Collecting area: New England

Founded by Betsy Siggins in 2009, Folk New England is an organization dedicated to documenting, preserving, and interpreting the cultural legacy of folk music in all its forms, with an emphasis on New England’s contribution.

The Ephemera Collection consists of dozens of posters, fliers, calendars, and other promotional materials for musical acts collected by Folk New England. Concentrated in the years of the folk revival in the late 1950s to late 1960s, many of the posters were sent to Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass.

Shortly after receiving her doctorate from the University of California Berkeley in 1972, the anthropologist Sylvia Helen Forman joined the faculty at UMass Amherst. A staunch feminist and activist, Forman was known for her commitment to her students and to the political life at the university, and for her engagement in the community. She died of cancer in 1992, just 48 years old.

The nine papers in this collection were the products of studies by students enrolled in Forman’s Anthropology 497 class at UMass Amherst. All are intensive analyses of issues of race, gender, and social justice in local communities, including disability, teenage pregnancy, child care, Cambodian refugees, and attitudes toward community living and community change.

Collection of chiefly newspaper clippings compiled by Georgana Foster documenting the response of the western Massachusetts community to a variety of local and national topics such as the Vietnam War, communes, the re-elections of Congressmen Silvio Conte and John Olver, the Amherst Peace Vigil, the Peace Pagoda in Leverett, and the Iraq War.

For the better part of four decades, Nancy E. Foster was active in the struggle for social justice, peace, and political reform. From early work in civil rights through her engagement in political reform in Amherst, Mass., Foster was recognized for her work in the movements opposing war, nuclear power, and the assault on civil liberties after the September 11 terrorist attacks. Locally, she worked with her fellow members of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst and with interfaith coalitions to address problems of hunger and homelessness.

Centered in western Massachusetts and concentrated in the last decade of her life (2000-2010), the Nancy Foster Papers includes a record of one woman’s grassroots activism for peace, civil liberties, and social justice. The issues reflected in the collection range from the assault on civil liberties after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to immigration, hunger and poverty, the Iraq Wars, and the conflict in Central America during the 1980s, and much of the material documents Nancy’s involvement with local organizations such as the Social Justice Committee of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Amherst. The collection also contains a valuable record of Nancy’s participation in local politics in Amherst, beginning with the records of the 1972 committee which was charged with reviewing the Town Meeting.

A native of Salisbury, Massachusetts, Robert Fowler (b.1805) was a prosperous shipbuilder and merchant with a trade extending from Nova Scotia to the Gulf South. He and his wife Susan Edwards, whom he married in 1830, had at least four children.

Kept by Robert Fowler between 1831 and 1854, the volume includes both diary entries (primarily 1841-1846) and accounts. With occasional commentary on local political matters, commerce, weather, and family matters, the diary is largely a record of Fowler’s spiritual concerns and his wrestling with doctrinal matters and the relationship of religion and daily life. An ardent temperance man, he commented on religious topics ranging from the Millerite movement to the resurrection, salvation, and the duty of prayer.

Beginning as an informal gathering in the home of Margaret Welch in 1959, Framingham Friends Meeting of the Society of Friends evolved organizationally into a formal worship group under the care of Cambridge Monthly Meeting in 1961 and then a preparatory meeting (1964). It was set off as an independent monthly meeting in 1979.

A newer monthly meeting, Framingham is well documented through a continuous set of meeting minutes from 1983-2022 (with some extending back to 1963) and a long run of newsletters and directories of members. The minutes often include official reports and other documents.

For the tercentenary of the Massachusetts court system, Paul J. Liacos, Chief Justice of the the Supreme Judicial Court convened a 45-member Commission on the Future of the Courts (also called Reinventing Justice) to examine the court’s role and responsibilities for the next century. The commission was charged both with creating a new vision for justice and for proposing a way for the system to move toward that vision. Responding to this initiative, Franklin County attorney Diane H. Esser and Thomas T. Merrigan, the First Justice of the Orange District Court, established a Franklin County Futures Lab Task Force Proposal to focus on the specific needs in Franklin County. Approved in December 1993 with Esser and Merrigan as chairs, the Task Force worked intensively with community partners, issuing a dozen recommendations on topics ranging from court house facilities to juvenile justice, substance abuse, Appropriate Dispute Resolution, and child care services. Although not all of the recommendations were implemented, the success of their model for court and community collaboration resulted in the creation on a ongoing position of Community Relations Coordinator in 1998. The project continues to evolve to meet community needs, but has continued to reflect the restorative justice values and principles engaged from the beginning.

The records of the Reinventing Justice initiative in Franklin County reflect an intensive, two-decade long effort to facilitate engagement between the courts and the community in western Massachusetts and build a vision for courts in the coming century. In addition to planning, administrative, and grant-seeking records, the collection includes significant documentation of process of engaging community members, and materials relating to their recommendations in restorative justice, substance abuse projects, facilities, and victim-offender mediation.

The Franklin/Hampshire Health Care Coalition is one of forty grassroots organizations in Massachusetts that allied to form the Massachusetts Campaign for Single-Payer Health Care (Mass-CARE) in 1995. Concerned about the inequities of the U.S. health care system, Mass-CARE has been a key sponsor of the Massachusetts Medicare for All act, which would establish a single payer health care system providing comprehensive health care for all residents of Massachusetts.

