Contributed by Cade Carlson

Among the various resources of the Forsyth County Public Library's North Carolina Collection, the Digital Forsyth website is a robust repository of historic photographs that depict Winston-Salem’s history through the power of images, and you don’t even have to be in a library to access it!

Winston-Salem Christmas Parade, 1956

The website was initially developed over 10 years ago through a series of grants and partnerships between 5 local institutions to consolidate remarkable images from our photograph collections to be publicly accessible. These 5 intuitions are: C.G. O'Kelly Library (Winston-Salem State University), Coy C. Carpenter Medical Library (Wake Forest University), Forsyth County Public Library, Old Salem Museums & Gardens, and Z. Smith Reynolds Library (Wake Forest University).

Workers in the stemming room of a tobacco factory, 1938

Digital Forsyth is a wonderful place for searching for photographs that are relevant to your local history interests, as it sports more than 12,000 images through which you can browse and search, with each image containing additional information about the subjects and contents of each photograph. But that’s far from the only feature that Digital Forsyth offers!

The website additionally facilitates photograph requests via the “request a print” button on image pages. While each institution has different methods for fulfilling such requests, Digital Forsyth makes this easy to navigate. There is also the “Stories” section, which has 32 essays about historic subjects and events, with each one containing between 4 to 8 images that bring these stories to life.

 

Hotel Robert E. Lee implosion, 1972

My favorite feature (besides the images themselves) is the public comments section for each image, which enables anyone to post a comment that will appear on the image’s page itself! These comments are wonderful additions because they can directly link the person leaving the comment to the image itself, whether it be remarking that an ancestor is present in the image, recognizing a location from a childhood memory, or sharing question relating to the image itself.

Protest/freedom march by Winston-Salem State College students, 1965

These comments are a fantastic example of crowdsourcing, and they provide further information about the photographs and their historic contexts while also creating avenues for conversation, as some of the images have comments that number in the 30s and even 40s (see this image, for example).

Interior of a tobacco warehouse during the tobacco market, 1938

While Digital Forsyth is not exhaustive in the number of images it houses versus what each institution has in their collections, it provides a valuable starting point for photographic research that can then be parlayed into further inquiries with the institutions themselves. Truly a wonderful resource and tool!