Collections: mss

Boarding house on Folly Cove in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and boarding house at Echo Hill Cottage, perhaps also in Gloucester. Includes names of visitors, callers, boarders, and lodgers (some family friends and neighbors, others unknown guests) who hailed primarily from Massachusetts but also from states around the country. Also contains early accounts from 1804, guests at a Christmas party, lists of members of the Lanesville Universalist Church and Society who died or moved away, moral and religious verses entered by “Grand Ma”, and numerous preserved dried flowers and foliage, among other notations.

John Woodward was a farmer in Groton, Mass., during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Although little is known of his life, it appears that Woodward was born in nearby Tyngsboro on March 7, 1813, and that he married twice: first to Rebecca Sawtelle of Groton in 1823 and second to Mary Jane Nutting — almost 30 years his junior — in Dec. 1866. With Mary Jane, at least, he was highly reproductive, fathering his first son, a seventh child, at the age of 66. Woodward died in Groton on Apr. 20, 1895, and was buried in his family’s ancestral home of Dunstable.

John Woodward’s accounts document the financial transactions of fairly typical farmer in Groton over the period of three decades. Raising an array of produce, from cranberries and chestnuts, to squash, barley, apples, and turnips, Woodward also raised poultry and a variety of livestock. The ledger documents the day to day exchanges of food and labor that comprised the core of the local economy. Noteworthy among his customers are locally prominent families such as Blood and Swett and at least two Nuttings.

The intertwined history of the Society of Friends in Worcester and Uxbridge, Mass., began with the first meetings for worship in Uxbridge in 1767, under the care of Smithfield Monthly Meeting. Set off as a monthly meeting in 1783, Uxbridge reached its peak during the first half of the nineteenth century, but following years of decline, it changed its name and center to Worcester Monthly Meeting in 1907. A group from the pastoral meeting at Worcester broke off in 1952 to create the unprogrammed Pleasant Street Monthly Meeting, although the two meetings reunited in 1979. The Worcester-Pleasant Street Monthly simplified its name to the current Worcester Monthly Meeting before 2009.

The records of Worcester Monthly Meeting include a nearly complete set of minutes beginning in 1905, about the time it changed name from Uxbridge Monthly, and an extensive, though broken run of newsletters. The records of Uxbridge Monthly Meeting and Pleasant Street Monthly Meeting prior to the reunion with Worcester are described separately.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

In the early 1980s, Paul Connett, a chemist at St. Lawrence University, his wife Ellen, and other environmental activists in upstate New York formed Work on Waste USA to oppose the incineration of solid waste materials. Arguing that incineration was a major source of air pollution, pumping dioxin, mercury, cadmium, and lead into the atmosphere and leaving behind toxic ash and other residues, Work on Waste consulted nationally on issues surrounding incineration, coordinating with dozens of local organizations, and it became an ardent proponent of recycling as an alternative. From 1988-2000, WOW published a pro-recycling, anti-incineration newsletter, Waste Not.

The records of Work on Waste document the national struggle against the incineration of solid waste. With materials from dozens of groups opposing incineration in their communities, the collection provides insight into community activism and grassroots legal and media campaigns. The collection also includes materials relating to Work on Waste’s support for recycling and extensive data on the environmental impact of dioxin and other chemicals, medical waste, and ash landfills, and on the operation of incinerators.

The 2001 World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance was held in Durban, South Africa, under the auspices of the United Nations as an international forum to address a range of issues, from the legacy of colonialism and slavery to Zionism. In response to a draft document equating Zionism with racism, both the United States and Israel withdrew from the Conference, and although it is often considered a landmark in the antiracist struggle, political events following the September 11 terrorist attacks have blunted its impact.

This small collection consists of a selection of ephemera and approximately 20 collected by an American attendee at the World Conference.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the Hampshire County town of Worthington, Massachusetts, was a significant crossroads on the Boston-Albany Turnpike, belying its small size. The population in Worthington peaked at barely over 1,000 in 1810, and declined slowly thereafter, although it remained an active stopover on the road for many years.

This standard double column account book provides a concentrated record of financial and other transactions in the antebellum period, probably associated with a tavern in Worthington, Mass. Although the ledger’s keeper is unidentified, it records an assortment of odd jobs filing saws, smoking meat, lending horses, carting, pasturing cattle, and tending sheep, along with the sale of significant quantities of beer and cider and a regular stream of hard brandy and rum. There are records as well of providing meals and, in one instance, caring for prisoners and their keepers overnight (p. 21). Most of the clients who can be positively identified were residents of Worthington (e.g., Persis Knapp, Chauncy B. Rising, Nathan Searl, Shubal Parish, Elisha H. Brewster, Addison D. Perry, Merritt Hall, and Otis Boies), however others are noted as wayfarers, passing through from towns such as Whately or Hadley. Clients settled their accounts with a motley mixture of cash, goods, and labor.

