Collecting area: New England

Long a favored destination for travelers due to its scenic coastline and rural landscapes, New England’s tourist industry evolved in parallel with transportation technologies. Rail lines opened summering opportunities in the interior of the region in the nineteenth century, and the expansion of roadways and the automobile after the First World War drove the industry further, leading to a proliferation of summer camps, inns, and tourist sites, even in remote locales, serving shorter-term vacationers from the working class through the moneyed elite.

This small collection of travel brochures gathered by Faith Brainard and her husband Homer W. Brainard in the 1920s and 1930s, documents camps, inns, hotels, and touristic sites throughout New England. Most of the brochures advertise accommodations or attractions in a natural setting, including room rentals at farms, hiking in the White Mountains, and the rivers and mountains of Vermont. The target audience for many of the brochures was women traveling alone, featuring the promise of clean accommodations and wholesome activities.

Born in 1948 to Robert Trigére and Jane Ellis, Trigére grew up in New York City and Argentina. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she remained close to both. Trigére attended the Lycee Francais de New York, a preparatory high school that taught in French. She was accepted to Sarah Lawrence College in 1969, which she attended for two years before transferring to the University of Boston to study Architecture. She moved to western Massachusetts in 1992 and became involved in a myriad of community organizations and projects. Notably, in 1997, Trigére helped found the Hatikvah Holocaust Education and Resource Center and served as the first director. Trigére was also active in several Jewish schools and educational centers as both an instructor and a leader. She and her husband, Ken Schoen, lived and operated a rare Jewish Bookstore out of the old firehouse in Deerfield, Massachusetts. She was on several committees dedicated to the preservation of the town, such as the Deerfield Historical Commission and she helped to create other community organizations such as the Deerfield Arts Bank. In 2016, Trigére was diagnosed with ovarian cancer and died in 2018.

The bulk of this collection dates from the time when Jane Trigére finished her undergraduate studies in 1975 to her passing in 2018, although there are some photographs and correspondence from her childhood. The collection includes materials that relate to her education and employment, artwork and writing, and community involvement as well as correspondence and family materials. Within the family materials are items related to Pauline Trigére, a prominent fashion designer.

The second child of attorney George J. Tucker and his first wife, Eunice, Mary E. Tucker was born in Lenox, Mass., ca.1835, and raised there with her elder brother Joseph and sisters Maria, Harriett, and Sarah. Mary died at a tragically young age on August 20, 1855. She is buried with her father and sister Maria in the town’s Church on the Hill Cemetery.

As small as the volume is, it is a complex book, consisting of two main parts, neither with certain authorship. Approximately the first third of the volume is comprised of brief notes on sermons delivered by Congregational minister Edmund K. Alden and other, 1854-1862, while the rest is a well-organized receipt book kept in a different hand. The receipts are arranged in sections devoted to bread and cake, soups, fish, meats, vegetables, pastry, puddings, other desserts, cake, preserves and jellies, miscellaneous, and pickles and sauces. Several recipes are attributed to other writers, including the well-known cookbook author Juliet Corson.

As a young man in Foxcroft, Maine, Abel Turner was caught up in the evangelical revivals and converted to Free Will Baptism, becoming a minister by the age of 21. Beginning in the backwoods settlements, Turner spent the better part of a decade attempting to “convert sinners” in Piscataquis and Penobscot Counties and the in the Burned-Over District of New York state, from Utica to Penn Yan and Cattaraugus County.

Written for his wife, Abel Turner’s long and detailed autobiography is a remarkable record of a young Free Will Baptist minister’s labors during the Second Great Awakening. Beginning with his childhood in Maine and his conversion experience, the manuscript provides insight into Turner’s experiences preaching in the rough-hewn interior settlements of Maine and the Burned-Over District of New York from roughly 1821 through 1839. In addition to some wonderful commentary on evangelical religion in the heart of the Awakening and on Turner’s own spiritual development, the memoir includes fascinating descriptions of the towns and people he met along the way.

