North Carolina Collection

[1] It is part of the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

In 1844, University President David Lowry Swain founded the North Carolina Historical Society in order to stimulate students' interest in history, but he also strove to collect every book, pamphlet, and newspaper in the state of North Carolina in existence.

An earlier donation by Sprunt in 1917 paid for the collection's first curator, Mary Lindsay Thornton, and his later gift of the Carolina Inn and uptown business properties allowed the North Carolina Collection to rely on trust funds instead of legislative appropriations for its funding.

[4] Its holdings include over 300,000 books and pamphlets, 6,000 printed maps, 50,000 reels of microfilm, 4,000,000 photographs, and 35,000 museum artifacts.

The Research Library's holdings contain items about the state of North Carolina from its earliest days to the present.