Collecting area: New England

Founded in September 1978, Sirius is an intentional community in Shutesbury, Mass., built on four foundational pillars: spiritual, ecological, communitarian, and educational. Established by former members of the Scottish Findhorn Community, Sirius is rooted in a non-sectarian spirituality and practices consensus in the community governance process and in their shared vision of an ecologically sustainable future.

The Sirius collection contains a nearly complete run of the commune newsletter along with a selection of fliers and brochures about the community, and a small number of newsclippings and photographs.

At the time of the American Civil War, Charles Sisson attended the Friends Boarding School in Providence, R.I. An active member of the Society of Friends, Sisson was apparently a dedicated student and avid member of the literary society. After graduation, he pursued an enormously successful career in the textile industry, becoming a founder of the Hope Webbing Company in 1883, one of the nation’s largest narrow-fabric manufacturers.

Kept by teenaged Charles Sisson, this diary includes regular entries describing a student’s daily life at the Friends Boarding School in Providence R.I. In addition to occasional details on coursework, Sisson describes his social activities in some depth, and often with some humor. With rare exceptions, the larger currents of the Civil War served as little more than a backdrop, although the future of liberated slaves appeared as a topic for debate at the Lyceum, and marching was taken up as an activity by the students.

A member of the Post War World Council, an ardent pacifist, and anti-imperialist, Stephen Siteman was a long-time member of the Socialist Party of America, serving for seventeen years as secretary to the party’s leader Norman Thomas. In his late teens, Siteman was imprisoned as a conscientious objector during World War II. Although he was later pardoned, his time as a prisoner led him into active involvement in prison reform and the peace movement.

During his long involvement in the Socialist Party, Siteman collected a large quantity of material relating to important socialist issues, including Socialist Reform, the peace movement, conscientious objection, and prison reform. The collection also includes a small selection of Siteman’s personal correspondence with Frank Zeidler, former Socialist mayor of Milwaukee, and the novelist Mark Harris.

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Granted in 1737 and incorporated in 1754, Greenwich, Mass., was the first town in the Swift River Valley settled by Europeans. Sitting astride the East and Middle branches of the Swift River and forming the eastern boundary of Hampshire County, Greenwich was primarily an agricultural town with light manufacturing and, beginning in the later nineteenth century, an active tourist trade. The town’s population peaked at over 1,100 early in the nineteenth century, declining slowly thereafter.

The photographic postcards in this collection all relate to the Quabbin town of Greenwich and were originally housed in an album of uncertain provenance. Primarily “real photo” postcards and dating between approximately 1908 and 1928, they were labeled by a knowledgeable, but unknown person at a later date to identify the houses, roads, stores, and views. Unlike many of the commercial postcards of the day, they present a very down-to-earth view of the town, its rocky fields, mills, houses and stores, and its summer hotels.

The children of a textile investor, Mary and David Slade were students at the Friends’ Boarding School in Providence, R.I., during the late 1830s. Both died tragically of consumption at a young age, David at 24 and Mary at 28.

The Slade family papers consist largely of the personal correspondence of the ill-starred David and Mary Slade, dating from and just after their time as students at the Friends’ Boarding School in Providence, R.I. Written primarily by schoolmates and friends, with a few letters from David and Mary themselves, the letters include some fine examples of the intimacy of young people, with their sights set on their schooling or beginning to make their life.

The Sleeveless Theatre Company was an innovative political theater company with a strong feminist slant. Founded in 1989 by UMass Amherst alumnae Lisa Channer, Maureen Futtner, K. D. Halpin, and Kate Nugent, and Smith alumna, Terianne Falcone, Sleeveless was an actor-centered, highly collaborative ensemble company that wielded humor in staging original, socially- and politically-charged theater. Based in Northampton, Mass., the company toured nationally and internationally, presenting sometimes controversial works on themes ranging from reproductive rights to the Gulf War. As they evolved, they refined their mission to focus on telling stories about the lives and perspectives of women, but under the strains of growing within their collaborative model, they made the decision to disband in 1997.

In addition to minutes for the company’s formative years (1989-1992), the records of Sleeveless Theater Company include a small selection of production notes, background research, fliers, reviews and newsclippings, and a handful of publicity photos. Among the plays represtened are Womb for Rent (1989), War: The Comedy (1991), The F Word (1992), Emily Unplugged (1995), and Mill America (1996).

An historian of twentieth century social movements, Blake Slonecker received his doctorate at the University of North Carolina in 2009 and joined the history faculty at Waldorf College soon thereafter. In a dissertation examining the utopian impulses of the New Left (published in 2012 as A new dawn for the New Left: Liberation News Service, Montague Farm, and the long sixties), Slonecker explored how the political and cultural activism of the 1960s helped reshape American political culture in the decade following.

In June 2008, Slonecker conducted oral historical interviews with four individuals who were part of the extended community centered on the Montague Farm and Packer Corners communes during the late 1960s: Tom Fels, Charles Light, Sam Lovejoy, and Richard Wizansky. In wide-ranging interviews, the former communards discuss topics ranging from the fraught politics of the era, political and cultural activism, gender roles and sexuality, and daily life on the communes.

World famous handgun and handcuff-manufacturing company founded in Springfield, Massachusetts in the 1850s.

The Smith and Wesson records are comprised of incoming sales and service correspondence with some outgoing correspondence and administrative and financial/legal subject files, including categories such as ads and advertising, American Railway Express, audits, counselors at law, debtors, insurance, legal actions, newsletters, patents and trademarks, personnel, photos, sample parts, sideline ventures, stocks and bonds awards, and Western Union Telegrams. Includes correspondence with the National Rifle Association, Small Arms Industry Advisory Committee, and the United States Revolver Association.

A chair-maker and Revolutionary War veteran, Daniel Smith lived on High Street in Ipswich, Mass. As early as 1774, Smith was bottoming and repairing chairs, and for several decades, he produced chairs of various sorts, including waist chairs, four-back chairs, “green chairs,” great chairs, round chairs, and low chairs. Smith died in Jan. 1844.

This rough, but noteworthy volume records nearly two and half decades of production by a Massachusetts chair maker in the early National period. The volume begins as a cipher book, apparently kept by Smith in his late teens, but by the earliest accounts in 1774, Smith records “bottoming and mending” chairs and, by 1785, making “six four back chairs & a grat chair” for Thomas Smith.

Gilbert Smith was a shoemaker and doctor from New Marlborough, Massachusetts, and his son Gilbert Jr. was a prosperous farmer from Sheffield, Massachusetts. Includes merchandise sales, labor accounts, lists of boarders, and documentation of the sale of homemade butter and cheese to local merchants, as well as trade with the substantial rural black community of the region.