Collecting area: Vermont

Born in Wales in 1833, Richard E. Lloyd found great financial success after migrating to Vermont in the 1850s. Beginning as the proprietor of a dry goods business in Fair Haven, Vermont, he diversified and expanded his holdings, eventually becoming a senior partner in the slate manufacturing firm Lloyd, Owens, and Co.

The daybooks from Richard Lloyd’s dry goods firm include numbered accounts of customers (many with Welsh surnames), lists of items purchased, price per measure, forms of payment (cash, goods, services, credit, making clothes), and the goods sold. Lloyd dealt in a typical range of goods found in a rural general store, including fabrics, ready-made clothes, eggs and dairy products, fruits and nuts, garden seeds, cutlery and tinware, and jewelry.

Middlebury, Vermont, was home to a Quaker worship group affiliated with Burlington Monthly Meeting from 1956 to 1962, and again beginning in 1970. This latter group led to formation of a preparative meeting in 1971 and to setting off as a monthly meeting in 1976 under the care of Northwest Quarter. Middlebury Friends Meeting has overseen the preparative meeting in South Starksboro Monthly (1982-1996) and a worship group in Rochester.

The meticulously maintained records of Middlebury Friends Meeting include a comprehensive set of minutes and extensive newsletters for the meeting beginning at the time of its establishment.

Homeopathic physician from Arlington, Vermont. Daybook contains patients’ names, including many women, identification of some cases (such as vaccination, extraction of teeth, treatment of swellings, fractures, and burns, and the delivery of babies), methods of treatment (such as purges, bleeding, cupping, and the use of blistering ointments), prices for his services, and method and form of payment (including goods such as fruits, vegetables, meats, clothes, and services such as butchering and timbering). Also contains personal entries and notation of goods he sold such as poultry, leathers, and fabrics.

Born in a “howling blizzard” in February 1946, Raymond Mungo became one of the most evocative writers of the 1960s counterculture. Through more than fifteen books and hundreds of articles, Mungo has brought a wry sense of humor and radical sensibility to explorations of the minds and experiences of the generation that came of age against a backdrop of the struggles for civil rights and economic justice, of student revolts, Black Power, resistance to war, and experimentation in communal living.

Consisting of the original typescripts and manuscripts of ten of Raymond Mungo’s books, along with corrected and uncorrected galleys and a small number of letters from publishers. Among the other materials in the collection are thirteen photographs of Mungo taken by Clif Garboden and Peter Simon during and immediately after his undergraduate years at Boston University; a DVD containing motion pictures of life at Packer Corners in 1969 and 1977; and an irate letter from a writer regarding the status of poems he had submitted to Liberation News Service.

In 1661, less than a decade after the first Friends arrived in British North America, the precursor to the New England Yearly Meeting was organized as the Rhode Island Yearly Meeting. As one of approximately two dozen yearly meetings in the United States, the NEYM currently comprises eight quarterly meetings and approximately 85 monthlies, which are the basic unit of organization for the Society. Like many Yearly meetings, the NEYM has been diverse in spiritual practice, reflected in a history of separations and reunions. Most famously, Orthodox Friends in New England divided in the 1840s into the increasingly evangelically-oriented Gurneyites, who went by the name Yearly Meeting of Friends for New England (joining Friends United Meeting in 1902), and the Wilburites, sometimes called Conservative Friends. In 1945, the disparate branches formally reunited.

Consolidated beginning in the 1960s, the NEYM collection contains the official records of the New England Yearly Meeting from its founding in the seventeenth century to the present, along with records of most of its constituent Quarterly, Monthly, and Preparative Meetings and records of Quaker schools and trusts. As varied as the Quaker practice they document, these records include minutes of meetings for business; committee records; newsletters, financial records; some personal papers; printed books and serials; and an assortment of photographs, audiovisual materials, microfilm, and electronic records. Of particular note are the vital statistics recorded by the Monthly Meetings, including general information on births, deaths, marriages, membership, and obituaries, and specifically-Quaker information on removals (formal letters written as members moved from one meeting to another), denials, testimonies (beliefs and convictions), and sufferings (penalties suffered by Quakers for following testimonies). The Archives Committee of the NEYM is a partner in records management and on-going documentation of the Meeting and its constituent bodies. The collection also includes several thousand Quaker books and pamphlets, including the libraries of Moses and Obadiah Brown and several individual monthly meetings. The records of most monthly meetings in Maine are held at the Maine Historical Society, while important bodies of records are held at the Newport Historical Society (some Nantucket and Rhode Island Meetings) or at individual Monthly Meetings.

An overview of the NEYM collections and a comprehensive inventory and finding aid prepared by Richard Stattler in 1997 at the Rhode Island Historical Society are available online. Stattler’s inventory includes materials in the NEYM Collection at UMass, as well as NEYM materials held at other institutions. SCUA’s updated inventory will follow in 2017.

