Collecting area: New England

Since its founding, Double Edge Theatre has embraced a two-fold mission: to develop and promote the highest quality of original theatre performance, and to create a permanent center of performance, practice, training research, and cultural exchange.

The collection documents the Theatre’s focus on research, international collaboration, and the elevation of artistic performance above and beyond stage work into the realm of cultural exchange.

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.

For most of his adult life, Capt. Friend Drake (1799-1882) farmed his property in Sharon, Mass., and raised a large family. Drake appears to have married twice, having three children with his first wife Sarah, and 10 with his second wife Sally. His son Melzar relocated to Texas in 1858 and served in the Confederate 24th Texas Cavalry during the Civil War.

Primarily a record of small purchases and labor, this daybook was kept by Friend Drake and his son Melzar — apparently interchangeably — during the years just prior to the Civil War. Interspersed throughout the text, however, are family references and interesting vignettes, including a mention of the great “Cold storm” of January 1857, which Drake called “the toughest storm I ever faced;” an agreement with a neighbor, allowing passage rights through a meadow in exchange for permission to take a valuable large white oak “root and branch;” and Melzar’s note from Oct. 25 1858 that his 121 year old grandfather Joseph Drake had died, just as Melzar was leaving for Texas.

Wildwood Cemetery, Amherst, Non. 2004

An historical archaeologist with an MA in Anthropology from UMass Amherst, Bob Drinkwater has recorded, photographed, and reported on the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century gravestones and stonecutters of western Massachusetts for over four decades, and he has identified a number of Connecticut River Valley carvers. A charter member of the Association for Gravestone Studies, he has been active in nearly every aspect of the organization, contributing scholarly articles to its journals, organizing and presenting at its conferences, and serving terms as President and Trustee. He offers a workshop, “Gravestone Studies 101: A Survey of Gravestone Art in the Pioneer Valley”, at Greenfield Community College.

Focused on Bob Drinkwater’s research on western Massachusetts, the collection contains several hundred images recording early gravestones in the cemeteries of Amherst and Hadley, photo documentation of the stonecutters of Berkshire County and the Quabbin region, and two longer works written by Drinkwater: “From quarry to graveyard: a schematic reconstruction of early New England gravestone-carving technology” (his honor’s thesis, ca.1975) and “Notes on Methods of Collection, Classification, Recording, and Analysis of Data for Stylistic and Demographic Studies of Early New England Gravestones.”

Jeffrey Drucker was a student and photographer at the University of Massachusetts Amherst from 1966 to 1969, where he majored in production management and was the WMUA station engineer. As a student, Drucker was a photography enthusiast, taking snapshots of events across campus, thoroughly documenting his years as an undergraduate at UMass in the late-sixties.

The Jeffrey Drucker Photograph Collection contains 387 photographs of a diverse array of campus events, including the Dow Chemical protest in 1968, parades, Roister Doisters productions, musicians like Stevie Wonder and Simon and Garfunkel performing at on-campus concerts, and iconic campus buildings. Many of Drucker’s photographs were printed in the Index yearbook as well as the University of Massachusetts Daily Collegian and give a clearly student perspective to life on campus.

Soldier in Revolutionary War and Shays Rebellion, later a state legislator and local politician from Grafton and Marlboro, Massachusetts. Drury’s papers contain family and business (farm and mill) correspondence, notes of hand, bills, receipts, and legal papers as well as records pertaining to the town of Grafton. Collection also includes papers of Timothy Darling and the Goulding, Place, and Sherman families.

As a child, W.E.B. Du Bois lived for several years on a five acre parcel of land on the Egremont plain near Great Barrington, Mass. Although barely five when his family moved into town, Du Bois never lost his feeling for this property that had been in his family for six generations, and when presented with the opportunity to reacquire the site in 1928, he accepted, intending to build a house there and settle.

Walter Wilson and Edmund Gordon purchased the Du Bois homesite in 1967 with the intention of erecting a memorial to Du Bois’ life and legacy. On October 18, 1969, the site was formally dedicated as the W. E. B. Du Bois Memorial Park, with civil-rights activist and future Georgia legislator Julian Bond giving the keynote address and Ossie Davis presiding as master of ceremonies. Nineteen years later, the Du Bois Memorial Foundation donated the property to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, designating the University of Massachusetts Amherst as custodian.

Narrated by Davis and including Bond’s keynote address, this documentary (originally shot on 16mm motion picture film) depicts the 1969 dedication ceremonies. For additional information, please visit the website for the Du Bois boyhood homesite.

The linguist Audrey R. Duckert was a pioneer in the study of American regional English. Born in Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, Duckert studied dialect at the University of Wisconsin, and after completing her doctorate at Radcliffe College in 1959, she joined the faculty at UMass Amherst. During her forty year career at UMass, Duckert became a founding member of the Dictionary of American Regional English (1965) and she was the first UMass woman admitted to Phi Beta Kappa. In addition to her linguistic work, she developed an avid interest in local history and was involved with several local historical societies, including the Swift River Valley Historical Society in New Salem.

The Duckert oral history collection consists of a series of 53 audiocassette recordings containing interviews with persons displaced when the Swift River Valley was flooded to create the Quabbin Reservoir in 1939. The histories include rich recollections of life in the towns of Greenwich, Enfield, Dana, and Prescott, with village life, education, family, and the changes that accompanied the inundation of the region. The original audiocassettes are in the possession of the Swift River Valley Historical Society.

Born in Cheshire, Conn., in 1822, Joseph Dudley learned “the marble business” from his father Elias, who had in turn been trained by David Ritter of New Haven. A staunch Methodist swept up in the religious ferment of the Second Great Awakening, Dudley joined his father’s business as a stonecutter in about 1845 and notes that he was among the first to letter tombstones in the rural Ever Green Cemetery in Woodstock, Conn., when it opened in 1848. He later worked in Meriden, Conn.

By generations, this volume has served as an account book, diary and memorandum book, memoir, geneaological record, and scrapbook, with each layer accumulated over all previous. Dudley’s memoir (beginning p. 78) includes a discussion of his upbringing in Cheshire, the tumultuous religious revivals during the 1840s and his reception into the Methodist Church and the Millerites, and much on his introduction to the marble business and work as a stonecutter through about 1853. The diary somewhat erratically covers the years 1873-1893.