The University of Massachusetts Amherst
Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center
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Collecting area: Photographs

Thomson, J. (John), 1837-1921

John Thomson Photograph Collection

1863
8 items 0.2 linear feet
Call no.: PH 002
Depiction of Caledonia Sugar Mill
Caledonia Sugar Mill

The Scotsman John Thomson is considered one of the fathers of social documentary photography and a pioneer in the photography of southeast Asia. Between 1861 and 1872, he traveled extensively in Asia, documenting the scenery and people of modern day Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, and China.

The collection includes eight albumen prints from wet-plate collodion negatives taken early in Thomson’s photographic career. The images of Penang, Malaysia, are all signed by John Thomson, with five dated November 1863. Subjects include Malay people, a native infantry regiment, sugar mill, temple, and Thomson’s widely reproduced image of tree ferns.

Subjects

George Town (Pinang)--PhotographsKedah--PhotographsMalaysia--Photographs

Contributors

Thomson, J. (John), 1837-1921

Types of material

Albumen printsPhotographs
Thurber, George, 1821-1890

Thurber-Woolson Botanical Manuscripts Collection

1803-1918
4 boxes 2.5 linear feet
Call no.: MS 065 bd

Largely self-educated, George Thurber (1821-1890) began a career as a pharmacist before signing on as botanist to the U.S. Boundary Commission from 1850-1854. After completing a masters degree at Brown University, he emerged as a important horticultural writer and editor of American Agriculturist from 1863 to 1885.

Letters, photographs, engravings, and clippings compiled primarily by George Thurber and bequeathed to George Clark Woolson (MAC class of 1871) who added to it and donated it as a memorial to his class, the first to graduate from the College. The collection includes 993 letters written by 336 correspondents, and 35 photographs and engravings, primarily botanists and other scientists, including Asa Gray, Louis Agassiz, John Torrey, Frederick Law Olmsted, John James Audubon, Henry Ward Beecher, Jefferson Davis, Edward Payson Roe, Donald G. Mitchell, and George Brown Goode.

Subjects

Botany--HistoryHorticulture--History

Contributors

Thurber, George, 1821-1890Woolson, George Clark

Types of material

Photographs
Tibensky, James

James Tibensky Collection

1973-1974
3 boxes 1.5 linear feet
Call no.: MS 1050
Depiction of Chapinville Cemetery, Salisbury, Conn., April 25, 1974
Chapinville Cemetery, Salisbury, Conn., April 25, 1974

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.

Gift of James Tibensky, Oct. 2018

Subjects

Sepulchral monuments--Connecticut

Types of material

Photographs
Towle, Gifford H.

Gifford H. and Marjorie B. Towle Papers

1970-1987 Bulk: 1945-1980
24 boxes 33 linear feet
Call no.: MS 881
Depiction of Gifford and Marjorie Towle, 1957
Gifford and Marjorie Towle, 1957

As a student at Mount Hermon School in the late 1920s, Gifford Hoag Towle met Marjorie Ripley Blossom, a young woman at the Northfield School for Girls. When Giff went on to the Massachusetts Agricultural College (BS 1932) and Marjorie to a midwestern Bible College for a year (before being called home due to a family crisis), they remained connected and after Giff’s graduation in 1932, they married. By the time that Giff graduated from Hartford Seminary, he had left his Quaker upbringing to enter the Congregationalist ministry, and he and Marjorie filled three pulpits near Pelham, Mass. In 1939, however, they were called by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions to serve as missionaries in the American Marathi Mission in Maharashtra State, central India. Following two years of intensive study of the Marathi language in Ahmednagar, they settled in Vadala, a rural village on the semi-arid plains, where they worked for thirty-four years, counting furloughs. In 1946 on furlough in the U.S., Giff earned a master’s degree in agricultural engineering from Cornell while pastoring a small church in the suburbs of Ithaca. In his agricultural work in India, Giff used the mission farm to demonstrate crop diversity and farm animal improvement; created co-operatives to enable poor farmers to use appropriate modern tools and machinery for pennies; taught good irrigation and soil conservation; and later built a Mechanical Unit and trained local Indians as mechanics to repair machinery and drill wells. Giff also invented a pump for which he never filed a patent, wanting instead to make it as widely available as possible. He built networks with relatives, churches, and non-profits to fund these efforts and get supplies.

