Collections: mss

Since 1975, Community Development Coordinators for state-level arts agencies in the United States have met annually for the exchange of information, training, and to plan state and national programs for community activity in the arts. Charged with development of both community arts councils and rural arts, CDCs also work to decentralize efforts. In recent years, they have increasingly been engaged in arts and social action programs and in providing a voice on national arts policy.

This small collection documents over thirty years of annual meetings between Community Development Coordinators from state arts agencies across the United States. Organized chronologically, the collection includes agendas, membership lists, communications among organizers, and materials used in workshops and that document the history of CDCs. In 2000, the CDCs began keeping records electronically, though without designating a record keeper. Electronic records have not been included in the collection.

As a young man in Shutesbury, Massachusetts, William B. Stetson (b. ca.1836) earned a living by performing manual labor for local residents. Most of his work, and increasingly so, was found in the range of tasks associated with lumbering: chopping wood, sawing boards, making shingles and fence boards. By 1870, Stetson was listed in the federal census as a lumberman in the adjacent town of Leverett.

Stetson’s rough-hewn book of accounts provides detail on the work and expenditures of a young man from Shutesbury, Massachusetts, in the years just prior to the Civil War. Carefully kept, but idiosyncratic, they document a working class mans efforts to earn a living by whatever means possible, largely in lumber-related tasks. His accounts list a number of familiar local names, including Albert Pratt, Sylvanus Pratt, Charles Pratt, Charles Nutting, E. Cushman, John Haskins, and J. Stockwell. Set into the front of the volume are a set of work records dated in Leverett in 1870, by which time Stetson had apparently focused his full energies on lumbering.

Steve Alves is a western Massachusetts-based documentary filmmaker who, through his company Hometown Productions, later Home Planet Pictures, has written, produced, and directed several documentaries that examine New England’s natural and cultural history. Alves’ films, Beneath the River (1999), A Sweet Tradition (1999), Together in Time (2001), Everyone’s Business (1997), Life After High School (1990) and Talking to the Wall (2003) look at inter-generational ties and the role of community in American life and the tensions between tradition and modern capitalism at the dawn of the 21st century. His films examine a range of topics including local business, sprawl development, work, the Connecticut river, contra dance, and maple syrup and incorporate an array of storytelling techniques including animation, film clips, and dramatic vignettes. His 2014 film, Food for Change focuses on food co-ops as a force for dynamic social and economic change in American culture. His films have won numerous awards and honors from a host of entities including the Chicago International Film Festival, International Family Film Festival, the United Nations, and more.

Alves began his career as a filmmaker in the early 1970s as a student at the University of Southern California Film School where he made several documentary and experimental student films on 8 and 16mm in and around Los Angeles. Following graduation, he worked in Hollywood and New York City as a film editor on such films as Dancing’s All of You (1980), Sacred Hearts (1981), Ski New Hampshire (1981), The Garden of Eden (1984 Academy Award® nominee), Niagara Falls (1984), and The Adirondacks (1987). He moved to western Massachusetts in 1988 and formed his own film company, Home Planet Pictures. He has also produced several educational films and award-winning television commercials.

Alves’ collection documents the 50 year career of a working independent filmmaker. It includes all of the elements for most of his films which include outtakes, b-roll, and full interviews for all of his documentary films; from his earliest film Life After High School to Food for Change, his most recent. The collection covers a wide range of film and video formats including ¾” U-Matic, Betacam SP, S-VHS, Mini-DV, DVD, Super 8mm and 16mm. Also included are screenplays, correspondence, transcripts, interview releases, funding proposals, financial records, production documents, posters, and photographs related to the filming, production, release, and screening of all of his films. An inventory of the collection is available upon request.

