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The new Massachusetts Agricultural College welcomed its first contingent of 34 students to campus on October 1, 1867, resulting in the first graduating class of 28 — the Pioneer Class of 1871. The student body waxed and waned in ensuing years as the college slowly began to diversify its curriculum and the students population itself, admitting international students as early as 1870, followed by graduate students (first degree awarded 1896), African Americans (class of 1901), and women (class of 1905). Enrollment at the university first topped 1,000 in 1945 rising to 6,000 by 1960. Following a tumultuous period of great expansion, UMass had over 23,000 students in 1970.

Organized by class year, this series includes a diverse body of material generated by undergraduate students at Massachusetts Agricultural College, Mass. State College, and UMass Amherst from its beginning to the present day. Although the content varies widely from class to class and by period of time, typical years includes basic data on the graduating class, publications by alums, reunion information, class notes, photographs, or small collections of letters written while in school. In a few cases, the quantity representing an individual almuna or alumnus has led SCUA to treat the materials as a separate collection with its own finding aid.

Founded in 1067, the Benedictine convent of San Pier Maggiore was an ecclesiastical center of medieval Florence, and socially one the city’s most prestigious religious houses for women. A Gothic church was completed at the convent in 1352, featuring an elaborate multi-paneled altarpiece by Jacopo di Cione. The convent remained active until its razing in 1784.

A utilitarian, but ritually significant work, this manuscript contains the text and music used in celebrating the consecration of nuns at the Benedictine convent of San Pier Maggiore. The acanthus border on the first folio suggests a mid-fourteenth century date of origin, though likely prior to the commissioning of Cione’s Coronation of the Virgin altarpiece.

Quaker worship in Rochester, New Hampshire, began in 1742 under the care of Dover Monthly Meeting, becoming the Pine Grove Worship Group by 1846. After the meetinghouse was moved to the Gonic neighborhood of Rochester in about 1862, the name of the meeting was changed to Gonic. Gonic became a preparative meeting in 1950 and was finally set off from Dover as a monthly meeting in 1981.

The scant records of Gonic Friends Meeting consist solely of newsletters: one run from Gonic in the late 1980s and another from the West Epping Preparative Meeting from 1982-1996.

Established in 1708, the Nantucket Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends has had a distinctive history marked by the separations that troubled Quakerism in the nineteenth century. In 1830, Nantucket became one of the few monthly meetings in New England to divide along Hicksite and Orthodox lines, and as that separation was healing in 1845, the Wilburite and Gurneyite factions separated. Uniquely, the Wilburites split further in 1863, when the “Primitive” or “Otisite” Friends departed. Quaker worship was effectively absent on Nantucket from 1894 to about 1939.

This fraction of the records of the Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends documents the history of the meeting up to and through the Wilburite-Gurneyite schism. With the exception of some loose materials from the Women’s Meeting from 1776-1781, the collection contains little from the first several decades of the meeting (these are housed at the Nantucket Historical Association), but there is rich content on the state of the meeting and the conflict that followed the separation of 1845, along with minutes from the decade leading up the Wilburite-Gurneyite reunion in 1944.

In the complex history of Quakerism on Nantucket, the Wilburite Nantucket Monthly Meeting of Friends stands out. Separating from the numerically smaller Gurneyites in 1845, the “Otisite” monthly on Nantucket separated again in 1863, drawing away from the Wilburite Sandwich Quarterly Meeting, drawing with them a number of sympathetic Friends on the mainland, particularly in Warwick, R.I. Although worship on the island effectively ended in 1894, the mainland Otisites maintained their separation until 1911. Quaker worship on Nantucket was revived in 1939 and with the reunion of Wilburites and Gurneyites in 1944, the monthly meeting decided to remain independent, joining New England Yearly Meeting only in 1956.

This small, but important collection is centered on the latter years of the Wilburite meeting on Nantucket, during the period of reunification with Gurneyites. The bulk of records for the Nantucket Monthly Meeting (Wilburite) are housed at the Nantucket Historical Association.

Having already separated between Hicksite and Orthodox factions in 1830, Friends on Nantucket separated again in 1845 between Gurneyites and Wilburites. While Gurneyites were the “larger body” in nearly every other meeting in the region, on Nantucket they were the minority. Drawing some of their members from the Hicksites, who were disbanding at the time, the Gurneyite monthly was under the care of Sandwich Quarterly Meeting. Never great number, the meeting was laid down in 1867, although a worship group under care of New Bedford Monthly Meeting continued to 1897.

This relatively small collection offers relatively complete documentation for a short-lived Gurneyite Friends meeting, including nearly complete runs of minutes (including rough minutes) for both the men’s and women’s meetings and records of meeting finances.

Although Quakers first worshipped in Boston in 1661, they were late in the game in organizing a formal meeting. A preparative meeting operated in the city for just over a hundred years (1707-1808) under the auspices of the Salem Monthly Meeting, and a second attempt at building a community began in 1870 with authorization of an indulged meeting in Roxbury. Set off formally as the Boston Monthly Meeting Friend in 1883, this meeting continued until 1944, when it merged with an independent meeting in neighboring Cambridge to create the current Friends Meeting at Cambridge.

The records in this collection offer thorough documentation of the Boston Monthly Meeting of Friends from its establishment as an indulged meeting in 1870 through to its merger in 1944 and change of name to the Friends Meeting at Cambridge. In addition to the meeting minutes, the collection includes substantial records of the monthly’s Friends Guild and Women’s Foreign Missionary Society.

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.

The Amesbury Monthly Meeting of the Society of Friends, tied historically to the Hampton and Seabrook Monthly Meetings, has met on the coast of Massachusetts and New Hampshire for over three hundred years.

The records of Amesbury (Hampton and Seabrook) Monthly Meeting document over three centuries of Quaker practice in New England coastal communities. The meeting minutes for both men’s and women’s meetings are relatively complete for the period 1701 to the late 1880s, and after nearly a century-long hiatus, pick up again in the mid-1980s.

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.