DigitalNC is happy to announce that additional newspapers from Northampton County, N.C. are ready to view online. With the contributions from our partners, Northampton County Museum, we were able to fill gaps and add a new title, The Northampton County Times-News, to our online collection. Specific additions include:
While we shed light onto the The Patron and Gleaner and Roanoke-Chowan Times in a recent blog post, we have yet to expand on one of the succeeding titles, The Northampton County Times-News.
In circulation from 1960 to 1974, The Northampton County Times-News published from Rich Square and Jackson every Thursday, but served all towns in Northampton County. Highlighting both local and global news, this title served its various communities with periodicals such as the Farm Review & Forecast and consistently updated (not to mention wittily titled) want ads. Football reigned in this area as a popular sport for all ages and genders to participate in and, as such, was frequently reported on.
For a full view of all Northampton County titles mentioned, click here. To view more of The Northampton County Times-News, click here. And if you would like information on the Northampton County Museum, you can visit their homepage here.
This front page of the January 2, 1919 Roanoke-Chowan Times includes a poem for World War I casualties.
One of our goals is to increase representation of counties and communities that are under-represented on DigitalNC. Most recently we’ve been focusing on around 10 counties; one of these is Northampton County. Today we’re happy to have added newspapers from that county, thanks to an inquiry from the Northampton County Museum.
We’ve added two titles, the Roanoke Patron (9 issues from 1883-1891) and the Roanoke-Chowan Times (1,237 issues from 1892-1926). The latter actually encompasses a few predecessor titles, including The Gleaner and The Patron and Gleaner.
The Roanoke Patron was published in Potecasi, N. C. and it targeted farmers who were members of the North Carolina Grange organization. The issues we have available report on Grange events and exhort its readers to support the Grange’s leaders and causes.
The Roanoke-Chowan Times and its predecessors were published alternatively in Lasker and Rich Square N.C. This is a traditional community newspaper, with personal news from around the county, state news, and syndicated anecdotes and stories. The years we’ve added include the turn of the century and World War I.
Right now these are the only newspapers we have available from Northampton County but we hope to see more online in the future. You can search and browse all of our newspapers on our newspaper browse page.
Twenty years worth of The Chowan Herald has recently been transferred to a digital format from a microfilm one, and these issues are now available on DigitalNC. These new additions cover Edenton’s news from 1934 until 1956 and cover all manner of Chowan County news. This paper is made available thanks to our new partner Shepard-Pruden Memorial Library.
Among other things, the paper frequently shares images of local homes and businesses, though the digitized microfilm is sometimes difficult to make out:
The paper also often includes a comic strip, “Facts You Never Knew!!!”:
To see more news from Edenton, and to learn more about The Chowan Herald, click here.
An advertisement for Ahoskie Department Store in the March 9, 1923 issue.
The Hertford County Herald, courtesy of Chowan University, is the newest paper available on DigitalNC, with issues up that span the years 1914-1923. The Hertford County Herald was established in 1910, and was published in the town of Ahoskie, North Carolina. The paper, which came out every Friday, was comprised of 8 dense pages to keep residents of Hertford County informed.
The Hertford County Herald covered news primarily in Ahokie and surrounding towns in Hertford County, such as Winton, Murfreesboro, and Como. Included were stories about the economy, agricultural conditions, politics, social events and meetings, fashion trends, and more. The paper also had a section called “State News in Digest” that covered a wide range of news from across North Carolina, and advertisements from local and regional businesses.
To see more materials from Chowan University, visit their DigitalNC partner page, or take a look at their website.
Staff at Shepard-Pruden Memorial Library (L-R) Destinee Williams, Claudia Resta, Brandy Goodwin, Larry the Mascot, and Jennifer Finlay
This year marks the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center’s 10th anniversary, and to celebrate we’ll be posting 10 stories from 10 stakeholders about how NCDHC has impacted their organizations.
