Digital Watauga

For centuries, an archive was the physical place where documents, artifacts, and other historical items were stored and where researchers and historians could reach back into the past to study the people, events, and records of our history. The archive was a location with an address and a room number—a place to visit in order to sift through the remnants of the past.The digital age has created new opportunities for archivists, historians, and the public. Digital Watauga is an online archive devoted to maintaining a robust, full historical record of Watauga County, located in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. The digital collection of photographs, artifacts, and documents went online in 2014 with the goal of providing an “archival memory” for Watauga County.Watauga is one of the 423 counties identified by the Appalachian Regional Commission (ARC) as being a part of Appalachia (ARC 2023). Prior to the arrival of white settlers, Indigenous people used this area as hunting grounds. Watauga became incorporated as a county in the state of North Carolina in 1849; the town of Boone, named for Daniel Boone, who, legend has it, hunted in the area, was chartered in 1872 (Watauga County 2023).In many ways, Watauga reflects familiar stereotypes associated with Appalachia. Poverty is a significant issue—the poverty rate in Watauga is about 22 percent (US Census 2022), and about 26 percent of the children in the public school system qualify for free or reduced-fee lunches. In some of the more rural schools in the county, the percentage of children who qualify for free and reduced-fee lunches can be more than 40 percent (Garrett Price, Director of Communications for Watauga County Schools, email to author, 2021). While the roads to Watauga have improved over the last century, the county is two hours from the nearest airport and about an hour from the nearest interstate highway, which makes it unlikely that Watauga will ever be a home for large companies seeking easy access to transportation hubs and highways.The county residents are predominantly white, but the county also includes the Junaluska community, one of the oldest Black communities in the Appalachian region. Many of the earliest Black residents of Boone were brought to Watauga as enslaved people in the nineteenth century. Until the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, Watauga was a segregated community, with separate schools for Black and white people, and limited employment options for Black people (Junaluska Heritage Association 2023).The four largest employers in Watauga are organizations that bring people of different backgrounds and beliefs to the area: Appalachian State University, Appalachian Regional Healthcare System, Watauga County Schools, and Samaritan's Purse (North Carolina Department of Commerce 2022). The rural county has become popular with second-home buyers, leading to a serious housing shortage (High Country Association of Realtors 2022). The history of Watauga County is rich and robust, with many lessons to share with present and future inhabitants.In 2011, two events occurred that brought about the creation of the Digital Watauga project. First, Appalachian State made the decision to permanently shutter its award-winning Appalachian Cultural Museum, which had been launched in 1989 (Center for Appalachian Studies 2023). The university had closed the museum to the public in 2006, and in the aftermath of the 2008 crash of the economy, Appalachian State decided it no longer had the funds to support the museum. Following that decision, many of the items in the museum were scattered to numerous other museums and organizations (Adams 2011; Watauga Democrat2012).“Things just flew out of there after the museum closed. Many of the local items on loan to the museum vanished off the mountain,” said Bettie Bond, retired Appalachian State University history professor and current president of the Watauga County Historical Society. “After that, people did not trust the university to house their treasured letters, photographs, and personal items.”1The second catalyst in the creation of Digital Watauga was the arrival of historian and archivist Eric Plaag, who moved to Boone in 2011.“One of the first things I did after moving to Boone was to seek out the local historical society, only to find that there was no museum or physical repository to visit; the Historic Boone organization had shut down in the early 2000s after the death of its founder, and the website for the Watauga County Historical Society had been apparently taken over by North Korean hackers, with all the content in Korean,” said Plaag. “With the closure of the university's Appalachian Cultural Museum, we needed to figure out the next step in terms of archiving the history of the community.”As Bond remembers, there was always a desire to capture the county's history. The loss of the Daniel Boone Hotel in the mid-1980s and the closure of the Appalachian Cultural Museum sounded the alarm.“There were lots of folks who wanted to work with us,” said Bond. “We just didn't know how to do it. And Eric had that expertise.”Digital Watauga launched in 2014 and has relied on grants, volunteers, and financial support from the Watauga County Historical Society to move forward and grow (Watauga County Historical Society 2023). People volunteer for this project because they believe the work is valuable.