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| Benbow House and Elm Street, looking south. From Album of Greensboro, Greensboro Chamber of Commerce, 1892. |
The Digital Projects unit is excited to announce that the State Library of North Carolina has awarded a
$203,910 LSTA grant to the University Libraries and five community partners to proceed with
Textiles, Teachers, and Troops: Greensboro, North Carolina, 1881-1945. We are honored to be the recipient of this grant award and are tremendously excited to begin the project.
Textiles, Teachers, and Troops will make available more than 175,000 digital images including photographs, manuscripts, rare books, scrapbooks, printed materials, and oral histories documenting the social and cultural development of Greensboro. For the first time, all five colleges and universities in Greensboro, along with the Greensboro Historical Museum, will be collaborating on a project to make primary source materials available online. By documenting the vitally important influence of the textile industry, public and postsecondary education, and the massive World War II military presence,
Textiles, Teachers, and Troops will provide context for understanding the growth of Greensboro from a town of two thousand residents into one of the leading manufacturing and education centers in the Southeast. The project will display these new materials alongside a large body of material already digitized by the partners and will provide the initial content for a larger community‐based history portal.
The project partners for
Textiles, Teachers, and Troops were selected due to their roles as leaders in the preservation and presentation of cultural heritage in Greensboro. Each holds responsibility for a
different and unique perspective on the history and shared culture of the city.
- UNCG University Libraries is the lead institution for the project and will provide content, digitization, metadata creation, website hosting, and long‐term storage of archival masters. In addition, the Project Manager will be based at UNCG. Most of the content will be provided by the Martha Blakeney Hodges Special Collections and University Archives.
- The Holgate Library is the library serving Bennett College, a historically black college established in 1873 which has been an active part of Greensboro’s history, particularly during civil rights movement. The Holgate Library will provide content and metadata for the project.
- The Brock Historical Museum of Greensboro College preserves the history of the College, life at the College, and the College's relation to and influence on both the surrounding communities and society in general. The Brock Museum will provide content and metadata for the project.
- The Friends Historical Collection is the archival repository of Guilford College. Guilford College will provide item selection and metadata creation and will also assist with the creation of contextual materials.
- The Greensboro Historical Museum is the principal collector, interpreter and exhibitor of Greensboro’s history. The museum will provide significant content and will perform much of the digitization and metadata creation of these resources onsite.
- The Bluford Library of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University serves the campus of the largest historically black university in North Carolina. Some digitization and metadata will be done onsite at N.C. A&T State but most will occur at UNCG.
Numerous collections will be digitized in whole or in part as part of the project.
Among the most significant materials related to
the textile industry in Greensboro are the Bernard Cone Photograph Albums and
the Cone Mills White Oak Plant Stereo Card Photographs. Digitizing these
collections will make available for the first time over 1500 images of life in
Greensboro’s textile mills and mill villages. The Cone photographs are
particularly unique in that they were taken by a member of the Cone family,
allowing something of an “insider” perspective into the spaces and the social
and labor history that are preserved in the images. Greensboro’s textile mills
and mill villages will also be documented by the inclusion of Harriet L. Herring’s
book Welfare Work in Mill Villages
and the Cone Mills promotional booklet Thirty
Years of Progress: 1895-1925.
As five of the six partners are institutions of
higher learning, materials relating to education in Greensboro are, of course,
a major part of the project. Particularly significant are the records of
Charles Duncan McIver, first president of the State Normal and Industrial
School (now UNCG). This massive collection, the largest collection to be
digitized as part of Textiles, Teachers,
and Troops, documents the founding of that institution as well as McIver’s
perspective on the town of Greensboro at the dawn of the twentieth century.
Additional education-related collections include course catalogs from UNCG and
Bennett College, plus student handbooks and materials related to Board of
Governors at UNCG’s predecessor institutions. Scrapbooks and correspondence
collections from students at what are now UNCG, Greensboro College, Guilford
College, and N.C. A&T State University document not only student life but
also the culture of the larger Greensboro community in the early to middle
twentieth century. A collection of commercial photographs documents NC A&T
State University and Bennett College in the 1930s and will complement photographs
of UNCG and other institutions that are already online. Guilford College is
also providing an album with numerous photos of that campus in the late
nineteenth century.
Several collections from Guilford College also
document regional education themes in general, particularly in the area of
women’s education (Mary Medenhall Hobbs Papers, Rachel Farlow Taylor papers),
the interaction between colleges (Robert
and Lyra Dann Papers), and Guilford College’s history and connection to the
community (selected series from the Binford papers, Duke Memorial Hall papers).
Also included, however, are several collections
pertaining to public primary and secondary education in Greensboro. The Abraham
Peeler Papers document African American education in the then-segregated city.
The dual system of public education is also a theme of the Greensboro Board of
Education Collection which includes a minute book from 1906 documenting all
aspects of the system’s operations. Finally, a 1937 insurance survey records
all buildings owned by the Guilford County school system at the time, including
plans, photographs, and financial details on the schools. The records of the
Guilford College Parent Teacher Association document activities of a community
school in what is now part of Greensboro during the Depression years.
Relating to the subject of Greensboro’s military
presence, particularly during World War II, probably the most significant
collection is the Paul Younts Papers. Younts was the commanding officer at
Greensboro’s Overseas Replacement Depot (ORD) and the collection documents in
great detail the history of the depot, which was a major presence during World
War II and shaped the development of eastern Greensboro for decades to come.
ORD and its predecessor, Basic Training Center #10 (BTC) are also documented in
the Luis Felicia Papers and the Jerry DeFelice Photographs. Closely related is
a collection of Greensboro promotional guidebooks produced for soldiers coming
to the city. These guidebooks not only reflect the military influence but also
social and cultural life in Greensboro during World War II, as is also true of
the selection of photos from the Carol W. Martin (Martin’s Studio) Collection,
which document both the base and the city in general. Finally, the Klein Family
Papers include material about a notable Greensboro family who housed and
entertained Jewish soldiers stationed or passing through the city. An
additional set of photographs, part of the N.C. A&T State University
Archives photo collection, further documents ORD/BTC-10 and provides a glimpse
into areas of the base that are now part of A&T’s campus.
Additional collections include the Ned Harrison
Collection, including recorded reminiscences of Greensboro during World War II;
a rare 16mm film documenting a visit home by national war hero George
Preddy; the Puckett Family Papers, which
document the home front in Greensboro during World War II; the McDaniel Lewis
Papers, which document this community figure’s activities and correspondence
during World War II; and a collection of scrapbooks pertaining to the World War
II activities of a local chapter of the D.A.R. Finally, the Army Town Exhibit
Files contain material compiled for the Greensboro Historical Museum’s Army
Town exhibit in 1993, including oral histories and other material related to
the military presence in Greensboro during World War II.
To provide additional context into the period, Textiles, Teachers, and Troops will also
include a selection of rare books focusing on Greensboro’s development during
the period including Greensboro:
1808-1904 by James W. Albright and several other titles.
The project will also incorporate material already digitized by the UNCG University Libraries and Greensboro Historical Museum as part of other projects, including Greenboro Historical Newspapers, Greensboro Pictorials, and Greensboro City Directories. We envision this as the first step in a larger local history portal that will work with other community institutions to make accessible many more aspects of Greensboro's history.
This grant is made possible through funding from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by the State Library of North Carolina, a division of the Department of Cultural Resources.
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