The University of Massachusetts Amherst
Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center
CredoResearch digital collections in Credo

Collecting area: Massachusetts (East)

Massachusetts

Massachusetts Agricultural Surveys

1910-1965
25 boxes 18 linear feet
Call no.: MS 261

Studies were conducted by departments of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Massachusetts State College, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus in conjunction with various other college departments and agencies of the state and federal governments. The surveys encompass a number of agricultural study areas such as land use, business and farm management, dairy farm and cost of milk production, tobacco and onion production, and poultry and livestock disease surveys. Supplemental statistical information and aerial photographs are also included.

Subjects

Agriculture--MassachusettsLand use--Massachusetts

Types of material

Aerial photographs
Meyer, Helen C.

Helen C. Meyer Collection

ca.1911-2020 Bulk: ca. 1940-1995
9 boxes 8 linear feet
Call no.: MS 1084

Adolph and Helen Meyer, Mass. Federation Presentee Ball, at Hotel Statler Hilton Boston, 1959 Nov.

A founding member of the Massachusetts Federation of Polish Womens’ Clubs, holding every post in the organization, Helen (Gorecka) Meyer (1908-2003) was incredibly active in the Polish community in Boston, Cambridge, and later Cape Cod. Born in Poland, Helen came to America at the age of three, living with her parents in Lynn and Wilmington, before moving to Cambridge. She married Adolph Meyer in 1928, and both were important business owners (establishments included the White Eagle Restaurant in Cambridge, the Log Cabin Restaurant in Waltham, South Boston Liquors, and Al’s Bottled Liquors) and community members. Honored by the Mass. Federation of Polish Womens’ Clubs in 1963 as their “Woman of the Year,” Helen was also actively involved in the St. Joseph and Sacred Heart Societies of St. Hedwig’s Parish, local and national Polish Roman Catholic Union groups, and the Kosciuszko Foundation Presentation Balls.

Compiled from Helen Meyer’s papers by her nephew Stan Bartosiak, this collection of personal, family, and community papers – including published materials, photographs, slides, correspondence, audiovisual material, news clippings and ephemera – documents the Polish community in the Boston area from the 1930s through the 1990s. Some records concerning the Meyer, Gorecka, and connected families are from earlier. Various Polish clubs and organizations are represented through society badges, souvenir programs, financial records, correspondence, and photographs, with the Kosciuszko Foundation Presentation Balls particularly well documented. Additional audiovisual recordings document Bartosiak and his work an educator.

Gift of Stan Bartosiak, 2019-2020.

Subjects

Boston (Mass.)--Social life and customsPolish Americans--Massachusetts

Types of material

Audiovisual materialsPhotographsSouvenir programs
Meyer, Norman

Norman and Mary-Louise Meyer Papers

1942-1984 Bulk: 1960-1980
3 boxes 4 linear feet
Call no.: MS 778
Depiction of Norman and Louise Meyer
Norman and Louise Meyer

Opposition to fluoridation of public water supplies in Massachusetts swelled in the 1950s, culminating in passage of a law in 1958 mandating that towns that wished to fluoridate would first put the proposal to public referendum. The primary force advocating for this law was the Massachusetts Citizens Rights Association, an organization founded and directed by Norman and Mary-Louise (Shadman) Meyer of Wellesley and which remained the leading anti-fluoridation group in the Boston area for twenty years. Having met and married while students at Harvard (1943) and Wellesley, respectively, the Meyers were tireless supporters of civic activities ranging from educational and environmental causes to public television (through the Citizens for Public Television in Boston), and disability (Norman served as director of the Protestant Guild for the Blind in Watertown), and they were stalwart members of the Wellesley town meeting. Norman Meyer died in Tortola in 1986, with Mary-Louise following in 1999.

The Meyer collection is a rich assemblage of letters and other materials documenting the Massachusetts Citizens Rights Association and the struggle against fluoridation in Wellesley, Newton, and other communities in eastern Massachusetts. Central figures in the movement, the Meyers maintained a wide correspondence with other activists throughout the region and published and disseminated information on the dangers of flourides in the water supply.

Subjects

Antifluoridation movement--MassachusettsDrinking water--Law and legislation--MassachusettsWater--Fluoridation--Law and legislation--Massachusetts
Middleborough (Mass.) country store

Middleborough (Mass.) Country Store Daybook

1825-1827
1 vol. 0.25 linear feet
Call no.: MS 221

Country store in the village of Titicut in Middleborough, Massachusetts, owned by members of either the Clark or Pratt families of the village. Includes goods for sale (groceries, cloth, hardware, and liquor), the method and form of payment (cash, rags, straw, wood, brick, and produce), customers’ names, and ways that families and women earned credit (producing braid or carting goods for the owners).

