Collections: mss

A long-time agricultural and environmental writer and editor, Susan J. Harlow has deep roots in New England and Vermont agriculture and organic farming communities. Harlow Farm, where she lives and grew up, was one of the first organic vegetable farms in New England, and was named Vermont Sustainable Farm of the Year in 1998. Her interests in journalism, communications, and farming have led to numerous publications, projects, and collaborations, including a period as Associate Editor for the Farm Progress Companies, serving as the Director of Communications at Antioch University New England, a published history on the University of Vermont Extension System, and numerous articles, including recurring pieces in American Agriculturalist.

The Susan Harlow Organic Farming Oral History Collection consists of six audio oral histories and additional notes from other interviews conducted by Harlow with Vermont organic farmers. Many of the interviews were part of a 2013 exhibit “Plowing Old Ground: Vermont’s Organic Farming Pioneers,” a collaborative effort with photographer John Nopper, who photographed the subjects of Harlow’s interviews. The visual exhibit featured interview summaries and quotations alongside photographs from six farms and their farmers, all pioneers in the history of organic farm production, marketing, and distribution in Vermont. The collection contains Harlow’s notes and transcriptions along with oral histories and interviews with: Jake and Liz Guest, Jack and Anne Lazor, Joey Klein, Bruce Kaufman, Howard Prussack, Paul Harlow, R. Houriet, Samuel Kaymen, Will and Judy Stevens, Richard Wiswall, and Enid Wonnacott.

An inventor, entrepreneur, and corporate executive, Carl C. Harris was the third of four generations of his family to help manage the Rodney Hunt Company, a major manufacturer of waterwheels, turbines, and textile machinery based in Orange, Mass. While still in high school in 1898, Harris already displayed a sharp business and technical eye, establishing the first telephone company in Orange, and he began his career after graduation from Worcester Polytechnical Institute, working as a draftsman for GE and then as a superintendent at Rodney Hunt. After a brief stint at the Simplex Time Recorder Company in Gardner, Harris returned to Rodney Hunt for good in 1912. After acquiring a controlling interest in 1917, he remained with the company in several capacities through the Depression and Second World War, serving as general manager, vice president, and treasurer, and from 1938-1947, as president. Throughout his career, Harris remained active in developing or improving a variety of new products and processes, registering a total of 99 patents, and he regularly used his offices at Rodney Hunt to launch other, smaller enterprises, including the Slencil Company,which manufactured mechanical pencils; Riveto, which produced toys and a paper fastening device; and Speed-Mo, a manufacturer of a moistening pad system. Harris retired in 1956 and died four years later in Orange at the age of 79.

The Harris Papers are centered closely on the entrepreneurial activity of Carl C. Harris, and include a particularly thick set of business records for the Slencil Company (ca.1935-1960) and the Riveto Company (1930s-1940s), and the slender record book of the Home Telephone Company. In addition to these, the collection includes many dozen slencils, including prototypes, speciality models, presentation sets, store displays, and marketing designs; examples of Riveto toys, Simplex inventions, flotation devices, and other oddities invented by Harris, along with the associated patents.

Although a Friends Meeting under the care of New York Yearly Meeting gathered in West Hartford from 1805 to 1819, the recent history of Friends in the Connecticut capitol began in 1935, when meetings were held as part of the independent Connecticut Valley Association of Friends. During the general unification of Friends in New England in 1944, the Association formally joined New England Yearly Meeting and Hartford Friends Meeting was officially set off.

The records of Hartford Monthly Meeting are unusually complete and extensive for a meeting from western New England, including nearly unbroken runs of meeting minutes and newsletters from the start of the meeting to the present.

A noted comic illustrator, Irwin Hasen enjoyed a career spanning over five decades, including work as staff artist for a number of classic comic book titles. He is perhaps best remembered as the artist behind Dondi, a strip about a war orphan co-authored with Don Edson, that ran nationally from 1955 to 1986.

Hasen’s Legacy Portfolio includes ten hand-pulled serigraphs signed and numbered by the artist, reflecting artwork from throughout his career. The SCUA portfolio is number 16 of 35 sets in the limited edition, with each print hand separated and printed in collaboration with the master printer Gary Lichtenstein.

