Collecting area: Natural sciences

The protistologist Lemuel R. Cleveland is credited with providing the first convincing evidence of the endosymbiotic relationship between protists and their metazoan hosts. A Mississippian by birth and graduate of University of Mississippi and Johns Hopkins, Cleveland spent the majority of his career at Harvard, specializing in study of the flagellates inhabiting the guts of termites and the wood-dwelling cockroach Cryptocercus.

This small collection consists of two papers by Cleveland (one in manuscript), four wood-mounted printing blocks, published color and black and white plates, and original paste-up figures for publications by protistologist L. R. Cleveland.

Robert L. Coffin (1889-1976) began a long association with the Massachusetts Agricultural College when he arrived on campus in 1912 to begin work as an assistant photographer for the East Experiment Station. His skill as a technical photographer and his artistic eye, however, soon made him a valuable commodity on campus and within a few years of his arrival, Coffin had branched out to work for a wide range of departments across campus and, in the late 1920s, for the US Department of Agriculture in Pennsylvania and New Jersey as well. An avid birder and naturalist, Coffin was particularly known for his nature photography, using a battery of different cameras to capture everything from scenic vistas to photomicrographs. Although he established a commercial photographic studio in Amherst in 1931, Coffin continued to accept a wide range of assignments at UMass, earning recognition as the unofficial campus photographer. He remained active almost to the time of his death in 1976 at the age of 86.

Containing the meticulously detailed records of an avid birder, the Coffin journal contains records of sightings and first and last occurrences of birds observed in the years 1912 and 1917-1922. The records in the journal reflect Coffin’s many birding trips in western Massachusetts, mostly in the Connecticut River Valley, however the journal also contains records from the Swift River Valley, the Harvard Forest, the Boston area, and the Connecticut coast. In a few cases, Coffin recorded the numbers of birds observed.

The cell biologist and biophysicist Eugene R. Gibbons was widely noted for his discovery of microtubule-associated motor proteins. For his doctoral research at Cambridge University in 1957 , Gibbons used an electron microscope to analyze chromosomal organization during mitosis and meiosis, earning him a call from Harvard University to help establish an electron mcircoscopic laboratory. While working on Tetrahymena to answer the question of how simple proteins can push cells through the water, he isolated and described a motor protein he called dynein, which moves cargos along microtubules and powers ciliar and flagellar motility. Relocating to the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1967 to become head of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory, and switching his organismal focus to sea urchin sperm, he and his collaborator and wife, Barbara, contined to make fundamental contributions to understanding the role of microtubule sliding in ciliar motility. Gibbons shared the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine with Ron Vale (2017) and the E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society of Cell Biology (1994). He died in January 2018 at the age of 86.

The Gibbons papers contain two boxes of laboratory notebooks, a box of his offprints with a small quantity of correspondence. A collection of Gustaf Retzius’s periodical Biologische Untersuchungen (1890-1914) has been transferred to printed 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.

An ornithologist and conservationist for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Joseph A. “Archie” Hagar’s career was rooted in the generation of naturalists such as William Brewster, Edward Howe Forbush, and Arthur Cleveland Bent. Born in Lawrence, Mass., on May 13, 1896, Hagar’s undergraduate career at Harvard was interrupted by service in the First World War, after which he completed his studies at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, graduating with the class of 1921. An expert field biologist and ecologist, he was appointed State Ornithologist in the Department of Fish and Game in November 1934 serving in that position for almost twenty-five years. A specialist in waterfowl and raptors, Hagar was deeply involved in early conservation efforts in New England, noted for his work on wetland conservation and for linking the use of DDT with eggshell thinning in peregrine falcons, and he was famously at the center of a dispute with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service over the design of the Parker River Wildlife Refuge. Never a prolific writer, he was an active member of the American Ornithological Union, the Nuttall Ornithological Club, the Wildlife Society, and other professional organizations, and after retirement, he was specially cited for his work in waterfowl conservation by Ducks Unlimited. Active until late in life, he died at home in Marshfield Hills on Dec. 17, 1989.

The Hagar Papers are a deep and valuable resource for the study of New England birds and the growth of modern conservation biology. With abundant professional correspondence, field notes on shorebirds and raptors, and drafts of articles, the collection documents the full range of Hagar’s activities as State Ornithologist, including a particularly thick run of material for the controversy over the Parker River Wildlife Refuge. Hagar also acquired a set of field notes, 1897-1921, from the Harvard ornithologist John E. Thayer.

Born at Ancram, N.Y., the merchant Benjamin Hoag (1865-1932) lived most of his life in Stephentown, N.Y., near the Massachusetts border. In 1900, he was listed as a dealer in bicycles, but by 1910, he was operating a broader retail trade in dry goods and grains. At the same time, he conducted a thriving trade in ornithological and oological supplies, announcing in journals such as The Oologist that he sold “books, periodicals, tools, supplies, eggs” as well as “fine line fish tackle and rods.” He also appears to have run a magazine subscription agency, offering everything from the Saturday Evening Post and Good Housekeeping to professional journals such as the Condor Magazine.

The Hoag collection consists of 1,345 letters, mostly incoming, and over 800 receipts, ephemeral items, and other documents, relating to Hoag’s oological and magazine businesses. Concentrated between 1901 and 1914, the collection offers a rich documentation of the oological trade in the years shortly before it was outlawed in 1918. The collection is organized chronologically.

Bronislaw Honigberg was a parasitologist who, though studying the intestinal parasites of amphibians, provided research for the U.S. Department of Public Health’s infections diseases lab. Born in Warsaw, Poland in 1920, Honigberg fled to the United States at the beginning of World War II, cutting short his Polish medical education to become an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley, where he earned his B.A. (1943), M.A (1946) and Ph.D. (1960). Honigberg joined the University faculty in 1961 and taught in the zoology department until his death in 1992.

The collection is comprised of Honigberg’s lecture notes, including exams, lab exercises, and illustrative material. There is also five folder of reprints spanning the years 1949 to 1991 and thus representing Honigberg’s research throughout his career.

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.

A pioneer in the chemistry of protists, Seymour H. Hunter (1911-2003) was among the founders of the Haskins Laboratories in 1935, helping to establish its programs in microbiology, genetics, and nutrition (now affiliated with Pace University). His diverse research interests centered on protist nutrition, and he is credited with significant advances in understanding the ecology of marine plankton and the development of culturing methods for algae and protists. Stemming from his work on nutrition in Euglena, he developed microbiological assays for the determination of vitamin B12 in human tissues, and other research was foundational for understanding of the role of chelation for metals in culture systems and clinical use. Sometimes called a “protozoology missionary,” Hutner was a founding member of the Society of Protozoologists And was noted for his ability to recruit and inspire students and colleagues.

The Hutner Papers contain a significant run of scientific correspondence concentrated in the 1970s and 1980s, relating to Hutner’s research, publications, and the Haskins Lab, along with a small amount of material relating to his position at Pace University and some personal correspondence.

John Kloetzel began his academic career in 1967 with his Johns Hopkins dissertation on the fine structure of the larval salivary gland in a dipteran. After a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Colorado, however, he began publishing on the structure of the ciliate cytoskeleton, working on Euplotes for much of his nearly forty year career at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. A past president of the International Society of Protistologists, Kloetzel has retired to Oregon.

The bulk of the Kloetzel Papers consists of TEM and SEM micrographs of protists, along with some correspondence, grant proposals, and manuscripts. Other Kloetzel material is located in the records of the International Society of Protistologists at the University of Maryland Baltimore County Library.