Collecting area: Massachusetts (East)

A noted South Shore cranberry grower, Kenneth Greenwood Garside was a graduate of Harvard (Chemistry, 1927) and MIT (MS, Gas and Chemical Engineering, 1929). After working for several years in the electric industry, he relocated to Duxbury, Mass., in 1937 to taking over operations of 406 acres of cranberry bog. Over the next twenty-five years as a grower, Garside served as Director of the New England Cranberry Sales Co. and as a board member of the National Cranberry Association, and after dissolving his partnership in the Duxbury Cranberry Company in 1956, he served as acting General Manager of Ocean Spray during the aminotriazole crisis of 1959-1960. Following his retirement from the bogs, Garside taught science in schools in Florida and Maine. He died at Blue Hill, Maine, in 1987.

The Garside Papers contain nearly forty years of letters between the Massachusetts cranberry grower Kenneth G. Garside and his daughter Anne G. Cann. Rich and well-written, these letters reflect Garside’s work and touch on his many interests, from cranberry culture to politics, family, and education. The collection also contains photographs and an assortment of cranberry business-related ephemera.

In the early 1870s, twenty year-old Marcellus H. Goodwin was listed as a music teacher in city directories for Newburyport, Mass., residing at 32 Federal Street in the home of his father, Abel L. Goodwin. In later years, Marcellus worked as an upholsterer, but died died prematurely in 1883.

The Goodwin scrapbook is a typical production of the period in which the pages in a bound volume (in this case containing work records from 1841) are pasted over with newsclippings, mostly from the early 1870s. Goodwin favored poetry, aphorisms, and brief tales — sometimes humorous, but other times including curious facts — which, as far as can be discerned, were clipped from the Boston Courier and Newburyport Herald. Goodwin also pasted in three colorful fashion plates, a small series of illustrations of buildings at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and an original poem, “A short sermon.”

A radical political organizer, Frank “Parky” Grace was a founding member of the New Bedford chapter of the Black Panther Party. Radicalized during his tour of duty in Vietnam in 1967, Grace became involved in the antiwar movement upon his return and organized the local branch of the Black Panthers shortly before the New Bedford Rebellion of 1970. In 1972, he and his brother Ross were charged with the murder, receiving life sentences. Parky Grace contended all along that he had been framed by the police for his political activity and in 1982, Ross admitted that he had been responsible for the murder, backing up his brother’s contention that he was not present at the time. Parky Grace was released from prison in 1984 and lived subsequently in New Bedford and Boston. He died in Boston in October 2001.

The Grace Papers consist of a powerful series of letters written to Gloria Xifaras Clark while Grace was confined in Walpole State Penitentiary. Informed by his revolutionary politics, the letters offer insight into the conditions of imprisonment, his treatment by guards, and his relationships with fellow prisoners.

The self-styled “insane architect” Aurin F. Hill (b. 1853) was a free thinking carpenter and architect in Boston who waged a concerted campaign for his vision of social reform at the turn of the twentieth century. A Spiritualist, social radical, and union man, Hill carried the torch for issues ranging from the nationalization of railroads and corporations to civil rights and women’s rights, and joined in opposition to vaccination, Comstockery and censorship, capital punishment, and lynching. A writing medium, married to the Spiritual evangelist Izetta Sears-Hill, he became President of the National Spiritual Alliance in 1915, a Spiritualist organization based in Lake Pleasant, Mass.
Esoteric, rambling, and often difficult to follow, the Hill papers provide profound insight into the eclectic mind of an important Boston Spiritualist and labor activist at the turn of the twentieth century. Whether written as a diary or scattered notes, a scrapbook, essays, or letters to the editor, Hill’s writings cover a wide range of topics, from spirit influence to labor law, from his confinements for insanity to police strikes, hypnotism, reincarnation, and housing. More than just a reflection of one man’s psychology, the collection reveals much about broader social attitudes toward gender and race, sexuality, urban life, politics, and religion, and the collection is a particularly important resource for the history of the American Spiritualist movement between 1890 and 1920.

A native of Swanzey, N.H., David W. Hill became a brass finisher in the years following his military service during the Civil War, working as a machinist for several concerns in Cambridgeport, Mass., New York City, NY, Newport, R.I., and Haydenville, Mass., through the mid-1880s.

The 13 pocket diaries in the Hill collection contain regular entries describing the weather, Hill’s work as a brass finisher, his travels, the state of his health, and miscellaneous mundane observations on his daily life.

