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.
Thanks to our partners at Campbell University, DigitalNC is proud to announce that four new yearbooks are now available! These issues of Pine Burr are some of the most recent publications from Campbell’s past, spanning from 2016 to 2023. They will join a collection of over one hundred Campbell yearbooks currently hosted on DigitalNC, some of which reach back into the first decade of the twentieth century.
The new yearbooks reflect student and faculty life immediately before and after the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrating the ways in which university systems adapted both instruction and education to protect the health of its student body. They could prove to be a vital resource for future researchers, which makes their preservation all the more important. Further, the recency of the publications are a useful comparison to Campbell’s older materials, reflecting over a century of growth and change within Harnett County.
You can read new issues of The Pine Burr online at DigitalNC here. Interested in learning more about Campbell University history? Find more resources online at DigitalNC here, or visit Campbell University’s digital archives online here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
