This article appeared in the Volume 2, Issue 1 Spring/Summer 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. So…how y’all doing? I don’t know about you, but I’ve found that this generally collegial greeting/query, something you’d say when meeting friends or family socially, now has deeper implications wrought by the pandemic. How are we doing as Appalachian archivists? Many archives – it’s likely that nearly all archives – are closed, or have been closed, hopefully to reopen sometime in the murky future. Smaller repositories may not reopen. Many of our colleagues’ jobs are at stake. Many of us are planning for the…
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Featured Collection, Origin Story Edition: Special Collections at the University of North Carolina Asheville
By Gene Hyde, Head of Special Collections & University Archivist, UNC Asheville This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 3 Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. For this issue of the Appalachian Curator, we take a look at the origins of Special Collections at UNC Asheville. Established in 1977 (and opening its doors in 1978), UNCA’s Special Collections were originally founded as the Southern Highlands Research Center. The 1970s was a fertile decade for Appalachian Studies, Appalachian research, and Appalachian special collections and archives. Much was afoot: the Appalachian Journal was started in 1972, the Appalachian Consortium published the…
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What’s New in Appalachian Special Collections?
This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 3 Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. New collections in regional repositories: Appalachian State University Berea College East Tennessee State University University of North Carolina Asheville Virginia Tech Western Carolina University nbsp; W. L. Eury Collection, Appalachian State University Private William Rufus Barlow Civil War letters – In the summer of 1862, William Rufus Barlow (1827-1865) of King’s Creek, Iredell County, North Carolina was conscripted into the Confederate Army, joining other draftees in Company B of the 18th North Carolina Infantry. The letters sent home by Barlow to his wife, Elizabeth German…
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Special Collections Committee News: Thinking about Special Collections: The Understory Grounding Appalachian History
By Stewart Plein, Special Collections Committee Chair, Appalachian Studies Association This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 3 Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Introduction While reading the newspaper on the first day of this New Year, my attention was drawn to an Associated Press article[i] about the impending opening of a collection of letters between the poet T.S. Eliot and his friend, Emily Hale. Sealed for fifty years at the request of Hale as a stipulation of her donation, the correspondence is now available for the first time. The opening of this collection provides students, scholars, and researchers…
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Editor’s Column
This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 3 Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Welcome to the Winter 2020 issue of the Appalachian Curator, which wraps up our first year of publication. The editors have been pleasantly surprised at how well the Curator has been received. As of this writing, we’ve had over 2,000 unique visitors, and you viewed individual stories and articles over 5,800 times. Thanks for reading …or at least stopping by and checking out the Curator! The Appalachian Curator is a publication of the Special Collections Committee of the Appalachian Studies Association, and we’re featuring an…
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Community Archiving Profile: ᏚᏗᏱᏧᎾᏕᎶᏆᏍᏗᎢ ᎤᏂᏃᎮᎸᏅᎢ – Stories of the Snowbird Day School
By Trey Adcock and Gene Hyde, UNC Asheville This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. By the time Snowbird Day School closed in 1965, about 550 Cherokee children had attended classes in this remote Western North Carolina school, located in the Cherokee community of Snowbird or Tuti Yi (as it is known in the Cherokee language). Quakers had originally run the school in Snowbird but by the beginning part of the 20th century the federal government, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, assumed responsibility for establishing and providing educational services. Snowbird…
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What’s new in Appalachian Special Collections?
This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. New collections in regional repositories: Appalachian State University Berea College East Tennessee State University University of Kentucky University of North Carolina Asheville Virginia Tech Warren Wilson College West Virginia University W. L. Eury Collection, Appalachian State University Paul Ashley Records: A major recent acquisition was the record collection of Paul Ashley of Creston, North Carolina. Ashley was an audiophile who collected all styles and genres of music, but had a particular affinity for Gospel music. At over 22,000 records, this collection contains a…
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Editor’s Column
By Gene Hyde This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 2 Fall 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. Welcome to the second issue of the Appalachian Curator: A newsletter about Appalachian special collections and archives. Just a few weeks after the first issue of the Appalachian Curator was published in March 2019, an arsonist set fire to one of the buildings at the Highlander Research and Education Center in New Market, TN. Initial reports indicated that documents and other materials were destroyed. To find out what happened, and what the results were for Highlander’s rich archival history, we interviewed Susan Williams,…
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Special Collections exhibit at ASA in Asheville
UNC Asheville and Mars Hill University co-hosted the 42nd annual Appalachian Studies Association Conference on the UNC Asheville campus, March 14-17, 2019. To celebrate the newly formed Special Collections Committee at ASA, eleven different special collections in Western North Carolina curated and contributed displays to the exhibit. The follow collections participated: UNC Asheville Mars Hill University Western Carolina University Appalachian State University NC Room, Pack Library Western Regional Archives Blue Ridge Parkway Archives Warren Wilson College Biltmore Estate Carl Sandburg House Swannanoa Valley Museum
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Editor’s Column
By Gene Hyde This article appeared in the Volume 1, Issue 1 Spring/Summer 2019 issue of the Appalachian Curator. Click here to view a PDF of the full issue. In 1966, West Virginia University librarian Robert F. Munn noted that a researcher wanting to write about Appalachia would discover “distressingly little in the way of useful primary and secondary material” about the region. [1] Munn’s observations were later echoed by Appalachian scholars Cratis Williams and Ronald Eller. Lack of archival resources was a problem, and scholars were concerned. Over the decades since Munn identified this problem, archivists and librarians throughout Appalachia have worked to identify, collect, arrange, describe, and make…
