Program for the Gainesville High School talent contest, Gainesville, Georgia, 1955 May 17. Hall County Library System Collection, Hall County Library System, Gainesville, Georgia.
We are excited to announce a new collection, the Hall County Library System Collection, which comes from our longtime partner, the Hall County Library System.
This collection was digitized as part of the DPLA’s Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP), which connects public librarians and public library collections with the DLG and DPLA. We appreciate the opportunity to work with Georgia’s public libraries and learn more about the communities that they serve.
Ronda Sanders, who oversees the Sybil Wood McRay Genealogy & Local History Collection of the Hall County Library System describes the history of the Hall County Library System, which serves a county population of over 187,700 people.
“Prior to 1933, the ladies of the Grace Episcopal Church started a small community library in the basement of their church. The tornado of 1936 destroyed the Grace Episcopal Church along with the library. Because of this loss to the community, Hall County residents started the groundwork for a public library in Hall County, Georgia. The first meeting of the Hall County Library Board was held in 1937. In March of 1938, the Hall County Library System officially moved into the basement of the courthouse where it remained until a modern two story library building was dedicated on February 8, 1970. The library system has always been involved in the preservation of Hall County’s history.”
Photograph of teenagers at the Debuteen Ball, Gainesville, Georgia, 1953 December 30. Hall County Library System Collection, Hall County Library System, Gainesville, Georgia.
The Hall County Library System Collection contains photographs and memorabilia related to Gainesville, Georgia, Gainesville High School and Riverside Military School, and features photographs, flyers, dance invitations, concert programs, student newspapers and yearbooks belonging to Vera “Buzzie” Bennett, a student at Gainesville High School in the 1950s. The collection also includes a 1819-1926 record book for the Inferior Court in Gainesville, and a 1911 Riverside Military School yearbook.
A large part of the work on the Hall County Library System Collection has been done by library staff and devoted volunteers, including Sybil McRay, Louise White, LoRetta C. Parker, Mary Gallant, Susan Stewart, Tina Dumestre, Adrian Mixson, and Ronda Sanders.
We would like to thank the Hall County Library System for another opportunity to collaborate on bringing their valuable resources to the Digital Library of Georgia, and hope that you enjoy looking through the new Hall County Library System Collection!
Photograph of children’s dog show, Manchester, Georgia, 1953. This photograph is from a scrapbook submitted to Georgia Power’s 1953 Champion Home Town contest. Pine Mountain Regional Library, Manchester, Georgia.
The Digital Library of Georgia is pleased to announce two brand-new online exhibitions on the subjects of children in Progressive-era America, and Georgia’s home front during World War II that are now available through the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). These exhibitions were created as part of the DPLA’s Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP) by collaborators from the Digital Library of Georgia (DLG), DPLA, and Georgia’s public libraries.
In twenty-first century American society, childhood is popularly understood as a time of innocence, learning, and play. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, children made up part of the country’s workforce, and labored on farms and in factories. Reformers during the Progressive Era—a period of social activism and political reform across the United States between the 1890s and 1920s—took a great interest in child welfare. Through organizations and legislation, they sought to define what a happy and healthy childhood should be in the modern age. The formula for a healthy childhood was further refined in postwar America.
Central themes in the exhibit include: work life, reform, public health, play, children’s organizations, and childhood in postwar America.
Photograph of a banquet, Perry, Georgia, 1945. Photograph shows a dinner held when General Courtney Hodges visited Perry, Georgia, in 1945. Houston County Public Library, Perry, Georgia.
Three years before the United States entered World War II, President Roosevelt declared the South to be “the nation’s number one economic problem.” Georgia’s economy was distinctly agricultural and low-wage, with little manufacturing compared with states in the North and Midwest. One year later, an influx of federal defense money established new wartime industries. Military training was widespread throughout Georgia, and World War II employment was crucial to the economic development of the state, ushering in the transformation to a modern, industrial, and diverse Georgia.
The exhibit covers key themes that include: military activities, soldiers and families, women’s involvement in the war, civilian war efforts, and homecoming after the war’s end.
PLPP, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is a project that connects existing DPLA service hubs (state, regional, or other collaborations that host, aggregate, or otherwise bring together digital objects from libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage institutions) with public librarians. The DLG became one of the first six service hubs for DPLA in 2013. Since then, the DLG has worked with public libraries statewide who have special collections and want to share their content with a broader audience, but may not have the resources to do so. Through PLPP, the DLG has provided digital skills training for Georgia public librarians, and has connected them with sustainable state and regional resources for digitizing, describing, and exhibiting their cultural heritage content online. Much of the training, digitization, and description of public library materials has taken place over the past year; items curated from this now-digitized public library content provide visual context for these two exhibits. “These new themed virtual exhibits, hosted by DPLA, provide a way to globally showcase the important historical materials held by public libraries in Georgia,” said Sheila McAlister, director of the DLG.
Cynthia Kilby, director of the Pine Mountain Regional Library System, which serves Meriwether, Upson, Talbot, and Taylor Counties in Georgia, appreciates the opportunities that PLPP has provided in creating access to her collections. Materials from Pine Mountain Regional Library’s collections are available in the Children in Progressive-Era America exhibit.
“I think this project will be helpful for patrons and they will enjoy it. Patrons can look and see images of their parents and grandparents and enjoy that. And children can use this as a resource for school projects,” Kilby said: “We don’t have an archives in the community, so this kind of material isn’t readily available except through this program.”
Wendy Cornelisen, assistant state librarian for Library Innovation and Collaboration, Georgia Public Library Service, said “Many of Georgia’s public libraries have unique items that have been cherished by the local community for years. In the past, historians would have to spend time and money to get to that local history. Thanks to Digital Library of Georgia and DPLA, the Public Library Partnerships Project has helped uncover and share some of this history with students and scholars around the world. These unique items help paint a more complete picture of our state’s history.”