The modernist poet Wallace Stevens produced some of the century’s most challenging works while employed as an attorney in Hartford, Connecticut. A native of Reading, Pa., Stevens attended Harvard as an undergraduate but left in 1900 before completing his degree. He later earned a law degree at New York School of Law. Working in insurance law but still intent on becoming a writer, he did not publish his first book of poetry until he was 44 years old. Over the last thirty years of his life, he became one of the most revered contemporary poets in the country. Stevens died of cancer in 1955.

Touching on poetry, criticism, and books, the collection consists primarily of letters received by the poet Wallace Stevens along with 35 annotated volumes from his personal library. Among the correspondents represented are Charles Tomlinson, Jean Wahl, Conrad Aiken, and the art collector and Stevens’ close friend Henry Church; there are also retained copies of three letters from Stevens: two regarding an honorary degree at Harvard, and one to Tomlinson declining to respond to Tomlinson’s analysis of “The comedian as the letter C.” The books included in the collection have annotations or inscriptions to or by Stevens.

Throughout the 1970s, Mary B. Stinson (formerly Lindblom) was an active member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in California and served as a delegate to the First National Women’s Conference in Houston.

The collection includes several ephemeral objects reflecting Stinson’s activism including IWY pendant necklaces and an ERA license plate frame, along with published reports and articles relating to the IWY and a 1979 NOW conference in California.

Stock certificates and other printed financial instruments became a medium for American corporations to signify their role in an expanding nation and their importance to the American economy. Often elaborately printed, in part to thwart counterfeiters, stock certificates and other financial instruments typically incorporated imagery reflecting their corporate activity, a burgeoning economy, and an the idealized nation.

This small collection of stock certificates and bonds was assembled for their value in illustrating printing history due to their more or less elaborately engraved letterheads and borders. Issued from 1842 to the even of the Great Depression, the collection includes 42 different certificates, plus a handful of duplicates, issued by railroad companies, insurance companies, banks, bridge companies, coal companies, dispatch and transit companies. The illustrations run the gamut from idealized representation of the corporation to symbolic expressions.

The shoemaker George Stocking was born on May 23, 1784, on his family’s farm in Ashfield, Mass., the second son of Abraham and Abigail (Nabby) Stocking. At 25, George married Ann Toby (1790-1835) from nearby Conway, with whom he had nine children, followed by two more children with his second wife, the widow Mary Jackson Shippey, whom he married on Dec. 16, 1840. George succeeded Amos Stocking, his uncle, in the tanning and shoemaking business at Pittsfield, Mass., where he died on Christmas day 1864.

George Stocking’s double column account book documents almost 35 years of the economic activity of a shoemaker in antebellum Ashfield, Massachusetts. Although the entries are typically very brief, recording making, mending, tapping, capping, or heeling shoes and boots, among other things, they provide a dense and fairly continuous record of his work. They also reveal the degree to which Stocking occasionally engaged in other activities to earn a living, including mending harnesses and other leatherwork to performing agricultural labor. The book includes accounts with Charles Knowlton, the local physician was was famous as a freethinker and atheist and author of Fruits of Philosophy, his book on contraception that earned him conviction on charges of obscenity and a sentence of three months at hard labor.

A member of the Massachusetts Agricultural College class of 1919, Ervin Sidney Stockwell, Jr. (1898-1983) was born in Winthrop, Mass., to Grace Cobb and E. Sidney Cobb, Sr., a successful business man and owner of a wholesale dairy. Entering MAC as a freshman in 1915, Stockwell, Jr., studied agricultural economics and during his time in Amherst, took part in the college debate team, winning his class award for oratory, and dramatics with the Roister Doisters. He performed military service in 1918 at Plattsburgh, N.Y., and Camp Lee, Va. Stockwell went on to found a successful custom-house brokerage in Boston, E. Sidney Import Export, and was followed at his alma mater by his son and great-grandson.

