Collecting area: Massachusetts (Central)

Wallace Haslett Myers was born in Worcester, Massachusetts on November 21, 1929, the elder of two sons of Roscoe and Priscilla Myers. Myers received his Bachelor’s Degree from Clark University in Worcester in 1951. He attended Boston University Law School in the summer of 1951, then enrolled in Harvard Law School, and received a law degree in 1954. Of note, he survived a close brush with the Worcester Tornado of 1953, classified as the 21st deadliest tornado in U.S. history. After graduating from law school, he served in the U.S. Army from 1954-1956 and was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia. Upon his return from the Army, Myers began practicing law, specializing in probate, taxation and real estate matters. On August 23, 1985, he married Irene Healy in Worcester. He belonged to the Worcester Republican 21 Club, was active in the Episcopal Church, and was a supporter of the church’s summer retreat house, Bucksteep Manor in Washington, Massachusetts.

This collection covers the years 1941-1975, with the bulk of the collection between 1945-1957. Myers frequently exchanged letters with many individuals, so the majority is personal correspondence between family and friends, documenting daily life, and notably including one friend’s marriage to a Korean woman during the era of the Korean War. Other papers in the collection pertain to his attendance at Clark, Boston University and Harvard, social activities and clubs, and stamp collecting and trading.

A farmer living in the Quabbin region, Levi Newton spent most of his life within a few miles of the adjoining towns of North Dana and New Salem. Born in 1830, Newton was married three times and raised two sons and a daughter. He died in New Salem in 1919.

Written at a time when his son Willie was living at home and his wife Persis was struggling with her health, Levi Newton’s pocket diary is a terse record of the daily life of a farmer in the great Quabbin region. Little more than a sentence or two in length, each entry makes quick note of the weather, travel, and Levi’s and Willie’s activities for the day, but there are relatively frequent references to the ailments and ultimate death of Persis and occasional notes on the anniversaries of the death of family members. The Newtons raised wheat, potatoes, cattle, hay, and oats on their farm and occasionally record hauling logs and other miscellaneous work.

The Otis Company of Ware, Massachusetts, was founded in 1839 and became a major producer of textiles, including checks, denims, and cotton underwear. At the height of their operations, the company operated three mills with a workforce of over 1,300.

The collection contains correspondence between Otis agent Henry Lyon and the firms of Parks, Wright & Co. (1846-47) and Wright, Whitman & Co. (1847), both of Boston. It includes bills, invoices, letters, and memos, covering orders for such goods as lamp glasses, patent starch, whale oil, gas pipes, bales of cotton, pot and pearl ashes, fish glue, sour flour, fire buckets, potato starch, tar, sheet copper, and indigo.

A Quaker investment broker and attorney, Henry H. Perry was born in Rhode Island in about 1885. A prominent figure in the New England Yearly Meeting, Perry was called upon by the American Friends Service Committee to act as director of three of the Massachusetts Civilian Public Service Camps: Royalston, Petersham, and Ashburnham. Under the Selective Service Act of 1940, negotiations between the Selective Service and the major peace churches resulted in the creation of a system by which conscientious objectors were allowed to refrain from direct participation in the war, by serving instead in Civilian Public Service camps. Assigned to “work of national importance,” they filled in for war-related manpower shortages in a variety of areas, including the Forest Service, Soil Conservation Service, mental hospitals, telephone line maintenance and repair, fire-fighting, and clearing fire debris that was left in the wake of the 1937 New England hurricane. Living in Petersham with his wife Edith (Nicholson), Perry served as director of the camps from June 1941 until they were discontinued in October 1942. Perry writes, in a letter dated November 1942, that he is “no longer connected to CPS;” his correspondence is addressed from Dover, MA, showing that he relocated to the Boston area. However, little information is available about him after the camps closed.

