Collections: mss

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.

A diplomatic and military historian, Waldo H. Heinrichs was the product of a family with a unique global perspective. A descendant of missionaries to Hawaii and South India and son of a man who led the YMCA mission in Palestine, Heinrichs grew up traveling internationally. After military service during the Second World War, he received both a bachelor’s degree (1949) and doctorate (1960) in history from Harvard, sandwiching in post-baccalaureate study at Brasenose College, Oxford, and stint in the foreign service and advertising. A long-time member of the faculty at Temple University, he has written extensively on U.S. foreign relations in the twentieth century. His first book, Joseph Grew, American Ambassador (1966), was awarded the Allan Nevins Prize and in later works he explored both the diplomatic and military history of the Pacific.

A tireless researcher, Heinrichs left a rich record of correspondence, writing, and notes relating to his work as an historian, and especially to his work on the diplomatic and military background of the Pacific during the Second World War. His collection, however, is still broader, including content relating to his own military service during and after the war and fascinating materials relating to his family. Of particular note are records of his father, Waldo Huntley Heinrichs, including copies of a diary kept as a fighter pilot in the 95th Aero Squadron during the First World War and a memoir of his experiences being shot down and taken as a prisoner of war, along with later materials documenting his YMCA service, and his on faculty at Middlebury College and as an intelligence officer with the 8th Fighter Command during the Second World War.

Sign from the Helping Hand House, out of which the Helping Hand Society operated.

Formed in 1887, the Helping Hand Society began as a missionary society for young girls who learned about the world (foreign missions) while also learning how to sew, developed by Emily Graves Williston. Within that same year, the Emily Mission Circle transformed into The Young Ladies’ Missionary Society, a society which became devoted to charitable work in Easthampton. The Society’s name was changed to the Helping Hand Society in 1894, and the group was incorporated in 1913. In 1919, the Society started operating out of a house purchased and endowed by Franklin W. Pitcher. The Society went on to establish a Visiting Nurse program, providing room for the nurse in the house, as well as an apartment rented out to caretakers, and at one time the Society operated a Benefit Shop. Membership in the Society has fluctuated over the years, and while specific projects may have been discontinued over time, the Society continues forward with its mission to provide help to those in need by donating time and resources to Easthampton and the surrounding communities that serve Easthampton residents.

The collection documents the history of the Helping Hand Society from its inception to around 2017. This includes minutes and annual reports, by-laws, and ledger books. There are also scrapbooks and photo albums, the framed incorporation document, and the original sign that adorned the Helping Hand House.