Collecting area: Agriculture

Charles Paul Alexander, a professor and head of the Entomology Department from 1922 until 1959, was the international expert on the crane fly (Tipulidae). Alexander was born in Gloversville, New York in 1889, earned his B.S. (1913) and Ph.D. (1918) from Cornell University and joined the Massachusetts Agricultural College faculty in 1922. Alexander became the head of the Entomology Dept. and the Zoology Dept. in 1937 and then the dean of the the School of Science in 1945 and while at the University, classified nearly 13,000 species of crane fly. His personal collection of crane flies is held by the Smithsonian Institute. Alexander died in 1981.

The Charles Paul Alexander Papers contains mainly Alexander’s published reports on the crane fly as well as some of his lecture notes.

The Allis family began farming in Whately, Mass., in 1716, when John Allis came into possession of a property that would be the home to nine generations of his descendants. A typically diverse operation, the farm centered on cattle and dairying and crops such as hay and potatoes, supplemented throughout the year by sugaring, the manufacture of lye soap, bee culture, and opportunistic work ranging from slating to the construction of water systems for farms. It was sold out of the family in 1957.

This small collection contains two closely-related memoirs about the Allis family and their farm in Whately, Mass., focusing on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Written by Lucius Howes Allis, the last Allis to own the farm, when he was 72 years old, “The Allis farm and its families” contains a lengthy genealogy, transcriptions of a handful of family deeds and documents, and brief stories about Lucius’ father Irving during his trip to Kansas and on the farm. “Up on the hill” is a lively memoir written by William R. Phinney, an alumnus of Massachusetts Agricultural College and apparently a friend of the Allis family. Phinney’s account contains excellent accounts of the lives of Elliot, Irving, and Lucius Allis, about farm life in the late nineteenth century, dairying, beekeeping, and other topics.

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.

An officer in the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry during the Civil War, Henry Alvord (1844-1904) became a Professor of Dairy Science at Massachusetts Agricultural College and a founder of the American Association of Land Grant Colleges. He went on to a distinguished career in education and work with agricultural experiment stations in Maryland and Oklahoma.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

In 1789, Vermont native Justin Morgan acquired a bay colt in Springfield, Mass., that became the progenitor of a distinctly American breed of general purpose horse. Noted for its stamina, strength, disposition, and beauty, the Morgan became widely popular in western Massachusetts and Vermont, eventually spreading nationally and internationally. To support the breed, the Morgan Horse Club (later the American Morgan Horse Association) was founded in 1909 and today maintains the breed registry, publishes The Morgan Horse magazine, and offers a wide range of public information and educational services.

The Registry records of the AMHA are a product of concern during the late 19th century for documenting and preserving the integrity of the Morgan breed and a means for breeders to certify pedigrees for their stock. In 1894, Joseph Battell published the first volume of the Morgan Horse and Register containing nearly 1,000 pages of pedigrees for “any meritorious stallion, mare, or gelding tracing in direct male line to Justin Morgan and having at least 1/64 of his blood,” and although standards have been modified since, the registry remains the primary source for documenting the history of the breed. The records in this collection include approved applications for the AMHA registry, including pedigrees and supporting materials.

This collection consists chiefly of published booklets and reports documenting land use and preservation in Massachusetts and across New England. As a member of the Rural Development Committee (RDC), Bob August was involved in improving the effectiveness of public and private rural development efforts. Correspondence, reports, and minutes for other groups, such as the Lower Pioneer Valley Reginal Planning Commission and the Committee on Development of Western Massachusetts, are also part of the collection.

George W. Barton was born in Sudbury, Massachusetts in 1896. After attending Concord High School in Concord, Barton began his studies in horticulture and agriculture at Massachusetts Agricultural College.

The Barton collection includes diaries, scrapbooks, photographs, newspaper clippings, programs, announcements, and his herbarium, and relates primarily to his career at the Massachusetts Agricultural College where he studied horticulture and agriculture from 1914-1918.

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.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

The seat of seven generations of the Blanchard and Means families, Elm Hill Farm was established prior to 1797, when the joiner Amasa Blanchard began acquiring property in Brookfield, Mass., as he looked forward to his marriage. The success he enjoyed in farming was a spark for his family’s prosperity. Amasa’s son Albert Cheney Blanchard left Brookfield in the 1830s to pursue commercial opportunities out west as a partner in the Richmond Trading Co., in Richmond, Ind., and by the time he returned home to take over operations after his father’s death in 1857, Albert had earned a fortune. In the years after the Civil War, Elm Hill grew to 1,300 acres crowned by a mansion built in 1870 that became the center of a compound of eight buildings. Each subsequent generation at Elm Hill has left its own distinctive mark. Albert’s son Charles P. Blanchard, a minister and talented amateur photographer, developed a renowned herd of Morgan horses, and Charles’ daughter Abby and her husband, the minister Oliver W. Means, added a herd of Jersey cattle that included a prize-winning bull, Xenia’s Sultan, imported in 1923, and the cow, You’ll Do Lobelia, better known as the original, real-life Elsie the Cow. Abby’s daughter-in-law, Louise Rich Means, laid acres of spectacular gardens on the estate. Following Louise’s death in 2009, Elm Hill left family ownership.

Consisting of nearly two centuries of papers that accumulated on the Elm Hill estate, the Blanchard-Means collection stretches from a handful of documents from the late eighteenth century relating to landholdings and Amasa ‘s work Blanchard as a joiner, to a blossoming of correspondence, photographs, ephemera, and realia dating from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Well-educated, well-traveled, and well-informed, the Blanchards and Means were prolific letter writers, and their papers provide wonderful insights into the lives of a religiously-devoted family from the New England elite. Among the highlights of the collection are the extensive records from the Richmond Trading Company and from the farm’s livestock and gardening operations (both Morgans and Jerseys) and a remarkable photographic record that document the family, the evolving landscape of Elm Hill, and the town of Brookfield, as well as hundreds of images from C.P. Blanchard’s world tours in the 1890s.

A member of of QTV fraternity, Charles Meade Boardman graduated from the Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1920 with a degree in landscape gardening.

Boardman’s Papers include two of his college yearbooks, a smattering of correspondence from the 1920s relating to landscape gardening, and approximately 30 photographs, apparently taken during or shortly after his time at MAC.