Collecting area: Massachusetts

Brothers Charles W. and Joseph F. Hodges moved from Norton, Mass., to Foxboro, and established a successful retail grocery business just prior to the Civil War that became the basis for other mercantile enterprises.

These two account books appear to be customer ledgers of the grocery firm Hodges and Messinger, which was to become the Union Store of Charles W. and Joseph F. Hodges.

Born in Marlboro, Mass., on July 28, 1849, Flora Ann Martin Ellithorp married Frank B. Holden of the adjacent town of Hudson on Nov. 22, 1871. The couple had three children: Marion Carlton, Fred Tracy, and Beatrice Spurr. Flora was just 35 when she died of liver cancer on May 24, 1885.

Holden’s manuscript receipt book includes recipes for a variety of baked goods and desserts, but primarily cakes and custards. Although some of the recipes may be original to her or her family, others are clearly attributed to other writers and some may have been derived from published cookbooks. Among the recipes are some of the most popular dishes of the era, including Parker House rolls, Washington pie, and Graham bread.

Farmer from New Salem, Massachusetts, whose secondary occupation was that of a shoe repairman. Daybook documents a component of small-scale, handwork shoe production in a local economy prior to the arrival of centralized, mechanized manufacturing; lists Holden’s shoemending skills and the method and form in which he was paid by customers, including cash, customers’ labor, and services or wares such as butchering pigs or cows, chopping or gathering wood, traveling by buggy to a different town, using a neighbor’s oxen, and a variety of food and tools.

During his undergraduate years at UMass Amherst (1988-1993), Jeff Holland was active as a photographer for both the Daily Collegian and the student yearbook, the Index. For a time during and after his college years, Holland worked as a professional photographer, doing freelance work in and around Northampton. Since moving to Minnesota in 1996, he has worked in various capacities in the airline industry and earned a Master of Public Affairs from the University of Minnesota in 2018.

This small collection consists of photographic negatives, contact sheets, slides, and prints taken by Holland during his undergraduate years at UMass Amherst. Taken primarily for use in the college newspaper and yearbook, much of the work is focused on UMass athletics, student protests, and concerts.

Between 1957 and 1968, the Southern Student Project of the American Friends Service Committee brought academically gifted African American high school students from the south to live and study in the north. Working initially through its New York office, the AFSC announced its desire to bring “to promising young people, thwarted by the doctrine of the separation of the races, the fullest development of their gifts” while providing northern whites with “an experience which will increase our understanding and deepen our involvement with the human community.”

A dense and nearly comprehensive record of participation in the Southern Student Project of the American Friends Service Committee, the Holmes collection documents a Quaker response to the civil rights crisis of the late 1950s and 1960s. Holmes carefully filed nearly every relevant piece of paper associated with his participation, from the fliers that introduced him to the project to listings of eligible students, his lengthy letter of inquiry and application, and his numerous exchanges with his support committee, the local high school, and the American Friends Service Committee. Perhaps more important, he kept both sides of an extensive and often lengthy correspondence with the Craig family, describing Deborah’s adjustment and progress in Amherst and the response of the local community. The collection also includes Holmes’ report of the Friends Conference on Race Relations and some correspondence between Holmes and Craig during her time in college, when Holmes attempted to provide counsel and financial support to help Craig continue her education.

A peace activist since the 1960s, Margaret Goddard Holt not only demonstrated against war, she led efforts to educate others about the effects of war. A member of the Gray Panthers of the Pioneer Valley and a co-founder along with her husband, Lee Holt, of the Amherst Vigil for a Nuclear Free World, she was sent as a delegate to Rome, Italy to visit Pope John XXIII advocating for a world without war. In addition to her dedication to peace and nuclear disarmament, Holt’s concern for prisoners developed into an involvement in prison-related issues.

The Holt collection of publications, brochures, news clippings, and correspondence reveals her interests and documents her role as a community activist during the 1980s.

Holyoke Co-operative Bank was the third bank organized in Holyoke during the boom years of the 1870s and1880s. It was organized on July 24, 1880 and was the third bank organized there by E. L. Munn. The bank was located at 243 High Street in 1919 and 319 Appleton St. in 1951. In 1971, the bank merged with Community Savings Bank, which was a combination of Chicopee-Falls, Mechanics, and Springfield Five Cent Savings Banks. In 1988, Community merged with Heritage Bank to become the largest bank in Western Massachusetts. Heritage failed in 1992 and was taken over by Fleet Bank.

The collection here, which was acquired from the Holyoke History Room and Archives at the Holyoke Public Library in 2020, consists mostly of cash journals from the late 1920s to the late 1960s. There is also one box of Board of Investment minutes and shareholder lists. The collection originally resided at the Springfield History Library & Archives, who most likely acquired it after the bank had merged with Community Savings Bank in 1971, since the material in the collection ends in 1970.

For more information on the merger see:
Piccin, N. (1992, December 6). Heritage failure brings to close 158 years of WMass banking. Sunday Republican (Springfield, MA), A26.

Inventory

Funded by a grants from the National Library of Medicine and other agencies, the Holyoke Consumer Health Library was a freely-available community resource that provided the general public with access to reliable health information. With the goal of enabling citizens to make informed decisions about their health needs, the Library collaborated with six community partners (the Holyoke Public Library, Holyoke Health Center, Mercy Women’s Health Center, Girls Incorporated of Holyoke, and the Holyoke Council on Aging), training the staff at each site to use the available resources and to conduct outreach to potential clients.

The HCHL collection contains organizational records from an experiment in health information equity in the earliest years of the internet, including planning documents, grant applications, and promotional materials.

A long-time leader in the Communist Party in Massachusetts, Otis A. Hood (1900-1983) was a frequent candidate for public office between the late 1930s and early 1950s. At a time of increasing repression, he stood openly for Communist principles, speaking regularly on the radio and at public forums. In 1954, he was one of several activists arrested for violating the state ban on the Communist Party, winning acquittal, and he was acquitted again after a second indictment in 1956 on charges of inciting the overthrow of the federal government.

The Hood papers are a slender reflection of Communist politics during the height of McCarthy-era repression. The collection centers around Otis Hood’s public espousal of Communist ideals as a candidate for public office in Boston, and particularly his runs for the city School Board in 1943 through 1949, but it includes fliers, handbills, and other materials relating to Communist-led campaigns relating to the war, housing, public transportation, and education, but most importantly, transcripts of radio broadcasts made by Hood during his political campaigns and relating to a variety of social issues.

Starting out as a blacksmith in Royalston, Mass., in 1828, Horace Pierce established a successful pail manufacturory. Taking his son Milo as a partner, he employed a work force of eight by 1870, selling over $6,000 of pail annually with capital of nearly $3,500. Horace Pierce died in Royalston in 1883 at the age of 78.

This ledger includes records of work performed as a blacksmith (shoeing horses, fixing irons, mending sleighs, shovels, or chains, sharpening tools), records of manufacturing pails, forms of payment received (cash, labor, agricultural produce, wood, shoes, coal, and old iron), lists of customers, accounts of employees (monthly wages, charges for boarding, and days lost to work), and accounts of supplies purchased.