“I have an interest in both history and technology, and this field involves the combination of preservation with cutting-edge technology in a rapidly shifting digital landscape,” said Sai Estep, former Digital Watauga coordinator and current volunteer on the project. “This marriage is fascinating because it means having one foot in the past, one foot in the future, and a finger on the pulse of today—because we try to tie our materials to what's currently happening.”The online collection, hosted on the Omeka Classic platform, is a blend of photos (family and professionally captured), artifacts, and historical documents. In addition to vacation images and family celebrations, the “archival memory” within Digital Watauga includes records of traumatic events like floods and blizzards and provides examples from the past of how to address the issues of today. Most of the items in the collection are returned to owners after they are digitized and added to the Digital Watauga online archives.“Archives are important,” said Jennifer Woods, Appalachian State librarian, lecturer, and Digital Watauga volunteer. “The value of preserving who we were in the past informs who we are working to become in the future.”The project shares letters and artifacts from historic moments like the 1918 flu pandemic, which illustrate the personal devastation of a pandemic and also reveal that masking to prevent illness was as controversial then as it was during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Those involved with Digital Watauga are also committed to finding and sharing stories from communities traditionally underrepresented in news archives and history books, like the stories of working-class citizens, women, and people of color.“There's a misconception that documenting history is neutral. That's not the case; historians and archivists choose which stories to preserve and share,” said Estep. “This has led to gaps in the narratives. An important part of what we do is preserving underrepresented narratives of people who may have had fewer opportunities for their voices to be heard.”The archive currently contains more than fourteen thousand items on its website, with well over two hundred thousand items awaiting digitization. It provides an astonishing record of interior and exterior spaces where people have lived and worked over the decades.“Because of our association with Appalachia, people think we are ‘those poor white people stuck up here behind the beyond,’” said Bond. “That is to say, the stereotypes about this region get in the way of the reality. This archive attempts to show the greater story of Watauga County.”The task of maintaining a digital archive is laborious, detail-oriented, and time-consuming. When COVID-19 hit and everyone was sent home to quarantine, the team decided to move forward with developing an extensive list of “controlled vocabulary” words to use for tagging and identifying the images. This often meant taking time to recategorize items previously uploaded to ensure that they aligned with the appropriate metadata and controlled words, which proved to be an enormous undertaking.“Scanning is tedious and repetitive, and you cannot multitask when you are doing it,” said Woods. “But I love contributing to this archive. It's fascinating to see what life was like before our time, that it was not a simple life—and you see the complex connections the people have with each other and their community.”Ellie McCorkle, a former Digital Watauga coordinator, grew up in nearby Ashe County and believes the project shows that history is more than the events that make it into the newspapers or history books.“Digital Watauga makes the history of the area much more relatable because you see people being people—you see people going about their business, living their lives,” McCorkle said. “To limit our history to just what can be found in news stories is a disservice to the people who lived through these things. To be able to highlight the daily work, the mundane activities is an honor.”Watauga County is an Appalachian community established when Zachary Taylor was president, a southern county that was almost equally divided during the Civil War between Union and Confederate supporters. It contains a university town in the Bible Belt that brings thousands of students each year to a community with families that have been here for generations. It has grown from a sleepy, economically frail community in the early twentieth century to a complex and economically vital community today. The history of Watauga County is contradictory, engaging, and important. Digital Watauga shows how families and small businesses have helped the growth and success of this county over time.“It's been interesting to see how some local family names are on half the buildings downtown because their family built them over the years—and it's also interesting to see a company like Appalachia Cookie Company, started by university students, grow to become a company that now ships nationally,” said McCorkle. “It's great to see this small business environment be nurturing both to local families and student entrepreneurs.”Digital Watauga shares the rich history of a county in western North Carolina buffeted by wars, pandemics, infrastructure, poverty, and growth. The archive shows the complicated reality of how the past influences the present and impacts the future of Watauga County.“You cannot understand the issues of today without the context of the past. Digital Watauga is a way to keep the history of the community on the mountain and also make it available to a much larger audience,” Plaag said.To peruse the Digital Watauga online archive, visit www.digitalwatauga.org.