Collecting area: New England

A politician hailing from Greenfield, Mass., Whiting Griswold was born in Buckland on Nov. 12, 1814, the son of Maj. Joseph Griswold. Earning his way through Amherst College (BA, 1838) by teaching in the local schools, Griswold studied law in the offices of Grennell and Aiken, but politics soon came to dominate his life. A serious player in partisan politics, he won election as a Democrat to the state House in 1848-1850 and then the Senate in 1851-1852. After taking part in the state Constitutional Convention of 1853, Griswold supported Buchanan for the presidency in 1856, but changed party to support Lincoln, winning terms in the state Senate on a Coalition vote in 1862 and as a Republican in 1869. Griswold was twice married: first, to Jane M. Martindale (1844), with whom he had two children, and second to Frances L. Clarke (1856), with whom he had three children, including the attorney Freeman Clarke Griswold (1858-1910), a graduate of Yale and Harvard law school (1884), who represented Greenfield in the State House in 1888.

The Griswold papers are dense collection documenting the lives and careers of two state-level politicians in Massachusetts during the years straddling the Civil War. Contents range from discussions of the political crises of the 1850s and Civil War to political agitation over railroad construction in Franklin County, to elections, political speeches, and papers written as a student. The collection includes five letters of the Transcendentalist minister James Freeman Clarke and some essays and correspondence from Freeman Griswold.

Aldin Grout was among the first American missionaries to the Zulus. Experiencing a religious conversion in his early twenties, Grout dedicated his life to the ministry, studying at Amherst College (1831) and Andover Theological Seminary (1834) before accepting an overseas appointment through the American Board of Christian and Foreign Missions. In Nov. 1835, Grout and his new wife Hannah (Davis) sailed for South Africa, destined with two other missionary couples for the Natal Province. Even after Hannah died of a lingering illness following the birth of a daughter in December 1835, Grout pressed onward in the cause, not returning home until the end of 1837. Placing his daughter under the care of family, and remarrying to Charlotte (Bailey), he wasted little time in returning to South Africa, remaining there from June 1840 until retiring in 1870, primarily at Umvoti station. In his latter years in Springfield, Grout was active in ABCFM efforts to translate the Bible into Zulu (1883) and he wrote occasionally about his missionary experiences. Aldin Grout died in Springfield on 1894, followed by Charlotte in 1896.

The roughly 195 letters in the Grout collection provided a remarkable commentary on American missionary activities in colonial South Africa, Grout’s personal religious convictions, and the lives of the Zulus to whom he ministered. The collection also includes a handful of fragmentary autobiographical and historical sketches written after Grout’s retirement, a wealth of letters from Grout’s wives and fellow missionary workers, Hannah and Charlotte.

Friends began to meet informally for worship in Guilford, Connecticut, in September 1951, and gained approval from the Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting to form a preparative meeting a year and a half later under the care of New Haven Monthly. Although they were accorded status as a monthly meeting in 1957, Guilford never truly thrived, and by 1966, they were officially laid down with the remaining members transferred to New Haven.

The collection is a relatively complete record of Guilford Monthly Meeting from its establishment as a preparative meeting in 1953 through its elevation to a monthly and ultimate dissolution. In addition to well-kept minutes, the collection includes some financial records, information on membership, and a small quantity of correspondence.

While in college, Tommy Hadges expected to become a dentist. After graduating with a Biology degree from Tufts University, he attended Harvard Dental School for 18 months, but discovered that his calling wasn’t in dentistry, it was in radio. While at Tufts, Hadges was involved in resurrecting Tufts’ campus station WTUR, & also worked at the MIT student-run broadcast radio station WTBS. Still an undergraduate, Hadges was recruited by Ray Riepen in 1968 to be among the first DJs (along with along with fellow WTUR announcers Joe Rogers & J.J. Jackson) at WBCN, Riepen’s experiment to bring freeform, rock radio to Boston. WBCN was a massive and groundbreaking success, and after 2 years splitting school with part-time announcing at WBCN, Hadges returned to the station in 1970 to be a full time announcer. Hadges was promoted to Program Director at WBCN in 1977 and then left to become Program Director for neighboring WCOZ in 1978. Hadges gathered significant experience in commercial radio at WCOZ and later at Los Angeles’ KLOS, where he doubled the station’s ratings. This experience positioned him to become a consultant with Pollack Media Group, eventually becoming President & spending several decades helping grow the consultancy into a major international business, serving as a radio producer for international broadcasts (including the Live Aid, Live 8 and Live Earth concerts) and helping new stations build technical infrastructure. Hadges retired from Pollack Media Group in 2018.

