Collecting area: New England

The fortunes of the Berwick (Maine) Monthly Meeting reflect the rise and decline of Quakerism in southern Maine more generally. Worship began in North Berwick in about 1750 and the Berwick Monthly Meeting was formally set off from its parent, Dover, in 1802. Following the Wilburite split, however, the meeting gradually declined. Regular meetings were suspended in 1919 and the meeting was formally laid down in 1952.

The surviving records of the Friends Monthly Meeting in North Berwick, Maine, contain the minutes of men’s, women’s, and joint meetings from throughout 1802, when it was set off from Dover Monthly Meeting, until it was laid down in 1952. The collection also contains records of births, deaths, and marriages under auspices of the meeting from the first worship in North Berwick in 1750 into the mid-nineteenth century.

The Friends’ Monthly Meeting at Berwick, Maine, divided during the Wilburite split of 1845, with the smaller Wilburite Meeting organized under the Wilburite Dover Quarterly Meeting (1845-1851) and then under the combined Salem and Dover Quarterly. Berwick was laid down on April 28, 1881, with its last recorded meeting on May 26, 1881. Its members joined Dartmouth Monthly Meeting (Wilburite).

Surviving records of this short-lived Wilburite Friends meeting include one volume each of minutes from the Men’s and Women’s meetings.

Lambert Bigelow (1821-1869) was proprietor of one of the most profitable general stores in Marlborough, Mass. Entering into partnership with his brother Levi in 1822, Bigelow grew to significant wealth, eventually joining with a friend and neighbor to establish the long-lasting firm, Morse, Bigelow, and Co. He died in 1869, survived by his wife and seven of eight children.

An early daybook maintained by the Lambert Bigelow’s newly established firm, and perhaps the first, this volume covers just over half a year of transactions (169 pages) typical of a New England country store of the 1820s. Bigelow’s customers purchased small quantities of goods ranging from molasses and rice to cotton and muslin, flour, sugar, tobacco, rum, “Holland gin,” and (rarely) brandy. Occasionally, Lambert dealt in daintier products such as cinnamon, raisins, and “cake chocolate,” or in specialty items like pudding pans, pitchers, and a black bean pot.

A native of Rockland, Maine, Alton H. “Blackie” Blackington (1893-1963) was a writer, photojournalist, and radio personality associated with New England “lore and legend.” After returning from naval service in the First World War, Blackington joined the staff of the Boston Herald, covering a range of current events, but becoming well known for his human interest features on New England people and customs. He was successful enough by the mid-1920s to establish his own photo service, and although his work remained centered on New England and was based in Boston, he photographed and handled images from across the country. Capitalizing on the trove of New England stories he accumulated as a photojournalist, Blackington became a popular lecturer and from 1933-1953, a radio and later television host on the NBC network, Yankee Yarns, which yielded the books Yankee Yarns (1954) and More Yankee Yarns (1956).

This collection of glass plate negatives was purchased by Robb Sagendorf of Yankee Publishing around the time of Blackington’s death. Reflecting Blackington’s photojournalistic interests, the collection covers a terrain stretching from news of public officials and civic events to local personalities, but the heart of the collection is the dozens of images of typically eccentric New England characters and human interest stories. Most of the images were taken by Blackington on 4×5″ dry plate negatives, however many of the later images are made on flexible acetate stock and the collection includes several images by other (unidentified) photographers distributed by the Blackington News Service.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

The seat of seven generations of the Blanchard and Means families, Elm Hill Farm was established prior to 1797, when the joiner Amasa Blanchard began acquiring property in Brookfield, Mass., as he looked forward to his marriage. The success he enjoyed in farming was a spark for his family’s prosperity. Amasa’s son Albert Cheney Blanchard left Brookfield in the 1830s to pursue commercial opportunities out west as a partner in the Richmond Trading Co., in Richmond, Ind., and by the time he returned home to take over operations after his father’s death in 1857, Albert had earned a fortune. In the years after the Civil War, Elm Hill grew to 1,300 acres crowned by a mansion built in 1870 that became the center of a compound of eight buildings. Each subsequent generation at Elm Hill has left its own distinctive mark. Albert’s son Charles P. Blanchard, a minister and talented amateur photographer, developed a renowned herd of Morgan horses, and Charles’ daughter Abby and her husband, the minister Oliver W. Means, added a herd of Jersey cattle that included a prize-winning bull, Xenia’s Sultan, imported in 1923, and the cow, You’ll Do Lobelia, better known as the original, real-life Elsie the Cow. Abby’s daughter-in-law, Louise Rich Means, laid acres of spectacular gardens on the estate. Following Louise’s death in 2009, Elm Hill left family ownership.