The Towle Collection contains a wealth of information for research in three distinct areas: missions and religious matters; agriculture in “developing” countries; and the cultural and socio-economic context of social change in rural India. The Towles’ voluminous correspondence and reports offer a particularly rich view into mission life in India, including American participation through churches, relations between Hindus and Christians or between Christians, and the viability of these efforts. Marjorie’s letters are particularly vivid, adding significantly to our understanding of mission lives and experiences. The collection is equally rich in revealing the impact of the Towles’ agricultural work and for study of the efficacy of government agencies and non-profits seeking to understand cross-cultural issues.

Gift of Jean Reed, 2015

Subjects

Agriculture--IndiaIndia--Description and travelMaharasthra (India)--Economic conditionsMissionaries--India

Contributors

Towle, Marjorie Blossom, 1907-1994

Types of material

Photographs
Trent family

Trent Family Papers

1850-1996
3 boxes 1.5 linear feet
Call no.: MS 373

Five generations of an African-American family that achieved commercial success and wealth through the restaurant and catering business as well as extensive real estate investments at the turn of the 20th century in New York City, Brooklyn, and Sea Cliff, Long Island, New York. Includes letters, public and church records, news clippings, ephemera, a videotape, and 87 photographs.

Subjects

African American capitalists and financiers--New York (State)--BiographyAfrican American families--New York (State)--HistoryAfrican Americans--Genealogy--Handbooks, manuals, etcAfrican Americans--New York (State)--BiographyAfrican Americans--New York (State)--Social life and customsBurleigh, H. T. (Harry Thacker), 1866-1949Capitalists and financiers--New York (State)--BiographyFuller, Meta Warrick, 1877-1968Landowners--New York (State)--BiographyRestauranteurs--New York (State)--BiographySmith familySmith, William H. (William Henry), 1836-1923Trent family

Types of material

Baptismal certificatesDeedsGenealogiesPhotographsVital statistics recordsWills
University of Massachusetts Amherst

University of Massachusetts Amherst Records

1863-2011
ca.7,500 linear feet
Call no.: RG 001-190
Depiction of MAC postcard
MAC postcard

Established in western Massachusetts in 1863 as the Massachusetts Agricultural College, the University of Massachusetts Amherst is a national research university and the flagship campus of the state’s five-campus University system. UMass, one of the founding members of the Five College Consortium established in 1965, offers reciprocal student access among the University and Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges. The University currently enrolls approximately 24,000 undergraduate and graduate students, and offers 87 bachelors degree programs, 6 associates, 73 masters, and 51 doctoral programs in 10 schools and colleges.

The Archives of the University of Massachusetts Amherst document the institutional memory of the campus and serve as the largest and most comprehensive source of information on the history and cultural heritage of the University. As the collective memory of the university, the repository contains official records and items having historical value such as records of governance, policy, operation of administrative offices, departments, research, programs, and publications. Unpublished materials in the Archives include photographs, films, memorabilia, administrative records of major university offices, and the papers of presidents, trustees, administrative officers, and members of the faculty.

Please note that collections for individual faculty members, administrators, and students, as well as selected groups and administrative units at the University are listed separately in UMarmot. The Concordance to the Archives is an alphabetical listing of University departments, centers, groups, and other units, providing call numbers, when appropriate. Researchers may also wish to consult the online guide to UMass Amherst collections. Our digital repository, Credo includes a growing number of oral histories and digitized collections of papers and organizational records. YouMass is a wiki devoted to the history of the University and its predecessors, the Massachusetts Agricultural College and Massachusetts State College.

