Collecting area: Massachusetts

Charles Hutchins Hapgood (1904-1982) was working toward a doctorate in French history at Harvard when the Great Depression derailed his plans. After a succession of jobs and wartime service, however, Hapgood returned to the academy, teaching history at Springfield College and Keene State for over three decades. He is best remembered as an advocate of several scientifically heterodox ideas, arguing that the earth’s outer crust shifts on geological time scales, displacing continents, and that the earth’s rotational axis has shifted numerous times in geological history. A long time friend and supporter of the medium Elwood Babbitt, he was author of several books, including The Earth’s Shifting Crust (1958), Maps of the Ancient Sea Kings (1966), The Path of the Pole (1970), and Voices of Spirit : Through the Psychic Experience of Elwood Babbitt (1975). Hapgood died in Fitchburg, Mass., on Dec. 21, 1982, after being struck by an automobile.

The Hapgood Papers contain a small grouping of correspondence and writings that offer a glimpse into some of Charles Hapgood’s late-career interests. Although the correspondence is relatively slight, relating primarily to publications in the last two or three years of his life, the collection is a rich resource for the lectures and writings of Elwood Babbitt.

An inventor, entrepreneur, and corporate executive, Carl C. Harris was the third of four generations of his family to help manage the Rodney Hunt Company, a major manufacturer of waterwheels, turbines, and textile machinery based in Orange, Mass. While still in high school in 1898, Harris already displayed a sharp business and technical eye, establishing the first telephone company in Orange, and he began his career after graduation from Worcester Polytechnical Institute, working as a draftsman for GE and then as a superintendent at Rodney Hunt. After a brief stint at the Simplex Time Recorder Company in Gardner, Harris returned to Rodney Hunt for good in 1912. After acquiring a controlling interest in 1917, he remained with the company in several capacities through the Depression and Second World War, serving as general manager, vice president, and treasurer, and from 1938-1947, as president. Throughout his career, Harris remained active in developing or improving a variety of new products and processes, registering a total of 99 patents, and he regularly used his offices at Rodney Hunt to launch other, smaller enterprises, including the Slencil Company,which manufactured mechanical pencils; Riveto, which produced toys and a paper fastening device; and Speed-Mo, a manufacturer of a moistening pad system. Harris retired in 1956 and died four years later in Orange at the age of 79.

The Harris Papers are centered closely on the entrepreneurial activity of Carl C. Harris, and include a particularly thick set of business records for the Slencil Company (ca.1935-1960) and the Riveto Company (1930s-1940s), and the slender record book of the Home Telephone Company. In addition to these, the collection includes many dozen slencils, including prototypes, speciality models, presentation sets, store displays, and marketing designs; examples of Riveto toys, Simplex inventions, flotation devices, and other oddities invented by Harris, along with the associated patents.

Born on January 29, 1908 in Conway, Massachusetts, Alice Totman spent her early years on her father’s family farm, Page Place, before he was forced to sell it due to a labor scarcity in 1916 and moved the family to Greenfield. She graduated from Greenfield High School in 1927 and enrolled at Massachusetts School of Art in Boston. She studied there for a year and a half before marrying Hart Mowry Hawks on June 16, 1929. The couple settled in Bellows Fall, Vermont where Mowry was recently assigned a permanent post with the Boston and Maine Railroad. Tragically, over the next fifteen years, Alice experienced seven pregnancies, only one of which resulted in a healthy child, Gertrude Ann, born in 1932. Alice’s interest in her family can be traced back to the earliest days of her marriage, during which time she worked on genealogies for both the Totman and Hawks families. Eager to share the knowledge she acquired and assembled, she often found ways to update her relatives, most notably in a family newsletter called Tot-Kin that she edited and published between the years 1935-1945.

Alice Totman Hawks’s collection consists of her extensive genealogical notes and writings, including a run of Tot-Kin, correspondence and some of Alice’s sketches.

A granting agency that advises and provides funding for grass roots, non-profit projects and organizations in order to bring about broad social change by addressing local issues and community needs. Records include minutes, reports, correspondence, successful and unsuccessful grant applications from Western Massachusetts organizations, grant source information, and grantee materials including organization reports, publications, member lists, clippings, and other materials.

Jonathan “Jay” Healy represented the 1st Franklin District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1970 to 1993. A moderate Republican, Healy was born in Greenfield in 1945 and raised on a 500-acre farm in Charlemont. A recent graduate of Williams College, Healy ran for office for the first time in 1970, succeeding his own father, Winston Healy, defeating both his Democratic rival and a far right challenge from within his own party. His popularity over the succeeding years in a heavily Democratic district was rooted in his close attention to issues of local concern, particularly agriculture and dairying. When he left office in 1993, he was appointed state Commissioner of Food and Agriculture, where he remained until 2003.

Documenting the career of a Massachusetts Republican, the Healy Papers contain a small selection of constituents’ correspondence, press releases, and position papers, plus an excellent assortment of scrapbooks, news clippings, and photographs relating to his political career. Although the focus is largely on his time in the state house, there is some materials relating to his role as Commission of Food and Agriculture.

