North Carolina Room
Contact Us:
Email the North Carolina Room
Morganton Public Library
Attn: North Carolina Room
204 S. King Street
Morganton, NC 28655
Telephone: (828) 764-9266
Online Yearbooks
The North Carolina Digital Heritage Center is a statewide digitization and digital publishing program housed in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Digital Heritage Center works with cultural heritage institutions across North Carolina to digitize and publish historic materials online.
Ancestry Library Edition is available at Morganton, Valdese, and C.B. Hildebrand branch libraries. Access is granted
on-site only to library computers and on personal devices connected to the library wi-fi. Sponsored by the Friends of the Burke County Public Library and the NC Room.
NewsBank News Herald Collection: Search over 10 years of Morganton history with The News Herald Collection, from 2008 to today. Explore current and archived issues of The News Herald with full-text articles from 2008-2018 and full-color newspaper pages beginning in 2019.
Access is granted to on-site users and remote users with a valid library card.
The News Herald and additional early newspapers of Burke County, going back to 1876, are available on microfilm in the NC Room. Early area newspapers from 1876 to 1924 are also searchable online through NC Live with the Historic North Carolina Digital Newspaper Collection and are accessible with your valid NC library card. For more information about these resources, call 828-764-9266.
Terms and Conditions of Use:
Authorized users are licensed to use the Products solely for access, search, retrieval, viewing, printing, and downloading for non-commercial academic, educational and research purposes. Printing and downloading are limited to insubstantial portions of the data, for temporary storage. All other use is prohibited. The removal or altering of any copyright or other notices within the Product or using any portion of Product for purposes of manual, automated or other machine-assisted indexing or classification of other publications is prohibited. The transmission of Content, including but not limited to by way of email, facsimile or other electronic means is prohibited unless transmission is between Authorized Users. Users may not modify, publish, transmit, display, participate in the transfer or sale of, create derivative works based on, or in any other way exploit any of the Content in whole or in part without the prior written consent of NewsBank and its respective content providers.
Pages from the Past: Index to Morganton Area Newspapers
Pages from the Past: Index to Morganton Area Newspapers
Newspapers are history, showing what life was like at a specific time.
This newspaper index is a compilation of several previous efforts to make information in area newspapers available to the public. Only the index is online. It is searchable by keyword or subject. The index covers the following area newspapers: The Blue Ridge Blade (1876 – 1880), The Farmer’s Friend (1898), The Carolina Mountaineer (1883 – 1884), The Morganton Star (1885 – 1889), The Burke County News (1899 – 1900), The Morganton Herald (1890 – 1901), and The News Herald 1902 – to current. A few articles from The Valdese News, The Charlotte Observer, The Hickory Daily Record, and Asheville Citizen-Times are included.
This index is a good resource for locating information about Burke County schools, churches, civic organizations, events, persons, businesses, industries, places and institutions. It is also searchable by a time frame e.g., January, 1912. Although personal names may be searched, the index is not a good source for obituaries. Obituaries for the years 2000 – mid 2011 are listed. However, only the name and date of the obituary is given without details.
Indexing for the newspapers began with a Title III Program to improve academic programs based on the Higher Education Act of 1965. As part of this program the late Fred Cranford, a local educator, helped initiate a Cultural Heritage Program in Burke County. Under Cranford’s leadership students indexed newspaper articles from early area newspapers. This project was completed in 1969. Since that time, curators of the North Carolina Room in the Morganton Public Library have continued to add to this index. Some years are more thoroughly indexed than other years. This indexing represents keywords and abstracts only. Complete articles are not available online but are available for view on microfilm or in the vertical files in the North Carolina Room at the library. Also available for research in the North Carolina Room are biographies (obituaries) and family files.
For those outside the area, NewsBank, Inc. has digitized newspapers that are word searchable. Since about 2009 The News Herald has been made available at libraries that subscribe to the NewsBank database. Pre-1923 area newspapers are being made available on various sites that are digitizing older newspaper that are no longer covered by copyright. These sites are continually changing. Therefore, using an online search engine may lead you to some useful sites.
