Collecting area: New England

In about 1954, a number of local Quaker meetings and worship groups in Vermont and New Hampshire coalesced to form the independent Vermont and New Hampshire Friends, which joined the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends in 1956 as the Upper Connecticut Valley Monthly Meeting. A loose confederation based in Woodstock, Vt., it included groups in Burlington, Hanover, Middlebury, Rockingham, Rutland, and Springfield during the brief period of existence. In 1959, the Upper Connecticut Valley Meeting was supplanted by the new Northwest Quarter.

This small but interesting collection contains an apparently complete run of newsletters from the evanescent Upper Connecticut Valley Monthly Meeting.

A community development and service agency founded in 1914, the Urban League of Springfield works to secure equal opportunity for minority groups in such fields as employment, education, housing, health, and personal welfare.

This small collection is tightly focused on the period of the school busing (desegregation) crisis in Springfield, 1974-1975, and the League’s efforts to analyze and respond to the underlying issues in race relations and political engagement. The contents include surveys on racial attitudes and voting behavior in the city along with a selection of publications from the League and a set of board minutes and handouts.

Located in Uxbridge, Mass., on the border with Rhode Island, Uxbridge Monthly Meeting was formally established in 1783. During the nineteenth century, this Quaker meeting was home to well-known abolitionists Abby Kelley Foster and Effingham Capron, but it declined in membership by 1900 and changed name to Worcester Monthly Meeting in 1907. A worship group currently meets in the historic Uxbridge Meetinghouse.

A small but important Quaker meeting, Uxbridge Monthly is documented by over a century of minutes, vital records, and other materials. The interrelated collections for Worcester and Pleasant Street Monthly Meetings are described separately.

Founded in 1975 by a group of Gilbert and Sullivan devotees, the Valley Light Opera is based in Amherst, Massachusetts. VLO presents one fully staged opera and one less formal production every year, and over the years the company has presented all fourteen of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas at least once.

This collection contains a wonderful visual record of VLO productions with hundreds of photographs capturing dozens of performances. The collection contains, too, records that document the company’s activities from the moment an opera is selected to be performed to last curtain call.

In the summer of 1967, members of University of Massachusetts Amherst campus groups, such as the Faculty Group on War and Peace and the Students for Political Action, joined with individuals from other area colleges and from the community at large to form the Valley Peace Center of Amherst for the purposes of opposing the Vietnam War, providing draft counseling, eliciting pledges from the government to avoid first use of nuclear and biological weapons, and reduction of the power of the “military-industrial complex”. The Center was active for more than five and a half years, drawing its financial support largely from the community and its human resources from student and community volunteers.

Correspondence, minutes, volunteer and membership lists, financial records, newsletters, questionnaires, notes, petitions, clippings, posters, circulars, pamphlets, periodicals, other printed matter, and memorabilia. Includes material relating to alternative service, boycotts, war tax resistance, prison reform, environmental quality, and political candidates.

The Valley Women’s Union was established in 1974 by members of the Valley Women’s Center, Northampton, Massachusetts, who were committed to political change benefiting women. They were concerned that the Valley Women’s Center had become a static umbrella organization and that many of its formerly vital functions had been absorbed by local social service agencies The VWU sought to unify groups that were working for political change beneficial to women.

Records include newsletters, agendas for meetings, reports, position papers, and mailings.

During the early phases of second wave feminism (1968-1978), the Pioneer Valley served as a center for lesbian and feminist activity in western Massachusetts, and was home to over 400 hundred, often ad hoc, groups, such as the Abortion and Birth Control (ABC) Committee, ISIS Women’s Center, the Mudpie Childcare Cooperative, and the Springfield Women’s Center.

The records of the Valley Women’s History Collaborative document the activities of these groups as well as the efforts of the founders of the Women Studies program and department at UMass Amherst to preserve this history. Of particular value are the many oral histories conducted by the collaborative that record the history of women’s activism in the Pioneer Valley, especially as it relates to reproductive rights.

Tinsmith and plumber from Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Mentions items he repaired and cleaned (stoves, furnaces, pots, pans, tinware, glassware, and crockery), goods sold (lamps, wash basins, kitchen utensils, shovels, fuel, and furnaces), occasional mention of payment with goods, lists of suppliers, and lists of customers, many of whom were prominent people in the community.

Friends began to gather for worship in Vassalboro, Maine, in 1780, shortly after Quakers began to settle the Kennebeck Valley to escape the American Revolution. Their numbers grew sufficiently to be granted states as a monthly meeting in 1787, and they have subsequently been the sponsor for a number of worship groups and preparatory meetings in central Maine, as well as the source from which five monthly meetings have been laid off.

The records of Vassalboro Monthly Meeting (Society of Friends) are spotty and incomplete, but include minutes of meetings for business from 1950s through 1980s, sporadic financial records, and a substantial, but incomplete series of newsletters from 1987-2010.

Serving as a Quaker quarterly meeting for central Maine, Vassalboro Quarterly was set off from Falmouth Quarter in 1813. Over the years, it has coordinated nearly two dozen monthly meetings extending as far north and east as Cobscook. Farmington Quarter was set off from it in 1841, but returned in 1952.

The records for Vassalboro Quarterly are substantially incomplete, but document the Quaker meeting from the 1970s through 2000s. Among other records are a highly incomplete set of minutes (and “records,” which are the materials distributed during meetings); a more complete, but still partial run of newsletters; and the records of Ministry and Counsel from the mid-1990s through mid-2000s.