Collections: mss

With a B.A. in literature from Antioch College and an M.A. in education from Columbia University, Katya Sabaroff Taylor has worked as a journalist and editor, health educator, women’s studies instructor, massage therapist, yoga teacher, and workshop facilitator. In 1980 she founded Creative Arts and Healing workshops, classes, and retreats to nurture the link between creativity and the healing process.

The collection features a wide range of Taylor’s work, reflecting her lifelong love of writing and teaching. Her poetry, essays, and fiction are included along with her memoirs and personal accounts, the collected writings of several classes of prison inmates enrolled in Taylor’s creative writing workshops, and the recollections of former members of the Liberation News Service.

The wheelwright Levi Ely Taylor was born in Longmeadow, Mass., on Nov. 17, 1795, the son of Nathaniel and Jerusha Taylor. Marrying a woman from Rocky Hill, Conn., Laura Peirce, he settled in Longmeadow and built a prosperous life for himself in his trade. His eldest son, Newton, followed him into the business.

Taylor’s daybook contains careful records of a wheelwright from Longmeadow, Mass., documenting his varied work in the repair of carriages. The transactions that appear in the volume range from making whiffletrees to shortening wheels, making and fitting out carriage seats, and painting and varnishing vehicles, with occasional forays into selling goods such as wheelbarrows and straw cutters.

A popular Spanish-language community radio program broadcast on the New England Public Radio station WFCR, Tertulia featured a wide range of music from the Caribbean region and South and Central America, news in both English and Spanish, and discussions of topics of importance to the Latino community. As of 2017, the show has enjoyed over thirty years on air.

The Tertulia collection consists of hundreds of cassette recordings of the radio show, mostly taken as air-checks and many of interviews with members of the Latino community in Western New England.

Four local unions located in New Bedford, Massachusetts, that joined in 1939 and became the first affiliates of the New Bedford Joint Board of the Textile Workers Union of America. Includes by-laws, minutes of board of directors and local meetings, correspondence, subject files, photographs, and scrapbooks relating to the administration of the New Bedford Joint Board, documenting its role in addressing grievances filed against individual companies, in facilitating arbitration, and hearing wage stabilization Board cases.

A graduate of Yale, failed schoolmaster, and politically-connected customs collector in eastern Maine during the antebellum period, Stephen Thacher raised a large family with grand intellectual ambitions. Thacher’s sons made the most of their collegiate educations in their careers in law and the ministry, his eldest daughter Mary married Thomas Wentworth Higginson, while a granddaughter Alice Thacher married the Harvard historian Edward Channing, son of William Ellery Channing and nephew of Margaret Fuller.

These relics of a prominent New England family contain nearly 150 letters, dozens of photographs and other visual materials, and a large assortment of books from three generations of Thachers and Channings. The letters are a rich resource for understanding the life of Stephen Thacher from the uncertainty of youth in Connecticut to political and financial success in the ports of eastern Maine. Assembled by Stephen’s son Peter, the collection includes a number of noteworthy items, including an excellent letter from Timothy Goodwin in July 1775, describing his experiences during the failed expedition on Quebec and the retreat to Crown Point, and a series of letters from Congressman Martin Kinsley on the major issues of the day, including the extension of slavery to the territories and formation of the state of Maine.

The Thayer family operated a small manufacturing complex on the Deerfield River in Charlemont, Massachusetts. Businesses included a sawmill, a foundry, a shop for the manufacture of axes and edged tools, and a tannery. Ledger documents their businesses and reflects the exchange economy of rural Massachusetts.

As Secretary for the Citizens Committee Against Fluoridation for Western Pennsylvania, Jean Thielman was one of the key litigants in the landmark 1978 case that halted fluordiation of the water supply in the borough of West View, near Pittsburgh. Having become involved in opposition to fluoridation of the water supply in the 1960s, Thielman was part of a network of activists that included Ellie Rudolph, Eugene Albright, and Martha Bevis.

The Thielman Papers consist of a small assemblage of correspondence and supporting materials pertaining to antifluoridation activism in western Pennsylvania during the mid-1970s.

Tom Gardner, 1966

Born in New Orleans in 1946, Tom Gardner began his involvement in social and political causes as a student at the University of Virginia (UVA) in 1964. He joined the burgeoning civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements and eventually dropped out of school to become a full time activist. During this time, he was the chairman of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC), an organization based in the south which opposed the Vietnam War, fought for civil rights for black Americans, and supported the rights of women and workers. He returned to UVA in 1969 and completed his bachelor’s degree in sociology in 1971.

Following UVA, Gardner worked as a staff member at the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) as an organizer. Concurrently, he joined the Southern Conference Education Fund (SCEF) and became a board member. SCEF was active in numerous causes in the south, dedicated in particular to civil rights and electoral reform.

Beginning in the 1970s, Gardner began work on prison issues, working with a number of politically and unfairly convicted prisoners, and advocating for an end to the death penalty. Gardner, and the groups he worked with, challenged the institutional racism of a southern justice system that had existed since the days of Jim Crow. The most prominent of these cases was that of Johnny ‘Imani’ Harris, who was originally sentenced to five life terms for 4 small robberies and an alleged rape in 1970 and eventually given the death penalty under Alabama’s capital offenses law due to an inadequate defense by his court appointed lawyers.

