Collecting area: Massachusetts (Central)

George Armelagos, expert on the diet of prehistoric humans and author of the book Consuming Passions: the Anthropology of Eating (1980) was a professor in the University’s Anthropology Department from 1971 until 1989. Armelagos was born in Lincoln Park, Michigan in 1936 and earned his B.A from the University of Michigan in 1958, his MA and PhD from the University of Colorado in 1963 and 1968 respectively. Armelagos became the face of physical anthropology in the 1980s, publishing popular works on forensic studies of prehistoric man and his research in the field of paleopathology attempted to apply the findings of skeletal research to contemporary nutrition and medicine. While at the University, Armelagos undertook a forensic study of the towns flooded by the Quabbin Reservoir. Armelagos left the University for a position at the University of Florida in 1989.

The George Armelagos papers include correspondence, grant proposals, and lecture notes from his time at the University of Massachusetts. There is a folder of materials from his study of the Quabbin Reservoir and photographs from the Mesa Verde Path. The remainder of the collection contains Armelagos’ published and unpublished works, stretching from his time as a Ph.D. student through his time at the University.

Stage coach line that carried passengers and mail from Berlin, Bolton, and Feltonville (Hudson) to the Boston area. Includes account book documenting expenses of running the line, with passenger fares recorded elsewhere. Last several pages contain an individual’s accounts, as well as photocopies of passages about the stage coach line and a poem written when the company folded. Amos Sawyer, Jr., and his son-in-law Lorren Arnold ran the business.

Twenty-four page register kept by unnamed person, possibly from a Quabbin town, listing boarders by name, payment received, and employee accounts. Payments noted in detail from February to October, 1850. Boarders included several doctors and L.S. Hills, possibly Leonard S. Hills of the Amherst, Massachusetts hat factory. Employee accounts list many women with Irish surnames, including Ellen O’Leary, Ellen Callahan, and Margaret Murphy.

Settled in 1660 and incorporated in 1718, the town of Brookfield (Worcester County) straddles the Boston Post Road, one of the major arteries during the colonial period connecting Boston with the towns of the Connecticut River Valley and New York.

This assemblage of documents from the town of Brookfield consists primarily of warrants for town meetings, many with agendas, issued through the local constable. Concentrated in the 1770s, these warrants provide relatively detailed information on matters of local importance, including town finances, tax assessments, contributions to the poor house, roadways, and property disputes. During the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary years, however, issues of interest to the town were often wrapped up in regional or national political issues. Town freeholders, for example, were called to consider requests to “come into any Vote or Resolve Respecting the East India Company Tea,” the encouragement of manufacture of firearms, smallpox inoculation, and pay for the town’s Minute Men.

The artist Burt Vernon Brooks was one of the outstanding chroniclers of daily life in the Swift River Valley before it was inundated to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Born in Brimfield, Mass., in 1849 and raised in Monson, Brooks moved to Greenwich with his family in the 1870s, where he worked on the family farm. At some unclear point before he turned 40, Brooks became active as an artist, painting local homes and scenery and taking photographs of the landscape, residents, and daily life in the Quabbin region. A prolific photographer, he was, in the words of historian Donald W. Howe, “hardly ever seen without his camera strapped to his back,” remaining active for decades. Three years after following his second wife to the west, Brooks died in Los Angeles in 1934.

The great majority of the 92 photographs in this collection are 5×7″ dry plate glass negatives taken by Brooks in the earliest years of the twentieth century, documenting the houses and people of Greenwich. Brooks’ work includes landscapes, houses, and a significant series of images of the Hillside School, but some of his best works are studio portraits, images of people at home or with their carriages, and posed scenes of children at play or at work. The collection also includes eight images by Brooks at Enfield, Greenwich, and Dana that are the property of the Swift River Valley Historical Society, and six images taken by Chetwynd and Pike in the Quabbin region to document properties slated for removal.

Freight haulers from Dana, Massachusetts. Includes information about products that were hauled (such as palm leaf hats, mats, lumber, railroad ties, and waste) and the companies for which they were carried. Also contains information about how Brown was paid (cash, barter, manure, chopped wood, stone) and the names of many people and places with whom Brown and Brothers conducted business.

During the mid-1970s, Robert Brown worked as a fifth grade teacher at the West Street School, Southbridge, Mass., while pursuing a graduate degree in anthropology at UMass Amherst under Joel Halpern. Part of Brown’s research involved conducting oral histories with Southbridge families identified as “ethnic,” including Albanian, Greek, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, and Puerto Rican, as well as the only African American family in town at the time. Brown published his work in local newspapers and ultimately in the book, The New New Englanders (Worcester, Mass.: Commonwealth Press, 1980).

The Brown collection includes copies of his newspaper articles, profiles of the families he studied, and apparently complete transcripts of two oral history interviews. Also included are copies of two papers by Brown on Southbridge, possibly for an anthropology class, analyzing the education of Puerto Rican students and the lives of Rumanian Americans.

Businessman in several partnerships in south-central Worcestor county who owned a general store in Webster, Massachusetts. Includes lists of partners (such as John P. Stockwell of Stockwell and Carroll), yearly salaries and profits, accounts of what he sold and how he was paid, lists of individual customers and manufacturing companies, and labor accounts of workers. Also contains an alphabetical index to the ledger and several pages of notes receivable and notes payable.

Nathaniel Chickering came to Enfield, Massachusetts, in 1800 with his son Otis and operated a grist mill for twenty years. One of Otis’ children, Bertrand, operated the Enfield telephone system in the Howe family store and lived with the Edwin H. Howe family.

Includes land and pew deeds of Nathaniel Chickering and Mrs. Otis Chickering’s account booklet with C.F. Wood and Co.

Situated in the northeastern reaches of the Swift River Valley in western Massachusetts, Dana was one of four towns inundated in the 1930s to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Rural and relatively sparsely populated, Dana’s economy centered on agriculture, leavened with manufacturing wood products and soapstone quarrying.

The Dana Collections include a comprehensive records of town meetings from incorporation through disincorporation (1801-1938), plus rich records for the Congregational Church and its affiliate organizations, the Ladies Aid Society, the Orthodox Congregational Society, and the Young People’s Society of Christian Endeavor. Most of the materials listed in this finding aid are held at the Swift River Valley Historical Society in New Salem, Mass., and were part of a cooperative digitization project centered on the records of the Quabbin towns.