Collecting area: New England

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.

Diane Bonder made experimental film and videos, using Super 8 and 16mm. Her poetic semi-narrative and autobiographical films explore themes of identity, landscape, memory and loss. Growing up in Northampton, Massachusetts, she graduated with her BA from UMass Amherst and studied photography at the Photographic Resource Center in Boston. She received her MFA from Rutgers University in 1993. In 1996, Bonder moved to Brooklyn, making it her home. Bonder was an artist in residence at UCross (Wyoming) and Squeaky Wheel (Buffalo, N.Y.) and received grants from NYFA and NYSCA. She maintained a longstanding relationship with Millennium Film Workshop, where she taught herself the optical printing techniques, which became part of her signature visual style. Bonder’s award-winning films have been screened at the Whitney Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Anthology Film Archives, NY, SF Cinematheque, Mix NYC and at many international film festivals, universities and curated screenings. Her work continues to be screened around the world. Retrospective screenings of her work have been held at MOMA, Hallwalls (Buffalo, N.Y.) and Millennium Film Workshop (New York).

The Diana Bonder Papers provides insight into her creative process as a filmmaker and photographer. The collection features film reels, U-Matic, Hi8, VHS, DVDs, and audio, which include Closer to Heaven, You Are Not From Here, The Physics of Love, Dear Mom, Tongue in Chic, Parole, Dangerous When Wet; film notebooks; slides, negatives, contacts sheets, which include portraits, landscapes, family photographs, Rutgers (installation, film, other project studies/prep), “Blood and Veins,” and others; photographic prints; and two large lightboxes and several small lightboxes.

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.

Born on February 12, 1936, to John and Jenny Bos of Tonawanda, New York, John Henry Bos graduated from Carnegie Tech with a B.A. in drama. His career in the arts began with a job in technical support in summer theaters and included work at major theaters, such as the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, and Deputy Director of the performing arts division for the New York State Council on the Arts. Bos served as Director of Performance Programs for National Public Radio during the 1980s where he earned a Peabody Award. Following his time at NPR, he hosted Arts America, a weekly cultural television program produced by the United States Information Agency. In the 1990s, Bos relocated to Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts, where he provided arts consulting and was involved in the revival of Memorial Hall, one of the many locations in which he hosted musical performances as a part of Rural Renaissance. It was during this time that Bos began writing, first as a member of the writing group, Spirit of the Written Word, at the CancerConnection during his first bout with cancer, and later as a bi-weekly columnist for the Greenfield Recorder. In his column, “Connecting the Dots,” Bos advocated for climate change and political life. He died of December 11, 2024, at the age of 88.

The John Bos Collection consists of an array of materials related to his career in the arts including theater programs, photographs, documents from the Theatre of the Living Arts in Philadelphia, as well as copies of his articles printed in the Greenfield Recorder and other publications.

The Boston and Albany Railroad was formed between 1867 and 1870 from the merger of three existing lines, the Boston and Worcester (chartered 1831), the Western (1833), and the Castleton and West Stockbridge (1834). The corporation was a primary east-west transit through the Commonwealth, with branches connecting towns including Athol, Ware, North Adams, and Hudson, N.Y.

The nineteen atlases comprising this collection include detailed plans documenting the location and ownership of rights of way, land-takings, and other land transfers to or from the railroad company. Dating from the early years of operation for the corporation to just after the turn of the century, the atlases include maps of predecessor lines (Boston and Worcester Railroad Corporation and Western Rail-Road), as well as the Grand Junction Railway Company (Charlestown, Somerville, Everett, and Chelsea), the Ware River Railroad, and the Chester and Becket Railroad.

Chartered in June 1835, the Boston and Maine Railroad was the dominant railroad of northern New England for nearly one hundred years. This collection consists of records from the Engineering Department of the Fitchburg Division relating to the maintenance of bridges in Massachusetts, including correspondence, accident reports, financial records and progress reports on work recommended by bridge inspectors.