Collections: mss

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.

Ledger, begun by George Cooley in 1843 to record the accounts of his soapmaking business in the Cabotville section of Chicopee, continued by Titus Chapin, an ardent abolitionist, and Mordecai Cough who managed the business following Cooley’s death (or departure) in 1848. The 1843 date coincides with the coming of many small businesses to Cabotville in connection with the growth of industries there at the time.

Cooley accepted goods, services and cash as payment. The most frequently accepted goods had relatively obvious value to a soap maker: grease and ashes, tallow, pork, scraps and skins, and candles. Some of the services bartered were repairing wagon, shoeing horse, fixing wippletree, making 30 boxes, and covering umbrella. The business sold gallons, bars, and cakes of soap. Mount Holyoke Seminary bought 28 “fancy soaps”. Also listed were shaving soap and hard or hand soap. In addition, sales sometimes included candles, butter, mop handles, molasses, apples and potatoes, squashes, satinet, cheese, cord wood, paint, and rosin. Some of the listings were annotated with regard to the customer’s character: Ashad Bartlett was seen as “bad and poor and fights with his wife”‘ Norris Starkwether was “an honest man”; and Miss L.B. Hunt “eloped with a man”.

In 1841, George H. Gilbert and Charles A. Stevens formed a partnership to manufacture broadcloth and cloaking in Ware, Massachusetts. Ten years later, the partnership dissolved and each partner carried a part of the business into separate establishments. The newly formed George H. Gilbert Company continued making high-grade woolen flannels, for which it developed a national reputation, until 1930.

Records, consisting of correspondence, financial records and cash books, construction contracts, sales lists, production records, and sample books, document the operation of Gilbert and Stevens and later the Gilbert Company for almost a century. The labor accounts (1851-1930), document the phases of the varying ethnic composition of the workforce — Irish, French-Canadian, and eventually Polish — well as the family orientation of the mills.

An organizer, consultant, and educator in the alternative agriculture movement, Grace Gershuny has been active in the field since the 1970s when she worked for the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), developing its first organic certification program. As a leader in the movement, Gershuny helped to establish both the Organic Trade Association and the Organic Farmer: The Digest of Sustainable Agriculture. Today she continues to write and teach on the subject, serving as a faculty member at a number of colleges, most recently Green Mountain College.

The collection consists chiefly of printed material from a run of the Organic Farmer to Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA) publications and organizational newsletters, such as the Rural Education Center. Amongst these publications are a few small but significant groups of materials including notes from Gershuny’s role as the NOFA VT coordinator in 1979 and her drafts and notes for the second editions of The Soul of Soil.

The cell biologist and biophysicist Eugene R. Gibbons was widely noted for his discovery of microtubule-associated motor proteins. For his doctoral research at Cambridge University in 1957 , Gibbons used an electron microscope to analyze chromosomal organization during mitosis and meiosis, earning him a call from Harvard University to help establish an electron mcircoscopic laboratory. While working on Tetrahymena to answer the question of how simple proteins can push cells through the water, he isolated and described a motor protein he called dynein, which moves cargos along microtubules and powers ciliar and flagellar motility. Relocating to the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1967 to become head of the Kewalo Marine Laboratory, and switching his organismal focus to sea urchin sperm, he and his collaborator and wife, Barbara, contined to make fundamental contributions to understanding the role of microtubule sliding in ciliar motility. Gibbons shared the Shaw Prize in Life Science and Medicine with Ron Vale (2017) and the E.B. Wilson Medal from the American Society of Cell Biology (1994). He died in January 2018 at the age of 86.

The Gibbons papers contain two boxes of laboratory notebooks, a box of his offprints with a small quantity of correspondence. A collection of Gustaf Retzius’s periodical Biologische Untersuchungen (1890-1914) has been transferred to printed materials.

Although poorly known, Chauncey S. Gillett (1815-1846) appears to have carried on a relatively small custom at a general store in Southwick, Massachusetts, during the early 1840s. The son of Almon and Cinthia Gillett, Gillett traded in the typical range of groceries, dry goods, and other commodities, including buttons, cloth, paper, tobacco and tea, molasses, and candles, but also in liquors of various sorts (rum, gin, and brandy cider). Gillett died at the age of 30 on January 4, 1846, and is buried in Southwick.

Kept by the young Chauncey Gillett, this daybook records a chronological series of transactions at a general stores in Southwick, Mass., between 1841 and 1845. Among Gillett’s customers were several relatives, including Almon, Rhodolphus, and Levi Gillett, all of whom are also buried in the Southwick cemetery.

A native New Yorker born in 1959, Al Giordano was drawn into the antinuclear movement as a teenager, becoming an important organizer for the antinuclear and environmental movements. Giordano sharpened his organizing skills through a close association with Abbie Hoffman, with whom he often collaborated throughout the 1980s. Giordano has worked as a journalist for several decades, primarily with the alternative press, founding his own periodical Narco News in 2000 and the School of Authentic Journalism in 2002. He currently resides in Mexico City.

The Giordano collection contains a miscellaneous assemblage of ephemera, publications and newspapers, reports, and a small quantity of correspondence, relating to antinuclear activism.

Founded in 1895, the Girls Club of Greenfield provides high quality early care and educational services to the girls of Franklin County, Massachusetts, and advocates for the rights of children and their families. During the school year, the Club offers diverse programming, ranging from an infant room and preschool to after school activities that promote teamwork, community spirit, social skills, and confidence. Since 1958, they have also operated a summer camp, Lion Knoll, in Leyden.

The records of the Girls Club of Greenfield include by-laws, annual reports, reports and meeting minutes of the Board of Directors, correspondence, and ledgers and account books. Also contains program files for daycare, summer camp, education worker programs, and others, personnel records, membership and committee lists, newsletters, press releases, ledgers, account books, scrapbooks, news clippings, photographs, slides, and artifacts.

The Glass Container Association (now the Glass Packaging Institute) was founded in 1919 as a trade association for the North American glass container industry. Throughout its history, the Association was an important voice setting industry standards and educating packing professionals, and they monitored trends and conducted and disseminated research in the use of glass containers. During the 1920s and 1930s, they responded to queries from their membership by carrying out research projects on product-specific issues in using glass containers as well as research into more general concerns relating to the use of glass containers.

This subject file maintained by the Glass Container Association during the 1920s through the mid-1930s, consists of inquiries from manufacturers and food processors about concerns in packing relating to particular products and packing methods. Organized topically, the files contain copies of queries and other correspondence, research data (in some cases) and reports, replies, publications, and occasionally write-ups on products and industry standards.

Felix Goldberg (1866-1948) was born in Zhuprahn, Lithuania in 1866, emigrating with his second wife, Janet Zelda, to the United States at the turn of the century. Although trained as an engraver, Goldberg was frequently unable to practice his trade due to ill health, and was supported by the boarding house for factory workers and itinerant ice harvesters run by his wife.

A loosely autobiographical manuscript written in Yiddish in the early 1930s by Felix Goldberg, an engraver who immigrated to the U.S. around 1900.