Collecting area: New Hampshire

Amelia Earhart’s Underground Flying Society logo

Amelia Earhart’s Underground Flying Society, (a.k.a. the Amelia’s) was a lesbian social club based out of Lebanon, N.H., serving the Upper Valley area of Vermont and New Hampshire, and beyond. Reachable via an unnamed post-office box, the club began in 1979 and provided members not only with much sought after social, leisure, and entertainment opportunities, but also a unique community of peers for discussion and activities around political, educational, health, and legal issues of importance to women and lesbians. Like their famous namesake, the Amelia’s did not shy away from risks in supporting women, the feminist movement, or actions promoting and educating about lesbians. The group often overlapped with feminist and lesbian print shop and publishing company, New Victoria Press, and the Amelia’s often used the New Vic building for their meetings.

The Amelia Earhart’s Underground Flying Society Records consist of over 25 issues of the “Amelia’s Newsletter” from 1986-2000; two clippings covering news related to the group, including the repeated vandalization of their “Upper Valley Lesbians” Adopt-A-Highway Program sign; a 1994 audiocassette of interviews for an oral history of the Amelia’s; and a VHS tape of a community event held in 2003 to reflect on the women’s movement in the Upper Valley in the 1970s and 1980s. The newsletter offers detailed documentation of the group and their concerns, including calendars of their social gatherings and other local, regional, and national events of interest, and recaps of relevant news to the lesbian community including updates about politics, legal issues, civil rights and benefits, marriage, discrimination cases, women’s health, education and school issues, and lesbian focused social and entertainment events.

The Amesbury Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends, tied historically to the Hampton and Seabrook Monthly Meetings, has met on the coast of Massachusetts and New Hampshire for over three hundred years.

The records of Amesbury (Hampton and Seabrook) Monthly Meeting document over three centuries of Quaker practice in New England coastal communities. The meeting minutes for both men’s and women’s meetings are relatively complete for the period 1701 to the late 1880s, and after nearly a century-long hiatus, pick up again in the mid-1980s.

Merchant and shoemaker from the Byfield Parish of Newbury, Massachusetts and Boscawen, New Hampshire.

Includes accounts of the prices paid for shoemaking and agricultural labor, accounts of the men and women who worked for his father’s shoe store and factory, notes of who lived in the younger Colman’s home, a page mentioning his move to New Hampshire, and accounts of agricultural produce sales and exchange of farm labor.

Although a Friends’ meeting met in Concord, N.H., from 1805 to 1840, the current Monthly Meeting dates to 1953, when it was accorded status as a preparative meeting under Weare Monthly. It has been part of Dover Quarter since it was set off on its own in 1967.

The records of the Concord Friends Meeting contain a relatively complete set of minutes from 1967 through 2024, and newsletter starting in about 1992.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

Born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on July 20, 1952, Robert D. “Renny” Cushing was a co-founder of the Clamshell Alliance, an antinuclear coalition that opposed the construction of the Seabrook Station Nuclear Plant, and a leader in organizing the occupation of the site in Seabrook (N.H.). Following the murder of his father in 1988, Cushing became an outspoken advocate to repeal the death penalty in New Hampshire. As an elected member of the state House of Representatives over several non-consecutive terms, he eventually succeeded in the effort to pass legislation that would abolish the death penalty including securing enough votes to override the governor’s veto. Cushing’s dedication to improving the lives of the people of his state was coupled with his deep passion for New Hampshire’s history. In 2020, Cushing was diagnosed with stage four cancer, but continued to serve as Democratic leader in the state House of Representatives until March 2, 2022 when he took a leave of absence for health reasons. He died five days later at the age of 69.

Cushing’s papers chronicle his tireless advocacy for two issues of great importance to him: the antinuclear movement and the repeal of death penalty in New Hampshire. His long-time service to the state is detailed in his political papers, which document not only his activities as a member of the state House of Representatives but also his involvement in political campaigns at the state and federal level.

Born and raised in France, the photojournalist Lionel Delevingne studied education at l’Ecole Normale in Paris, but settled permanently in the United States in 1975. Based at first in Northampton, Mass., he became a prolific photographer of American social movements while working for the Valley Advocate and other publications, covering the early years of the Clamshell Alliance and the antinuclear movement in considerable depth. His work has been exhibited frequently and published widely in the mainstream and alternative press, including the New York Times, Le Figaro Magazine, Die Zeit, Newsweek, Washington Post Magazine, Mother Jones, and Vanity Fair.

The Delevingne collection includes remarkable visual documentation of the antinuclear movement of the 1970s and beyond, including some of the its most iconic images. Beginning with coverage of the Seabrook occupation, Delevingne covered the movement as it spread throughout the northeastern U.S. and internationally. The collection includes exhibition prints, prints for publication, and digitized images ranging in date from the mid-1970s through 1990s. Copyright in the images has been retained by Delevingne.

The Friends Meeting at Dover, New Hampshire, is one of the oldest in British North America, with worship held there as early as 1662 when three Quaker women missionaries arrived on Dover Neck. Originally called Piscataqua, the meeting emerged as Dover Monthly Meeting by the latter decades of the seventeenth century and became the hub of a thriving Quaker community and the font from which several other New Hampshire meetings derived. In addition to overseeing a number of worship groups and preparatory meetings, Dover became the mother of monthlies and Berwick and Sandwich, which were set off in 1802, and Gonic in 1981.

The records of Dover Monthly Meeting offer extensive documentation of one of the oldest Quaker meetings in northern New England. Although most of the earliest records have not survived, the collection includes a nearly unbroken set of minutes from the turn of the eighteen century to 1981; extensive records of births, deaths, and marriages; spotty records for Ministry and Oversight and finance, and an array of recent newsletters. Minutes for the Women’s Meeting for the years 1783-1814 are not present and presumed lost.

The Society of Friends’ Quarterly Meeting in Dover, N.H., was formed from Salem Quarterly Meeting in 1815. It has coordinaed four active monthly meetings: Concord (since 1967), Dover (1815), Gonic (1891), and Weare (1958), plus two that have been laid down: Sandwich (1815-1888) and Berwick (1815-1952).

In addition to a comprehensive set of minutes for Dover Quarterly since its establishment in 1815, the collection includes extensive records for Ministers and Elders and a small quantity of material on meeting history.

Part of the Society of Friends’ New England Yearly Meeting, Falmouth Quarterly Meeting was set off from Salem Quarter in 1794 and has subsequently given rise to quarterlies in Vassalboro (1813) and Parsonsfield (1888-1938).

With the majority of records for Falmouth Quarterly Meeting housed at the Maine Historical Society, SCUA maintains records that include only the minutes from 1988 to 1996, and records of Ministry and Counsel, 1965-1988, with a small gap near that end.

Quaker worship in Rochester, New Hampshire, began in 1742 under the care of Dover Monthly Meeting, becoming the Pine Grove Worship Group by 1846. After the meetinghouse was moved to the Gonic neighborhood of Rochester in about 1862, the name of the meeting was changed to Gonic. Gonic became a preparative meeting in 1950 and was finally set off from Dover as a monthly meeting in 1981.

The scant records of Gonic Friends Meeting consist solely of newsletters: one run from Gonic in the late 1980s and another from the West Epping Preparative Meeting from 1982-1996.