Collections: mss

A Cape Cod Quaker, and lifelong member of the West Falmouth Friends Meeting, Cecilia Bowerman Fuglister was born in West Falmouth, Mass., in 1906. After receiving a BA in mathematics and biology at Earlham College in 1928, she went on to earn an MA in Library Science from Columbia (1932), where she remained as a librarian. Two years after marrying the oceanographer Frederck C. Fuglister in 1939, however, she returned to Cape Cod when he took a position at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. She helped to establish the document library at Woods Hole and served as its librarian until her retirement in 1977. She died in Falmouth on Jan. 14, 2005, at the age of 98.

The Fuglister collection consists of a miscellaneous assemblage of records, mostly from Sandwich Monthly Meeting from 1797 through the 1840s, with a few later items. The collection also included fifteen memoirs and memorials for Friends, nearly all from the mid-nineteenth century.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

Yasuko Fukumi graduated from Tsuda College in Tokyo in 1949 with a B.A. in English. From 1949 to 1952, she worked in the library of the Narimasu High and Junior High Schools, before becoming an Assistant Librarian at the American School in Japan. In 1962, Fukumi moved to the United States to pursue a graduate degree in library science at Kansas State Teachers College. She held two positions at other American libraries before joining the staff of the UMass Amherst Library as a cataloger and later as the East Asian Studies Librarian. Fukumi first discovered the Benjamin Smith Lyman Collection, housed then at the Forbes Library in Northampton, in 1979. From that time forward, she worked tirelessly to bring the collection to the attention of the faculty at UMass and to the scholarly world at large. In 1987, she mounted a campaign to raise the $200,000 necessary to purchase the collection from the Forbes Library and secure it a permanent home in the UMass Amherst Special Collection and University Archives.

Fukumi’s papers focus on her extensive research both on Benjamin Smith Lyman and on the Japanese books that comprised his collection, books now housed along with his papers at UMass Amherst. Materials include Lyman family history and genealogy, Lyman’s contributions to Japan’s coal, oil, and mineral reserves during the latter of the 19th century, and Fukumi’s bibliography of Lyman’s library. The collection also contains limited material on Fukumi’s employment at the university library and a large selection of her Haiku poems.

A physician and native of Warwick, Mass., Amory Gale worked as an allopath after his graduation from Brown College in 1824, before turning to homeopathy in the mid-1850s. Often struggling with ill health, Gale plied his trade in a long succession of towns, including Canton, Scituate, Mansfield, and Medway, Massachusetts, as well as towns in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Between 1844 and 1853, he interrupted his medical practice for a turn in the pulpit.

Gale’s surviving ledgers include accounts with patients, their form of payment, lists of medical fees, and a draft of a business agreement with a fellow homeopath in Woonsocket, J.S. Nichols.

Myra Gallond (1849-1924) was the eldest daughter of the proprietor of a successful boarding house and livery stable on South Prospect Street in Amherst, Mass. After marrying Henry E. Paige, a veterinary surgeon and brother of Massachusetts Agricultural College faculty member James B. Paige, Myra maintained her own boarding house on South Prospect.

This diminutive autograph album was assembled in Amherst, Mass., between 1867 and 1874, presumably at the boarding house Myra Gallond’s family operated on South Prospect Street. Gallond’s long association with nearby Massachusetts Agricultural College included taking in boarders from the school and working there briefly as a housekeeper, and she was the sister-in-law of one of the college’s best known faculty members. Several of the College’s earliest students appear in the album, including three of the first international students, Saitaro Naito (Japan), Gabriel Codina (Spain), and Elesbam Fiuza Barreto (Brazil) and several from the Pioneer Class of 1871.

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.

Alice Blake Hawes Garside, who became a prominent educator in Boston known for working with students with reading and learning challenges, was born in 1909 in New Bedford, Mass., a descendant of a whaling family with deep roots there. She graduated from Vassar College in 1930, the year she married Kenneth Garside, with whom she had three daughters before they divorced in 1956. Beginning in the early 1950s, Alice Garside worked as a reading tutor at the Cambridge School in Weston and reading supervisor in the language clinic at Mass General, where she was trained in the Orton-Gillingham method under Dr. Edwin Cole, a pioneer in the field of learning disabilities. Having also earned a master’s degree from Boston University, she trained teachers at the Carroll School from its founding in 1967, joining the school’s staff in 1976 and staying until her retirement in 1990. She was honored as the first recipient of the Alice H. Garside Award from the Massachusetts Branch of the International Dyslexia Association in 1985 and the IDA’s highest honor, the Samuel T. Orton Award, in 1987. In her retirement, she continued to consult on reading and made regular trips to the Bermuda Reading Clinic. Alice Garside passed away in 2007 at age 98.

The Alice H. Garside Papers cover Garside’s professional life as a teacher as well as her personal life. There is documentation of her extensive travels, including the six-month round-the-world trip she took not long after her divorce, as well as correspondence, photographs and photo albums, journals, ephemera, and memorabilia. The collection also includes some family history and genealogical material.

A noted South Shore cranberry grower, Kenneth Greenwood Garside was a graduate of Harvard (Chemistry, 1927) and MIT (MS, Gas and Chemical Engineering, 1929). After working for several years in the electric industry, he relocated to Duxbury, Mass., in 1937 to taking over operations of 406 acres of cranberry bog. Over the next twenty-five years as a grower, Garside served as Director of the New England Cranberry Sales Co. and as a board member of the National Cranberry Association, and after dissolving his partnership in the Duxbury Cranberry Company in 1956, he served as acting General Manager of Ocean Spray during the aminotriazole crisis of 1959-1960. Following his retirement from the bogs, Garside taught science in schools in Florida and Maine. He died at Blue Hill, Maine, in 1987.

The Garside Papers contain nearly forty years of letters between the Massachusetts cranberry grower Kenneth G. Garside and his daughter Anne G. Cann. Rich and well-written, these letters reflect Garside’s work and touch on his many interests, from cranberry culture to politics, family, and education. The collection also contains photographs and an assortment of cranberry business-related ephemera.

Lexicographer and former English faculty at Indiana State University, John Edward Gates is the author of numerous scholarly articles on idiomatic phrases and the principles and practice of dictionary making, as well as the co-editor of the Dictionary of Idioms for the Deaf. Reflecting his work as a lexicographer, this collection consists of research notes and proofs of articles and book reviews.

A successful merchant from Gaysville, Vermont, Merrick Gay (1802-1866) operated a general store in his village for many years, later establishing a woolen factory. Gay served his community variously as postmaster, town clerk, and state senator.

These two daybooks document Gay’s business transactions with local individuals and firms and with the Town of Stockbridge and Narrows School District. The entries record the name of each customer, the method and form of payment (cash and goods), and Gay’s purchases, including labor costs for hauling freight.

Late in the nineteenth century, George and Kent was one among many firms in Barre, Vt., specializing in the supply of granite for grave markers and monuments. Under senior partner William L. George, the firm was located on Seminary Street in the 1880s, supplying a clientele that reached as far away as Iowa. Although the firm was listed in city directories from at least 1883 to 1890, further details are scant.

This small collection consists of receipts and correspondence relating to George and Kent’s trade in granite memorials. Concentrated in a narrow window, mostly 1887-1888, the collection includes three sketches for memorials to be produced by the firm.