This collection consists of administrative and business records concerning the start up, operation, and shut down of the AFSC-run CPS Camps in Royalston, Ashburnham, and Petersham, Mass. Camp Directors were under mandatory orders to keep the strict records that make up the bulk of this collection—administrative documentation, correspondences, health records, itineraries, financial reports and budgets, all pertaining to camp operations. This documentation acted as a deliberate gesture, demonstrating the competency and legitimacy of CPS camp work to Selective Service authorities. However, this collection also contains some personal correspondence and notes not directly related to camp administration, that give a personal, everyday-life, glimpse at the stresses, struggles, and emotional labor, on the part of Quakers, who had to step up, come together, and make the best of a terrible situation: protecting and caring for conscientious objectors during a time of war.

Pleasant Street Monthly Meeting was formed in 1952 when a group from the programmed Worcester Monthly Meeting sought unprogrammed worship. After more than a decade as an independent meeting, Pleasant Street came under the care of Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting in 1963, and a decade later, they began to hold joint meetings with Worcester, formally merging in 1979 to form the Worcester-Pleasant Street Monthly Meeting (later Uxbridge Monthly).

This small collection consists of photocopies of the two original minutebooks compiled by Pleasant Street Monthly Meeting prior to its merger with Worcester to form the Worcester-Pleasant Street Monthly Meeting (now Uxbridge Monthly Meeting).

A textile manufacturer, Ponakin (or Ponikin) Mill was established on the north branch of the Nashua River, half a mile from North Lancaster, in 1861, near the site of an earlier cotton mill. By the end of the Civil War, it boasted 40 employees who produced 500,000 yards of brown sheeting, but by the time it was incorporated in 1888, specializing in the production of cotton yarn, manufacturing in Lancaster was already on the decline. The company survived at least into the 1920s.

This survival from a central Massachusetts textile manufacturer contains miscellaneous business records copied into a letterpress (or wet press) copy book, in which a combination of moisture and pressure was used to transfer ink from the original onto a sheet of tissue paper. This records cover a wide terrain, including inventories of stock on hand, accounts payable, insurance and IRS tax information, payroll data (without names), shipping lists and lists of customers, and a few copies of business letters.

The collection includes demands and receipts 1804-1809 for taxes (parish, highway, town, county, and state) on various tracts of land in Greenwich, Massachusetts owned by Dr. William and Eleanor Porter. It also includes three documents dating from 1800-1808 regarding the settling of accounts with local individuals: Ichabod [Trandell], James Mills, and Isaac Hunter, and an agreement ca. 1807 to sell pasture land to Captain West of Greenwich.

Rural and sparsely populated, Prescott, Massachusetts, was founded in 1822 along the ridge separating the West and Middle branches of the Swift River. Its three villages (North Prescott, Atkinson Hollow, and Prescott Hill) never amounted to more than a few houses each, and the town’s total population never exceeded 500. Prescott became the first of four towns to vacate after the Swift River Valley was ordered cleared and dammed to create the Quabbin Reservoir, ceding its administration to the state in 1928 before formally disincorporating in 1938.

The records of Prescott, Mass., document the history of the smallest of the four towns inundated to create the Quabbin Reservoir. Held by the Swift River Valley Historical Society, the materials in this collection consist of records of town meetings and of the activities of the town Selectmen, 1822-1938, as well as sparser records of the School Committee, the Treasurer, and Overseers of the Poor.

During the 1920s and 1930s, the populations of four towns in the Swift River Valley, Mass., were relocated to make way for completion of the Quabbin Reservoir. Dana, Enfield, Greenwich, and Prescott were formally disincorporated in 1938, marking an end to over a century of small town government in the region.

The Quabbin Broadside Collection contains as assortment of printed and posted notices issued in three of the four Massachusetts towns that were flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir. These include announcements for dances (including the Enfield Fire Department Farewell Ball in 1938), for plays performed by the North Dana Dramatic Club, and notification of voter registration and tax assessment.

The collection consists of five maps prepared by the Massachusetts Metropolitan District Water Supply Commission of the anticipated site of the Quabbin Reservoir, some with hand-written notations, and one map showing the route of Boston’s water supply.