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At first glance, the papers, out-of-date wall calendars, matchbooks, and pinback buttons scattered on a table inside UNC Chapel Hill’s Wilson Library look like the discard pile in someone’s housecleaning project. Yet these items aren’t destined for the trash bin. They’re historic artifacts so prized they’re being accepted into the North Carolina Collection, thought to be the largest assemblage of materials on any one state in the country.

Around the table sit Linda Jacobson, keeper of the North Carolina Collection Gallery; Christian Edwards, assistant keeper; and Bob Schreiner, curatorial specialist. They’re waiting for the next fascinating object to be presented by collector Lew Powell.

Since 2005, Lew Powell has donated more than 5,000 objects to the North Carolina Collection at UNC. photograph by Anna Routh Barzin

Powell specializes in ephemera — items that aren’t necessarily meant to be kept, but for one reason or another end up in the dark corners of desk drawers or dusty attics, only to be discovered decades later. This includes pennants, posters, postcards, event tickets, souvenir giveaways, and a host of other once-forgotten objects.

“[These items] represent everyday life in North Carolina in a way that a lot of documents that are kept do not,” Jacobson says. “We have about 35,000 objects in the North Carolina Collection Gallery overall, and you wouldn’t expect that in a library. A lot of people don’t leave papers, but they have these objects that speak to their lives and interests.”

A spinning top from the North Carolina State Fair is part of the Lew Powell Memorabilia Collection.  Photography courtesy of Lew Powell Memorabilia Collection, North Carolina Collection, The Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill

Powell’s ephemera was accepted into the North Carolina Collection in 2005, after his friend, then curator Bob Anthony, “came over and looked at my stuff,” Powell says. “He went back to Chapel Hill and called me one day and said, ‘We’ll take all of it.’ I took it over there in a car stuffed to the gills.”

Powell has been returning to Chapel Hill from his home in Charlotte ever since to contribute items of interest. In the Lew Powell Memorabilia Collection, which now consists of more than 5,000 objects, you’ll find a souvenir moonshine jug from the 1964 National Democratic Convention. A button from the 1974 Cape Hatteras Anglers Club Tournament. A prize ribbon from a dairy cattle show at the Iredell County Fairgrounds in 1954. A ticket to a speech given by President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Charlotte’s American Legion Memorial Stadium in 1936. And a matchbook from the Excelsior Barber Shop in Salisbury, featuring a pinup girl and the slogan “Where Every Job Is an Improvement.”

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Powell has always had “the collecting gene.” As a boy growing up in Mississippi, he was a connoisseur of baseball cards, arrowheads, and model airplanes. In 1974, he moved to North Carolina to work for The Charlotte Observer. He traces his fascination with ephemera to the early ’80s, when he and his late wife, Dannye, visited a flea market near the airport in Charlotte.

“I came home with a button that turned out to be probably as rare as any button I’ve got,” Powell says. He’d found a Harry Truman inauguration button from a meeting of the North Carolina Society — one of the oldest state societies in our nation’s capital. “I think I paid $5 for it,” he continues. “Some things you hold in your hand, your eye likes them, and things unfold from there.” What unfolded was a five-decade mission to save many objects that would otherwise be lost to time.

“Some things you hold in your hand, your eye likes them, and things unfold from there.”

After his first find, Powell began to frequent the Metrolina Flea Market in North Charlotte. As his collection grew, its purpose became more defined. “North Carolina just grew as a focus,” he says. “I’ve always found North Carolina interesting. It’s Southern and it’s not Southern. It’s [culturally] part of the Eastern Seaboard and the Deep South.” As examples, he cites the never-ending tug-of-war between eastern- and Lexington-style barbecue and the fact that Republican Jesse Helms and Democrat Terry Sanford served in the U.S. Senate at the same time: “It’s like two weather fronts colliding.”

When you hold one of Powell’s items in your hand, it’s like a tiny keyhole inviting you to peer into a distant part of North Carolina’s history: its culture, its customs, and its curiosities. “Lew is a discerning collector,” Jacobson says. “Each item he brings in is fascinating in some way. And in most cases, there’s a deeper story to be told.”

Between 1942 and 1945, about 20,000 cadets trained at the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School in Chapel Hill. Photography courtesy of United States Navy Pre-Flight School (University of North Carolina) Photographic Collection #P0027, North Carolina Collection, The Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill

Cadets carried cobalt blue matchbooks during training at the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School in Chapel Hill in the 1940s. Photography courtesy of Lew Powell Memorabilia Collection, North Carolina Collection, The Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill

Consider a cobalt blue matchbook featuring an illustration of a dive bomber and the words “U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School.” The little matchbook is striking, but not remarkable. That is, until you learn who might have carried those matches around in their pockets: baseball Hall of Famer Ted Williams and future presidents Gerald R. Ford and George H.W. Bush. Williams and Bush were cadets and Ford was an instructor at the Chapel Hill-based school in the early ’40s.

