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After eight years as a Quaker worship group, Farmington Monthly Meeting was set off from Pondtown in 1991, becoming one of the newest members of Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting. Worship at Farmington is unprogammed.

Particularly for the early years, minutes for the Farmington Monthly Meeting were recorded (or preserved) somewhat irregularly, though continuously from 1984 to 2012. The collection also contains a set of state of the society reports. information on membership, and memorials.

The Northeast Organic Farming Association began as the vision of a New York City plumbing supplies salesman and has grown into a large association supporting information-sharing, education, collaboration, and certification. Increasingly influential non-profit organization with chapters in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, and Vermont, NOFA has “nearly 4,000 farmers, gardeners and consumers working to promote healthy food, organic farming practices and a cleaner environment.”

The NOFA collection includes records, publications, ephemera, photographs, and other materials from NOFA chapters in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont, along with material from the Interstate Council. The collection includes information on NOFA’s conferences and programs, educational work, lobbying, and their initiatives in organic certification and organic land care.

View issues of The Natural Farmer online.

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.

Corn sample, Herbarium of Walt C. Galinat, 1971

Born in 1923 in Manchester, Connecticut, Walton Clarence Galinat was a corn enthusiast for almost his entire life. He worked with various aspects of corn in high school, as an undergraduate student assistant at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, in graduate school at the University of Wisconsin, as a research associate at Harvard University, and finally, as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he worked at the Waltham Field Station as a plant geneticist from 1964 until his retirement in 1990. A contributing author to more than 300 published papers, Galinat spent significant parts of his research career in Mexico studying ancient maize, but was also deeply embedded in New England farming and corn production and sustainability. In addition to his world-renowned research on corn evolution, morphology, and diversity, he is credited with the development of many varieties of corn, including Candy Stick, “airplane corn,” and a red, white, and blue kernel variety. His skill as an artist was also recognized across his field and beyond, with his articles often accompanied by beautifully detailed illustrations of corn samples, his widely distributed and used teaching illustrations, and with a few of his hand-drawn corn diagrams permanently displayed in the National Academies Building in Washington D.C. The Waltham Experiment Station building retains several of Galinat’s oversized 3D art models of corn plant migrations and lifecycles to this day. Amongst many honors, Galinat was awarded the prestigious Distinguished Economic Botanist Award from the Society for Economic Botany in 1994.

The Walton C. Galinat Papers document Galinat’s academic, service, research, and artistic work during his time at the Waltham Experiment Station while employed as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Roughly half the collection is administrative and professional materials, including correspondence; research files and journals, with numerous detailed hand-drawn illustrations; Experiment Station and Hatch annual reports and grants; UMass administrative memos, reports, and files; and photographs of corn samples as well as individuals from Experiment Station, Home Economics, and 4H clubs. The other half of the collection consists of three-dimensional corn display samples and pressed corn and grass from Galinat’s personal herbarium.

Serving as a Quaker quarterly meeting for central Maine, Vassalboro Quarterly was set off from Falmouth Quarter in 1813. Over the years, it has coordinated nearly two dozen monthly meetings extending as far north and east as Cobscook. Farmington Quarter was set off from it in 1841, but returned in 1952.

The records for Vassalboro Quarterly are substantially incomplete, but document the Quaker meeting from the 1970s through 2000s. Among other records are a highly incomplete set of minutes (and “records,” which are the materials distributed during meetings); a more complete, but still partial run of newsletters; and the records of Ministry and Counsel from the mid-1990s through mid-2000s.

Select materials in this collection are restricted; consult an archivist for more information.

Martha Ramsey is the author of Where I Stopped, a memoir of rape in adolescence, and Blood Stories, a book of poems. Ramsey grew up in Flemington, New Jersey, a farming community 65 miles southwest of New York City. She had unusually creative, bohemian-minded, arts-oriented parents; her father was a pioneering jazz historian; both became alcoholics. She was a precociously intelligent child and was skipped two grades at her local elementary school; she escaped from the resulting loneliness and social insecurity into books and nature. She was happier as a day student at Solebury School, a progressive high school nearby in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. On a summer day in 1968, at age 13, while she was walking her bike up a back road near her home, she was attacked and raped by a 28-year-old man, a stranger. She insisted that her parents call the police immediately, “so it won’t happen to anyone else.” Her parents soon heard from neighbors that before Martha, the rapist had “molested other girls.” She endured a confrontation with him at the police barracks and giving testimony at the trial that resulted in his conviction and sentence of 15 years. Five years later she also endured the shock of learning on a visit home from college that he had, while released on parole, sexually assaulted and murdered a 16-year-old girl near the girl’s family’s farm, on the anniversary of the rape. This time he was sentenced to life. Where I Stopped, written when Ramsey was in her thirties, tells this story in detail and follows her attempts to understand what had happened to her and how it was affecting her over the years as she grew into adulthood, pursued her calling as a poet, and married. The memoir also chronicles her decision to return to the place where she grew up to speak with people who remembered the crime and who had participated in the trial and to unearth the police and trial records—all part of her effort to come to terms with what she remembered.

