WCU Digital Collections

10/16/2026

Our Mystery Photos Website is back up and running! Search your family name and see if any photographs were long-ago left behind at Sherrill's Studio in downtown Waynesville. Any information known about the people or places in the photographs can be easily shared through the website and digital copies can be requested. We would love to reunite these unclaimed photographs with their rightful owners.

Sherrill’s Studio served Waynesville, NC from 1902 to 1975 and developed thousands of rolls of film dropped off by locals and visitors. Sometimes, the person who dropped off the film didn’t return to pick up their photographs! Sherrill’s Studio dutifully kept the envelopes of developed photos ...

08/06/2026

We are so grateful that new issues of the Sylva Herald, 1951-1980, are now available online.

Thanks to our partners Southwestern Community College NC and Jackson County Public Library, issues of the Sylva Herald and Ruralite from 1951 to 1980 are now on DigitalNC! Read our blog to learn more!

https://www.digitalnc.org/blog/new-issues-of-the-sylva-herald-and-ruralite-reveal-history-of-female-publishers-in-the-20th-century/

07/15/2025

Special and Digital Collections is excited to introduce our new digitization workstation, the DT Ion! We've been training with super helpful folks from Digital Transitions. It will be a leap forward in quality and workflow--and we can't wait to get started!

07/03/2025

The fourth of July holiday always makes me think of family and friends gathering, boat rides, and picnics. Here is a random assortment of images that are from film brought to Sherrill’s Photography Studio in downtown Waynesville for developing, but never picked up. The only clue we have is a name on the envelope. If you recognize any people or places, let us know! Also, check out our Mystery Photos website mysteryphotos.wcu.edu to see if you might recognize any of the people in the photographs or search for a name under the “More Names” tab and request images from any name that you may recognize.

06/18/2025

We were sad to see the old White Oak Tree fall over the weekend of June 6th. And just how old was the tree? We’ve heard that a core sample was taken in 2021 and it was determined to be between 240-280 years old. The tree was a big part of what made the view from Special Collections Reading Room so interesting, and it will be dearly missed.

Pictured here is an aerial view from around 1929 when both the new and old Cullowhee Baptist church were in place, a view of church from the school’s 50th anniversary celebration in 1939, a view beyond the football field from 1941, a few-recent day photographs, and some from after the tree’s fall.

03/03/2025

Thank you, Loran for teaching the library Wet Recovery skills today. It was vey interesting and we learned a lot. Hopefully we won’t ever need these skills, but if we do, we’re ready.

02/24/2025

Walter Berry is doing a handstand, Jim Thompson is taking his picture from the trail, and Guy Frizzell is standing on top of Charlies Bunion in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. This National Park photo from 1935 is part of the Carlos C. Campbell collection that we are in the process of putting online. With such beautiful days in the upcoming week, it is time to get out and hike, but please don’t try this handstand on the trail!

02/14/2025

These Valentines are from our Judge Frederick Moore Family collection. They were received by Margaret Moore in 1919 from her students while she was a student teacher attending Greensboro College for Women. The collection includes correspondence from 1894-1896 and 1908 from her father, Judge Fred Moore, to her mother, Lela Enloe, before and after they were married. Fred was writing from Webster, Asheville, and Charlotte, North Carolina.

1910s

02/06/2025

We just put online a series of about 100 images taken by James Baldwin Shelton (1886-1977) prior to the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the Elkmont area. This is a community picnic held at the end of the school year, likely in Elkmont, date unknow. J. B. Shelton grew up in the Smoky Mountains and married Sarah “Caroline” Walker, whose sisters are famous for securing a lifetime lease to remain in their home, becoming a living museum when the Great Smoky Mountains National Park was created. Shelton carried his bulky camera, glass plates, and tripod around the mountains and processed his plates in a darkroom over a stream near his house. To browse all of the images: https://tinyurl.com/3tn9as2y

01/17/2025

The Mountain Heritage Center (located in Hunter Library on WCU’s campus) opened a new exhibit today, Friday, January 17 “A Stranger No More” which reintroduces the life and photography of George Masa. The exhibit pairs beautifully with one of our newest manuscript collections donated by Bill and Alice Hart. The Hart’s have been curating their Masa collection for many years and Bill has provided a mountain of contextual information to go along with it. We have a portion of the collection online already and are working diligently on more, link in the bio. Also not to be missed and fairly new on the shelves, is a book by Janet McCue and Paul Bonesteel, “George Masa: A Life Reimagined” which reads like a novel you don’t want to put down. All of this is in gratitude, as we owe a lot to Masa whose photography skills, diligent mapping, and persistence played a major role in preserving the mountains that surround us.