Born on January 29, 1908 in Conway, Massachusetts, Alice Totman spent her early years on her father’s family farm, Page Place, before he was forced to sell it due to a labor scarcity in 1916 and moved the family to Greenfield. She graduated from Greenfield High School in 1927 and enrolled at Massachusetts School of Art in Boston. She studied there for a year and a half before marrying Hart Mowry Hawks on June 16, 1929. The couple settled in Bellows Fall, Vermont where Mowry was recently assigned a permanent post with the Boston and Maine Railroad. Tragically, over the next fifteen years, Alice experienced seven pregnancies, only one of which resulted in a healthy child, Gertrude Ann, born in 1932. Alice’s interest in her family can be traced back to the earliest days of her marriage, during which time she worked on genealogies for both the Totman and Hawks families. Eager to share the knowledge she acquired and assembled, she often found ways to update her relatives, most notably in a family newsletter called Tot-Kin that she edited and published between the years 1935-1945.

Alice Totman Hawks’s collection consists of her extensive genealogical notes and writings, including a run of Tot-Kin, correspondence and some of Alice’s sketches.

A granting agency that advises and provides funding for grass roots, non-profit projects and organizations in order to bring about broad social change by addressing local issues and community needs. Records include minutes, reports, correspondence, successful and unsuccessful grant applications from Western Massachusetts organizations, grant source information, and grantee materials including organization reports, publications, member lists, clippings, and other materials.

Since it was first proposed in 1977, controversy surrounded Waste Technologies Industries’ plans to operate a hazardous waste incinerator in East Liverpool, Ohio. Particularly after construction on the plant began in 1990, grassroots opposition swelled citing concerns over pollution from cement kiln dust, dioxins, and other environmental toxins. With the support of organizations such as Work on Waste and Greenpeace, local activists waged a years-long campaign against the incinerator, ultimately losing out to the industry’s greater political power.

A small and somewhat heterogenous assemblage, this collection documents public opposition to hazardous waste incineration centered on the Waste Technologies Industries plant in Ohio and sites in Calvert City, Ky., and Illinois. In addition to selected legal filings and technical information, the collection documents public responses and support from Greenpeace America and Work on Waste.

Jonathan “Jay” Healy represented the 1st Franklin District in the Massachusetts House of Representatives from 1970 to 1993. A moderate Republican, Healy was born in Greenfield in 1945 and raised on a 500-acre farm in Charlemont. A recent graduate of Williams College, Healy ran for office for the first time in 1970, succeeding his own father, Winston Healy, defeating both his Democratic rival and a far right challenge from within his own party. His popularity over the succeeding years in a heavily Democratic district was rooted in his close attention to issues of local concern, particularly agriculture and dairying. When he left office in 1993, he was appointed state Commissioner of Food and Agriculture, where he remained until 2003.

Documenting the career of a Massachusetts Republican, the Healy Papers contain a small selection of constituents’ correspondence, press releases, and position papers, plus an excellent assortment of scrapbooks, news clippings, and photographs relating to his political career. Although the focus is largely on his time in the state house, there is some materials relating to his role as Commission of Food and Agriculture.

A multi-talented performer, the African American expatriate Gordon Heath was variously a stage and film actor, musician, director, producer, founder of the Studio Theater of Paris, and co-owner of the Parisian nightclub L’Abbaye. Born in New York City, Heath became involved in acting as a teenager and enjoyed a career that spanned post-World War II Broadway to the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s. In addition to his many roles on film and stage, he and his partner Lee Payant enjoyed success as recording artists in the 1950s and 1960s.

The Heath collection includes personal and professional correspondence, scrapbooks containing photos and clippings from assorted television and film productions in addition to songs, poetry, and reviews of plays or playbills from productions he attended. The Papers also contain art work, sheet music, personal and production photographs, and drafts of his memoirs.

In 1960, William K. Hefner (1915-1993) became one of the first of new breed of radical pacifists to run for elective office, when he ran as a peace candidate for Congress in the 1st district of Massachusetts. An accountant from Greenfield, Hefner was involved at a national level with movements for peace and civil rights. An early member of SANE, a founder of Political Action for Peace in 1959 (now CPPAX) and the Greenfield Peace Center (1963), and an active member of the American Friends Service Committee, War Resisters League, Turn Toward Peace, and the World Without War Conference, Hefner was an energetic force in the movements for peace and disarmament, civil rights, and a more just economic system. He ran unsuccessfully for office in three elections between 1960 and 1964, and supported peace candidate H. Stuart Hughes in his bid for election to the U.S. Senate in 1962.

The Hefner papers offer a remarkable record of politically-engaged activism for peace and social justice in the early 1960s. With an intensely local focus, Hefner was tied in to the larger movements at the state and national level, corresponding with major figures such as A.J. Muste, Bayard Rustin, Benjamin Spock, and Arthur Springer. The collection includes particularly rich documentation of the early years of Political Action for Peace, which Hefner helped found, with correspondence, minutes of meetings, and publications, as well as equally rich materials on Hefner’s bids for congress in 1960 and 1962.