The records of the Franklin/Hampshire Health Care Coalition are a reflection of grassroots advocacy in Massachusetts for single payer health care. The collection includes minutes of meetings, background and informational materials, and other documents, including some materials from founding members Arky Markham and Alice Swift.

Frederic Allen Whiting at his typewriter

Frederic Allen Whiting Jr., the “Poet Laureate of Perkins Cove”, was born on January 10, 1906 in Boston Massachusetts to Olive Elizabeth Cook, a singer, and Frederic Allen Whiting Sr., a philanthropist and museum director and president of the American Federation of Arts. They moved to Cleveland in 1912 where Frederic Sr. became the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Having a father as the director of a cultural heritage institution, exposed young Frederic to the intellectual class. He met poets, scholars, and others from the world of arts and letters including Sir Lawrence Binyon, Langdon Warner, Carl Purington Rollins, and Thomas Whitney Surette. He attended the private Hawken School in Cleveland and Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, which he referred to later as “redolent of witchcraft and Indian massacres, and compliance with chamber of commerce goals and attitudes”. He went to Harvard for two years before becoming a freelance writer.

Adopting the pen name Allen Whiting, his first foray into writing began when he wrote commentary and criticism for the Magazine of Art, the organ of the American Federation of the Arts, where he was also editor from 1931-1942. Some of his pieces for the magazine were republished in the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post. Under his tenure, the circulation rose and he became familiar with all aspects of magazine production and made contacts with members and chapters of the American Federation of Arts, which consisted of artists, writers, teachers, museum officials, art dealers, and officials working with U.S. government cultural projects. On one occasion in 1940, Whiting took charge of the Federation’s annual convention, which met in San Francisco. He left the magazine in May 1942 to participate in the war effort.

Whiting was appointed Chief of the Office of War Information’s Overseas Exhibit Section. Charged with developing programming and staff, Whiting aimed to project positive visual images of the United States to Europeans. He was responsible for planning and carrying through creative programming, administrative duties, and liaison work with other civilian agencies, Army & Navy administrators, business leaders, and the press. Following the end of the war, he was brought to Washington by Elmer Davis to develop an exhibit aimed at explaining to liberated Europe the demand on resources of the continuing war in the Pacific. The project was abandoned following the surrender of Japan in August of 1945.

Following the war, Whiting became a freelance writer and photo editor, wrote two novels, short stories, and non-fiction pieces on a variety of subjects, including politics, the arts, and food. He designed and produced a brochure for a New England children’s camp and was a contracted photo research and editor for the State Department.

In 1951 he was recruited to work as a civilian information specialist with the Department of the Army’s Reorientation Division for occupied areas, which was responsible for supplying materials used to re-educate the people of Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. Out of an office in New York, he supplied the U.S. Information Centers in Japan with musical recordings and other media. The job ended following the end of the U.S. occupation in December, when he resumed freelance writing and editing. He moved his parents from Florida to Ogunquit, Maine in 1952, where he became the Associate Director of the Museum of Art of Ogunquit where he assembled a Winslow Homer exhibit but was later “politely fired” by Henry Strater.

Throughout the 1950s Whiting’s wife Rose suffered from several strokes and eventually died in 1960. Whiting was also caring for his aging parents, which caused much stress and led to excessive drinking where his “control over beverage alcohol had left me behind”. His mother died in 1955. During this time he found solace in the Roman Catholic Church and was committed to the Augusta State Hospital in 1957. Whiting’s battles with alcoholism and simultaneous search for God was explored in his unpublished 1965 autobiographical novel, Minutes of the Days.

The collection contains evidence of an attempt to start an organization called The Society of Servants of Rose Hill, whose aim was to “bring to bear in a practical manner the venerable and curative offices of prayer and work upon those in particular need of them”. The goal was to create cooperatively governed outpatient retreat centers in bucolic settings for people recently released from psychiatric institutions. The mission statement stated that no one would be turned away for financial or religious reasons. There is no evidence that the organization ever came to fruition.

Whiting’s career as a published poet began in the 4th grade. He was eventually published in several magazines including Spirit: A Magazine of Poetry, The American Poetry Magazine, The Harvard Advocate, Voices, and The Cecelian. He spent much of his creative life in Ogunquit, Maine reading his work at informal gatherings of “mostly young people of creative bent, gathered in the vicinity of Perkins Cove”. In 1952 he completed his first novel, The Gift of Merlon Crag.

The collection consists of copies, drafts, published and unpublished copies of Whiting’s poetry written throughout his lifetime. The manuscript of his unpublished autobiographical novel, Minutes of the Days is also contained herein. Some biographical information, written by Whiting while planning to release Minutes of the Days, is in the collection as well.

U.S. Marshal of Massachusetts in charge of collecting the census for his judicial district in 1860. Includes petitions, letters of introduction and applications to him from prospective enumerators, list of assistants and their signed oaths, census returns, related correspondence, and certificates of receipt from the marshal’s office. Also contains letters from Joseph C.G. Kennedy to Freeman, an instruction book for assistants, the marshal’s oath, and a receipt for a set of returns from the Secretary of the Commonwealth.