Concurrent to his work as an activist, Gardner has worked as a journalist and photographer, writing articles for a number of commercial publications as well as some independent work. While working for the Montgomery Advertiser, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, and others, he covered local, college, and political news. Gardner has also used journalism to bolster his activism, writing for left-wing publications such as Workers World and The Great Speckled Bird. He used his talents in photography by taking photos of protests and events he attended for use in articles by him and others.

Gardner returned to school several times after originally graduating from UVA in 1971. He received a masters degree in Journalism from the University of Georgia in 1982, a masters in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard in 1985, and later a Ph.D. in Communication from UMASS Amherst in 2005. Throughout his PhD program and since its completion, Gardner has been a professor of Communication at Westfield State University, using his experience from a life full of activism to continue educating a new generation of students and activists.

This Gardner collection illustrates much of Gardner’s activism and journalism work throughout his life. It contains correspondence, articles, press releases, meeting minutes, photographs, pamphlets, newsletters, publications, notes, and newspapers. The collection documents the full scope of Gardner’s life; from his time as a student activist at the University of Virginia to his more recent achievements as a professor at Westfield State University.

The collection also contains a large amount of material written by Gardner himself, as well as publications, newspapers, and articles that either relate to causes he was directly involved in or the political issues of the day.

Thomas Weston Fels is an artist, author, art historian, writer, and curator. Born in Baltimore, Maryland, 1946, Fels spent his teenage years at The Putney School, a private boarding school in Southern Vermont. Upon completion, Fels enrolled in Amherst College, and after graduating in 1967, moved to the Montague Farm commune. 

Fels lived on the farm from 1969 to 1973, and was an integral member of the larger communard community, extending from the Wendell Farm and Johnson Pasture, to Packer Corners and the Tree Frog Farm. While there, Fels associated with prolific writers, artists and photographers of 1960s counterculture, such as Harvey Wasserman, Ray Mungo, Peter Simon, and others. 

Sometime after leaving the commune, Fels returned to school, attending Williams College. He graduated in 1984, earning a Masters in the History of Art. Following the completion of his degree, Fels was awarded multiple prestigious fellowships. In 1986, he became a Chester Dale Fellow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while between 1998-1999, he was a Fletcher Jones Foundation Fellow of the Huntington Library, California. His career has seen him employed by numerous museums across North America, ranging from the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art in California, the Elizabeth de C. Wilson Museum in Vermont, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Quebec. 

 Fels has organized many exhibitions throughout his career, some internationally. In California, Fels’ exhibition Carleton Watkins: Western Landscape and the Classical Vision was presented at the J. Paul Getty Museum of Art; while his exhibition Fire and Ice: Treasures from the Photograph Collection of Frederic Church at Olana, was shown at both the Dahesh Museum in New York, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

In addition to his curatorial duties, Fels’ work as a researcher and writer has led him to publish a variety of catalogs and companion pieces to his exhibitions alongside various articles and books. In 1989, he published O Say Can You See: American Photographs 1839-1939, and in 1994, he edited a single issue of Farm Notes, in some ways a successor to the Montague Commune’s Green Mountain Post (formerly New Babylon Times). In 2008, Fels published the memoir Farm Friends, reflecting on his life, the counterculture era, and his time on the Montague Commune. In the same year, Fels helped found the ‘Famous Long Ago Archive’ at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; collecting the personal papers of several members of the communard community. These collections contain articles, manuscripts, photos, posters, oral histories, and more. He continued to reflect on the Montague Farm, publishing Buying the Farm in 2012, providing an in-depth history of the commune, connecting with communards decades later, while chronicling the farm from its beginning in 1968 through the following thirty-five years of its existence. 

Since 2013, Fels has been showcasing his unique cyanotypes throughout the American Northeast, and by 2015 his art would take him to Europe and the United Kingdom. In 2016, his large, life-sized renderings were subject to sale at one of the world’s most renowned auction houses, Christie’s London. Beyond his photography and historical work, Fels can be found giving lectures throughout New England, or at his home in Southern Vermont. 

The Thomas W. Fels Montague Farm Collection reflects the work of the many friends he made while living on the Montague Farm. Their works make up the bulk of the collection, containing articles, manuscripts, publications, photographs, posters, and audio recordings. Of particular interest is the 25th Anniversary reunion of the Montague Commune. The 10-day celebration is memorialized through photos, audio recordings, and a publication. 

An enthusiast for contract bridge, John Bidwell Thomes was at his playing peak when the new game was sweeping the nation in popularity. In 1931, Thomes and his fellow Portland aficionados organized what may be the first state-wide contract bridge conference in their native state of Maine, just three years after formation of the American Bridge League and prior to creation of the present-day New England Bridge Conference.

Thomes indicated that these five typewritten volumes were originally intended as a means of preserving a record of “some hands that were quite remarkable,” holding out hope that his project might develop into a book that might be called “Adventures at the bridge table.” Simultaneously a record of the games themselves and the strategy and tactics pursued, these volumes are equally a record of the early formation of a bridge conference in New England and its first tournaments. The league included both men’s and women’s teams.