Nov
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From Grandfather Mountain to Chapel Hill
November 1, 2007 | Subscribe to this post
Posted by Stephen Fletcher in Behind the Scenes, Biography
The life’s work of photographer Hugh Morton has a new home: the North Carolina Collection Photographic Archives in Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It took two trips in four vans filled to the gills to bring it all from the Morton residence near Grandfather Mountain to the university where Morton spent his freshman through junior years as a student. His enlistment in the United States Army in September 1942, at the outset of his senior year, pulled him away to the Pacific and on to what became a celebrated life, but he returned to the campus he loved time and time and time again—and likely always with his camera.
It’s also likely that Morton had his camera with him everywhere else he went. We all look for something to “click” in our lives; for Hugh Morton it was his cameras’ shutters. We think he clicked them about half a million times. It takes a lot of shutter clicks to fill four vans. Morton made many photographs and shot a lot of motion picture film, too. It will take a good deal of time—measured in years—to organize and make available for use the results of so much clicking. Sometimes I “shutter” just thinking about it.
There is so much interest in the Morton collection. The first inquiries started before we opened more than a handful of boxes. The time needed to make such a voluminous collection available compared to the demand for its use beckoned for a non-traditional approach to collection processing. The way it’s “supposed” to be done is to open the collection only once it is completed. To make material accessible as soon as possible, we are planning to make parts of the collection available incrementally as we complete them.
We also needed a way to keep people informed about our progress and offer glimpses into the collection’s wealth. We are enthused by the public interest and want to transform it into community involvement. So we developed this blog to meet those needs and we hope it “clicks” with you!
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Links
- ArchivesNext - Blog examining archives and technology
- Biographical Conversations with . . . Hugh Morton - An episode from the UNC TV program featuring a one-on-one conversation with Hugh Morton
- Chapel Hill Memories - Recollections and memorabilia from Chapel Hill native Charly Mann
- Duke Digital Collections - Updates and discussion from staff of the Duke Libraries’ Digital Collections Program
- Field Trip South - Blog of the Southern Folklife Collection (SFC), Wilson Library, featuring SFC, follow SFC holdings, events, sights, sounds, etc.
- Grandfather Mountain - Scenic attraction and nature preserve in Linville, NC owned by Morton from 1952 until his death in 2006
- Morton Biography from Grandfather Mountain website
- NC Collection Photographic Archives
- NC Digital Collections Collaboratory - For Digital Librarians in North Carolina to share experiences, exchange ideas, and develop collaborations.
- NC Miscellany Blog - Blog of the North Carolina Collection, Wilson Library, UNC-CH
- Posterity Project - Blog related to archives, history, civic responsibility, and open access to public records in Tennessee
- Processing the Chew Family Papers - Reports on an NEH-funded project to process the papers of the Chew Family at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.
- Southern Short Course in News Photography - America’s longest running photojournalism seminar, of which Morton was a founder
- Southern Sources - Interesting staff finds, curiosities, old favorites, and other cool stuff from Wilson Library’s Southern Historical Collection
- UNC Libraries
- UNC-CH Digital Collections homepage
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My favorite blog, to date. Please call on me if I can help with any Wilmington identifications.
I was a camper and later a counselor at Camp Yonahnoka in Linville from 1959-1966. Mr. Morton took all the photographs each year for the Camp’s catalogue — activities photos, group photos, and individual camper and counselor photos.
The photos of campers were taken of three campers at a time and cropped later; in the catalogue your photo would be listed alphabetically. All were published and sent out to the homes of everyone who had been there the previous summer.
I’d kill to have those catalogues today.
If you ever get the desire to see some of those catalogs, the North Carolina Collection has several from the late 1940s through the early 1950s. You can search the UNC Library catalog using the keyword “Yonahnoka” to see which issues are in the collection.