New Partnership and New Collection with the Pine Mountain Regional Library

Report on health and sanitation aims, Manchester, Georgia, 1953. Document describes 19 aims or goals for health and sanitation in Manchester, Georgia, including making periodic inspections of places serving food; public water sources; public restrooms and slaughter houses. Other goals include instituting mosquito and rodent control; eliminating all outdoor toilets; building a sanitary landfill and iniating a flood control program. Pine Mountain Regional Library Collection.
Report on health and sanitation aims, Manchester, Georgia, 1953. Document describes 19 aims or goals for health and sanitation in Manchester, Georgia. Pine Mountain Regional Library Collection.

We are excited to announce our new partnership with the Pine Mountain Regional Library and welcome the Pine Mountain Regional Library Collection to the DLG.

The Pine Mountain Regional Library Collection includes photographs from scrapbooks submitted to Georgia Power’s Champion Home Town contest in 1952 and 1953. The photos document the town’s progress in the areas of education, industry, recreation, youth, clubs and societies, and include brief written progress reports. The reports and photographs present a snapshot of a small town through the eyes of its community. The collection also includes 1955 and 1957 issues of The Callaway Beacon, a weekly magazine published for the employees and families of the Callaway Mills Company in LaGrange, Georgia.

Cynthia Kilby, the director of the Pine Mountain Regional Library, says that the collection “provides a nice snapshot of life in a small town during the 1950s…It shows community pride and the development boom that occurred after World War II.” She adds that the reports in the scrapbooks were eye-opening. “The narratives listed community improvements. It was startling to read what some of the goals were, such as every home having indoor plumbing by a certain year. That is something we take for granted now.”

Digitized as part of the DPLA’s Public Library Partnerships Project (PLPP), the Pine Mountain Regional Library Collection is one of our newest resources featuring materials from public library collections. Kilby notes “We don’t have an archives in the community, so this kind of material isn’t readily available except through this program.” We would like to thank the Pine Mountain Regional Library for collaborating with the Digital Library of Georgia to make its collection available for digitization, and hope that you enjoy looking through the Pine Mountain Regional Library Collection!

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Turner Scrapbook Collection

A black and white photograph of the Old Corley House located in Covington, Georgia.
A black and white photograph of the Old Corley House located in Covington, Georgia.

We are pleased to announce the Turner Scrapbook Collection, brought to you courtesy of the Newton County Library System (NCLS). The collection comes to us as part of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation-funded Public Libraries Partnerships Project (PLPP), where the Digital Library of Georgia has been granted the opportunity to work collaboratively with public librarians to provide digital skills training and resources to make their cultural heritage content available online.

Britt Ozburn, Materials Coordinator at the Newton County Library System, tells us: “Newton County has a long, significant history and beautiful architecture.  This scrapbook is a collection of artifacts that contribute to telling our county’s story, as they were seen decades ago in our local community.”

The Turner Scrapbook was donated to NCLS in the 1970s by Nat S. Turner, Jr., a local businessman and three-term mayor of Covington, Georgia. In the 1940s, Turner took several black and white photographs around Covington, including the Oxford campus of Emory University, and compiled them into a scrapbook.

Ozburn notes: “The collection shows many well-known iconic buildings around Newton County, some of which no longer exist.  Many of these buildings date back to before the American Civil War.  They also represent a history of Emory University’s Oxford campus.” The collection also contains images of large homes located adjacent to Covington’s downtown square.

We hope you take a peek at this new collection, and welcome the Newton County Library System as a new project partner!

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