Collecting area: Massachusetts

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Denise Karuth and Fred Pelka are activists and historians of the disability rights movement based in Massachusetts. Both are graduates of SUNY Buffalo, while Karuth holds a masters in rehabilitation counseling from Boston State College and a masters in divinity from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. Karuth came into activism through her church’s involvement in the civil rights movement and her own experience as a student dealing with blindness and multiple sclerosis at the State University of New York at Buffalo. After moving to Boston, her activism continued in efforts by the disability community to secure accessible and affordable mass transit in Massachusetts, and she has been involved with a broad spectrum of disability campaigns and organizations, serving as a peer counselor for people with disabilities, as Executive Director of Boston Self-Help Center, as a consultant on disability issues for the Human Genome Initiative, as a grant writer at the Stavros Center for Independent Living, and as Chair of the Governor’s Commission on Accessible Transportation under Gov. Michael Dukakis. She has also been an advocate for people who are homeless and was a principal founder of the First Church Shelter of the First Church in Cambridge. Karuth’s lifelong partner Fred Pelka, himself a person with disabilities, became involved in disability rights activism in 1983 while working at the Boston Center for Independent Living, and has made an impact as an editor and prolific author since. A 2004 Guggenheim Fellow, he has written three books on disability issues: The ABC-CLIO Companion to the Disability Rights Movement (1997), The Civil War Letters of Charles F. Johnson, Invalid Corps (2004), and What We Have Done: An Oral History of the Disability Rights Movement (2012). His fourth book, A Different Blaze, was published by Hedgerow Books in 2014, and is his first published poetry.

The Karuth and Pelka collection documents thirty years of social justice activism in Massachusetts centered on the movement for disability rights. Beginning in the1980s struggle for accessibility in transportation, the collection reflects the breadth of Karuth’s commitments and work on issues ranging from apartheid and US imperialism to homelessness and HIV/AIDS, and her work with organizations such as First Church in Cambridge, Amnesty International, Not Dead Yet, the Governor’s Council of Accessible Transportation, and the Boston Self Help Center. Pelka’s part of the collection contains extensive research and background material, notes, and drafts for each of his books, including lengthy transcripts of interviews with pioneers in disability rights.

A veteran of the peace movement and founder of the Traprock Peace Center (1979), Randy Kehler was active in the National Nuclear Weapons Freeze Campaign, the Peace Development Fund, and the Working Group on Electoral Democracy. Beginning in 1977, he and his wife became war tax resisters, withholding federal income tax to protest U.S. military expenditures, donating it instead to charity. As a consequence, their home was seized by the IRS in 1989, setting up a protracted legal struggle that resulted in Kehler’s arrest and imprisonment and the sale of the house. They remain tax resisters.

The Kehler Papers document the five year struggle (1989-1994) against the seizure and sale of the Kehlers’ home by the IRS. The collection includes meeting minutes, notes, correspondence, newspaper clippings; letters to the editor, essays, articles, plans and strategy documents for the vigil set outside the Kehler home; support committee information and actions; correspondence with government officials, the IRS, and the Justice Department; letters of support; documents from the legal proceedings; and political literature addressing the Kehlers’ situation.

Sharon Keim has been active in the arts in Washington, D.C., as a photographer, independent curator, adjunct professor and lecturer at Georgetown University, and lecturer at the Washington Center for Photography and The Martin Gallery. The recipient of an MA from the National Louis University, Keim studied studio photography and art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, working in papermaking, screenprinting, and letterpress. From 1981 to 1986, she was director of In The Mind’s Eye, Inc., a fine art photography dealership in Washington, and she founded, and served as executive director of The Washington Center for Photography.

The Keim Collection includes a copy (8/10) of her artist’s book, Stones: Standing in the Shadow of Time, which was printed at the Hand Print Workshop International in New Baskerville Italic on Somereset and Vellum paper. Accompanying the volume is a portfolio of forty gravestone rubbings on rice paper made on Cape Cod between 1995 and 1997, using D. H. George and M.A. Nelson’s book Epitaph and Icon (1983) as a guide.

Nina Keller riding in the back of a hay truck, Wendell, 1980.

Currently residing in Wendell, Massachusetts, Nina Keller has had an active role in environmental and social activism in the Pioneer Valley and New England area for the better part of 40 years. Since the 1970s, Keller has played an active role in local and regional activism, from the antinuclear movement to hazardous waste disposal. She was an initial member of the Alternative Energy Coalition (AEC), was part of the Friends of the Earth (FOE) environmental organization, and most notably took part in efforts to close the nearby Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. At 62, Keller currently chairs the Wendell Board of Health, and has had a recent history of participation in local government.

