Collecting area: Agriculture

A farmer, activist, and writer, Elizabeth Henderson has exerted an enormous influence on the movement for organic and sustainable agriculture since the 1970s. Although Henderson embarked on an academic career after completing a doctorate at Yale on the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1974, by 1980, she abandoned academia for Unadilla Farm in Gill, Mass., where she learned organic techniques for raising vegetables. Relocating to Rose Valley Farm in Wayne County, NY, in 1989, she helped establish Genesee Valley Organic CSA (GVOCSA), one of the first in the country, and she continued the relationship with the CSA after founding Peacework Organic Farm in Newark, NY, in 1998. Deeply involved in the organic movement at all levels, Henderson was a founding member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) in Massachusetts, has served on the Board of Directors for NOFA NY, the NOFA Interstate Council, SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) Northeast, and many other farming organizations at the state, regional, and national level, and she has been an important voice in national discussions on organic standards, fair trade, and agricultural justice. Among other publications, Henderson contributed to and edited The Real Dirt: Farmers Tell about Organic and Low-Input Practices in the Northeast and co-wrote Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture (1999, with Robyn Van En) and A Manual of Whole Farm Planning (2003, with Karl North).

Offering insight into the growth of the organic agriculture movement and the organizations that have sustained it, the Henderson Papers document Henderson’s involvement with NOFA, SARE, and the GVOCSA, along with her work to establish organic standards and promote organic practices. Henderson’s broad social and political commitments are represented by a rich set of letters from her work educating prisoners in the late 1970s, including correspondence with Tiyo Attallah Salah-El and John Clinkscales, and with the American Independent Movement in New Haven during the early 1970s, including a nearly complete run of the AIM Bulletin and its successor Modern Times.

Harvard educated and a veteran of the American Revolution, Benjamin Heywood was a jurist and prosperous farmer from Worcester, Mass.

Includes documentation of civic and farming activities, such as which animals were put to pasture on what date, which pastures were leased to others, the names and terms of indentured laborers, and the sale/exchange of agricultural products to customers such as Isaiah Thomas, William Eaton, Nathaniel Stowell, Ithamar Smith, and Jonathan Rice. Also contains references to family members.

Farmer from New Salem, Massachusetts, whose secondary occupation was that of a shoe repairman. Daybook documents a component of small-scale, handwork shoe production in a local economy prior to the arrival of centralized, mechanized manufacturing; lists Holden’s shoemending skills and the method and form in which he was paid by customers, including cash, customers’ labor, and services or wares such as butchering pigs or cows, chopping or gathering wood, traveling by buggy to a different town, using a neighbor’s oxen, and a variety of food and tools.

John Brooks Howard, Jr., known by his family as Brooks (and as J. B. or “Gibby” to his classmates), was a popular and vivid presence on the campus of Massachusetts Agricultural College from 1926 until 1929. Born in November 1908, he arrived from Reading, Mass., as part of the class of 1930; majored in biology; was elected editor-in-chief of the student newspaper the Collegian; was a member of the honor society and the rifle team; and loved wildlife and the outdoors, especially birds. Early one morning, in the spring of his junior year, he climbed to the high branches of a tree to collect specimens. His death at age 20, after falling from the tree, stunned the campus community and broke his mother’s heart, haunting his family for a long time after.

This collection provides glimpses into the life of a MAC student in the late 1920s, with some documentation of his observations of birds and nature and campus activities. It contains an assortment of Brooks’s own papers and possessions, as well as items kept by his family after his death: three diaries, correspondence, mementos and ephemera, photographs including three larger ones in frames, newspaper clippings, a pair of wooden shoes that was a gift from his Dutch friend Hans Van Leer ‘32, and a small field microscope apparently issued to Howard by the college.

Born in 1792, Ashley Hubbard was raised on a farm in Sunderland, Mass., and spent a life invested in agriculture. Prospering in both work and family, Hubbard owned one hundred acres of land at the height of his operations and had a successful, though relatively small scale run of livestock, including horses, oxen, milk cows, and sheep.

In this slender volume, a combination daybook and memorandum book, Hubbard maintained a careful record of breeding and maintaining his livestock. Succinctly, the memos make note of the dates and places on which he serviced horses, took heifers or cows to bulls, or pastured his stock, and there are occasional notices on sheep.

In 1948, Otto and Helen Hunerwadel were among the first cohort of Fulbright grantees to work in the newly independent nation of Burma. Having worked as a county agent in Tennessee since the height of the Depression, Otto (1891-1952) brought a wealth of experience as an agricultural teacher and advisor, while Helen (1898-1996) was an experienced instructor in canning technologies. Based near Taunggyi in the eastern Shan states, the Hunerwadels were witness to the earliest days of conflict between the central government and both Communist and ethnic Karen insurgencies, but despite the instability, they left a record of assistance that contributed both to the formation of US policy in international development and the growth of the Fulbright program. In July 1952, Otto contracted malaria and died in Rangoon of thrombophlebitis produced by his treatment. He became famous posthumously as the model for the heroic title character in William Lederer’s novel, The Ugly American. Although Helen returned to the states after Otto’s death, she continued to work with Fulbright programs, doing two-year tours of Iran (1953-1955) and Surinam.

