Blast from the Past

by  Gretchen Beilfuss Witt  Rowan Public Library

                Ever get a hankering to reminisce about the majorette from the high school band,  the varsity football squad or how accurate the superlative choices were.    Do you wonder what your parents looked like when they were in high school?   You could discover the answer in the Rowan Public Library collection of annuals.   RPL has a collection of annuals, predominantly high school annuals which have been acquired primarily through donations over the years and are kept as part of the History Room collection.   As such they are available for perusal only in the History Room and not for checkout.    The History Room also has a few yearbooks from middle schools or junior high schools and elementary schools.   Included in the collection are annuals from schools that no longer exist, for example Rowan Memorial Hospital Nursing School, Rowan Technical Institute, Dunbar and the Farm Life School.    Recently, the History Room had the annuals from 1921 through 1967 for Salisbury High/Boyden High School digitized.  These annuals are available online by through a link on the History Room webpage.   Once on the RPL website, choose History & Genealogy, the menu will give a number of choices for items – choose The Echo 1921-1967.  Clicking on this link will bring up “Digital NC” which is hosting our yearbooks.   From this page look to the upper left and find a box with a graduation cap and the word “Yearbooks”; click on that box and a chronologically listing of the yearbooks will appear.  Choose which year to look at and the book will appear in the “Internet Archive” book reader mode – basically this allows you to flip pages as though you had the book in front of you rather than viewing it as one long document in a computer file. 

                The History Room would like to continue having the county yearbooks digitized and made available.  Dunbar and J.C. Price are two of the more popular high schools, unfortunately, the collection is not complete.    Former Dunbar principal Ezra Gilliam was kind enough to give RPL many of the Dunbar annuals including the first annual created in 1950 consequently  the library is missing only 1952 and 1953 of the Dunbar High School annuals.   Price High School served as a high school exclusively from 1932 to 1969 yet RPL has only a handful of the Price yearbooks.  The first decade is missing completely and the History Room has less than half of the remaining yearbooks between 1942 and 1969. 

A number of institutions in the county, Woodleaf or Granite Quarry for example, were high schools in the early 1900s but then were converted to other uses as the school system grew.   The library would love to have any yearbooks that are from a current or past school operating in Salisbury and Rowan County.  Anyone who has annuals that they would be willing to donate to the library or who would be willing to lend the annuals for a period of time in order to get them digitized, please contact Gretchen Witt, Supervisor of the Edith M. Clark History Room.   In the meantime, enjoy the Salisbury/Boyden high school annuals now available online.