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Over 30 newspaper titles added to DigitalNC!

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newspapers

Header for July 17, 1867 issue of Hendersonville paper "The Pioneer"

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.

Tyson & Jones Buggy Company ad from the February 16, 1888 issue of the Southern Protectionist

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:

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.

 

Livingstone College and Boyden High School Yearbooks Now Available

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underrepresented yearbooks

Thanks to our partner, Rowan Public Library, Boyden High School and Livingstone College yearbooks are now available on our website. This batch includes yearbooks from 1941 for Boyden High School and 1930, 1946-1947 for Livingstone College.

Livingstone College is a historically Black college located in Salisbury, North Carolina. In 1879, the college was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Zion Church and was just a single building on 40 acres of land. In 1887,  the school was renamed from Zion Wesley College to Livingstone College in honor of David Livingstone—a philanthropist, explorer, and Christian missionary. Today, the college consists of more than 15 buildings on over 300 acres of land with over a thousand enrolled students. 

Pictures of students and the Livingstone College campus.Several pictures featuring various groupings of Livingstone College students.

In 1904, Salisbury High School was founded in to educate children of the area. Twenty-two years after its founding, in 1926, the school’s name changed to Boyden High School after a new school building was built. The school remained Boyden for almost 50 years until the name was reverted back to Salisbury High School in 1971. 
Page in the 1941 Salisbury High School yearbook detailing the various statistics of the class of 1941 including average height, eye color, etc.

To learn more about Rowan Public Library, please visit their website.

To view our North Carolina African American high school yearbooks, visit our African American high schools collection.

For more yearbooks from across North Carolina, visit our yearbook collection.

New Blueprints, Maps, and Artifacts from the Chapel Hill Historical Society Tell the Story of Chapel Hill

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maps memorabilia

Almost a hundred new maps and blueprints have been digitized and added to DigitalNC, courtesy of our partner, the Chapel Hill Historical Society. Dated from 1875 to June 2007, these maps illustrate how much the city of Chapel Hill and Orange County has changed in the last century and a half.

A map of how Chapel Hill would have appeared in 1818. Franklin St and Columbia St are featured.

This new batch contains many different types of maps and blueprints, including maps of Chapel Hill neighborhoods, site plans for individual properties, blueprints of the Chapel Hill Public Library and its additions, maps of the city’s outer limits, and township tax maps.

A color-coded map of the Glen Lennox properties circa 2008

Beyond recent maps of Chapel Hill, this batch also includes several other interesting items. One map sketches Orange County, as well as the neighboring counties that ceded land between the years of 1752 and 1849. Another sketches the state of North Carolina as it appeared in 1753, when Anson and Rowan Counties stretched to the west. Another map, from 1976, sketched Chapel Hill as it would have appeared in 1818.

Other items in the collection tell their own Chapel Hill stories. In 1925, R.L. Strowd, a local landowner, sold a number of lots throughout Orange County, and those deeds of land sales are also included in this collection. Another record of land sale is included, when Samuel Morgan sold land to Jesse Hargraves in 1845 for the cost of $4,300. This batch of items also includes a book that contains detailed maps of the Chapel Hill and Carrboro area from the 1960s through the 1980s, as well as an informational pamphlet from 1953 advertising the Lake Forest neighborhood of Chapel Hill.

By adding yet more maps, blueprints and artifacts to our collection, we can learn and understand more about the city that DigitalNC calls home. To see more materials from the Chapel Hill Historical Society, visit their contributor page or check out their website.

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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.

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