Collecting area: Massachusetts

124-page handwritten autobiographical account written in Polish by 100 year-old Edward A. Borkowski of Turner Falls, Massachusetts.

Born on February 12, 1936, to John and Jenny Bos of Tonawanda, New York, John Henry Bos graduated from Carnegie Tech with a B.A. in drama. His career in the arts began with a job in technical support in summer theaters and included work at major theaters, such as the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, and Deputy Director of the performing arts division for the New York State Council on the Arts. Bos served as Director of Performance Programs for National Public Radio during the 1980s where he earned a Peabody Award. Following his time at NPR, he hosted Arts America, a weekly cultural television program produced by the United States Information Agency. In the 1990s, Bos relocated to Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, where he provided arts consulting and was involved in the revival of Memorial Hall, one of the many locations in which he hosted musical performances as a part of Rural Renaissance. It was during this time that Bos began writing, first as a member of the writing group, Spirit of the Written Word, at the CancerConnection during his first bout with cancer, and later as a bi-weekly columnist for the Greenfield Recorder. In his column, “Connecting the Dots,” Bos advocated for climate change and political life. He died of December 11, 2024, at the age of 88.

The John Bos Collection consists of an array of materials related to his career in the arts including theater programs, photographs, documents from the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, as well as copies of his articles printed in the Greenfield Recorder and other publications.

The Boston and Albany Railroad was formed between 1867 and 1870 from the merger of three existing lines, the Boston and Worcester (chartered 1831), the Western (1833), and the Castleton and West Stockbridge (1834). The corporation was a primary east-west transit through the Commonwealth, with branches connecting towns including Athol, Ware, North Adams, and Hudson, N.Y.

The nineteen atlases comprising this collection include detailed plans documenting the location and ownership of rights of way, land-takings, and other land transfers to or from the railroad company. Dating from the early years of operation for the corporation to just after the turn of the century, the atlases include maps of predecessor lines (Boston and Worcester Railroad Corporation and Western Rail-Road), as well as the Grand Junction Railway Company (Charlestown, Somerville, Everett, and Chelsea), the Ware River Railroad, and the Chester and Becket Railroad.

Chartered in June 1835, the Boston and Maine Railroad was the dominant railroad of northern New England for nearly one hundred years. This collection consists of records from the Engineering Department of the Fitchburg Division relating to the maintenance of bridges in Massachusetts, including correspondence, accident reports, financial records and progress reports on work recommended by bridge inspectors.

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

In the fall 1987, a working group was formed in Boston to help coordinate planning for HIV-related services, prevention, and education. The Boston AIDS Consortium began operations the following January with the goal of ensuring effective services for people affected by HIV/AIDS and enabling them to live healthy and productive lives. In its eighteen year existence, the Consortium worked with over seventy public and private agencies and two hundred individuals.

The Records of the Boston AIDS Consortium provide valuable insight into community-based mobilization in response to the AIDS epidemic.

The Boston Bluegrass Union (BBU) is run by an all-volunteer Board of Directors, with a mission to educate people in the Northeast about bluegrass music.  Formed in 1976, the BBU hosted its first concert on October 3, 1976, with Joe Val and the New England Bluegrass Boys. The BBU is the premier source for bluegrass music activities in the Northeast, presenting concerts, festivals, education programs, and informal music get-togethers. Over its nearly 50 years, the BBU has become the central resource for everything bluegrass in Boston and has, in part, been responsible for creating the vibrant market for bluegrass that exists today in the Boston area. Since its founding, BBU has presented over a thousand shows featuring top national and regional artists, making it one of the longest running such series in the country.  The list of bluegrass bands that have been featured over the years includes such acts as Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, Ralph Stanley , Jim and Jesse, Tony Rice, the Country Gazette, The Johnson Mountain Boys, The Seldom Scene,  J.D. Crowe and the New South, Hazel Dickens, Laurie Lewis, the Lynn Morris Band, the Good Old Persons, the Lonesome River Band, IIIrd Tyme Out, Special Consensus, Dry Branch Fire Squad, and the Claire Lynch Band. While BBU was first focused on concerts, their signature event is now the annual Joe Val Bluegrass Festival, presented Presidents Weekend at the Sheraton Framingham Hotel.  The Joe Val Festival had its origins in 1985 as a fundraiser to assist the ailing Joe Val with his medical expenses. His untimely passing and his remarkable talents continue to be honored with the three-day festival which bears his name. The event features a star-studded Main Stage, a Showcase Stage which shows off the talents of up-and-coming regional bands, the Joe Val Kids Academy, over 50 workshops, vendors, and round the clock jamming. The festival was awarded the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Event of the Year in 2006. 2026 marks the 40th edition of the Joe Val Bluegrass Festival, the 100^th anniversary of Joe Val’s birth, as well as the 50^th anniversary of the BBU’s founding.  