With the approach of the American Bicentennial in 1976, concern grew among historic preservationists in Boston that the city’s old cemeteries and grave markers were showing the damage of many decades of harsh weather and poor maintenance. Led by the Boston Parks and Recreation Department, the Boston Landmarks Commission, and The Bostonian Society, with the collaboration of the Massachusetts Historical Commission, and the Association for Gravestone Studies, among others, the Historic Burying Grounds Initiative was established to develop a plan to inventory over 15,000 markers and assemble a master plan (1985, updated 1998) to care for the cemeteries in the long term. Supported by both public and private funds, the HBGI focused initially on stabilization, preservation, and restoration of historic artifacts, tomb structures, and retaining walls, and their efforts continue today.
The HBGI Collection contains reports and inventories from the first phase of work carried out by the Initiative, focusing on the Dorchester North, Central, Copp’s Hill, Eliot, Granary, Kings Chapel, and Phipps Street Burying Grounds. The collection also contains two editions of the Manual for Preservation prepared by the HBGI.

Everett Hoagland at the PAWA World Poetry Conference in Accra, Ghana, 1999.

Poet Everett Hoagland was born and raised in Philadelphia and attended and graduated from Lincoln University, and later Brown University on a full fellowship for pursuing his Masters of Arts. Hoagland’s poetry came of age during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and the Black Arts Movement, and is often powerfully political. Driven by the history, music, rhythms, and both collective and individual stories from African and African American culture and experiences, Hoagland is one of the most significant African American poets of the late twentieth century. His second chapbook, Black Velvet, was published by the pioneering Broadside Press in 1970, and he has remained widely published and anthologized through to the present day, including his most recent anthology addition, a poem about the Black Lives Matter movement. In addition to his writing, Hoagland has given readings across the nation and globe, and also served as a teacher and mentor to many, primarily in his position as a Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth for over thirty years. He has won numerous awards and honors, including a 2023 American Book Award, the Award for Outstanding Achievement in Poetry from the American Literature Association’s Society for African American Literature and Culture, the Gwendolyn Brooks Award for Fiction, two state-wide poetry competitions for Massachusetts Artists Foundation fellowships, the Distinguished Service to University award from UMass Dartmouth, two MA Local Cultural Council grants for book publications, ForeWord Magazine’s Best Poetry Book award, and the 2015 Langston Hughes Society Award. Hoagland also served, from 1994 to 1998, as the inaugural poet laureate of his adopted hometown of New Bedford, MA.

The Everett Hoagland Papers include manuscript materials and over twenty books documenting Hoagland’s decades-long career as a poet and writer on racial politics and African American experiences. They consist of photographs; performance and presentation programs, reviews, and recordings; interviews and articles; and unpublished and published writings including copies of Hoagland’s column in the New Bedford The Standard Times, a draft of his Master’s thesis, short fiction stories, a scrapbook of unpublished poetry, and poetry in magazines, periodicals, Hoagland’s authored poetry books, and numerous anthologies.

Brothers Charles W. and Joseph F. Hodges moved from Norton, Mass., to Foxboro, and established a successful retail grocery business just prior to the Civil War that became the basis for other mercantile enterprises.

These two account books appear to be customer ledgers of the grocery firm Hodges and Messinger, which was to become the Union Store of Charles W. and Joseph F. Hodges.

Born in Marlboro, Mass., on July 28, 1849, Flora Ann Martin Ellithorp married Frank B. Holden of the adjacent town of Hudson on Nov. 22, 1871. The couple had three children: Marion Carlton, Fred Tracy, and Beatrice Spurr. Flora was just 35 when she died of liver cancer on May 24, 1885.

Holden’s manuscript receipt book includes recipes for a variety of baked goods and desserts, but primarily cakes and custards. Although some of the recipes may be original to her or her family, others are clearly attributed to other writers and some may have been derived from published cookbooks. Among the recipes are some of the most popular dishes of the era, including Parker House rolls, Washington pie, and Graham bread.

Between 1957 and 1968, the Southern Student Project of the American Friends Service Committee brought academically gifted African American high school students from the south to live and study in the north. Working initially through its New York office, the AFSC announced its desire to bring “to promising young people, thwarted by the doctrine of the separation of the races, the fullest development of their gifts” while providing northern whites with “an experience which will increase our understanding and deepen our involvement with the human community.”

A dense and nearly comprehensive record of participation in the Southern Student Project of the American Friends Service Committee, the Holmes collection documents a Quaker response to the civil rights crisis of the late 1950s and 1960s. Holmes carefully filed nearly every relevant piece of paper associated with his participation, from the fliers that introduced him to the project to listings of eligible students, his lengthy letter of inquiry and application, and his numerous exchanges with his support committee, the local high school, and the American Friends Service Committee. Perhaps more important, he kept both sides of an extensive and often lengthy correspondence with the Craig family, describing Deborah’s adjustment and progress in Amherst and the response of the local community. The collection also includes Holmes’ report of the Friends Conference on Race Relations and some correspondence between Holmes and Craig during her time in college, when Holmes attempted to provide counsel and financial support to help Craig continue her education.