Author of Camping & Woodcraft and Our Southern Highlanders, Horace Kephart was instrumental in the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The Horace Kephart Papers contains correspondence, photographs, print material, maps and 27 journals that include hand-written entries, typed notes, and clippings.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a revival of handcraft swept over the Appalachian Mountains as part of a renewed worldwide interest in things made by hand and in the place of work in society. An archival repository contains over 4,500 documents, photographs, and craft objects supported by a research-based interpretive …
Founded in 1889, Cullowhee Academy grew from a semi-private school into a state-supported four-year college. By the mid-1920s, Western Carolina Teachers College was reported to have trained over 2,000 teachers. Later known as Western Carolina College, it became Western Carolina University in 1967. The collection includes images of school …
Civil War soldiers from western North Carolina kept in touch with family members by exchanging frequent letters to and from the war front. Hunter Library's collection of Civil War letters ranges from 1862 to 1863, reflecting a variety of concerns, personal situations, and circumstances. The collection is organized by family name.
Listen to over 150 audio files created by Catch the Spirit of Appalachia, a western North Carolina not-for-profit. These files were created from a series of radio interviews that aired weekly on a local radio station. Each half-hour radio programs captures “local memory” detailing the traditions, events, and life stories of …
This digital collection brings together several notable photographic collections that depict the landscape and people of western NC in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Images are from the Hunter Library Special Collections and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Three travelogues allow viewers to visit towns and communities throughout western North Carolina over three generations. Follow a route along footpaths and wagon trails as it was in the 1890s, take a train ride in the 1910s, and drive by car along mountain roads in the 1930s to see what the region looked like a century ago.
Hunter Library is committed to building regionally oriented, historically significant collections of broad cultural and research interest. The library's digital collections provide a foundation for research, education, and humanities programming through their documentation of significant aspects of the American story.
| C |
| E |
| H |
| P |
| S |
| T |