This week we have another 34 newspaper titles up on DigitalNC, including four from Carthage, North Carolina: Former home to the Tyson & Jones Buggy Company.
The “Jones” of the Tyson & Jones Buggy Company was William T. Jones, who was born into slavery and became one of the most well-respected and wealthiest businessmen in Carthage. Born near Elizabethtown in 1833, his father was a plantation owner and his mother was an enslaved person. Prior to the Civil War, he was given his freedom and moved to Fayetteville to work as a painter for a carriage company. It was there that his work was noticed by Thomas Tyson, who convinced him to come to Carthage to work for his fledgling operation in 1857, and by 1859 Jones was made a partner in that company. In 1861, Jones joined the Confederate Army and was subsequently captured by Union forces. While imprisoned at Fort Delaware, Jones began making moonshine from potato peelings and bread crusts and selling it to the Union guards. After Sherman’s March left much of the area devastated, it was the Jones’ moonshine money that allowed the Tyson & Jones Buggy Company to restart production, employing many struggling locals and helping to restart the local economy.
Even though Jones was a captain of industry, North Carolina House of Representatives candidate, and Sunday School teacher with a legacy that lives on in Carthage, it was not widely acknowledged that he wasn’t White. It wasn’t until recently that him being a Black man was recognized as fact and his full story was told.
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 week we have another 41 titles up on DigitalNC! In this batch we have a lot of new papers from Durham and Beaufort, as well as our first additions from Mocksville, Pine Forest, and Kenansville!
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 week we have added issues from 35 different newspaper titles! One of the titles we have is a paper from the now non-existent town of Buffalo Springs, North Carolina. According to this News & Record article, the Harnett County town ceased to exist when the turpentine industry in the area died out. But the intriguing thing about these papers isn’t the ghost of this town, it’s the man who wrote them: John McLean Harrington. Professor and author Michael Ray Smith penned this fascinating paper about Harrington and his newspapers, in which he writes: “Shortly before the Civil War, the son of an affluent Southern family began a journalism career unlike any in his community, his state, or even the nation and produced 305 handwritten newspapers, perhaps the greatest single output of handwritten newspapers by any American journalist.” Harrington had a subscription list of roughly 100 people and would painstakingly copy each individual paper by hand, even though printing presses were widely available at the time. In 1858, when Harrington was writing issues of The Nation, he was only 19 years old. The young man’s ambitions didn’t stop with just being a journalist. He also apparently worked as a bookkeeper, surveyor, educator, sheriff, and postmaster in Harnett County. While his accomplishments were quite impressive, he was also a man of contradiction. Smith writes this of the rural Renaissance man: “He talked of a partner but never revealed the colleague’s identity—if he indeed had one. He discussed the evil of drinking but died an alcoholic. He served as a member of the Confederate militia only to swear an oath that he would always remain a loyal Unionist. Perhaps Harrington tended to do or say whatever was expedient or expected at the time. Maybe he was himself just conflicted in numerous ways.”
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.
Thanks to support from the North Caroliniana Society and to our partner, Harnett County Public Library, new issues of The Daily Record are now available on our website. This batch expands our current collection of the paper to include 1956 to 1962. Published Monday through Friday, The Daily Record suppled Dunn and Harnett County with local and global news stories. Today, the paper continues to be published in Dunn, North Carolina.
Starting in 1945, citizens of North Carolina fought for the establishment of a minimum wage in the state. The article to the right, “14-Year Fight Ends; Action First In South,” highlights the establishment of a minimum wage by North Carolina’s General Assembly in 1959–the first state south of Pennsylvania to do so. The bill guaranteed that all workers in the state would be paid a minimum of 75 cents an hour, equivalent to about $6.88 an hour today.
To learn more about Harnett County Public Library, please click here.
A new newspaper title, The Daily Record, has been added to the DigitalNC collection thanks to our new partner, the Dunn Area History Musuem. 1134 issues spanning the years 1950-56 are available to view online, expanding our coverage of Harnett County, North Carolina.
Succeeded by The Dunn Dispatch, The Daily Record supplied the local area with publications on global and local news every Monday through Friday. Major events reported on in this upload include the end notes of World War II, the beginning of the Cold War, the Korean War, and the 1952 Presidential election of Eisenhower and Vice President Nixon. While headlines often revolved around global politics, The Daily Record notably made Klan arrests and court rulings front page news, as well as acknowledging moments of national desegregation.
This holiday season join us here on the blog for the 12 Days of NCDHC. We’ll be posting short entries that reveal something you may not know about us. You can view all of the posts together by clicking on the 12daysofncdhc tag. And, as always, chat with us if you have questions or want to work with us on something new. Happy Holidays!