The Boston Bluegrass Records currently consists of 32 issues of the group’s newsletter, Bluegrass Breakdown, event flyers, and concert recordings. Additions to the collection are expected.

Founded in 1973, the Boston Jazz Society grew from a small group of enthusiasts listening to music in living rooms to a thriving organization that “kept Jazz alive” in New England. As Jazz’s popularity began to fade in the late 1960s, local Jazz societies formed to provide support to artists and give them the means and venues to continue to perform on the road. The Boston Jazz Society was originally inspired by one of the earliest, the Left Bank Jazz Society of Baltimore. Like the Left Bank, BJS produced concerts in clubs, theaters, and hotels but expanded their efforts to include exhibits, television and radio shows, and a Jazz education program for grade school students. The longest running BJS activities, however, were the annual Jazz Barbecues and starting in 1975, the BJS Scholarships. The scholarship program raised funds for young Jazz musicians to attend the New England Conservatory of Music’s Jazz Department and the Berklee School Of Music and began the musical careers of many important musicians, composers, and teachers. BJS was also deeply connected to the local music scene, celebrating Roxbury, Mass. natives Alan Dawson and Roy Haynes, whose brother Vincent was a long-time board member, among many others. After 42 years of promoting Jazz music in Boston, the Boston Jazz Society, Inc. dissolved in 2015.

The Boston Jazz Society Records extensively document BJS’s meetings, events, business dealings, and scholarship administration through meeting minutes, posters, correspondence, photographs, recordings, videos, and BJS’s own propaganda and publications. The majority of the BJS records came from the collection of founding member and longtime president Aureldon Edward Henderson and also represents his involvement in promoting Jazz in the Boston area.

Although Quakers first worshipped in Boston in 1661, they were late in the game in organizing a formal meeting. A preparative meeting operated in the city for just over a hundred years (1707-1808) under the auspices of the Salem Monthly Meeting, and a second attempt at building a community began in 1870 with authorization of an indulged meeting in Roxbury. Set off formally as the Boston Monthly Meeting Friend in 1883, this meeting continued until 1944, when it merged with an independent meeting in neighboring Cambridge to create the current Friends Meeting at Cambridge.

The records in this collection offer thorough documentation of the Boston Monthly Meeting of Friends from its establishment as an indulged meeting in 1870 through to its merger in 1944 and change of name to the Friends Meeting at Cambridge. In addition to the meeting minutes, the collection includes substantial records of the monthly’s Friends Guild and Women’s Foreign Missionary Society.

Born in 1912 in Fargo, North Dakota, Fred W. Boughton was raised in Twin Falls, Idaho. He graduated from the University of Kansas during the Great Depression with a degree in chemical engineering. Unable to find a good job closer to home, he accepted a position at the Eastman Kodak company in Rochester, New York, an up-and-coming firm specializing in photography. At Kodak, he worked with a team that invented a transformative photo paper. Over the years, he rose to the position of Vice President. His career was only half the picture, however, in his spare time, Boughton was an artist. He began taking figure drawing classes at a local gallery, then moved onto watercolors of some of his favorite landscapes. Later, he delved into larger oil paintings in the abstract expressionist mode. Finally, he did a series of portraits of his family and other people, which captured individuals’ essence. Boughton’s grave rubbings were created mostly on family vacations to New England. He thought that these images were worth preserving for ages to come. When he and his wife retired to Florida, he became active in the local art community and was a volunteer docent at an art gallery. Boughton died in 1999; he made his art a work of life, and his life a work of art.

The Fred W. Boughton Collection consists of gravestone rubbings from New England, with an emphasis on Massachusetts, slides and photographs of tombstones, and research files created and collected during the 1970s-1980s.

The firm of Brackett and Shuff manufactured moldings, doors, and sashes in Lowell, Massachusetts, during the 1840s.

This slender ledger includes sparse accounts (fewer than 30p.) of millwork done by Brackett and Shuff, documenting the manufacture of moldings, doors, and sashes. Crudely kept and only partly filled out, it includes some records of setting up machinery, including tempering plane irons and truing shoulder saws.