A Seemingly Insignificant Sentence…

A longtime NC Collection researcher recently pointed out the following sentence from Chancellor Bill Aycock’s report to the UNC System President for 1957/1958:

“Lieutenant Dean Smith, currently serving in the Air Force, has been employed to succeed Mr. James A. Freeman as Assistant Basketball Coach.”

And so it began…

A Cool “Then and Now”

One of our photographic archivists, Elizabeth Hull, recently emailed the following link:

http://thesepiatownblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/great-thennow-view-of-historic-dorothea.html

I’ve seen this black-and-white photograph a hundred times–if I’ve seen it once, and I always knew it was in North Carolina…but I never bothered to find out where or if the building still existed. Now that I know, I feel a field trip to Person County coming on.

North Carolina Awards For 2010

Check out this story for the list of North Carolina Award recipients for 2010:

Six North Carolinians to get state’s highest award

The UNC Library has scanned programs from 1964 to 2008, which give information on the award and that year’s recipients. They are available for viewing at the following link:

North Carolina Awards

A North Carolinian With Lewis And Clark

We recently had a question about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and whether or not the University Library had any relevent resources. The Library does, but it made me start thinking (of course) about whether or not there was a North Carolina connection. I found at least one…a member of the Corps of Discovery was from North Carolina. Can anyone name this person? Were there others? Are there other North Carolina connections of which our loyal readers know?

Happy 75th To The Blue Ridge Parkway!

Everything these days is green, environmentally friendly, or recycled. So, in an effort to recycle and love the environment, we are recycling a past “This Month in North Carolina History” for this month’s edition. The item was written by Harry McKown in 2004: September 1987 – The Blue Ridge Parkway.

However, there’s another good reason to recycle this article…this weekend the Parkway is celebrating its 75th anniversary. See: Blue Ridge Parkway, 1935-2010.

Craft Revival: Shaping Western North Carolina Past and Present

NCM received the following announcement and wanted to share it with our readers…

The Hunter Library, in collaboration with Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, has mounted a collection of photographs of a delegation of Cherokee craftsmen with Joan Mondale at the groundbreaking of the National Park Service’s Folk Art Center. Taken on the Blue Ridge Parkway, the photos document some of the attendees and crafts demonstrated at the 1977 event. To see the photos, go to http://craftrevival.wcu.edu and type “Mondale” into the Search box.

Craft Revival: Shaping Western North Carolina Past and Present is a project of Hunter Library at Western Carolina University. Its aim is to create a research-based website that documents an historic effort to revive handcraft in the western part of the state. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, western North Carolina craftsmen formed the cornerstone of a revived interest in things handmade to create a movement referred to as the Craft Revival. The online archival repository includes over 4,500 documents, photographs, and craft objects that are housed in the collections of regional museums, guilds, and craft schools. Hunter Library has organized these into a searchable database available via the web.