A project of the North Carolina State Archives, this collection contains over 23,000 pages from newspapers dating from 1751 until 1898.
Click on the link "Newspapers Included" to see the current list of titles from 6 towns. The runs are mostly short, sometimes with only 2 or 3 issues from one paper. Advertisements are included, including indexing of the text. Navigation is a bit awkward.
In addition to browsing, you can search by keyword, year, or a particular newspaper. Results include a thumbnail of the newspaper as well as its title and the date of the particular result. Clicking on the thumbnail of the page provides a viewer window to show you the whole page, with icons for moving around, zooming, turning the paper, etc.