Consisting of nearly two centuries of papers that accumulated on the Elm Hill estate, the Blanchard-Means collection stretches from a handful of documents from the late eighteenth century relating to landholdings and Amasa ‘s work Blanchard as a joiner, to a blossoming of correspondence, photographs, ephemera, and realia dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Well-educated, well-traveled, and well-informed, the Blanchards and Means were prolific letter writers, and their papers provide wonderful insights into the lives of a religiously-devoted family from the New England elite. Among the highlights of the collection are the extensive records from the Richmond Trading Company and from the farm’s livestock and gardening operations (both Morgans and Jerseys) and a remarkable photographic record that document the family, the evolving landscape of Elm Hill, and the town of Brookfield, as well as hundreds of images from C.P. Blanchard’s world tours in the 1890s.

Named for Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the “Rebel Girl,” Elizabeth “Liz” Blum has worked to live up to her name through public activism, organizing, and community service in the civil rights, anti-war, women’s, anti-apartheid, co-op, and other movements. After graduating from Bennington College in 1964, Blum went south as a part of the Mississippi Freedom Vote, going door to door in northwestern Mississippi until her house in Tupelo was firebombed, forcing her to relocate to Columbus for the remainder of the registration drive. She continued her work and connections with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in New Haven as a worker for the Freedom School and the Economic Research and Action Program, and additionally lived in New York City and San Francisco before returning to Vermont in 1967 to live in a commune and teach French at Castleton University. There Blum organized an SDS chapter and women’s group before moving to Cambridge, Mass., joining the Boston Women’s Health Collective and helping to edit Our Bodies, Ourselves. A retired Occupational Therapist, Blum is currently county chair of the Vermont Progressive Party, serves on the Board of the Hanover Co-op Food Stores where she heads the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee, and continues her diverse advocacy work through personal and community action.

Small in size, but generous in topic and form, the Blum Papers consist of correspondence and two newsletter portions with commentary on numerous events and activist groups during the first half of the 1960s. Personal experiences and reflections on national politics and trends, student and community organizing, and the anti-Vietnam War and civil rights movements, reveal how individuals negotiated and prioritized their thoughts and actions during such turbulent times. Correspondents include Henry M. Aronson, Ike Coleman, Vernon Grizzard, and Mike Miller, and updates from and to Blum are mostly from Mississippi, but also San Francisco, Cambridge, New Haven, and Selma.

Twenty-four page register kept by unnamed person, possibly from a Quabbin town, listing boarders by name, payment received, and employee accounts. Payments noted in detail from February to October, 1850. Boarders included several doctors and L.S. Hills, possibly Leonard S. Hills of the Amherst, Massachusetts hat factory. Employee accounts list many women with Irish surnames, including Ellen O’Leary, Ellen Callahan, and Margaret Murphy.

A Quaker worship group was formed in Bolton, Mass., in 1763 and grew into a separate monthly meeting in 1799. Always a small outpost, regular worship continued there until 1954, when the meetinghouse was sold to the museum at Old Sturbridge Village. The meeting was formally laid down to Worcester Monthly Meeting in 1972.

The surviving records of Bolton Monthly Meeting include relatively complete minutes from 1799 to 1972, plus records of marriages, births, and deaths into the latter years of the nineteenth century.

An award-winning photojournalist, Kathy Borchers began a thirty year career with the Providence Journal in the mid-1980s. A native of Dayton, Ohio, she and her twin sister Karen (also a photojournalist) took up photography in high school and refined their technique as undergraduates at Bowling Green State University. After receiving her master’s degree at the Indiana University School of Journalism in 1981, Borchers worked for three years with the Topeka Capital-Journal before landing in Providence. In addition to covering general news and sports, she took on a number of special assignments and longer-form photoessays over the years in southern New England. She retired in 2015.

A rich sampling from a long career in photojournalism, the collection includes photographic negatives and prints along with associated published materials. Centered primarily on her time with the Providence Journal, the collection reflects the breadth of Borchers’ assignments, including general news, sports coverage, and longer-form photoessays, in both black and white and color. The collection also includes five self-made books: three on long-term photographic projects for the Journal and two career retrospectives.

124-page handwritten autobiographical account written in Polish by 100 year-old Edward A. Borkowski of Turner Falls, Massachusetts.