Collecting area: Massachusetts

A physician and native of Warwick, Mass., Amory Gale worked as an allopath after his graduation from Brown College in 1824, before turning to homeopathy in the mid-1850s. Often struggling with ill health, Gale plied his trade in a long succession of towns, including Canton, Scituate, Mansfield, and Medway, Massachusetts, as well as towns in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Between 1844 and 1853, he interrupted his medical practice for a turn in the pulpit.

Gale’s surviving ledgers include accounts with patients, their form of payment, lists of medical fees, and a draft of a business agreement with a fellow homeopath in Woonsocket, J.S. Nichols.

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.

Myra Gallond (1849-1924) was the eldest daughter of the proprietor of a successful boarding house and livery stable on South Prospect Street in Amherst, Mass. After marrying Henry E. Paige, a veterinary surgeon and brother of Massachusetts Agricultural College faculty member James B. Paige, Myra maintained her own boarding house on South Prospect.

This diminutive autograph album was assembled in Amherst, Mass., between 1867 and 1874, presumably at the boarding house Myra Gallond’s family operated on South Prospect Street. Gallond’s long association with nearby Massachusetts Agricultural College included taking in boarders from the school and working there briefly as a housekeeper, and she was the sister-in-law of one of the college’s best known faculty members. Several of the College’s earliest students appear in the album, including three of the first international students, Saitaro Naito (Japan), Gabriel Codina (Spain), and Elesbam Fiuza Barreto (Brazil) and several from the Pioneer Class of 1871.

A noted figure in the alternative press and a former president of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, Clif Garboden was a long-time editor and writer for the Boston Phoenix. Arriving as a student at Boston University in 1966, Garboden was drawn into a close-knit, creative community on the BU News staff that included Raymond Mungo, Peter Simon, and Joe Pilati, filling a versatile role that entailed work as writer, editor, and photographer. After graduating in 1970, Garboden moved immediately to the Phoenix where he applied his signature wit and occasional snark to a wide range of topics. Apart from a six year period when he worked for the Boston Globe, Garboden was an indispensable part of the Phoenix editorial team until he was laid off in cost cutting moves in 2009. After a lengthy struggle with cancer, Garboden died of pneumonia on Feb. 10, 2011. He is survived by his wife, Susannah (Price), and children Molly and Phil.

The Garbdoen collection consists of hundreds of photographic prints, including work for both the Boston University News and the Phoenix and many personal images of family and friends.

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.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

In the early 1970s, the documentary filmmaker Bruce Geisler dropped out of Pomona College one semester short of graduation, drove across country, and joined the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune, then the largest commune in the eastern United States. During his four years living with the Brotherhood, later renamed the Renaissance Community, Geisler learned the craft of filmmaking, before returning west to earn an MFA at the film school of the University of Southern California. Geisler has received a number of awards as a screenwriter and filmmaker including the Grand Prize for Best Screenplay from Worldfest Houston and the Dominique Dunne Memorial Prize for Filmmaking, and, in 2007, he released his feature-length documentary, Free Spirits, about the Brotherhood of the Spirit/Renaissance Community and its ill-fated founder, Michael Metelica Rapunzel. Geisler is currently a Senior Lecturer in the UMass Amherst Department of Communication.

Documenting everyday life in a Massachusetts commune and performances by the commune bands (Spirit in Flesh and Rapunzel), the Geisler collection was assembled in conjunction with the making of the film Free Spirits. In addition to many hours of both raw and edited film footage taken by members of the Brotherhood of the Brotherhood of the Spirit and Renaissance Community, the collection includes a rich assemblage of still photographs, ephemera, and newspaper clippings relating to the commune.

Ledger, begun by George Cooley in 1843 to record the accounts of his soapmaking business in the Cabotville section of Chicopee, continued by Titus Chapin, an ardent abolitionist, and Mordecai Cough who managed the business following Cooley’s death (or departure) in 1848. The 1843 date coincides with the coming of many small businesses to Cabotville in connection with the growth of industries there at the time.

Cooley accepted goods, services and cash as payment. The most frequently accepted goods had relatively obvious value to a soap maker: grease and ashes, tallow, pork, scraps and skins, and candles. Some of the services bartered were repairing wagon, shoeing horse, fixing wippletree, making 30 boxes, and covering umbrella. The business sold gallons, bars, and cakes of soap. Mount Holyoke Seminary bought 28 “fancy soaps”. Also listed were shaving soap and hard or hand soap. In addition, sales sometimes included candles, butter, mop handles, molasses, apples and potatoes, squashes, satinet, cheese, cord wood, paint, and rosin. Some of the listings were annotated with regard to the customer’s character: Ashad Bartlett was seen as “bad and poor and fights with his wife”‘ Norris Starkwether was “an honest man”; and Miss L.B. Hunt “eloped with a man”.

In 1841, George H. Gilbert and Charles A. Stevens formed a partnership to manufacture broadcloth and cloaking in Ware, Massachusetts. Ten years later, the partnership dissolved and each partner carried a part of the business into separate establishments. The newly formed George H. Gilbert Company continued making high-grade woolen flannels, for which it developed a national reputation, until 1930.

Records, consisting of correspondence, financial records and cash books, construction contracts, sales lists, production records, and sample books, document the operation of Gilbert and Stevens and later the Gilbert Company for almost a century. The labor accounts (1851-1930), document the phases of the varying ethnic composition of the workforce — Irish, French-Canadian, and eventually Polish — well as the family orientation of the mills.

Although poorly known, Chauncey S. Gillett (1815-1846) appears to have carried on a relatively small custom at a general store in Southwick, Massachusetts, during the early 1840s. The son of Almon and Cinthia Gillett, Gillett traded in the typical range of groceries, dry goods, and other commodities, including buttons, cloth, paper, tobacco and tea, molasses, and candles, but also in liquors of various sorts (rum, gin, and brandy cider). Gillett died at the age of 30 on January 4, 1846, and is buried in Southwick.

Kept by the young Chauncey Gillett, this daybook records a chronological series of transactions at a general stores in Southwick, Mass., between 1841 and 1845. Among Gillett’s customers were several relatives, including Almon, Rhodolphus, and Levi Gillett, all of whom are also buried in the Southwick cemetery.

A native New Yorker born in 1959, Al Giordano was drawn into the antinuclear movement as a teenager, becoming an important organizer for the antinuclear and environmental movements. Giordano sharpened his organizing skills through a close association with Abbie Hoffman, with whom he often collaborated throughout the 1980s. Giordano has worked as a journalist for several decades, primarily with the alternative press, founding his own periodical Narco News in 2000 and the School of Authentic Journalism in 2002. He currently resides in Mexico City.

The Giordano collection contains a miscellaneous assemblage of ephemera, publications and newspapers, reports, and a small quantity of correspondence, relating to antinuclear activism.