Hundreds of new photos, documents and artifacts have been newly digitized at DigitalNC, courtesy of our partners, the Kings Mountain Historical Museum and the Mauney Memorial Library. These digitized materials are part of a joint project between the two institutions, DigitalKM.
Vice President Rockefeller speaking at Kings Mountain High School in 1975 in celebration of the bicentennial.
Included in this batch is nearly 600 images and over 50 historical artifacts from Kings Mountain Historical Museum. These photos include blueprints for the U.S. Post Office at Kings Mountain, photos from the Kings Mountain Centennial parade and celebrations, school and class photos, photographs of military personnel, pictures of local clubs, bands, and sports teams, and much, much more.
Some of the artifacts from Kings Mountain Historical Museum include souvenir programs and other memorabilia from the centennial (100 years), sesquicentennial (150 years), and bicentennial (200 years) anniversaries of the Battle of Kings Mountain. This collection also includes a set of different photographs of military personnel, individuals from Kings Mountain, Trinity Episcopal Church in Kings Mountain, sports teams from the Kings Mountain High School, and much, much more.
A Boeing Flying Fortress, purchased with war bonds bought by Kings Mountain residents during WWII.
Also included are over 125 photos from Mauney Memorial Library and over a dozen historical objects. The photos include class pictures from schools around Kings Mountain, photos of churches around Cleveland County, areas and buildings in Kings Mountain, several aerial views of local schools, and much, much more.
Among these artifacts from Mauney Memorial Library are a collection of research binders by Bonnie Mauney Summers, which contain hand-written notes and charts of genealogical research on 3 branches of the Mauney family and others around Kings Mountain. There is also a binder of monthly meeting minutes taken by the secretary of the Kings Mountain House and Garden Club, dating from 1956-1963. Finally, this collection includes a series of different photographs of areas and people around Kings Mountain, as well as a batch of letters to military personnel sent and received during World War II.
Charles E. Neisler Jr, relaxing in the Davidson College Chemistry Lab, circa 1915.
You can learn more about the Kings Mountain Historical Museum by visiting their contributor page or by visiting their website. To learn more about the Mauney Memorial Library, click here to visit their partner page or click here to visit their website. This collection is part of a joint project to digitize materials related to Kings Mountain history. To learn more, visit the DigitalKM website.
Front page of the Bessemer City Messenger, dated May 25, 1895.
An issue of the Bessemer City Messenger has been newly digitized and added to DigitalNC. The issue is date May 25, 1895, making the Messenger one of the oldest newspapers we have on file. Unfortunately, not much else is known about this newspaper, including when it began or when it ended. This 1895 issue is only the second instance of the Messenger being preserved to this day. The only other copy of any issue known to exist is an 1892 edition held in the State Library of North Carolina in Raleigh, N.C.
Published out of Bessemer City, the Messenger served the residents of Gaston County during its circulation. Its articles take a distinctly Populist stance, celebrating Populist Party victories throughout the country in the early 1890s, while also arguing for greater distribution of wealth among workers and increased living conditions for children and women. A number of articles are also dedicated to trade protection, wheat production, manufacturing, and tariffs. For example, the article on the right is dedicated to the rapid expansion of cotton production mills in the South, with North Carolina being a particular spot for growth. While there were some notices of local events and local news among Gaston County and nearby towns in Cleveland County, the majority of this paper’s articles were dedicated to national or international events, creating an interesting dynamic when compared to other North Carolina papers of the time on our site.
Having the Bessemer City Messenger added to our collection is an invaluable resource when it comes to learning about the lives of North Carolinians in the late 1800s.
Civil War diary of William Andrew Mauney.
William Andrew Mauney was a Confederate soldier from North Carolina who kept a diary during the Civil War. The diary, which comes from the Kings Mountain Historical Museum, has been digitized and added to DigitalNC. The Mauney Diary also includes a transcript of the diary, making the text searchable and easier to read.
