Collecting area: New England

A resident of Amherst, Massachusetts and member of the UMass class of 1965, Sheila Rainford has a strong interest in local history and is a staunch supporter of her local public library, the Jones Library. An area of particular interest is the role of agriculture in the Pioneer Valley. She is co-editor with Ruth Owen Jones of a book on local agricultural history, Harvesting History: Amherst Massachusetts Farms, 1750-2010 (Amherst, Mass., 2010).

The collection consists chiefly of subject files relating to farms and farming in Amherst and the Pioneer Valley. Topics include CISA, NOFA, area farms, local CSAs . Eight audiocassettes contain presentations or interviews ranging from Doris Abramson on the history of the Jones Library to personal recollections and sewing as a business.

Eileen McCarthy Rakouskas is a personal historian and founder of Mosaic Memoirs, a service that assists people in recording, editing, and producing oral histories, memoirs, and other family stories. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College and Holyoke Community College, she has been particularly interested in recording “ordinary lives” and lives connected with social justice struggles.

On May 17, 2004, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health that it was unconstitutional to prohibit same-sex marriage in Massachusetts. On the first day of legalized same-sex marriage, Rakouskas conducted interviews with couples waiting in line to apply for marriage licenses, city clerks, and others. Her collection also includes an assortment of other materials documenting the first day of full marriage equality.

A dry goods merchant and chair maker in Erving, Massachusetts, Joseph Rankin dealt in a variety of goods from Boston to Hartford, selling chairs as far away as New York City and Chicago. Rankin’s store supplied the essentials: produce, hardware, news, and gossip.

This collection contains an assortment of correspondence and receipts documenting the nature of business in small town Massachusetts, with small glimpses of the growth of the furniture trade in Franklin County.

The independent filmmaker Abraham Ravett has taught film and video at Hampshire College since 1979. Born in Poland in 1947 and raised in Israel, Ravett emigrated to the United States with his family in 1955. Since earning his BFA and MFA in Filmmaking and Photography, he has won wide recognition for his work, receiving major grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, among other organizations, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation. His films have been screened internationally and have earned Top Prize at the Viennale 2000, the Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Onion City Film/Video Festival.

This small collection contains raw footage on open-reel videotape shot by Ravett and two dvds documenting local communities in eastern Massachusetts: the North End, Boston (1977-1978) and Haverhill High School (1978-1979), the latter taken while artist in residence.

Herman Edgar Ray, son of Fred Jackson Ray and Mabel Cosella Merriam Ray, was born in Westminster, Massachusetts on May 28, 1911. Herman Edgar married Anita Crabtree on May 4, 1934 in Gardner, Massachusetts. The family remained in the area throughout the 1950s as indicated by their correspondence.

The collection consists primarily of family photographs spanning three identifiable generations of the Ray family, and contains photograph albums, formal portraits, and miscellaneous photographs. Additional material includes postcards, correspondence, and hand-made greeting cards. The materials document the childhood of Herman Edgar Ray. His extended family includes: Mr. and Mrs. Edwin Ray, Mr. and Mrs. Hiram Ray, Ray Fenno, Mary Emergene Fenno, Mr.and Mrs. Charles A. Smith, Mr. and Mrs. Charles Davis, Helen Gates, Mary Russell, and Eleanor Howe.

Founded in 1935, the Northeast Dairy Conference was “an association of more than 40 organizations of dairy producers in thirteen states from Maine to West Virginia.” Ranging from individual farmers and cooperatives to state-level departments of agriculture and milk control boards,” the NDC represented the interests of “hundreds of dairy plants and… thousands of workers,” and worked to ensure the success of the “principle agricultural industry in the Northeast.”

The Regional Dairy Marketing Program collection contains meeting proceedings, annuals reports, research project statements, and detailed accounts of the Northeast Dairy Conference’s Cooperative Regional Projects from 1946 to 1960.

Established within the Wilburite Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting in 1844, the Rhode Island Monthly Meeting (Wilburite) was a small product of the Separation of 1844-1945 within the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends. By 1863, the men’s meeting had declined to such an extent that only a single member remained, and therefore for a year, join meetings were held with the women’s meeting. The meeting was laid down in April 1864, with members transferring to Providence Monthly Meeting (Wilburite), although a handful of members rejected the decision to disband and continued to meet through the end of the year.

This small collection contains a nearly comprehensive minutes for the men’s and women’s meetings of the Rhode Island Monthly Meeting (Wilburite), along with a volume of records of births, marriages, and deaths.

Following the Wilburite separation in the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends in 1845, the Wilburite “smaller body” reconstituted the structure of the Quaker church. The Rhode Island Quarterly Meeting was formed after the split overseeing four monthly meetings in Rhode Island and one in Massachusetts, most of which were relatively short lived.

The records of the Wilburite Rhode Quarterly Meeting include a relatively complete set of minutes and thorough documentation of the Ministers and Elders.

For more than fifty years, Jim Ricci collected both machine tools and the books,  catalogs, and manuals that relate to the machinery and the industry as a whole. A graduate of UMass Amherst (’71) and the son of a faculty member, Ricci is an historian of reel lawn mowers who has written extensively on the subject, publishing the book Hand, Horse, and Motor: The Development of the Lawn Mower Industry in the United States in 2016.

The collection represents more than 750 companies and includes brochures, catalogs, manuals, and parts lists from machine tool manufacturers. The majority of the companies represented are located in the United States; international companies are located in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, England, France, Germany, East Germany, West Germany, Hungary, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Poland, Scotland, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan and Turkey.

Machine tools are machines that make parts and pieces for end products or other machine tools. These tools range from lathes, range from lathes, milling machines, grinders, manual and hydraulic presses, drill presses and saws to drills, mills, grinding wheels and cutting tools as well as measuring tools, jigs and fixtures. The machine tool industry evolved dramatically throughout the 20th century with the introduction of multi-function workstations. Multi-axis machines with attached tools changers are driven by sophisticated computer-controlled programs. The evolution of the industry is reflected, in part, in this historical collection of printed materials.

A prosperous farmer in the southern reaches of Massachusetts Bay Colony, James Richards was born on June 2, 1658, and never ventured far from his from his home in Weymouth or the adjoining town of Braintree. The son of William Richards and his wife Grace Shaw, and a member of the third generation of Richards in the new world, James was characteristically diverse in his economic activities, raising livestock (sheep and pigs), harvesting salt grass, making salt, and raising crops including rye, corn, and barley, which he malted, presumably for the production of beer. Although most of his transactions were local, he traded as far away as Charlestown and Barnstable.

The Richards family ledgers include a daybook from James Richards kept between 1692-1710 and an account book from his great grandson Jacob Richards kept a century later, along with loose receipts from generations of Richards in between. The volume associated with James Richards records sales of goods produced on his Weymouth farm, including barley, rye, “Indian corn,” salt, mutton and lamb, pork, and eggs, along with occasional records of the sale of goods such as shingles, “board nails,” clapboards, molasses and sugar, lamp oil, tobacco, and cloth. The sparser records from Jacob Richards include accounts that include the sale of cider; cord wood; pine, oak, and maple boards; and shoes.