Michael Gramm Coffman
April 9, 2024
When I arrived at Digital Watauga for my first training day in August 2023, I had no idea what to expect. Despite gaining experience in collections management, exhibit design, museum education, and other fields related to historical work, I had virtually no experience digitizing objects within a collection. This inexperience both thrilled and frightened me. However, once I began diving into the collections here at Digital Watauga, the fascinated curiosity of a historian overtook me, and the negative thoughts I carried at the beginning of the semester quickly faded.
On August 21, I embarked on my first collection, the second series of the Cecil Jackson Slide Collection. This series, which includes 102 slide images taken by Cecil Jackson during the 1970s and 80s, provided me with a growing sense of community that would be a staple of many of the collections I digitized that fall. Many of the images dealt with the Junaluska Community here in Boone, and although I knew nothing of this history beforehand, after its completion, the collection helped offer a genuine understanding of a community deeply rooted within the history of Boone and Watauga County.
My second collection, the sixth series of the Bethel Collection (which I digitized from September 7 to 25), showcased 192 images from various periods, locations, and people. The images and documents ranged from portraits and graduation/school photos to pictures of churches, community gatherings, animals, and the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina. Embedded within this collection’s sentiment of community, I discovered the life of Dorothy Virginia Farthing. Although I knew nothing of her when I began, I pieced together only a short strand of her life throughout my time with the collection. Images within the collection illustrate that Dorothy lived from 1921 to 1997, was likely a schoolteacher (multiple images show her posing for a class picture or taking school photos), and was active within her community.
One of several tintype images found in the Bethel Collection, showing an unidentified woman and likely taken between 1880 and 1910. Image courtesy of the Bethel Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
Moving into the tenth series of the Bethel Collection provided many of the same discoveries as the Bethel Six. Working with this collection from September 26 to October 20, I found numerous newspaper articles and other documents that required more time to digitize, identify, and describe than its predecessors. One such newspaper article (Bet-Col-10-005) and a directory for the Oak Grove Baptist Church (Bet-Col-10-025) took considerable time to complete because of the nature of tracking down the many family and singular names that appeared on the documents. Comprised of 192 items, Bethel Collection Series 10 also included four unique tintype photographs (Bet-Col-10-141, 142, 143, 144). These were created around the turn of the 20th century and, while common at the time, are an exciting find today. The series also had four large family albums that revealed trips to Williamsburg and Jamestown in March and July 1960. These, along with others within the collection, once again helped to piece together life during the 20th century for people who lived here in Watauga County.
This image from the Historic Boone Collection helped Gramm make important connections between the original Echoes of the Blue Ridge vignette performances and the subsequent production of Horn in the West. Image courtesy of the Historic Boone Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
While each collection provided Digital Watauga with a unique understanding of life in the High Country, the most exciting and enjoyable collection was the semester’s last assignment, Series One of the Historic Boone Collection. Compiled from a dissolved historical organization within Boone known as Historic Boone, the Historic Boone Collection, especially Series One, is a page-turning and fascinating collection. You never quite know what you will find next. Long parked with our digital partners at DigitalNC (as part of an agreement that pre-existed the creation of the Digital Watauga Project), those original scans were of poorer quality and had associated metadata littered with errors and misidentifications; re-digitizing them and sharing them on Digital Watauga has been on the project’s task list for many years, so it was exciting to take on this important project. Within the 240 images and documents of the series ranging from the 1890s to the early 2000s, which I digitized from October 23 to November 29, were an Appalachian State University (ASU) sports brochure for basketball, wrestling, and swimming from the 1967-68 season, pictures of historic houses within the Boone community, photos of community leaders, and images of severe storms affecting the region.
The overall collection itself also tells a fascinating story. For a couple of years following the death of Historic Boone founder Dr. Gene Lewis Reese (1927-2001) and the disbanding of the Historic Boone group, portions of the collection sat in the sun in the window of a building in Downtown Boone, then got moved to a storage locker for safekeeping, during which portions of the collection appear to have “wandered away.” Concerned about the collection’s safety and preservation, Flavel Eggers (1928-2020) and Sarah Lynn Rives Blair Spencer (1927-2021) intervened to rescue the collection in 2004 (for more on this, see Watauga Democrat, February 23, 2005), then spent the better part of a decade cataloging and arranging the collection. Eggers and Spencer then turned to Phillip C. McGuire and Patricia Maddux—former members of the Historic Boone group—to formally donate the collection to the Watauga County Public Library in 2014. The first wave of digitization by DigitalNC occurred in 2014 before the collection became part of the Digital Watauga Project in 2015. Finally, under the protection of Digital Watauga and its rigorous security and preservation measures, the collection is gradually undergoing digitization, archival rehousing, and reorganization.
Constance Shoun Stallings (1904-1982) is visible seated at left in this early 1950s image of various figures associated with the Horn in the West production. Seated to Stallings’s left is Samuel Sheldon. Standing, left to right, are Robert Edward Agle (1911-1981), playwright Kermit Hunter (1910-2001), Dr. Isaac Garfield Greer (1881-1967), and Dr. Daniel Jay Whitener (1898-1964). Image courtesy of the Historic Boone Collection, Digital Watauga Project.
As I worked to digitize these various collections during the semester, I took a graduate class at ASU with Dr. Andrea Burns. In this class, we worked with the Hickory Ridge Living History Site to create a new exhibit that would showcase the history of Hickory Ridge, the importance of the Horn in the West drama to tourism in the High Country, and the origins of the Daniel Boone Native Gardens. The members of my group received the Horn in the West section. I knew very little about the drama and even less about its obscure roots. However, digitizing images of the Echoes of the Blue Ridge drama from July 1949 found within Historic Boone Series One began to paint a picture of the drama's origins. Echoes of the Blue Ridge was a locally crafted series of historical vignettes that originally appeared in the 1949 Watauga County Centennial festivities. Inspired by the success of the Centennial event and two subsequent performances of Echoes, local leaders hired famed playwright Kermit Hunter in 1952 to write the first draft of Horn in the West, which opened that same year and has been a staple of High Country tourism ever since. Using the images within the collection as a foundation, my group created an exhibit that is now on display in the main hall at the Hickory Ridge Living History Site. Although we were unable to use images or documents from the Historic Boone Collection within our final exhibit, the collection helped our group connect pieces of history that had been severed for decades.
As the fall semester ended and turned into the next, and I continue to digitize new collections, it still fascinates me what people consider important enough to document and preserve. In other cases, though, it is interesting to see behind the images to tell a story many people may not always see. These kinds of images were the centerpiece for our Digital Watauga exhibit displayed at the Jones House this past March, whose theme of tourism behind the scenes showcased the workers, performers, and pioneers who labored behind the scenes to build the tourism industry of the High Country.
As my time with the project has passed, inexperience has turned into knowledge. Working with Digital Watauga has not always been what I first envisioned. Still, it has been a fulfilling and beneficial opportunity that has advanced my knowledge, future prospects, and love for history.
Series 01 of the Historic Boone Collection is currently in metadata review and will likely be online in early Summer 2024. Series 06 and 10 of the Bethel Collection are already online.