Descendants of one of the founding families of Northampton, Mass., John Wright and his brother Samuel were farmers and freight haulers during the first half of the nineteenth century. Before the 1840s, the brothers hauled freight by wagon from Northampton as far away as Hartford and Boston, however the advent of lower-cost carriers over canal and rail, led them to restrict their operations to a local clientele.

The Wright collection includes nine bound volumes and four folders of loose material associated with the businesses of John Wright, his brother Samuel, and son Edwin. They document the growth of a freight hauling firm that supported a substantial trade stretching to Boston, as well as the eventual decline of that business.

A 1968 graduate in mathematics from MIT, Ferd Wulkan has been a fixture in activist circles for many years. A member of SDS in college and a rank-and-file clerical union leader at Boston University, Wulkan moved to Amherst in 1989. His passion has been the intersection of the labor movement with other progressive movements; he served for 15 years as a field representative with Locals 509 and 888 of SEIU, working with non-faculty professional personnel at UMass Amherst and Boston, and then as a representative and organizer for the Massachusetts Society of Professors from 2004 to 2016. In 2007, Wulkan became organizing director for the Public Higher Education Network of Massachusetts (PHENOM), a grassroots advocacy organization for affordable and accessible public higher education.

The Wulkan Collection consists of a fascinating array of material from Leftist and radical political movements during the late 1960s and early 1980s, with an emphasis on the Cambridge-Somerville area. In addition to a rich assemblage of formally published pamphlets and magazines, the collection includes a large number of fliers, handouts, informally published works, and underground newspapers on Socialist, Feminist, and anarchist topics and relating to the war in Vietnam, the labor movement, civil rights, and Black Power. The collection also contains three unprocessed boxes of material related to the clerical/technical union at Boston University. This union was affiliated with District 65, UAW, and District 65 had been part of the Distributive Workers of America, and affiliated with the United Auto Workers in the early 1980s. Related to this collection is a thesis by Leslie Lomasson, who worked at BU and completed her Master’s at UMass Amherst: “We Built the Union Ourselves: A Feminist Model of Unionism at Boston University” (1994).

Account book of Eunice P. Wyman of Concord, Massachusetts documenting financial transactions relating to her farm and homestead. She gained income not only from selling products (butter, soap, syrup for a sick man, pigs), but also through selling the services of her sons John and Franklin (picking apples, driving cows, digging potatoes, butchering, digging wells, shoveling gravel) and renting half her house to a man who paid, in part, by performing chores (putting rockers on an arm chair, white washing two rooms, making a flower box).

Wyman’s goods and her sons’ services were typically paid for in cash or by exchange of goods or services (cider and vinegar, wool, by driving her cattle home from Stoddard’s pasture, shoemaking, plowing the garden, by “himself and oxen to go into town to get 23 rails and 11 posts,” use of wagons, horses, carts, and oxen). Customers have been identified as being from Concord, Carlisle, Acton, and Westford. The account book includes records of grocer Porter Kimball of Sterling, Massachusetts (1814), and recipes.

Yankee Publishing was founded in 1935 by Robb Sagendorph, who saw an opportunity for a magazine devoted to depicting New England life and culture. With an initial subscription of 614, Yankee Magazine was launched in September of that year and despite the hardships of Depression and war, it has thrived, becoming a beloved institution. In 1939, Sagendorph purchased publishing rights for the Old Farmer’s Almanac, which had been published continuously since 1792, and quickly restored it to profitability. Still based in Dublin, N.H., Yankee remains an independent, family-owned enterprise, with responsibilities passing to his nephew Judson Hale, son-in-law Rob Trowbridge, and grandson Jamie Trowbridge. Although the company has made forays into other areas of publishing, Yankee Magazine and Old Farmer’s Almanac remain its core business.

The records of Yankee Publishing offer insight into the early years and growth of the corporation and its remarkable survival in age of media conglomeration. The collection includes two boxes of materials relating to the founder, Robb Sagendorph, and extensive correspondence, reports, memos, and other materials relating to Yankee Magazine and Old Farmer’s Almanac through 1999. In addition to nearly complete runs of both of the mainstay periodicals, the collection also includes a variety of materials accumulated by Yankee’s owners over the years, including several hundred glass plate negatives depicting New England and its characters.