Collecting area: Agriculture

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.

Born in Middleton, Massachusetts, in 1824, Charles L. Flint worked his way through Harvard, graduating in 1849, taught for a short time, then returned to Harvard in 1850 to enter the Law School. In 1853, he left his law practice to become secretary of the newly formed Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, remaining in that position for 27 years. He had a part in the founding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a member of the Boston School Committee, and as one of the founders of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, he served as secretary of the Board of Trustees for 22 years. Selected during a budgetary crisis, Charles L. Flint agreed to serve as President of Massachusetts Agricultural College without a salary. For four years he gave lectures at the college on dairy farming. Upon the resignation of President William Smith Clark in 1879, Flint was elected President, though he served only until the spring of 1880.

The Flint collection contains an assortment of photographs; reports as Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, 1854-1881; and printed versions of published writings.

Sylvia Helen Forman (1944 or 1945-1992) was an anthropologist and educator at the University of California – Berkeley and at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst focusing primarily on the demography, genealogy, and health outcomes of Quechua and Spanish-speaking Indigenous and Mestizo peoples in the Andean regions of Ecuador. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1972 for her study of law and conflict in rural highland Ecuador and the following year she joined the faculty at UMass Amherst. Soon after, she began to teach at UMass Amherst until her death in 1992 at only 48 years old. Forman’s legacy at UMass exists today through her former students, her substantial research, and her contributions to the Department of Anthropology, namely its Junior Year Writing program and the Sylvia Forman Third World scholarship fund (which was initially funded by a $100,000 grant from her estate).

Throughout the entirety of her life and her career, Forman was passionately dedicated to feminist and other social justice causes in the United States, in Ecuador, and elsewhere. From early in her career, she stood out as an advocate for her students and was instrumental in building cross-connections among anthropologists in the Five Colleges Consortium to expand opportunities for study, and she also forged strong connections with academics in the developing programs in Women’s Studies. She would later be recognized posthumously as one the founders of the Association for Feminist Anthropology in 1998.

Sylvia Helen Forman’s work in Ecuador can generally be split into two periods, the first of which corresponds roughly to 1966-1975, and the second from around 1976-1981, but she continued to work with contacts in the region long after. The former period saw more direct involvement and travel in Andean Ecuador, while the latter saw fewer trips and less extensive fieldwork. Regardless, both periods focused on similar topics of demography, genealogy, and medical experiences. Forman also did continue to travel to the region after these main research periods, but fewer materials are available from after 1981. Each series in this collection contains different parts of Forman’s work in Ecuador, her professional life, her personal life, and an array of pamphlets, postcards, and other ephemera she collected along the way. The majority of the content available is research-related and typically consists of field notes, data, diaries, and journals.

Although Henry Flagg French was selected as the first president of the new Massachusetts Agricultural College, he served in that office for barely two years. A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law School, French was a strong proponent of scientific agriculture, but in 1866, after falling out with the college administration over campus design, he resigned his office, leaving before the first students were actually admitted.

The French collection includes a suitably small body of correspondence, including 16 letters (1864-1866) from French to the original campus landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, and letters and reports from French to college officials, together with published writings, biographical material about French and his son, sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), and photographs. In part, these are copies of originals in the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers at American University, Washington, DC.

Corn sample, Herbarium of Walt C. Galinat, 1971

Born in 1923 in Manchester, Connecticut, Walton Clarence Galinat was a corn enthusiast for almost his entire life. He worked with various aspects of corn in high school, as an undergraduate student assistant at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, as a research associate at Harvard University, and finally, as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he worked at the Waltham Field Station as a plant geneticist from 1964 until his retirement in 1990. A contributing author to more than 300 published papers, Galinat spent significant parts of his research career in Mexico studying ancient maize, but was also deeply embedded in New England farming and corn production and sustainability. In addition to his world-renowned research on corn evolution, morphology, and diversity, he is credited with the development of many varieties of corn, including Candy Stick, “airplane corn,” and a red, white, and blue kernel variety. His skill as an artist was also recognized across his field and beyond, with his articles often accompanied by beautifully detailed illustrations of corn samples, his widely distributed and used teaching illustrations, and with a few of his hand-drawn corn diagrams permanently displayed in the National Academies Building in Washington D.C. The Waltham Experiment Station building retains several of Galinat’s oversized 3D art models of corn plant migrations and lifecycles to this day. Amongst many honors, Galinat was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Economic Botanist Award from the Society for Economic Botany in 1994.