Day 9: We’ll Host Items You Scan
Many of our partners have done scanning on their own. However, as we like to joke here at the NCDHC, the scanning is the easy part! It is getting those materials online for the public to view that can be really complicated. Hosting materials online is a key part of our expertise and we are happy to take any items you’ve scanned yourself and load them into DigitalNC for you. We have helped partners who have just scanned a yearbook or two, as well as partners who have embarked on large scale community projects such as DigitalKM, or who have had to migrate their digital collection from their own system, as in the case of Harnett County Public Library.
One of over 200 scrapbooks Transylvania County Library scanned themselves and sent to us to host on DigitalNC
If you are interested in sending us materials you’ve scanned yourself, we have some guidelines for how we’d like to receive it.
All scanned images must have a minimum image quality of 300 dpi, and preferably come as TIFFs, although we will take JPEGs. There can’t be any watermarks on the images.
We’ll need at least minimal metadata with a title and unique filename for each item. We will be happy to share a template for you to fill out to send along with the objects and can discuss any questions that arise with that template. This page on metadata requirements is also a handy guide to check.
The scanned items and their corresponding metadata can be sent via FTP, a cloud based storage site such as Dropbox or Google Drive, or you can send us an external hard drive or thumb drive. Once we receive the items, we add it to our normal queue and get them online.
Check back on Thursday as we reveal Day 10 of the 12 Days of NCDHC!
We’ve taken a look back at this year’s top 5 most viewed items on DigitalNC, and they may not be what you expect! Here they are in order of popularity.
The most viewed single item on DigitalNC was this photo:
Want to know more about Madison Beach? We did, and found this page in a Rockingham County Public Library volume by local author John T. Dallas to help us out.
This picture of Jim Thornton and his band includes Congressman Harold D. Cooley and singer Mozelle Phillips. The band played at dances and events, as well as on the radio and a live country music television show out of Raleigh entitled “Saturday Night Country Style.”
From the 1880s, this postcard shows the bridge spanning Contentnea Creek in Wilson County, with “Wiggin’s Mill” and the reservoir waterfall in the background. Wiggin’s Mill was a sawmill, and can be found in newspapers of that era as a local landmark both on land and on the creek. The Wilson Advancedescribes the Wiggin’s Mill bridge floating away in a “freshet” in June 1891.
Taken together, yearbooks are the most popular items available on our site. It’s not surprising that one made the top 5 list. This 1976 Yackety Yack has spectacular photographs with 1970s style.
For the curious, here are some overall numbers for DigitalNC for 2017. Here’s looking forward as we work with partners to share even more of North Carolina’s cultural heritage in 2018!
The CCCC Etheridge High Tech building under construction
An aerial view of the Central Carolina Technical College Harnett campus
A new batch of over 130 images from Central Carolina Community College have now been added to DigitalNC. This is our seventh set of photos and it brings our exhibit A Pictorial History of Central Carolina Community College to almost 3,000 photos!
Much of this set is about the various buildings around CCCC, including the construction of the CCCC Pittsboro campus, the construction of the CCCC Etheridge High Tech building, and the planning and construction of the CCCC Harnett County campus. Also included are photos of the NC School of Telecommunications, the Harnett Correctional Institute, and several aerial photographs taken of the CCCC Campus in Harnett County.
Three newspapers from Dunn, North Carolina are now available online. All three were recommended for digitization by the Harnett County Public Library.
The Central Times was a weekly newspaper published in the first half of the 1890s. It’s main focus were events happening in Dunn and the wider Harnett County area, although national and world events were also well covered in it’s pages. The issues available in DigitalNC span 1891-1895.
The County Union was also a weekly publication in Dunn, NC, which replaced The Central Times. However, while the Times seemed to have a fairly even-handed take on events, the County Union was definitely a Democratic party supporting publication. Big topics in the paper include the Gold vs. Free Silver debates of the 1896 Presidential election, as well as the push for a Democratic takeover of the North Carolina government in 1898. The issues of the County Union available in DigitalNC cover 1895-1899.
As a result of the win by the Democrats in the 1900 election in North Carolina, the County Union changed it’s name to The Democratic Banner in 1901. Continuing to print local and state news with a partisan slant, the paper covers the start of the twentieth century in North Carolina and the strong shift in politics in the state as Governor Aycock took charge. Topics including prohibition support, anti-women’s suffrage editorials, and segregation becoming increasing institutionalized are all topics of discussion. Issues covering 1901-1902 are included in DigitalNC.
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.
