Collecting area: New England

The Connecticut River Valley town of Whately, Mass., was first settled by Europeans in about 1672, separating from the northern section of Hatfield and displacing the Norwottucks, or Fresh Water Indians. Officially incorporating in 1771, the town’s economy has been based primarily in agriculture, including the production of tobacco, potatoes, and dairy.

The four reels of microfilm that comprise this collection contain records of the town of Whately, Mass., from settlement in the middle of the nineteenth century, including records of the Congregational Church, deeds, and vital records (births, baptisms, marriages, deaths).

A resident of Haydenville, Mass., during the 1930s, C. H. Wheeler was evidently captivated with the profound political changes sweeping the nation during the years of the Great Depression.

Containing hundreds of political cartoons clipped from local newspapers and national media, C. H. Wheeler’s scrapbook documents media reactions to the Great Depression and New Deal, the presidential election of 1936, Alf Landon and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and national and international political currents.

One of twelve children of Obadiah and Agnes (Tuttle) Wheeler, Truman Wheeler was born in Southbury, Conn., on Nov. 26, 1741. After completing his education, reportedly at Yale, Wheeler moved north to Great Barrington, Mass., in the spring of 1764. Acquiring property about a mile south of the center of town, he soon established himself as a general merchant trading in silk, fabrics, and a variety of domestic goods.

The Wheeler account book represents the initial years of a thriving, late colonial mercantile business in far western Massachusetts. Beginning in June 1764, not long after Wheeler set up shop in Great Barrington, the account book includes meticulous records of sales of domestic goods ranging from cloth (linen, silks, and osnabrig) to buttons, ribbons, and pins, snuff boxes, a “small bible,” “jews harps,” and tobacco. Among the prominent names that appear as clients are members of the Burghardt and Sedgwick families.

Truman Wheeler, Jr., of Great Barrington, Mass., is considerably more obscure than his father, a prominent merchant, but in the two decades after the War of 1812, he made his living raising and selling rye, oats, and corn, tending sheep, and operating a substantial cider mill.

Wheeler Jr.’s account book records an array of fairly typical transactions in a non-cash economy, in which goods (grain, cider, barrels, food) or services (rental of the cider mill, lodging, labor) of one sort were exchanged for another. The frequency and scale of his cidering operation, and his rental of his cider mill when not used, is a distinguishing feature of his account book, which includes accounts with members of the Burghardt, Ives, Tucker, Warner, Wheeler, Willcox, and other families, as well as with Jack Negro, to whom Wheeler sold grain, pork, and brandy in exchange for assistance in haying.

A physical education teacher from Rome, New York, Elizabeth W. Whitaker became an avid recorder of gravestone inscriptions in the 1940s. She died in 1992 at the age of 93.

The core of the Whitaker collection consists of 25 receipts and accounts relating to the early marble industry in western Massachusetts. The key figures in this series are Rufus Willson and his father-in-law, John Burghardt, who quarried stone near West Stockbridge, Mass., conveying it to Hudson, N.Y. The collection also includes a selection of photographs and postcards of gravestones, mostly in New England and New York; two folders of typed transcriptions and newspaper clippings of epitaphs from the same region, ranging in date from the early colonial period to the mid-19th century; and a price list of Barre granite from Wetmore and Morse Granite Co., 1934.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

A not-for-profit media company based in Burlington, Vermont, White Light Communications produced dozens of videos during the late 1980s and early 1990s reflecting the voices and experiences of psychiatric survivors. With initial funding from the National Institute of Mental Health, Executive Director Paul Engels and his colleagues, all psychiatric survivors themselves, built a fully-equipped television production studio and conducted nearly one hundred interviews with ex-patients and leaders in the antipsychiatry movement. Although most of the interviews were conducted in Burlington, they also produced documentaries, and covered national events such as the final two Alternatives conferences and “Self Help Live,” a broadcast that focused on highlighting consumer/survivor leaders.

The hundreds of video interviews and other productions that comprise the White Light Communications collection were produced by, for, and about psychiatric survivors. Paul Engels interviewed nearly a hundred ex-patients including important leaders in the movement such as Judi Chamberlin, Sally Zinman, Howie the Harp, and George Ebert, and several episodes focused on the mental health system and activism in Vermont. The subjects of the interviews range widely from homelessness to involuntary treatment, peer support, suicide, surviving the mental health system, and the history of the psychiatric survivors movement.

A cooper based in South Hadley, Massachusetts, during the first half of the nineteenth century, Cyrus White made tubs and barrels of all varieties: soap tubs, leach tubs, oil barrels and casks, cheese presses, butter churns, and buckets.

Cyrus White’s daybook is a closely focused record of the range of work of one cooper in a country town in Massachusetts. White’s work ranged from repairing wheelbarrows and making washing machines to making all varieties of a cooper’s oeuvre.

A convinced Friend who became an advocate for peace, Willis H. White was a member of the East Greenwich Monthly Meeting. A secretary in the Providence-based real estate firm William H. White & Sons, White was active in several organizations promoting peace and spiritual renewal within the Society of Friends in the years after the First World War.

The bulk of Willis H. White’s papers are concentrated on his activities on behalf of peace, social justice, and the Society of Friends in the period 1919-1922. The collection includes materials documenting White’s work with the American Friends Service Committee and on invigorating the Society through the London Conference of All Friends and the evangelical Forward Movement of Friends, and there is a relatively small, but interesting series of letters from the labor and peace activist, A. J. Muste.

