Collecting area: Massachusetts

Founded in 1977, the Association for Gravestone Studies (AGS) is an international organization dedicated to furthering the study and preservation of gravestones. Based in Greenfield, Mass., the Association promotes the study of gravestones from historical and artistic perspectives. To raise public awareness about the significance of historic gravemarkers and the issues surrounding their preservation, the AGS sponsors conferences and workshops, publishes both a quarterly newsletter and annual journal, Markers, and has built an archive of collections documenting gravestones and the memorial industry.

The AGS Ephemera Collections contains a mix of materials relating to gravestones and the slate and marble industries. Most of the items relate to the marble and slate industries in Western Massachusetts and adjacent areas in Vermont and New Hampshire.

This collection consists chiefly of published booklets and reports documenting land use and preservation in Massachusetts and across New England. As a member of the Rural Development Committee (RDC), Bob August was involved in improving the effectiveness of public and private rural development efforts. Correspondence, reports, and minutes for other groups, such as the Lower Pioneer Valley Reginal Planning Commission and the Committee on Development of Western Massachusetts, are also part of the collection.

Arlene Avakian arrived at UMass in 1972 as a graduate student working on the social history of American women, but quickly became a key figure in the creation of the university’s new program in Women’s Studies. As she completed her MA in History (1975) and EdD (1985), she helped in the early organization of the program, later joining the faculty as professor and program director. Through her research and teaching, she contributed to an engaging departmental culture in which the intersection of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality were placed at the center, building the program over the course of 35 years into the nationally-recognized Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Avakian has written and taught on topics ranging from the lives and experiences of Armenian American and African American women to culinary history and the construction of whiteness. She retired in May 2011.
Documenting the growth and development of Women’s Studies at UMass Amherst, the collection includes valuable material on the creation of the department (and Women’s Studies more generally), second- and third-wave feminism, and Avakian’s teaching and research. The collection includes a range of correspondence, memoranda, notes, and drafts of articles, along with several dozen oral historical interviews with Armenian American women. Also noteworthy is the extensive documentation of ABODES, the Amherst Based Organization to Develop Equitable Shelter, which established the Pomeroy Lane Cooperative Housing Community in South Amherst in 1994.

Clairvoyant from youth, Elwood Babbitt developed his psychic abilities at the Edgar Cayce Institute, and by the mid-1960s, was well known in Western Massachusetts through his readings and lectures, often opening his home to other seekers. Charles Hapgood, a professor at Keene State College, worked closely with Babbitt studying the physical effects of the medium’s trance lectures, and by 1967, he began to take on the painstaking process of transcribing and copying them. With communications purporting to come from Jesus, Albert Einstein, Mark Twain, and the Hindu god Vishnu, among others, these lectures formed the basis for several books by Hapgood and Babbitt, including Voices of Spirit (1975) and The God Within (1982). In 1970 Babbitt became involved with the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune in Leydon, Massachusetts and was a “spiritual mentor” to Michael Metelica, the community leader there. He helped Metelica develop his psychic abilities, but they eventually had a falling out, along with others from the community, in the late 1970s. Babbitt ultimately established a non-profit, alternative school, the Opie Mountain Citadel, which was essentially run out of Babbitt’s home in Northfield. He continued to involve himself in spiritual groups up to his failing health and eventual death in the Veteran’s Administration Hospital in White River Junction, Vermont on April 25, 2001

The collection consists of proofs of publications, lectures, some correspondence, film reels, and transcripts of spiritual communications for which Babbitt was the medium.

Ebenezer Bailey was a wholesale shoe purchaser and distributor from Massachusetts. The collection comprises just over 100 items, the bulk of which are receipts for the purchase and sale of shoes and slippers, covering the period from 1852 to 1882.