In 1960, William K. Hefner (1915-1993) became one of the first of new breed of radical pacifists to run for elective office, when he ran as a peace candidate for Congress in the 1st district of Massachusetts. An accountant from Greenfield, Hefner was involved at a national level with movements for peace and civil rights. An early member of SANE, a founder of Political Action for Peace in 1959 (now CPPAX) and the Greenfield Peace Center (1963), and an active member of the American Friends Service Committee, War Resisters League, Turn Toward Peace, and the World Without War Conference, Hefner was an energetic force in the movements for peace and disarmament, civil rights, and a more just economic system. He ran unsuccessfully for office in three elections between 1960 and 1964, and supported peace candidate H. Stuart Hughes in his bid for election to the U.S. Senate in 1962.

The Hefner papers offer a remarkable record of politically-engaged activism for peace and social justice in the early 1960s. With an intensely local focus, Hefner was tied in to the larger movements at the state and national level, corresponding with major figures such as A.J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Benjamin Spock, and Arthur Springer. The collection includes particularly rich documentation of the early years of Political Action for Peace, which Hefner helped found, with correspondence, minutes of meetings, and publications, as well as equally rich materials on Hefner’s bids for congress in 1960 and 1962.

Since his youth in Mexico City, Carlos Heiligmann has traveled with a camera in hand. An industrial engineer by training and documentary photographer by nature, he has captured images throughout his world travels, and recently has concentrated on recording libraries in the small towns of western Massachusetts.

The digital photographs that comprise this collection document nearly four dozen public libraries in Berkshire, Franklin, and Hampshire counties in western Massachusetts.

Sign from the Helping Hand House, out of which the Helping Hand Society operated.

Formed in 1887, the Helping Hand Society began as a missionary society for young girls who learned about the world (foreign missions) while also learning how to sew, developed by Emily Graves Williston. Within that same year, the Emily Mission Circle transformed into The Young Ladies’ Missionary Society, a society which became devoted to charitable work in Easthampton. The Society’s name was changed to the Helping Hand Society in 1894, and the group was incorporated in 1913. In 1919, the Society started operating out of a house purchased and endowed by Franklin W. Pitcher. The Society went on to establish a Visiting Nurse program, providing room for the nurse in the house, as well as an apartment rented out to caretakers, and at one time the Society operated a Benefit Shop. Membership in the Society has fluctuated over the years, and while specific projects may have been discontinued over time, the Society continues forward with its mission to provide help to those in need by donating time and resources to Easthampton and the surrounding communities that serve Easthampton residents.

The collection documents the history of the Helping Hand Society from its inception to around 2017. This includes minutes and annual reports, by-laws, and ledger books. There are also scrapbooks and photo albums, the framed incorporation document, and the original sign that adorned the Helping Hand House.

The tanner Phinehas Hemenway was born in Bolton, Worcester County, Mass., in September 1794, the fourth of six children born to Simeon and Mary (Goss) Hemenway, but he resided nearly his entire adult life in the Franklin County hill town of Shutesbury. Although little is known about his life, Hemenway appears to have married twice, to a Polly or Mary Gray in about 1816, and to the widow Mary Sears of Prescott in Aril 1838. Hemenway died in Shutesbury on December 21, 1850.

With approximately 150 pages of brief, but closely written records of daily transactions, the Hemenway daybook documents the range of activities of rural tannery in antebellum Massachusetts. Along with the names of clients, the date and amount, and a brief notation on whether the work was for dressing, tanning, currying, or (apparently) the sale of finished product, Hemenway records work in a variety of leathers, from calf to sheep, hog, and horse and from sole leather to upper leather, sometimes specified as for shoes. The daybook also includes credit entries for labor performed, the purchase of hemlock bark or hides, or more rarely for cash to settle accounts.

A farmer, activist, and writer, Elizabeth Henderson has exerted an enormous influence on the movement for organic and sustainable agriculture since the 1970s. Although Henderson embarked on an academic career after completing a doctorate at Yale on the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1974, by 1980, she abandoned academia for Unadilla Farm in Gill, Mass., where she learned organic techniques for raising vegetables. Relocating to Rose Valley Farm in Wayne County, NY, in 1989, she helped establish Genesee Valley Organic CSA (GVOCSA), one of the first in the country, and she continued the relationship with the CSA after founding Peacework Organic Farm in Newark, NY, in 1998. Deeply involved in the organic movement at all levels, Henderson was a founding member of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) in Massachusetts, has served on the Board of Directors for NOFA NY, the NOFA Interstate Council, SARE (Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education) Northeast, and many other farming organizations at the state, regional, and national level, and she has been an important voice in national discussions on organic standards, fair trade, and agricultural justice. Among other publications, Henderson contributed to and edited The Real Dirt: Farmers Tell about Organic and Low-Input Practices in the Northeast and co-wrote Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture (1999, with Robyn Van En) and A Manual of Whole Farm Planning (2003, with Karl North).

Offering insight into the growth of the organic agriculture movement and the organizations that have sustained it, the Henderson Papers document Henderson’s involvement with NOFA, SARE, and the GVOCSA, along with her work to establish organic standards and promote organic practices. Henderson’s broad social and political commitments are represented by a rich set of letters from her work educating prisoners in the late 1970s, including correspondence with Tiyo Attallah Salah-El and John Clinkscales, and with the American Independent Movement in New Haven during the early 1970s, including a nearly complete run of the AIM Bulletin and its successor Modern Times.