The extensive correspondence between Sidney Stockwell and his mother, going in both directions, provides a remarkably in-depth perspective on a typical undergraduate’s life at Massachusetts Agricultural College during the time of the First World War, a period when MAC was considered an innovator in popular education. The letters touch on the typical issues of academic life and social activity, Stockwell’s hopes for the future, his military service and the war. Following graduation, Stockwell undertook an adventurous two year trip in which he worked his way westward across the country, traveling by rail and foot through the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana, Washington state and California, taking odd jobs to earn his keep and writing home regularly to describe his journey. An oral history with Stockwell is available in the University Archives as part of the Class of 1919 project.

A visionary of modern wind power, Forrest “Woody” Stoddard was a graduate in aeronautics from MIT (BS, 1966; MS 1968) and an early member of the UMass Amherst “wind power mafia.” After service with the Air Force, Stoddard returned home to Amherst, Mass., in 1972 to pursue a doctorate in Ocean Engineering and to take part in the emerging field of alternate energy. Joining the vibrant, interdisciplinary group at UMass gathered around William Heronemus, he began a dissertation in wind turbine dynamic analysis (1979), earning selection as lead developer of the famed 25kW Wind Furnace 1 (WF-1) turbine. To carry research into practice, Heronemus, Stoddard, and other UMass graduates joined US Windpower (later Kenetech), the country’s first producer of large wind turbines and promoter of early wind farms. A tireless advocate for wind power and alternative energy, Stoddard was highly regarded as a researcher but also as a teacher and mentor of a generation of engineers who populate the industry. Nearly coincident with his untimely death on Jan. 25, 2007, the American Wind Energy Association awarded Stoddard its Lifetime Achievement Award.

As a participant in the early years of the wind power group at UMass, Stoddard’s papers offer insight into an engineer’s experiences in the fitful growth of the wind power industry. The collection is rich in engineering data on turbine dynamics and other aspects of wind power and the extension of academic research into the nascent wind power industry, and it includes an interesting array of both personal and professional photographs and correspondence.

Ann Stokes with Nanette the dog, 1972

Ann Richardson Stokes (1931-2016) was an activist, artist, and community builder across such issues as progressive politics, women’s and lesbian/gay rights, and the environmental and antinuclear movements. Stokes was born and educated in New Jersey, the daughter of Dr. Emlen Stokes and Lydia Babbott Stokes, and the great grand-daughter of Charles Pratt. A lifelong Quaker and longtime member of Putney Friends Meeting, Ann moved to Welcome Hill in West Chesterfield, NH in 1959. She helped build and run the studio retreat for women artists, Welcome Hill Studios, which has been inspiring and nurturing artists since the 1970s, and in 1985 Stokes published an account of the all-woman-built first studio in “A Studio Of One’s Own.” Ann purchased a large parcel of land in West Chesterfield with stone ruins left by Madame Sherri, a vaudeville costume designer known for her entertaining, and carried on her party tradition by hosting Nina Simone, Odetta, the Arthur Hall African-American Dance Troupe and many others. Ann eventually donated the parcel now known as the Madame Sherri Forest with many sites and trails, including the Ann Stokes Loop named in her honor. A talented writer and painter, Ann penned numerous thoughtful letters to editors across the country, but was happy to engage personally in social action as well, such as when she was jailed for two weeks for protesting the Seabrook Station nuclear power plant in 1977 or when she ran, unsuccessfully, for Sheriff in West Chesterfield.

The Ann R. Stokes Papers document Ann’s varied and passionate life of art, community building, Quakerism, and activism. The building and story of Welcome Hill Studios, as well as Ann’s famous parties, are well documented with scrapbooks, photographs, and posters. Her engagement with the Putney Friends Meeting is evident through numerous records and correspondence. Family photo albums and scrapbooks document the Stokes extended family history, and Ann’s own writing, photographs, and art (mostly original paintings and prints) make up a bulk of the collection. Ann’s collection of women/lesbian organization’s newsletters, mostly from the 1980s-2000s, with titles such as Lezzie Fair, Open Closet, Lesbian Connection, the Revolutionary & Radical Feminist Newsletter, show her engagement with local and national women’s issues.