The Nina Keller Collection is largely organized into five subject areas used by Keller to organize her files: Economics; Environmental Issues; Hazardous Materials; Nuclear Power; and Pesticides and Herbicides. Of note within these files are local, state, and federal reports and documents covering topics such as nuclear emergency evacuation plans, chemical sprays and their health effects, and hazardous waste regulation. Several items reflect Keller’s personal life, most notably two journals from Montague Farm, used communally for diary entries, drawings, clippings, photographs, and account keeping. The collection’s focus spans from the 1970s to the 1980s, as well as the early 2000s.

Owner of the Amherst Athletic Club and columnist for the Amherst Bulletin from 1991 to 2004, Larry Kelley is deeply involved with Amherst area relations and government. He ran for both Select Board and Finance Committee, and was instrumental in raising awareness about and banning the illegal sale of martial arts weapons in Massachusetts.

Included in the Kelley papers are over 100 newspaper clippings, either his editorials, letters to the editor, or guest columns, about issues ranging from the use of town safety services by Amherst College, his objection to the Civil Rights Review Commission’s right to subpoena, his fight to fly commemorative flags in downtown Amherst both on the anniversary of September 11th and on the day Osama bin Laden is captured, to his objection over the Amherst-Pelham Regional High School’s production of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues.

A notable figure in Amherst, Mass., prior to the founding of Amherst College, Rufus Kellogg was born on July 16, 1794, the child of Jerusha and Joseph Kellogg. Married to Nancy Stetson in June 1820, Kellogg made a successful, if highly varied living, serving as town postmaster (1809-1824), keeping an inn and tavern at the “City” beginning in 1818, and farming, and he became a stalwart of the local Masonic lodge. His son Rufus Bela Kellogg rose even higher on the social ladder, graduating from Amherst College in 1858 and became a prominent banker.

A diverse and fairly complicated book of records, the Kellogg ledger is part waste book, day book, memorandum book, and account book, marking records of lending a horse and sleigh are interspersed with accounts for the sale of grain and hay, boarding locals, repairing pumps, and other miscellaneous transactions. Although it is unclear precisely which member or members of the Kellogg family kept any individual record, it appears that Rufus must have initiated the book, although later entries were clearly made by one or more of his children.

The collection primarily consists of photographs taken by Elaine Kenseth-Abel of Cambodians refugees in Thailand who later relocated to Amherst, Massachusetts during the 1970s-1980s. The collection also includes color prints of drawings by E. Seng Huot depicting Cambodian genocide.

Fred “Lil” Kerslake was proprietor of one of the premier performing animal acts of the turn of the twentieth century, featuring a porcine troupe that did “everything but talk.” From about 1891 through the 1930s, Kerslake’s Pigs rolled barrels and jumped ropes, climbed ladders, played see saw, and drew carriages to the delight of audiences across the United States and Europe. With his wife Mary and, after 1913, his son Fred by his side, Kerslake’s Pigs toured with Carl Hagenbeck, Walter L. Main, and Ringling Brothers. Fred and Mary retired to Gill, Mass., in 1930 where they ran a dog kennel. Fred Kerslake died at home in Sept. 1949, with Mary following in 1954.

Assembled by Fred and Mary Kerslakes, the four scrapbooks in this remarkable collection are packed with photographs and ephemera documenting their far flung travels between the 1890s and 1920s, along with promotional and candid shots of their beloved pigs, donkeys, and horses. Interspersed in the volumes are photographs of clowns and other circus performers, brochures, fliers, and posters advertising Kerslake’s Pigs and the circuses that employed them.

The family of Roxana Kingsbury Gould (nee Weed) farmed the rocky soils of western New England during the late nineteenth century. Roxana’s first husband Ambrose died of dysentery shortly after the Civil War, leaving her to care for their two infant sons, and after marrying her second husband, Lyman Gould, she relocated from southwestern Vermont to Cooleyville and then (ten years later) to Shelburne, Massachusetts. The Goulds added a third son to their family in 1869.

A rich collection of letters and photographs recording the history of the Kingsbury-Gould families of Shelburne, Massachusetts. The bulk of the letters are addressed to Roxana Kingsbury Gould, the strong-willed matriarch at the center of the family, and to her granddaughter, May Kingsbury Phillips, the family’s first historian. In addition to documenting the complicated dynamics of a close-knit family, this collection is a rich source for the study of local history, rural New England, and the social and cultural practices at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.

A wool dealer in the firm of Horswell, Kinsley, and French of Boston, Edward W. Kinsley captured his memories of the Civil War in a series of written reminiscences. These typescript copies include his memories of the raising of the 1st North Carolina Colored Regiment, his second visit South and the Emancipation Proclamation Celebration, General Tom Stevenson’s confirmation as Brigadier-General, the second election of President Lincoln, and the fall of Richmond among others. The collection also includes passages from Kinsley’s diary, letters, a scrapbook, photographs, newspaper clippings, and notes from the diary of Edward’s wife, Calista A. Kinsley.