The Beaumont E was a monthly publication produced by the Beaumont Manufacturing Company beginning in October 1942 for the people of the Beaumont Mill community and their soldiers and sailors serving in the military overseas as well as at home. The newspaper shared the accomplishments of mill workers, as well as news from the mill village and surrounding community. During the war, the paper frequently published letters from men stationed overseas to their families back home at Beaumont, providing a much-needed connection for families and friends to their loved ones.
The entirety of the WWII-era portion of the Beaumont E Collection (1942-1946) was donated in digital format by Mr. James (Jay) Adams III, the eldest son of Beaumont Mill’s wartime superintendent Mr. James (Jay) Adams, Jr. The remaining issues in the collection are held as physical copies within the archives, the bulk of which were donated by Mr. Lamar Montjoy and several other residents of Beaumont Mill Village. While not complete, the collection provides an excellent window into life in a textile mill and mill village. The University Archives is actively seeking to fill in missing issues where possible.
In June of 2020, the archives introduced the Write it Down COVID-19 Community Archiving Project. The project was designed to provide a space for students, faculty, staff, and community members to share their experiences from the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the fall of 2020, the archives began a partnership with teaching faculty in the Communications Department at USC Upstate to have students create submissions of oral histories as a class assignment. The assignment was repeated in the spring of 2021, and the resulting oral histories are in the process of being prepared for upload to the South Carolina Digital Library in the summer of 2021. A news story about the project is linked below.
From the Archives Feature - UP Magazine, Fall 2020
An NEH grant project that centers on teaching using local history was awarded to an Upstate University. This project uses the local history of an upstate mill and mill village.