Likewise, a box label for El-Rees-So cigars from the early 20th century hints at a forgotten chapter of Greensboro history: In 1922, hundreds of workers turned out some 90 million cigars a year, making Greensboro the largest cigar-producing city between Tampa and Baltimore.

A bottle label for Mullen’s Liniment harks back to a time when hucksters were plentiful and oversight for their claims was nonexistent. Mullen’s miraculous product promised relief from cramp colic, diarrhea, headache, toothache, neuralgia, rheumatism, sore throat, croup, coughs, colds, asthma, dyspepsia, palpitation of the heart, cuts, stings of insects, corns, and more. Its claims were almost certainly exaggerated, but the 66 percent alcohol content of this elixir — manufactured by Hornets’ Nest Liniment Company in Charlotte — most definitely created a buzz.

“Some of the North Carolina Collection are the older, traditional objects,” Jacobson says — like the pocket watch carried by Elisha Mitchell when he fell and died while exploring the mountain that now bears his name. “Lew’s items are nontraditional for a library, and many are bright and colorful.”

Just look at the richly illustrated produce labels that speak to North Carolina’s fertile agricultural past, including Hi-Jack Yams, Miss Carolina Brand tomatoes, Brushy Mountain Brand blackberries, Nantahala Brand stringless beans, and Watauga chopped kraut.

Or take a trip down memory lane through vintage automobile window decals promoting Clingmans Dome, Carolina Beach, Ocracoke, Grandfather Mountain, and Santa’s Land Park and Zoo in Cherokee.

For practically a song, Powell purchased many a music-themed item: A poster for a 1930s concert at Pilot Mountain High School starring Fred Kirby & His Smiling Cowboys; backstage passes for Avett Brothers, James Taylor, and Grateful Dead concerts; and a set of dog tags marking the 20th anniversary of Kannapolis native George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars.

• • •

Many of Powell’s objects are small, but their significance multiplies when put in historic context. “Lew’s items give you that little nugget that connects the bigger stories,” Edwards says. “It helps you connect the dots.”

For example, North Carolina’s fraught labor history during the ’20s — pitting powerful owners against outside union organizers — is summed up in a poster showing 17 mill workers under the words “Help Free the Gastonia Prisoners.” The protesters had been jailed during the Loray Mill Strike of 1929, following an altercation with law enforcement that resulted in the death of the local police chief and the wounding of several mill workers.

Before moving to North Carolina, Powell covered politics and culture, including the civil rights movement, for a Mississippi newspaper. He possesses a keen eye for the conflicts and controversies that are an inevitable part of the human experience, and he feels his collection serves an important purpose in that regard. “The objects help us remember how life was in the state during those decades,” he says. “I do like the idea of having those things saved and appreciated and used.”

“The objects help us remember how life was in the state during those decades.”

After each piece is accepted and cataloged, the collection staff conducts research and writes a brief synopsis that helps the viewer better understand its significance within the framework of North Carolina’s history.

And now, you don’t have to leave home to enjoy Powell’s “Kingdom of Thingdom,” as he calls it. A couple hundred examples can be viewed online through the North Carolina Collection website. “The digital world is such a wonderful match for [the collection],” Powell says. “You see such vivid detail on the screen. It just captures you.”

Jacobson hopes that exhibiting and promoting Powell’s collection will inspire others: “It shows everybody that they can be a donor. Most people are going to think, ‘Oh, I don’t have anything,’ but they can look at these materials and know that they, too, have things like that.”

With an eye for the cheap, the fleeting, and the seemingly insignificant, Powell has, over time, created the exact opposite: a treasure chest of glittering little jewels that are memorable, enduring, and priceless.

To see some of the treasures in the Lew Powell Memorabilia Collection, visit library.unc.edu/lew-powell-collection.

Small Wonders

Lew Powell’s fascination with North Carolina ephemera began with a button he found at a Charlotte flea market in the early ’80s. Photography courtesy of Lew Powell Memorabilia Collection, North Carolina Collection, The Wilson Library, UNC Chapel Hill

Lew Powell is proud of the buttons in his memorabilia collection. And with good reason: There are 3,407 of them, showcasing an assortment of sports teams, politicians, personalities, reunions, causes, events, and occasions. How else would we know that the North Carolina State Firemen’s Association held their annual convention in Goldsboro in 1898? Or that there really was a NASCAR Dads for President George W. Bush constituency? Or the exact dimensions of the “World’s Largest Bureau” in High Point?

There are buttons promoting the Raleigh Speedway, Old North State tobacco, the U.S. Census (1940), baseballer Whitey Lockman from Gaston County (who hit a homer in his first major league at bat for the New York Giants), and political groups of every persuasion, including Tar Heel Democrats, Reagan Republicans, and Libertarians for NC. The buttons are so popular they’ve been temporarily loaned to institutions like the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center and the Earl Scruggs Center in Shelby.