The issues cover news topics like sports, facility renovations, and school events, as well as creative works by students and advertisements for local businesses.
The newly digitized Lincoln Echo materials make up another contribution to DigitalNC by the Chapel Hill Historical Society. For more information, visit their DigitalNC partner page or their website.
This week we have another 34 titles up on DigitalNC! While this batch focuses heavily on newspapers from Hendersonville, Goldsboro, and Greensboro, it also includes Fayetteville, Henderson, Albemarle, Clinton, Burlington, and our first addition from Bush Hill. Bush Hill (renamed Archdale in 1886) was home to the Annie Florence Petty, who was the first professionally educated and trained librarian in the state of North Carolina. Petty (born 1871) was a founding member of the North Carolina Library Association and, in keeping with her Quaker upbringing, she was also the first secretary of the North Carolina Friends Historical Society. After her prosperous, four-decade long career building the library at the North Carolina State Normal and Industrial School (now the University of North Carolina at Greensboro) and other libraries across the state, she retired in 1933 and moved into the family home she shared with her equally successful, chemist sister, Mary Petty.
Mary (left) and Annie Petty in 1952. Image via uncghistory.blogspot.com
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.
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.