Frederic Allen Whiting at his typewriter

Frederic Allen Whiting Jr., the “Poet Laureate of Perkins Cove”, was born on January 10, 1906 in Boston Massachusetts to Olive Elizabeth Cook, a singer, and Frederic Allen Whiting Sr., a philanthropist and museum director and president of the American Federation of Arts. They moved to Cleveland in 1912 where Frederic Sr. became the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art. Having a father as the director of a cultural heritage institution, exposed young Frederic to the intellectual class. He met poets, scholars, and others from the world of arts and letters including Sir Lawrence Binyon, Langdon Warner, Carl Purington Rollins, and Thomas Whitney Surette. He attended the private Hawken School in Cleveland and Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, which he referred to later as “redolent of witchcraft and Indian massacres, and compliance with chamber of commerce goals and attitudes”. He went to Harvard for two years before becoming a freelance writer.

Adopting the pen name Allen Whiting, his first foray into writing began when he wrote commentary and criticism for the Magazine of Art, the organ of the American Federation of the Arts, where he was also editor from 1931-1942. Some of his pieces for the magazine were republished in the New York Herald Tribune and The Washington Post. Under his tenure, the circulation rose and he became familiar with all aspects of magazine production and made contacts with members and chapters of the American Federation of Arts, which consisted of artists, writers, teachers, museum officials, art dealers, and officials working with U.S. government cultural projects. On one occasion in 1940, Whiting took charge of the Federation’s annual convention, which met in San Francisco. He left the magazine in May 1942 to participate in the war effort.

Whiting was appointed Chief of the Office of War Information’s Overseas Exhibit Section. Charged with developing programming and staff, Whiting aimed to project positive visual images of the United States to Europeans. He was responsible for planning and carrying through creative programming, administrative duties, and liaison work with other civilian agencies, Army & Navy administrators, business leaders, and the press. Following the end of the war, he was brought to Washington by Elmer Davis to develop an exhibit aimed at explaining to liberated Europe the demand on resources of the continuing war in the Pacific. The project was abandoned following the surrender of Japan in August of 1945.

Following the war, Whiting became a freelance writer and photo editor, wrote two novels, short stories, and non-fiction pieces on a variety of subjects, including politics, the arts, and food. He designed and produced a brochure for a New England children’s camp and was a contracted photo research and editor for the State Department.

In 1951 he was recruited to work as a civilian information specialist with the Department of the Army’s Reorientation Division for occupied areas, which was responsible for supplying materials used to re-educate the people of Japan and the Ryukyu Islands. Out of an office in New York, he supplied the U.S. Information Centers in Japan with musical recordings and other media. The job ended following the end of the U.S. occupation in December, when he resumed freelance writing and editing. He moved his parents from Florida to Ogunquit, Maine in 1952, where he became the Associate Director of the Museum of Art of Ogunquit where he assembled a Winslow Homer exhibit but was later “politely fired” by Henry Strater.

Throughout the 1950s Whiting’s wife Rose suffered from several strokes and eventually died in 1960. Whiting was also caring for his aging parents, which caused much stress and led to excessive drinking where his “control over beverage alcohol had left me behind”. His mother died in 1955. During this time he found solace in the Roman Catholic Church and was committed to the Augusta State Hospital in 1957. Whiting’s battles with alcoholism and simultaneous search for God was explored in his unpublished 1965 autobiographical novel, Minutes of the Days.

The collection contains evidence of an attempt to start an organization called The Society of Servants of Rose Hill, whose aim was to “bring to bear in a practical manner the venerable and curative offices of prayer and work upon those in particular need of them”. The goal was to create cooperatively governed outpatient retreat centers in bucolic settings for people recently released from psychiatric institutions. The mission statement stated that no one would be turned away for financial or religious reasons. There is no evidence that the organization ever came to fruition.

Whiting’s career as a published poet began in the 4th grade. He was eventually published in several magazines including Spirit: A Magazine of Poetry, The American Poetry Magazine, The Harvard Advocate, Voices, and The Cecelian. He spent much of his creative life in Ogunquit, Maine reading his work at informal gatherings of “mostly young people of creative bent, gathered in the vicinity of Perkins Cove”. In 1952 he completed his first novel, The Gift of Merlon Crag.

The collection consists of copies, drafts, published and unpublished copies of Whiting’s poetry written throughout his lifetime. The manuscript of his unpublished autobiographical novel, Minutes of the Days is also contained herein. Some biographical information, written by Whiting while planning to release Minutes of the Days, is in the collection as well.

Shortly after graduating from college in 1920, Martha Richardson married Philip F. Whitmore, a market gardener from Sunderland, Mass., and 1915 graduate of Massachusetts Agricultural College. As a housewife and mother of three, Martha supported Philip, who became a Trustee of his alma mater and a representative in the State House (1950-1962). Philip Whitmore died in 1962, with Martha following nineteenth years later.

This small collection includes six scattered diaries of Martha Whitmore, kept somewhat irregularly during the years 1937, 1947, 1950, 1953, 1957, and 1962. Largely personal in nature, they are centered on home and family life, husband and children, and Martha’s love of nature, but they include occasional references to Philip Whitmore’s political activities and the University of Massachusetts.