Today’s 10 for 10 Q&A is from Jennifer Finlay, Chowan County Librarian at Shepard-Pruden Memorial Library. (Library’s home page | NCDHC contributor page) We’ve worked with the Library to digitize issues of The Chowan Herald out of Edenton, NC. We were happy to work with them in a successful trial project to accept additional funds from partner organizations for newspaper digitization, too. Read below for more about our partnership with the Shepard-Pruden Memorial Library.
What impact has NCDHC had on your institution and/or on a particular audience that means a lot to you?
We had the good fortune of being chosen to have part of our local newspaper, The Chowan Herald, digitized by NCDHC in 2018. I then proposed an innovative approach to digitizing more years of the paper by having our local historic preservation grantors help fund more years. NCDHC had not done this in the past and the Shepard-Pruden Memorial Library was part of a pilot program. This helps small, rural and lightly funded libraries to be able to do digitization without having to learn all the technical aspects of digitization and hosting the results.
Do you have a specific user story (maybe your own!) about how DigitalNC has boosted research or improved access to important information?
This saves us so much time when we get the phone calls from out of state asking about a Chowan Herald article. We no longer have make time to go upstairs, fire up the microfilm machine, try and find an article with limited reference information and no index. We can either look for it ourselves while on the phone or give the link to the caller and they can have fun reliving the past.
If you were asked to “describe what makes NCDHC great” in a few words, what would they be?
NCDHC as a website is so much more user friendly than the state archives. (Sorry state archives). I love that Lisa Gregory and the decision makers of DigitalNC took a chance on us and tried something new.
From the 1960 Quarterian, Swan Quarter’s High School Yearbook
Today we’re highlighting recently added yearbooks from a number of eastern North Carolina high schools from the 1940s to early 1960s. We lack a lot of yearbooks from the easternmost counties in North Carolina so it’s always a pleasure to add more. This batch includes a range of schools in a variety of counties:
Beaufort County
Chowan County
Dare County
Hyde County
Tyrrell County
Washington County
These yearbooks were contributed for digitization from a private individual, and the Outer Banks History Center is acting as contributor. Take a look at other high school yearbooks from the Outer Banks and nearby counties on our high school yearbooks page.
Front page of the August 17, 1917 issue of the Albemarle Observer
Eight issues of the Albemarle Observer, from Edenton, North Carolina, are now available online. Issues from the “only newspaper published in Chowan County” date from August to November, 1917, and cover news about individuals and businesses throughout the area.
As these issues were published in the midst of World War I, they include listings of Chowan County individuals who had been drafted to serve in the military, those who were required to report for wartime physical examinations, and other wartime news. For information about additional items on DigitalNC from World War I, visit this
blog post.
This week we have 40 more titles on DigitalNC from all across North Carolina! Most of these papers are from Raleigh (such as the long-running Raleigh Evening Times and the Methodist Episcopal paper Raleigh Christian Advocate) as well as many papers from smaller communities. We have Rich Square’s Roanoke-Chowan Times, The Warrenton Gazette from Warrenton, The Roanoke News from Weldon, and Richmond County’s Rockingham Rocket. Whether it’s marriage announcements, classifieds for lost pets, or local elections where the winner barely reaches 100 votes, these newspapers give a glimpse into what small town life in North Carolina was like over a hundred years ago.
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.
