Collecting area: Mass Agricultural College (1863-1931)

Marshall O. Lanphear spent forty-five years at Massachusetts Agricultural College, earning his B.A in 1918 and a Master’s in 1926, after which he taught agronomy and served as college registrar. After service as an infantryman at the end of the first World War, Lanphear worked briefly as an instructor at the Mount Hermon School before returning to MAC for graduate study. Known to his colleagues as “Whitey,” he taught courses on farm management, dairying, and pomology and on his retirement, Lanphear was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters. He died on April 24, 1993 at the age of 98.

The Marshall O. Lanphear Papers include a number of his published articles, correspondence regarding his honorary degree, speeches, lecture notes and personal items including illustrated Christmas cards from 1915, his 1917 driver’s license, and correspondence related to his retirement. There is also a folder of business records from the college farm.

A one time baseball player, Edward M. Lewis was hired as a Professor of Language and Literature at the Massachusetts Agricultural College, serving as the College’s President from 1924 to 1927.

Includes personal and official correspondence primarily while Dean and President of Massachusetts Agricultural College, particularly with President Kenyon Leech Butterfield (1868-1935); administrative memoranda; student records; other records generated while Dean and President of MAC on such subjects as relations of the college with state officials, curriculum, purpose of the college, desirability of compulsory chapel, establishment of Jewish fraternities, and women’s education; also, transcripts of addresses, newspaper clippings, and biographical material. The collection includes nothing relating to Lewis’s baseball or teaching careers.

The career of the agricultural chemist Joseph Bridego Lindsey was tied closely to his alma mater, the Massachusetts Agricultural College. A brilliant student, Lindsey earned his bachelor’s degree in 1883 after only three years of study and he launched his professional life at the College, working with his mentor Charles A. Goessmann at MAC and then for the L.B. Darling Fertilizer Company in Pawtucket, Mass. After enrolling at the prestigious Gottingen University and earning his degree in 1891 after only two years, Lindsey returned to Amherst to work at the College’s Experimental Station, where he helped initiate an extension program. Noted for promoting legislation in the state to support research and purity in animal feed, Lindsey rose to become head of the MAC Chemistry Department from 1911 until 1928 and oversaw the creation of the Goessmann Chemistry Laboratory in 1921. He retired from the College in 1932 and died in Amherst on October 27, 1939.

The Lindsey collection includes published articles and pamphlets as well as an analysis of the water in the campus pond from 1901, where Lindsey demonstrated that the water was unsafe for human consumption. There is also correspondence from Lindsey’s son about a memorial plaque and portrait of Lindsey, along with several photographs of the former chemist.

Susie D. Livers arrived at Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1903 as a member of one of the college’s first co-ed classes. After graduating in 1907, Livers worked at Ginn & Company Publishers in Boston and then as a Detail Officer at the State School for Girls in Lancaster, Massachusetts.

Included in the scrapbook are handwritten personal correspondence in the form of letters, postcards, holiday cards, and telegrams; unidentified photographs; MAC report cards dated 1904 and 1907; class papers and a class notebook; and programs and tickets for sporting events, weddings, and campus socials. In the back of the scrapbook are 35 herbarium samples which include dried plants with notations of plant names as well as dates and locations indicating where the plants were found.

Enjoying one of the longest tenures of any administrator in the history of the University of Massachusetts, William Lawson Machmer served under five presidents across 42 years, helping to guide the university through an economic depression, two world wars, and three name changes. During his years as Dean, Machmer witnessed the growth of the university from fewer than 500 students to almost 3,800, and helped guide its transformation from a small agricultural college into Massachusetts State College (1931) and finally into the University of Massachusetts (1947).
Machmer’s papers chronicle the fitful development of the University of Massachusetts from the days of Kenyon Butterfield’s innovations of the 1920s through the time of the GI Bill. The collection is particularly strong in documenting the academic experience of students and the changes affecting the various departments and programs at the University, with particular depth for the period during and after the Second World War.