Founded in 1975 in Lebanon, NH, by Beth Dingman, Claudia McKay (Lamperti), Katie Cahill, Nina Swaim, and Shelby Grantham, New Victoria Printers became one of two all-female print shops in New England at the time. Believing strongly that “the power of the press belongs to those who own it,” they began to solicit work from non-profit and politically-oriented groups. Like its namesake Victoria Press, an 1860s women run print shop in London owned by Emily Faithful, an early advocate of women’s rights, New Victoria was also committed to feminist principles. The shop offered work and training in printing, machine work, and other traditionally male dominated fields; initially focused on printing materials from the women’s movement; and was organized as a collectively owned and democratically run organization.
Additionally, the shop functioned as a de facto women’s center and lesbian hub for Lebanon and the surrounding area, often overlapping with the lesbian social club Amelia Earhart’s Underground Flying Society, (a.k.a. the Amelia’s). The print shop was a place of education, community, creativity, and activism, and soon publishing opportunities, as the group founded New Victoria Publishers in 1976 to publish works from their community. The print shop closed in 1985, with Dingman and McKay taking over the running of the non-profit publishing company out of their home in Norwich, VT, with an emphasis on lesbian fiction in addition to other women-focused works. An early bestseller, Stoner McTavish by Sarah Dreher, put them on the map, with the company publishing over a hundred books by and about lesbians, winning three Lambda Literary Awards and several other honors.
The New Victoria Publishers Records consist of photographs, newsletters, and cards put out by the collective, materials printed by the press, marketing and promotional materials, author correspondence, graphics and cover art, book reviews, financial and legal records, histories of the organization, news clippings, and an almost full run of the books published by the company. The collection is particularly rich in documenting the work and production of a women owned business within the feminist press movement as well as the lesbian publishing industry.

Howard Prussack at High Meadows Farm in Putney, VT

A farmer for over thirty years along the Connecticut River in Vermont, John Nopper came to photography later in life. Drawn to the challenge of capturing individuals and environments in his and surrounding communities, Nopper focuses on portraits and landscapes, and specializes in 11”x17” or larger printing, emphasizing the depth of tone in his black and white photography. His photograph projects often focus on the instruments and individuals of a specific industry or place, and frequently document subjects and vocations he feels warrant increased attention, either due to their methods, like his work documenting traditional maple sugaring and printing practices, or due to current events, such as a more recent project as an embedded photographer within a Vermont city police department.

The John Nopper Photograph Collection currently consists of twenty-five, 11”x17”, black and white prints from the exhibit “Plowing Old Ground: Vermont’s Organic Pioneers,” along with the descriptions from the project. In a collaborative effort with interviewer and writer Susan J. Harlow, Nopper photographed the subjects of Harlow’s interviews for an exhibit featuring interview summaries and quotations alongside photographs from six farms and their farmers, all pioneers in the history of organic farm production, marketing, and distribution in Vermont. The collection also includes digital photographs not printed, as well as digital versions of most of the prints.

The meeting was known as Barton-Glover Friends Meeting from its founding in 1985 through 2015. In 2016, the meeting changed its name to Northeast Kingdom Quaker Meeting. The group began in 1980 as a worship group under the care of Burlington Friends Meeting and met in private homes. In 1985, the group began meeting in the basement of the Barton Public Library and does not have a meeting house. In 1992, the worship group became a monthly meeting in the Northwest Quarter of the Society of Friends. The meeting is an unprogrammed meeting with attendance that has ranged over the years from 10-25. Members and attenders are primarily residents of Orleans County and seasonal residents of the area.

The collection consists of minutes for Meeting for Business of the Quaker meeting known as Northeast Kingdom Quakers, based in Orleans County, Vermont.

The Northeast Organic Farming Association began as the vision of a New York City plumbing supplies salesman and has grown into a large association supporting information-sharing, education, collaboration, and certification. Increasingly influential non-profit organization with chapters in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont, NOFA has “nearly 4,000 farmers, gardeners and consumers working to promote healthy food, organic farming practices and a cleaner environment.”

The NOFA collection includes records, publications, ephemera, photographs, and other materials from NOFA chapters in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont, along with material from the Interstate Council. The collection includes information on NOFA’s conferences and programs, educational work, lobbying, and their initiatives in organic certification and organic land care.

View issues of The Natural Farmer online.

The Northwest Quarterly Meeting of Friends consists of a collection of monthly meetings located in northwestern New England, specifically from Vermont and western New Hampshire. It was formed out of the Upper Connecticut (CT) Valley Monthly Meeting and was set off from the Connecticut Valley Quarterly Meeting in 1959. It currently includes monthly meetings from Bennington (VT), Burlington (VT), Hanover (NH), Plainfield (VT) and Putney (VT).

The collection primarily includes correspondence from the start of the QM in 1959 to 1982, and is organized by clerk, chronologically. It also includes a partial collection of minutes, mostly handwritten from 1959-1974, and a folder of Ministry and Counsel committee minutes from 1964 and from 1970. There are six folders of administrative records (mailings lists and position statements) and a folder of miscellaneous logistical information sent to the membership about preparations for various quarterly meetings. There are also 2 additional boxes with an almost complete set of issues of the newsletter “The Nor’wester” from 1959-2005.