A powerful collection documenting the writing of her memoir, Where I Stopped, Ramsey’s papers include audio recordings of statements she and others made to the police shortly after her rape; a transcript of the trial; Ramsey’s notes from interviews she conducted with individuals who remembered the crime; and drafts of her memoir, containing comments from early readers and material cut from the final version. Ramsey’s unpublished writings, journals, and correspondence document her intellectual and emotional life from her teenage years forward, including the drafts of all her published and unpublished poems. Family papers focus on the author’s father, Frederic Ramsey, a noted jazz historian; they include correspondence, photographs, and the unpublished autobiography of Ethel Ramsey (1884–1965)—textile designer, painter, and participant in the artists’ colony in New Hope, Pennsylvania—that contains acerbic discussion of the struggles of women artists in the late nineteenth century and later.

Pondtown Monthly Meeting of Friends, based in Winthrop, Maine, began as a worship group under the care of the Winthrop, Maine Monthly Meeting in 1982. After a year, it was set off from Winthrop Monthly Meeting to become a monthly meeting as part of the Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting. Eight years later, in 1991, the Farmington Monthly Meeting was set off from Pondtown.

The collection consists of six folders, containing minutes from 1991-1993, State-of-the-Society reports for 1991 and 1992, some correspondence and a query.

The farmer Nathaniel Maynard was born in Marlborough (Worcester County), Mass., on Feb. 27, 1780, the eldest of four children of Joseph Maynard and Lovina Barnes. By 1804, when he married Rachel (Hill) of North Brookfield, Nathaniel was already a resident of Leverett, where he had apparently moved with his brother William. Nathaniel and Rachel had four children: Ira B. Maynard (1810-1896), Alvin (1813-1818), Emeline Dudley (1815-1901), and Joseph Bartlett Maynard (1817-1881).

This small volume is a hybrid production. Roughly the first half of the volume consists of relatively standard exercises for learning arithmetic and business activities, including calculating weights, measures, currencies, finances, and interest rates. The remainder consists of accounts, recording a variety of work performed by Maynard, ranging from farm labor (sale of potatoes, plowing and planting, working with oxen, slaughtering, and chopping wood) to weaving (“sheeting”) and especially mending or making shoes.

After working for a year on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in the Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) program, James Tibensky returned to college, declared a major in anthropology, and soon began to focus on gravestones. For his masters degree at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Tibensky took up an ambitious project, systematically documenting every pre-1800 grave marker in western Connecticut, photographing each stone, and noting the name, date of death, orientation, style, and material. Painstakingly entering and analyzing the data on the computer using Hollerith cards, he completed his thesis, “The colonial gravestones of western Connecticut,” in 1977. During the latter stages of his research, he became a charter member of the new Association for Gravestone Studies.

The Tibensky collection contains the complete product of James Tibensky’s remarkably thorough study of western Connecticut colonial-era gravestones, including approximately 350 rolls of negative film with the accompanying original field nates, printounts, and statistical data, all meticulously maintained.

Spread out across the early national landscape, the Beach and Cooke families were bound by the ties of family, friendship, and business. The brothers-in-law Samuel Beach, from Branford, Conn., and Samuel G. Cooke, from Mendon, Illinois, both served in the Civil War. As a corporal in the 27th Connecticut Infantry, Beach saw action at the battles of Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, while Cooke served in the west with the 50th Illinois before taking a captain’s commission in the 44th U.S. Colored Troops. Farmers and fruit growers, the two settled in Branford after the war, with Beach establishing Pawson Park, a day resort and picnic grounds that prospered in the 1880s.

The paper of Samuel and Harriett Beach contain family correspondence from two generations of Connecticut family in the mid-nineteenth century. Of particular note are 31 war-date letters and a post-war memoir of the battle of Fredericksburg from Samuel Beach, and three war-date letters from Samuel G. Cooke. The collection also includes an interesting, though scattered series of letters relating to the creation and operation of the day resort, Pawson Park.