Staff at the Swannanoa Valley Museum are busy putting together materials for a photo history book of Swannanoa that will be published next year. The museum is asking the community to help by contributing vintage photographs from Beacon, Grovemont and downtown Swannanoa taken before 1950. They would also love to have more images of people, businesses, family homes, churches, schools, streets, and scenic photographs that illustrate what life was like in Swannanoa.

Every photograph included in the book will be credited to the photograph’s donor. Also, each photograph will be scanned into the museum’s photographic database and then promptly returned to the owner. To submit your photograph, please call the museum at 669-9566 or send an email to info@swannanoavalleymuseum.org.

The book will have chapters covering life in Swannanoa before the arrival of the Beacon Mill, during the Beacon Mill heyday, and during the 1960s and 1970s, as the Mill’s influence began to decline.