Robert W. Tuthill taught epidemiology at UMass Amherst for nearly three decades and championed the libraries by both serving on the Friends of the Library board and bringing his students into the stacks for class assignments. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Penna., Tuthill attended high school in Newton, Mass., and earned an associate’s degree from Newton Junior College before coming to the University of Massachusetts. At UMass, he majored in sociology, graduating in 1956, and served at the Valley Forge Army Hospital before returning to academia at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a master’s degree in sociology. At the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, he studied epidemiology, earning his Ph.D. in 1970. When Tuthill returned to UMass to join the faculty in 1970, it was to start the epidemiology program, which would be part of the School of Public Health and Health Sciences. Tuthill joined the Friends of the Library board in 1988 and served for nearly fifteen years, including a term as president. In 2003, he was honored with the Libraries’ Siegfried Feller Award for Outstanding Volunteer Service. Tuthill retired from UMass in 1998.

The Tuthill Papers contain teaching materials from some of the notable courses Tuthill taught at UMass, including Environmental Epidemiology and Biases in Epidemiologic Research; a small amount of research materials associated with an ADD/ADHD study; and copies of his publications, which included studies involving a variety of public health issues, from lead poisoning and smoking to family planning and cancer. Much of Tuthill’s research took place in the Western Massachusetts region.

A farmer and laborer in Antrim, N.H., Thomas Dimon Twiss was born in Beverly, Mass., in 1801. At the age of 24, Twiss married a local Antrim woman, Betsey Brackett, with whom he raised a family of three children.

This typical single-column account book of the mid-nineteenth century records Twiss’s diverse economic transactions, providing labor for the town in “braking rods” [breaking roads] and “digin graves”and to neighbors and for a wide variety of manual farm labor, including killing hogs, plowing, threshing, haying, and assorted carpentry work.

Chartered in 1835, the Boston and Maine Railroad was one of the largest and most successful railroad operations in northern New England for over a century, hauling both freight and passengers. The Railway began a slow decline as early as the 1930s with the decline in manufacturing in the region and later with the decline of passenger service. It came through a bankruptcy in 1970 and continues as a non-operating ward of Pan Am Railways.

This collection consists of blueprint valuations of the assets of the Boston and Maine Railroad, compiled by the Bureau of Valuation of the U.S. Interstate Commerce Commission in 1931.

In 1993, UMass Educational Television was created by Dean Bailey Jackson and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Jay Carey to establish a creative media outreach project for the School of Education. Professor Liane Brandon was asked to be the Director with Associate Dean Jay Carey as Co-director. Working in collaboration with staff member Scott Perry, they designed UMass Educational Television to provide the public with innovative, original, educational programming using the resources of the School of Education and the University, and to serve as a hands-on learning laboratory for students and teachers. They became the only School of Education in the country to produce original educational programming for cable/home audiences. Despite the positive reception of the programs produced, funding for the UMass Educational Television was cut and production ceased in 2003.

The UMass Educational Television Collection consists of many of the original programs they developed and created: Try This At Home, Fresh Ink, Who Knows? Pet Tales, Valley Vignettes, Hi Mom!, and Fine Print. Show flyers, posters, production files, and awards provide insight into the creation and reception of programs.

Although the precise origins of UMass Peacemakers are murky, by 1982, the group was an active presence on the UMass Amherst campus organizing opposition to militarism and the nuclear arms race and providing support for the nuclear freeze movement. Organizing vigils, demonstrations, informational workshops, and providing civil disobedience training, the Peacemakers were the most visible pacifist group on the UMass Amherst campus in the 1980s.

The UMass Peacemakers Records focus on the activities of the student group between 1983 and 1990, documenting their role in confronting the aggressive international expansionism of the Reagan administration and its “Star Wars” program, while also engaging at the local and national level by organizing rallies, lectures, poetry readings, and film screenings. At UMass, Peacemakers was part of the larger Progressive Student Network, and worked alongside other student organizations including the Radical Student Union.