Mauney was born in Cleveland County, North Carolina, and enlisted at Brevard’s Station on August 6, 1861. He began the diary in December 1861 and continued it through 1865. He wrote about daily life in the army and their movements and battles around North Carolina, Virginia, and up to Pennsylvania. Mauney also lists the names of officers and privates in the Confederate army, writes down finances, rations, and a clothing inventory, and wrote out lyrics of songs that were sung in the soldiers’ camp (below). Along with the Civil War Diary are a letter from William Andrew Mauney to his father and a receipt fragment from the diary.
You can see more from Kings Mountain Historical Museum here and visit their website.
“Songs for Camp.” Mauney writes out lyrics to camp songs in his Civil War diary.
William Andrew Mauney’s letter to his father during the Civil War.
This week we have another 70 titles up on DigitalNC including over 1,000 issues of The Robesonian, 1,000 issues of The Western Sentinel, 3,000 issues of The Reidsville Review, 4,000 issues of The News and Observer, and almost 4,000 issues of the Salisbury Evening Post!
In the March 8th, 1914 issue of The News and Observers we have an article detailing a practice game played by the Baltimore Orioles while in Fayetteville. This happens to be the game where a 19 year old George Herman “Babe” Ruth hit his first home run as a professional baseball player. Ruth was also given his iconic nickname “Babe” while in Fayetteville on this trip.
The News and Observer, March 8th, 1914
Image via The Fayetteville Observer
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:
Asheboro
Asheville
Belhaven
Brevard
Charlotte
Cherryville
Clayton
Concord
Cooleemee
Creedmoor
Durham
East Bend
Elizabeth City
Forest City
Gastonia
Goldsboro
Greenville
Kenly
Leaksville
Lenoir
Lincolnton
Lumberton
Mocksville
Mooresville
Moravian Falls
New Bern
Raleigh
Red Springs
Reidsville
Rocky Mount
Rutherfordton
Salisbury
Selma
Shelby
Smithfield
Spruce Pines & Burnsville
Statesville
Taylorsville
Washington
Waynesville
Wilmington
Windsor
Winston-Salem
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.
Thanks to our partner, Henderson Institute Historical Museum, a batch containing Henderson Institute school census cards from the early 1900s are now available on our website. These cards feature various information on students including their name, grades, marriage status, address, birth dates, birthplace, and more.
Individual school census card for Henderson Institute student E. Roy Brandon.
Established and operated by the Freedmen’s Board of the United Presbyterian Church to educate the Black community, the Henderson Institute opened its doors to students of Vance County in 1887. The school remained opened for 83 years before its operations as an official high school ceased in 1970 due to integration. During its years of operation, the school served as the only secondary school open to Black individuals in Vance County. In 1986, the Vance County Board of Education deeded the school’s Library Science Building to the Henderson Institute Alumni Association. With funding from graduates, friends, and the general assembly, the association restored and renovated the property. Today the building houses the Henderson Institute Historical Museum.
To learn more about the Henderson Institute Historical Museum, please visit their website.
To view more materials from North Carolina’s African American high schools, please view our North Carolina African American High Schools Collection.
Thanks to our partners at Mauney Memorial Library, DigitalNC is proud to add 1,700 new additions of The Kings Mountain Herald as well as 3 Kings Mountain High School yearbooks. Digitization of the newspapers was funded by Mauney Memorial Library, with hosting provided by DigitalNC.
Distributed from the city of Kings Mountain, the many additions of The Kings Mountain Herald span 1982 – 2015, covering decades of local Cleveland and Gaston county news. Traditional newspaper topics, such as sports, obituaries, and opinion pieces, are continuously explored throughout the years, interspersed in the ’00s with supplements such as “The Great Home Search” and “Medical Matters“. Of note, police reports appear frequently in all decades.