View selected records on women's affairs at UMass, 1924-1951

A specialist in agricultural marketing, Robert J. McFall arrived at the Massachusetts Agricultural College in January 1920 to take up work with the Extension Service. A graduate of Geneva College and Phd from Columbia University (1915), McFall had worked with the Canadian Bureau of Statistics for two years before his arrival in Amherst.

The McFall collection includes a suite of published and unpublished works in agricultural economics, including an incomplete run of Economic Reports from MAC on business conditions (1921-1925), and papers on agricultural cooperation in Massachusetts, municipal abattoirs, business regulation in Canada, agriculture and population increase, and the New England dairy market. Of particular note is a monograph-length work co-authored by McFall and Alexander Cance, entitled “The Massachusetts Agricultural College in its Relations to the Food Supply Program of the Commonwealth.”

A pioneer in scientific agriculture, Manly Miles was born in Homer, N.Y., in 1826. A naturalist by inclination with a strong practical streak, Miles took a degree in medicine at Rush Medical College (1850) and practiced as a physician for eight years. His interests in the natural sciences, however, soon left him to abandon medicine, and after accepting a position with the State Geological Survey in Michigan from 1858-1861, he turned to academia. An early member of the faculty at Michigan State College, and later Illinois State College, he was recruited to the agricultural faculty at Massachusetts Agricultural College by President Paul Chadbourne in 1882. Four years later, however, following Chadbourne’s untimely death, Miles returned to Lansing, Mich., where he remained until his death in 1898. During his career, he was noted for his interests in organic evolution and plant and animal breeding.

The Miles collection contains 8 notebooks containing notes on reading. In addition to a general notebook on scientific matters, the remaining seven are organized by subject: Breeds of animals, Farm buildings, Farm economy, Feeding and animals, Implements, Manures, and Stock breeding.

Long-time residents of Hadley, Massachusetts, the Nash and Scott families were united in 1881 when John Nash, a farmer, married Lizzie Scott. Of their seven children, Herman B. Nash, graduated from the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1917, and immediately enlisted in the army, serving in France at the close of World War I. His youngest sister, Helen, kept the family connected during these years by writing and distributing a family newsletter, the Plainville News.

The Nash-Scott Family Papers contain a number of photographs, including an album capturing a trip to the west coast in 1915 and a canoe trip to Labrador in 1920. Herman B. Nash’s scrapbook documents not only his time as a student at M.A.C., but also his service in France, featuring candid photographs taken by Nash during and after the war as well as identification cards, company rosters, and a German propaganda leaflet picked up near the front. Pamphlets, genealogical notes and postcards complete the collection.

A prominent member of the Massachusetts Agricultural College Class of 1876, George A. Parker (1853-1926) began a career in landscape gardening and the development of parks shortly after graduation. Shortly after the turn of the century, he was appointed Superintendent of Parks in Hartford, Conn., helping to develop Colt Park and a number of smaller properties that turned the city into one of the models for New England. He resigned from his post in January 1926 and died later that year from heart disease.

The Parker Album is a more extensive version of the standard class album for 1876, featuring not only albumen portraits mounted on thick stock of the faculty and students, but almost fifty views of campus. Among these are uncommon images of the major academic buildings, the chapel, and hash house, but also interior and exterior shots of buildings on campus, such as the Botanic Museum and the Durfee greenhouses, and images of the students in military drill. All photographs were taken by John L. Lovell of Amherst.

For many years, Charles H. Patterson served as head of the Department of Language and Literature at Massachusetts Agricultural College. Born in Smithsonville, Ont., in 1863, Patterson received both a BA (1887) and MA (1893) from Tufts University before launching his teaching career. He joined the faculty at MAC as an assistant professor of English, in 1916, after 13 years at West Virginia University. A former professional actor, he taught courses in modern literature, with a particular interest in drama, and served as department chair for nearly a decade before his sudden death in 1933.

The Patterson Papers contain a small selection of correspondence and notes on English composition and literature as taught at Massachusetts Agricultural College. Most noteworthy, perhaps, is a draft of Patterson’s unpublished book, The Amazing Boucicault.