This week’s additions include:
- The Southern Home (Charlotte, N.C.) – 1870-1881
- The Tarborough Southerner (Tarboro, N.C.) – 1877-1910
- Warrenton Gazette (Warrenton, N.C.) – 1872-1897
- The Record (Warrenton, N.C.) – 1892-1912
- Roanoke-Chowan Times (Rich Square, N.C.) – 1907-1926
- The Daily Tobacco Plant (Durham, N.C.) – 1888
- The Tobacco Plant (Durham, N.C.) – 1889
- The Times-Mercury (Hickory, N.C.) – 1899-1912
- Rockingham Post-Dispatch (Rockingham, N.C.) – 1923-1924
- Rockingham Rocket (Rockingham, N.C.) – 1888-1890
- Salisbury Daily Sun (Salisbury, N.C.) – 1897-1904
- Salisbury Evening Sun (Salisbury, N.C.) – 1904-1905
- The Salisbury Truth (Salisbury, N.C.) – 1900
- The Salisbury Semi-Weekly Truth-Index (Salisbury, N.C.) – 1900-1903
- Salisbury Daily Truth-Index (Salisbury, N.C.) – 1900
- The Statesville Sentinel (Statesville, N.C.) – 1909-1922
- The Roanoke News (Weldon, N.C.) – 1878-1922
- The Carolina Era (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1871-1872
- Tri-Weekly Constitution (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1876
- The Weekly Constitution (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1876
- Daily Constitution (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1875-1876
- North-Carolina Constitutionalist and Peoples’ Advocate (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1832-1833
- The Weekly North Carolinian (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1868
- The North Carolinian (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1868
- The Raleigh News (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1876-1877
- The Raleigh Weekly News (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1878-1880
- Blasting-Powder for Democrats and Conservatives (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1872
- Southern Illustrated Age (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1875
- The Episcopal Methodist (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1867-1868
- Raleigh Episcopal Methodist (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1869-1870
- Raleigh Christian Advocate (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1894-1899
- Daily Examiner (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1874
- The Raleigh Evening Visitor (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1890
- The Daily Evening Visitor (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1890-1894
- The Raleigh Evening Times (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1905-1906
- The Raleigh Daily Times (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1912
- The Raleigh Daily Tribune (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1897
- The Sentinel (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1866-1867
- The Union Herald (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1919-1922
- Raleigh Weekly Telegram (Raleigh, N.C.) – 1871
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.
Back in August, we announced our annual call for microfilmed newspaper digitization. We asked institutions throughout North Carolina to nominate papers they’d like to see added to DigitalNC. As it is every year, it was an incredibly tough choice – we are typically able to choose between 40-60 reels out of hundreds or thousands nominated. This year we’ve chosen the following titles and years.
| Title |
Years |
Nominating Institution |
| Carolinian (Raleigh) |
1945-1959 |
Olivia Raney Local History Library |
| Chatham Record (Pittsboro) |
1923-1930 |
Chatham County Libraries |
| Chowan Herald (Edenton) |
1934-1956 |
Shepard-Pruden Memorial Library |
| Concord Times |
1923-1927 |
Cabarrus County Public Library |
| Goldsboro News |
1922-1927 |
Wayne County Public Library |
| Yancey Record / Journal |
1936-1977 |
AMY Regional Library System |
For our selection criteria, we prioritize newspapers that document underrepresented communities, new titles, papers that come from a county that currently has little representation on DigitalNC, and papers nominated by new partners. After selection, we ask the partners to secure permission for digitization and, if that’s successful, they make it into the final list above.
We hope to have these titles coming online in mid-2019. If your title didn’t make it this year don’t despair! We welcome repeat submissions, and plan on sending out another call in Fall 2019.
The headline in The Daily Advance announcing the sudden death of the 29th President of the United States.
Over 1300 issues of Elizabeth City’s daily newspaper–The Daily Advance, provided by our partner, Pasquotank County Library, are now digitized. These issues span the time period from 1923-1927, and as indicated by the paper’s name, were published every day except Sundays. The Daily Advance was founded in 1911 and continues to be published online and in print. Elizabeth City is located in Pasquotank County on the North Carolina coast. Currently the paper also covers Currituck, Camden, Perquimans, and Chowan counties.
During the 1920s The Daily Advance covered both national and local news including politics, the economy, and other stories of note. The paper provides a lens to see the nation during the roaring ’20s through the view of coastal North Carolinians. The introduction of new products and industries, dramatic political events, shifts cultural norms, and changing role of the media can be seen in this local paper.
To browse through issues of The Daily Advance, click here. To see more materials from Pasquotank County Library, take a look at their partner page or visit their website.
New women’s fashion trends discussed in the September 14, 1925 issue of The Daily Advance