On March 13, 1903, Joseph Michael Bajgier was born in Odrzykon, Poland, the youngest of three sons in a farming family. Schooled only through the third grade, Joseph served as a young man in the First Air Division of the Polish Army before following his older brother in emigrating to the United States in 1927. Settling in Chicopee, Mass., with its large and active Polish community, Bajgier began work as a slaughterer of pigs for a meat processing company, but within a few years, he had saved enough money to purchase a small grocery store in Longmeadow. In about 1935, he returned to Chicopee, purchasing a grocery and deli, Bell Market, that his family ran for 36 years. Bajgier was deeply involved in the local Polish community as a member of the Polish National Alliance, the Holy Name Society of St. Stanislaus Parish, and an organization of Polish veterans in exile (Stowarzyszenie Polskich Kombatantow). He and his wife Martha (Misiaszek) had two sons, Casimir and Edward

The Bajgier collection documents the lives of a Polish family in Chicopee, Mass., from the time of immigration through the 1970s. The core of the collection surrounds the life of Joseph Bajgier, and includes a number of documents and a diary from the time of his emigration in 1927, a fascinating series of letters from relatives in Turaszowka, Poland before and after the Second World War, and several photographs of the family and their business in Chicopee.

James Baker was a member of the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune (later the Renaissance Community) in the early 1970s, and a key contributor to the Free Spirit Press, the commune’s publishing operation. Part promotion, information, and entertainment, the Free Spirit Press magazine ran for four issues in the winter and spring 1972-1973.

The Baker collection consists of the surviving materials from the production of Free Spirit Press concentrated heavily in the period between winter 1972 and summer 1974. Accumulated mostly while preparing a brochure for the commune, the manuscript material contains copies of the commune’s by-laws and membership rolls, comments from community members on how they wished to be represented, and a story board for the brochure and series of quotes from community members to be included. The second half of the collection contains hundreds of images, mostly 35mm negatives, taken of or by the commune and its residents. The images depict the production and distribution of Free Spirit Press and the commune band (Spirit in Flesh, later called Rapunzel), but they also include several rolls of film taken by commune members of major rock and roll acts of the era, including the Grateful Dead, Taj Mahal, Jethro Tull, Santana, Chuck Berry, Hot Tuna, and Fleetwood Mac.

Children and nurse in isolation ward in hospital. ca.1915

45 4×6 and 5×7 glass plate negatives of photos of buildings, homes, farms, animals, nature scenes in and around the Worcester, MA area. Locations include a children’s isolation ward, Jersey Stock Farm, Bordon Robertson’s farm, cold storage building, Bordon Robertson’s house, Baldwin Apple Blossoms Charlie Fosters (Corrs Reservoir), Oakdale Brook, Otis Davis house, Oakdale in West Boylston, Hadley Furniture Company Building in downtown Worcester, MA, and the Fogg Library in South Weymouth, MA.

The photos were discovered by the parents of Stuart Barlow in 1960 upon the acquisition of their home outside of Worcester. The photographer’s are unknown.

Lumbering was an important part of the economy in northern Franklin County, Massachusetts, during the late nineteenth century, particularly in the region abutting the border with New Hampshire.

These two volumes document a sawmill that appears to have operated in Franklin County, Mass., perhaps Northfield, in the latter half of the nineteenth century. One volume is a work record for employees at the mill (1871-1875), the second is a daybook with sales records (1874-1876) either from a company store or country store. Many of the transactions are with the mill’s employees. Most of the (relatively) high value exchanges recorded in the daybook are for lumber, shingles, or board, but there are numerous small cash records and the sale of miscellaneous goods such as tobacco (and tobacco boxes), bricks, hay, nails, rubber boots, meat and flour, corn, and even a watch. Although the precise location of the mill is uncertain, Northfield seems most likely. Several names recorded in the volume can be traced through the census to the vicinity of northern Franklin county, including Romanzo Hill, listed in the federal census for 1880 as living in Warwick, Mass., and “works in sawmill”; Jackson Doolittle of Hinsdale, N.H. (1870 and 1880); T. B. Stratton, who operated a country store in Millers Falls in 1872; and Roswell Stratton, a carpenter in Northfield (1880). We have been unable to identify G. A. Barrett beyond his name.

Freight hauler, farmer, sawmill owner, and possibly a hatmaker from Williamsburg, Massachusetts.

The first volume of Bartlett’s accounts includes records of Bartlett’s income, sales and exchange of goods and services, and details about his employees and family (such as family births, deaths, and marriages). Volume 2 contains lists of hat purchases, lists of teachers and their pay, his participation in town affairs, and a number of lyrics to Civil War songs.