The Walton C. Galinat Papers document Galinat’s academic, service, research, and artistic work during his time at the Waltham Experiment Station while employed as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Roughly half the collection is administrative and professional materials, including correspondence; research files and journals, with numerous detailed hand-drawn illustrations; Experiment Station and Hatch annual reports and grants; UMass administrative memos, reports, and files; and photographs of corn samples as well as individuals from Experiment Station, Home Economics, and 4H clubs. The other half of the collection consists of three-dimensional corn display samples and pressed corn and grass from Galinat’s personal herbarium.

A noted South Shore cranberry grower, Kenneth Greenwood Garside was a graduate of Harvard (Chemistry, 1927) and MIT (MS, Gas and Chemical Engineering, 1929). After working for several years in the electric industry, he relocated to Duxbury, Mass., in 1937 to taking over operations of 406 acres of cranberry bog. Over the next twenty-five years as a grower, Garside served as Director of the New England Cranberry Sales Co. and as a board member of the National Cranberry Association, and after dissolving his partnership in the Duxbury Cranberry Company in 1956, he served as acting General Manager of Ocean Spray during the aminotriazole crisis of 1959-1960. Following his retirement from the bogs, Garside taught science in schools in Florida and Maine. He died at Blue Hill, Maine, in 1987.

The Garside Papers contain nearly forty years of letters between the Massachusetts cranberry grower Kenneth G. Garside and his daughter Anne G. Cann. Rich and well-written, these letters reflect Garside’s work and touch on his many interests, from cranberry culture to politics, family, and education. The collection also contains photographs and an assortment of cranberry business-related ephemera.

An organizer, consultant, and educator in the alternative agriculture movement, Grace Gershuny has been active in the field since the 1970s when she worked for the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), developing its first organic certification program. As a leader in the movement, Gershuny helped to establish both the Organic Trade Association and the Organic Farmer: The Digest of Sustainable Agriculture. Today she continues to write and teach on the subject, serving as a faculty member at a number of colleges, most recently Green Mountain College.

The collection consists chiefly of printed material from a run of the Organic Farmer to Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA) publications and organizational newsletters, such as the Rural Education Center. Amongst these publications are a few small but significant groups of materials including notes from Gershuny’s role as the NOFA VT coordinator in 1979 and her drafts and notes for the second editions of The Soul of Soil.

German-born agricultural chemist, professor of Chemistry at the University of Massachusetts Amherst when it was known as Massachusetts Agricultural College, and President of the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists and the American Chemical Society who made several important contributions in nineteenth century chemistry and held at least four patents.

The Goessman collection includes correspondence (mostly professional), some with presidents of Massachusetts Agricultural College, William Smith Clark (1826-1886) and Henry Hill Goodell (1839-1905). Also contains handwritten drafts of addresses and articles, his dissertation, printed versions of published writings, handwritten lecture notes, class records, proposed college curricula, notes taken by students, handwritten research notes, newsclippings and offprints utilized in research, and biographical materials.

Brass mouse-head stencil used in genetics work at Mount Hop Farm

An applied geneticist associated with Massachusetts Agricultural College and Mount Hope Farm, Hubert Dana Goodale made important contributions in poultry and dairy science.

The Goodale Papers contain correspondence written to Goodale, primarily by his friends and colleagues in poultry science, Al Lunn (Oregon Agricultural College), Loyal F. Payne (Kansas State), and John C. Graham (Mass. Agricultural College). Mixing both personal and professional content, the letters touch on academic life in post-World War I period and a variety of issues in poultry husbandry and genetics.

Barrie Barstow Greenbie was a key member of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning at UMass Amherst from 1970-1989. In a long and remarkably diverse career, Greenbie worked as an artist with the Works Progress Administration, as a soldier and journalist, as a professor of theater, an architect, inventor, author, and landscape planner. After earning a BA in drama from the University of Miami (1953), he worked for several years in the theatre program at Skidmore College. While there, he added architecture to his array of talents, designing the East 74th Street Theater in New York in 1959, and founded a company to produce a “self-erecting” building designed to substitute for summer tent theaters. Two years after joining the faculty at UMass in 1970, he completed a doctorate in urban affairs and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin and continued with a characteristically broad array of creative pursuits, designing the William Smith Clark Memorial, among other things, and conducting an extensive aerial survey of the landscapes of the Connecticut River Valley. In monographs such as Design for Diversity and Spaces: Dimensions of the Human Landscape, Greenbie examined the interactions between humans and nature. He died at his home on South Amherst in 1998.

The Greenbie Papers document a long career as academic, writer, artist, architect, and theatrical designer. Of particular note is the extensive and engrossing correspondence, which extends from Greenbie’s years as a student at the Taft School in the late 1930s through his World War II service with the Sixth Army in the South Pacific and Japan, to his tenure at UMass Amherst (1970-1989). The collection also includes a small but interesting batch of correspondence between Greenbie’s parents (1918-1919).