Leonard Adams (1946-) began his career with the UMass Amherst Libraries in May 1974 when he was hired to work as an Exit Check on the night shift. Before earning his MLS at the University of Rhode Island in 1975, Adams worked in Circulation and Serials, after which he became Serials Cataloger and Bindery Supervisor, and in 1980, Government Documents Librarian. He added Patents and Trademarks to his job duties in 2004. A founding member of the Boston Library Consortium’s Government Documents Interest Group, Leonard Adams served the UMass Amherst Libraries for 33 years before his retirement in May 2008.

Adams’s papers provide insight into the inner-workings of a Government Documents Repository and convey, even in their brevity, the nature of the work of a Government Documents librarian. Included among the papers are professional correspondence, a Government Documents Technical Processing Manual and articles written by Adams, Adams’s annual reports and performance reviews, and other documents relating to Adams’s long tenure at the University Libraries.

Transcripts of Civil War diaries of Samuel Chapin and William R. Sessions both of South Wilbraham, Massachusetts. Chapin was twenty-one and Sessions twenty-seven when they enlisted in the Union Army with 25 other Wilbraham men on August 29, 1862. They were assigned to the 46th Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers for nine months service.

Justice of the peace, merchant, landowner, and entrepreneur from Prescott and Shutesbury, Massachusetts. Nine volumes contain descriptions of his duties as justice of the peace, a book of deeds and mortgages from local real estate transactions, account books of sales in his general store and from his palm leaf hat business, and notes of accounts with individuals.

Santa Clara figurative bowl (70.291)

Born in Denver, Colorado, in October 1884, Leonard D. Hollister was a collector of Southwestern Native American pottery and the son of Uriah S. Hollister, a prominent executive with the Continental Oil Company and author of The Navajo and His Blanket (1903), an early work on Navajo textiles.

The Hollister collection is a diverse assemblage of 94 works by Native American potters, representing a cross-section of southwestern cultures and pueblos. According to Fred A. Rosenstock, who purchased the collection after Hollister’s death, the pieces were acquired one or two at a time over several decades, often purchased directly from the artist. Hollister acquired examples from pueblos including Acoma, Cochiti, Hopi, Jemez, Laguna, Maricopa, Picuris, San Ildefonso, San Felipe, San Juan, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Taos, Tesusque, Zia, and Zuni. The signed pieces, over a quarter of the collection, includes works by some of the century’s most influential potters.

During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Samuel Kramsh worked as a collector and supplier of native plants for horticulturists and botanists, including Humphry and Moses Marshall and Benjamin Smith Barton.

This manuscript includes an exhaustive record of plant species collected in Pennsylvania and North Carolina during the years 1787-1789.

When Leonard Lewin’s satire Report from Iron Mountain was published in November 1967, as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, it struck an immediate chord. Purporting to be a document leaked from a special study group in the highest level of the government, the Report examined the peril that would result to the economy and social stability of the nation should a condition of “permanent peace” break out.

The Lewin Papers offer insight into the history of the reception of Report from Iron Mountain and on Leonard Lewin’s career as a writer. Included in the collection are materials relating to his education at Harvard, his social and political background, and his writing. Of additional interest are letters from his wife Iris, a union organizer during the late 1930s and early 1940s, and from his father, who ran sugar plantations in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic and a refinery in Indianapolis.

Businessman from West Cambridge, Massachusetts with additional dealings in Charlestown, Quincy, Waltham, and Tyngsboro.

The volume includes lists of personal and business purchases, services provided for his family, and business services such as whitewashing, carting coal, sawing wood, carrying letters, collecting debts, relaying a brick fireplace, and “work loading Sloop Rapid,” and barter and cash transactions. References made to Locke’s involvement with Universalism and members of the Tufts family of Cambridge and Middlesex County.