The Tommy Hadges Papers document his years at WBCN in Boston, and includes photographs — some of the only depicting WBCN’s Stuart Street location, ephemera, and promotional materials.

First settled in 1659, Hadley was officially incorporated two years later. Microfilm records of the town consist primarily of minutes of town meetings along with nineteenth-century transcriptions.

A local branch of the national political party, the Hadley Greens organize around the principles of environmentalism, social justice, and non-violence, along with a general opposition to corporate dominance of the political process.

This small collection contains bylaws of the Hadley Green Party, minutes of meetings (2003), materials on organizing, and an assortment of notes, newsletters, correspondence pertaining to salient issues in the 2004 election, a t-shirt, banner, and pinback buttons.

A local, grassroots organization, Hadley Neighbors for Sensible Development coalesced in the early 2000s to advocate for environmentally and socially responsible development in Hadley, Mass. Working through the town planning board and town meeting, the group successfully opposed the construction of Walmart Superstore in town and worked to mitigate the impact of Lowes and other big box stores along the Route 9 corridor.

A miscellaneous assortment of documents relating to work in town meeting and with the town planning board, the collection includes notes, newspaper clippings, and assorted background information.

Western Massachusetts political leader, publisher, and banker (1881-1960), trustee of the University of Massachusetts (1940-1956), and founder, editor and publisher of the Greenfield Recorder newspaper (1912-1928); political positions included State Representative (1909-1913), State Senator (1913-1915, 1923-1927), and State Treasurer (1929-1930); in 1934, was Republican candidate for Lieutenant Governor, and in 1936, candidate for Governor.

The Haigis collection includes scrapbooks (1903-1936), chiefly of clippings, together with speeches (1936), posters, badges, campaign material, and photographs, mainly from Haigis’s unsuccessful campaigns for lieutenant governor (1934) and governor (1936); and tape of an interview (1974) with Leverett Saltonstall about Haigis, conducted by Craig Wallwork.

Writer, editor, and educator, Anne Halley was born in Bremerhaven, Germany in 1928. A child during the Holocaust, she relocated with her family to Olean, New York during the late 1930s so that her father, who was Jewish, could resume his practice of medicine. Graduating from Wellesley and the University of Minnesota, Halley married a fellow writer and educator, Jules Chametzky, in 1958. Together they raised three sons in Amherst, Massachusetts where Chametzky was a professor of English at UMass and Halley taught and wrote. It was during the late 1960s through the 1970s that she produced the first two of her three published collections of poetry. The last was published in 2003 the year before she died from complications of multiple myeloma at the age of 75.

Drafts of published and unpublished short stories and poems comprise the bulk of this collection. Letters to and from Halley, in particular those that depict her education at Wellesley and her professional life during the 1960s-1980s, make up another significant portion of her papers. Publisher’s correspondence and a draft of Halley’s afterward document the Chametzkys effort to release a new edition of Mary Doyle Curran’s book, The Parish and the Hill, for which Halley and Chametzky oversaw the literary rights. Photographs of Halley’s childhood in Germany and New York as well as later photographs that illustrate the growth of her own family in Minnesota and Massachusetts offer a visual representation of her remarkable professional and pesonal life.

As a contributor to the Atlas of Massachusetts, Professor Joel Halpern collected data and articles in support of his essay published in the “Ethnic Groups” section. The collection consists primarily of drafts of his essay and research notes.