The collection includes dense documentation of the Hunerwadel’s work in Burma and Iran, and the early years of American foreign aid in south and southeast Asia. Consisting primarily of six thick scrapbooks, the collection provides a rich visual record, combined with letters and printed materials of time abroad. One scrapbook is devoted primarily to the Hunerwadel family, and the collection also includes a plaque commemorating Otto in Burma, and a copy of Helen Hunerwadel’s engaging unpublished memoir, “Our Burma story.”

An historian of economics specializing in American agriculture, Lorian Pamela Jefferson was one of the first women in the field and became an expert on New England agricultural industry. Born in 1871 near Necedah, Wisconsin, Jefferson earned her B.L. from Lawrence University in 1892 and her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1907, continuing on to study towards her PhD though she never finished her research. Jefferson began working at the University in 1912 as an expert in the Division of Rural Social Science and became a professor of Agricultural Economics in 1915. Known as “Miss J”, Jefferson was a dedicated teacher and published extensively on various aspects of agricultural industry and marketing, including the McIntosh apple market and the agricultural labor movement. Illness forced Jefferson’s retirement from the University in 1935 and she died shortly thereafter.

Industry reports, farm and community market assessments, and many of her published articles make up the majority of the collection. There is also a bound volume of correspondence and pamphlets by Jefferson from 1914 titled “Letters Relating to economic Entomology in the United States.” Among the published work is a copy of the magazine Farm and Garden from April, 1924.

Frederick Painter Jeffrey was born in the coal mining town of Trauger, Pennsylvania in February 1911. Jeffrey received a BA in poultry husbandry at Pennsylvania State College in 1932 and then an MS in poultry genetics at Massachusetts State College in 1934. Jeffrey became a professor of Poultry Science at Rutgers University from 1935-1944; after leaving Rutgers, Jeffrey became a professor in the Poultry Science Department at the University of Massachusetts, a department he later headed. In 1954 he became the Dean of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture, a position he held until his retirement in 1971. Frederick Painter Jeffrey died in September 1997.

The Frederick Painter Jeffrey Papers include materials about his work with Bantam chickens and document his tenure at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. There are also limited materials related to his family and schooling.

Karl S. Finison was an undergraduate (class of 1975) and then graduate student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, studying Anthropology and local agricultural history. His 1979 master’s thesis “Energy Flow on a Nineteenth Century Farm,” was a part of a Anthropology Department research series on the ecological anthropology of the Middle Connecticut River Valley, studying demographic and other trends from 1650 to 1900 in the area. Part of this work was supported in 1970s by the Connecticut Valley Population Ecology Project. While doing this work, Finison also began to collect agricultural journals, books, and original manuscripts about the ecological history of Upper and Middle Connecticut River Valley.

This collection consists of five original accounting logs and ledgers from western Massachusetts and southern Vermont, offering insight into the commerce and community in these areas in the 19^th-century and early 20^th-century:

• An 1803-1826 account book covers agricultural and business transactions in the Middle Connecticut River Valley, including in such Massachusetts towns as Chester, Granby, Northampton, Northfield, and Shelburne.
• A ledger of the accounts of E. F. Reed and Co. (Dummerston, VT) from 1883-1894, is the only volume with a known authorial origin.
• A mixed-use logbook includes 1845-1846 worker logs (lumber industry) in Ashfield, MA; 1849 diary and expense entries from Shelburne Falls, MA; diary entries from 1851, ca. 1855, and 1878; and undated “little sermons.”
• An account book of unknown origin, 1881-1905, mainly transactions regarding  shoes, boots, and harnesses.
• A “Time Book,” tracking the labor of agricultural workers at an unknown location in summer 1912.

Nina Keller riding in the back of a hay truck, Wendell, 1980.

Currently residing in Wendell, Massachusetts, Nina Keller has had an active role in environmental and social activism in the Pioneer Valley and New England area for the better part of 40 years. Since the 1970s, Keller has played an active role in local and regional activism, from the antinuclear movement to hazardous waste disposal. She was an initial member of the Alternative Energy Coalition (AEC), was part of the Friends of the Earth (FOE) environmental organization, and most notably took part in efforts to close the nearby Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. At 62, Keller currently chairs the Wendell Board of Health, and has had a recent history of participation in local government.

The Nina Keller Collection is largely organized into five subject areas used by Keller to organize her files: Economics; Environmental Issues; Hazardous Materials; Nuclear Power; and Pesticides and Herbicides. Of note within these files are local, state, and federal reports and documents covering topics such as nuclear emergency evacuation plans, chemical sprays and their health effects, and hazardous waste regulation. Several items reflect Keller’s personal life, most notably two journals from Montague Farm, used communally for diary entries, drawings, clippings, photographs, and account keeping. The collection’s focus spans from the 1970s to the 1980s, as well as the early 2000s.