Subjects

Massachusetts Agricultural CollegeMassachusetts Agricultural College--FacultyMassachusetts Agricultural College--StudentsMassachusetts State CollegeMassachusetts State College--FacultyMassachusetts State College--StudentsUniversity of Massachusetts AmherstUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst--FacultyUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst--Students

Types of material

Photographs
University of Massachusetts Amherst. Alumni

University of Massachusetts Amherst. Alumni

1871-2007
146.25 linear feet
Call no.: RG 050

This record group contains materials that document alumni and alumni activities throughout the history of the Amherst campus. Included are annual reports, constitutions and by-laws, board and committee minutes, cash books and financial statements, correspondence, alumni directories, class lists, obituaries, biographies, bibliographies of alumni writings, photographs, alumni periodicals, brochures from alumni events, newsclippings, handbooks and manuals, reunion and dinner programs, scrapbooks, memorabilia and artifacts.

Subjects

University of Massachusetts Amherst--Alumni

Contributors

University of Massachusetts Amherst. Alumni Office

Types of material

PhotographsScrapobooks
University of Massachusetts Amherst. Photographs

University of Massachusetts Amherst. Photographs

ca.1867-2007
Call no.: RG 100-176

The archives of UMass Amherst contain tens of thousands of formal and informal photographic images of the campus community from its founding in the 1860s to the present. The collections have been organized into over twenty discrete series. Digitized version of approximately 13,000 of images are available online.

Subjects

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Types of material

Photographs
Vietnamese Students Association (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

Vietnamese Students Association New Year's Day Celebration Collection

1985
1 envelope 0.1 linear feet
Call no.: MS 106 bd

The Vietnamese Students Association hosted a Vietnamese New Year celebration at the Campus Center of the University of Massachusetts Amherst on February 20, 1985. Collection contains twelve photographs and a program listing sponsors, speakers, performers, the sequence of events, descriptions of ancestor worship, the legend of the earth and the sky cakes, the menu, and some song lyrics.

Gift of Lucy Nguyen, 1985

Subjects

Amherst (Mass.)--Social life and customsUniversity of Massachusetts Amherst--Students--Social life and customsVietnamese New Year--Massachusetts--PhotographsVietnamese Students Association (University of Massachusetts at Amherst)Vietnamese students--Massachusetts--FolkloreVietnamese students--Massachusetts--Social life and customs

Types of material

PhotographsSongs
Walker, Mary Morris

Mary Morris Walker Papers

1868-2003 Bulk: 1944-2003
8 boxes 12 linear feet
Call no.: MS 775

An avid botanist and naturalist, Mary (Morris) Walker was born in Stamford, Conn., on April 1, 1923, the daughter of renowed surgeon and naturalist Robert Tuttle Morris. After graduating from Vassar in 1944, Morris took her MA in Geology at the University of Michigan, marrying a fellow geologist Eugene H. Walker in 1947. Moving to Kentucky, Iowa, and Idaho before settling in Concord, Mass., in 1968, the Walkers raised three children. In Concord, Walker studied for an MA in library science at Simmons College (1971), but her work in botany and natural history became increasingly important. As a plant collector, writer, and educator, Walker traveled widely in the United States and the Caribbean, and she became a leader in organizations including the New England Wild Flower Society, the New England Botanical Club, the Thoreau Society, and the Appalachian Mountain Club. Walker died in Concord on Oct. 2, 2012.

The Walker Papers are a rich assemblage of materials documenting the life of an energetic amateur botanist. Beginning during her time as a student at Vassar, the collection offers insight into Walker’s growing interest in the natural sciences, her botanizing, and her commitments to several organizations devoted to natural history. The collection also includes a small number of letters and photographs of Walker’s father, Robert T. Morris.

Gift of Cynthia Gray and Arthur Walker, Apr. 2013

Subjects

BotanizersBotany--Study and teachingNew England Botanical ClubNew England Wild Flower SocietyThoreau Society