The newest Kings Mountain High School yearbooks, each titled Milestones, come from 1967, 1968, and 1969. They showcase the high school activities of ’60s Kings Mountain teens, including a wide array of clubs.
VICA (Vocational Industrial Club of America) Auto Mechanics club members, Milestones, 1968.
To learn more about The Kings Mountain Herald and see all issues, click here. For more information on Mauney Memorial Library, visit their homepage here, and to view more digitized materials from Kings Mountain and beyond, click here.
In the early days of the North Carolina Digital Heritage Center, we digitized thousands of records created during the Durham Urban Renewal Project. Recently, we revisited these records with the intention of making them more accessible and useful to our partners and the public.
The Durham Redevelopment Commission was established in 1958 with the intention eliminating “urban blight” and improving the city’s infrastructure as more and more personal vehicles filled the city’s streets. Durham Urban Renewal targeted seven areas — one in Durham’s downtown district and six in historically Black neighborhoods including Hayti and Cleveland-Holloway. The projects in these six neighborhoods impacted approximately 9,100, or 11.7%, of Durham citizens at the beginning of the project in 1961. Although the initial timetable for the project was ten years, the project efforts went on for nearly 15 years and was ultimately never completed. By the end of the urban renewal efforts, more than 4,000 households and 500 businesses were razed and a new highway — NC 147 — stretched through the heart of Durham.
Some structures included in the collection, such as the second home for the main branch of the Durham Public Library, outlived the urban renewal project and still stand today. This building is located at 311 East Main Street.
The Durham Urban Renewal Collection contains studies, reports, appraisals, property records, photographs, brochures, and clippings that span the nearly 20 years of urban renewal projects. These materials are artifacts of Durham before, during, and after urban renewal dramatically altered the city.
In an effort to make these materials as accessible and accurate as possible, we recently completed a major cleanup of the collection. Properties are now listed by complete street address. Many of the residential properties — and some commercial properties — were appraised more than once during the urban renewal process. We have consolidated all appraisals, photographs, and other records for individual properties into single listings, and text in these records are full-text searchable. We also used historical maps of the city from the years of urban renewal to provide additional information for unaddressed or mislabeled appraisals and records. In addition to the changes made to improve accessibility by address, we made efforts to ensure that the names of property owners are complete, accurate, and consistent across the collection, so that records may be located more easily in searching by the owners’ names.
The materials in the Durham Urban Renewal Collection came from Durham County Library’s North Carolina Collection and are only a portion of the materials contributed by the library to date. To learn more about the Durham County Library, visit their website or partner page.
Newspapers from across the state continue to be added at rapid pace to DigitalNC. The Press and Carolinian and the Hickory Democrat, two newspapers printed in Hickory, NC are now available online.
The Press and Carolinian, which was a merger between The Press and The Carolinian papers in Hickory in 1887, covers general news of the day both in Hickory and across the country. In their inaugural issue following their merger, the editors state to their readers that, “Our purpose is to spread, not to suppress the truth, and in this we ask the aid of all…We intend to make the Press and Carolinian not only a welcome visitor in every household but an indispensable luxury.” While they claim an air of neutrality, the paper has a definite Democratic slant to its reporting and promoted the Democratic party ticket headed by Grover Cleveland in 1892. Other topics regularly reported on include big issues of the day such as union strikes, tariff disagreements, and an overall focus on the economic conditions of the country. The issues available in DigitalNC cover 1887 until 1892. The Press and Carolinian was recommended for digitization by the Catawba County Library.
The Hickory Democrat is a much flashier looking newspaper than the Press and Carolinian, with issues from 1906 until 1915 available online. On the byline they inform their readers that they provide access to “All the News While It Is News.” One particular feature of the Democrat that makes it stand out is the prevalence of political cartoons on every front page of the paper, relating to both state and national news items. The Hickory Democrat was recommended for digitization by the Hickory Public Library.
Visit our Newspaper Collection for more North Carolina newspapers from DigitalNC.