Subjects

Barter--Massachusetts--Middleborough--19th centuryBraid--MassachusettsFreight and freightage--MassachusettsGeneral stores--Massachusetts--MiddleboroughMiddleborough (Mass.)--Commerce--19th centuryTiticut (Middleborough Mass.)--Commerce--19th century

Types of material

Daybooks
Miller Family

Miller Family Photographs

ca.1880-1980
1 boxes, 1 oversize envelope 1.25 linear feet
Call no.: MS 119

Four generations of the Miller family from Roxbury and Hull, Massachusetts. Includes photographs mounted on twenty-eight sheets of posterboard and 158 slides stored in two slide trays that are comprised of formal and informal family portraits; family businesses; church and business gatherings; a wedding announcement; and postcards from the early 1900s depicting public recreation sites. More recent photographs reveal how the public recreation sites have changed over the years. Robert Parker Miller, a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst and a member of the Miller family, displayed these images in an exhibit entitled “Trying to Live the American Dream” (1986, Wheeler Gallery).

Subjects

Family--United States--HistoryHull (Mass.)--PhotographsMassachusetts--Social life and customs--19th century--PhotographsMassachusetts--Social life and customs--20th century--PhotographsRoxbury (Mass.)--Pictorial works

Contributors

Miller family

Types of material

Photographs
Morton, Cyrus

Cyrus Morton Account Book

1828-1838
1 vol. 0.25 linear feet
Call no.: MS 185 bd

The physician Cyrus Morton, (1797-1873) came from a notable medical family from Plymouth County, Mass. His father Nathaniel and son Thomas were both physicians, and his sister-in-law, Julia A.W. (Drew) Winslow was one of the first female medical doctors in the Commonwealth. Morton’s second wife, Lydia Hall (Drew) Morton, was one of the first teachers at the Perkins School for the Blind, and a member of the first graduating class of the Lexington Normal School. Morton died in Halifax on May 18, 1873.

Morton’s account book contains records of frequent visits to his patients, dispensing medicine, his fees and receipts for payment (often received in kind as pigs, fish, beef, hay, wood, the use of a horse, spinning done by widows or wives, digging a well, carpentry, etc.), and a copy of a prayer in Morton’s hand. Among Morton’s patients were Timothy Wood, Stafford Sturtevant, Jacob Thompson, Capts. Knapp and Cushman, and Cyrus Munroe.

Subjects

Halifax (Mass.)--Social life and customs--19th centuryPhysicians--Massachusetts--Halifax--19th century

Contributors

Morton, Cyrus, 1797-1873

Types of material

Account books
Moss, Bernard

Bernie Moss Collection

ca. 1960-1978
7 boxes 10.5 linear feet
Call no.: PH 062
Depiction of Bernie Moss with two unidentified women in Moss's home, 1962
Bernie Moss with two unidentified women in Moss's home, 1962

A fixture of the Boston Jazz scene, Bernie Moss began taking photographs in the early 1960s, capturing musicians on stage and after hours in the clubs he frequented. Musicians that Moss would meet at Connelly’s, the Savoy Cafe, Lennie’s on the Turnpike, and later the Jazz Workshop, would often come to Moss’s apartment at 11 Queensberry Street where he would give them a place to stay and a meal. His generosity and love of the music and musicians was renown among the top artists of the era; inspiring Dexter Gordon to compose the song “Boston” Bernie Moss in his honor. Moss was born on Christmas day in 1908 and grew up in a Jewish household. He played trombone as a member of the Massachusetts National Guard 241st Coast Artillery Regiment from 1929 to approximately 1939 but spent the remainder of his life looking after the Boston apartment buildings he inherited from his father, known as the Moss Realty Co. According to Nat Hentoff in his memoir Boston Boy, “he took care that none of his tenants ever knew him as a landlord. His brother collected the rent, and the janitor received all the complaints about services. Bernie just showed up to talk about jazz.” Moss died on February 13th, 1988.

The Bernie Moss Photograph Collection primarily consists of Moss’s color photographs taken at Boston Jazz clubs in the 1960s and early 1970s. The photographs include musicians Alan Dawson, Roy Haynes, John Coltrane, Ben Webster, Dizzy Gillespie, Yusef Lateef, Herbie Hancock, Art Blakey, and many more. Moss’s amateur style brings life to some of the most important years of modern Jazz, showing Jazz greats at the height of their powers, often in informal settings. Many photographs were mounted and catalogued as part of a traveling exhibit curated by the Boston Jazz Society.

Subjects

Jazz musicians--Massachusetts--Boston--PhotographsJazz--Massachusetts--Boston--Photographs

Types of material

Color prints (photographs)
Mount Ida College

Mount Ida College Records

ca. 1899-2018
95 141 linear feet
Call no.: MS 1028
Depiction of Three Mount Ida College students with a mare and foal
Three Mount Ida College students with a mare and foal

Mount Ida College was a regional, co-educational college with 1500 students, over forty majors, and a graduate program designed for working adults. The college began in 1899 when George Franklin Jewett and his wife Abigail Fay Jewett purchased a property on a hill in Newton Corner named Mount Ida and began a college prep and finishing school program, the Mount Ida School for Girls, that steadily grew, adding a junior college curriculum in 1917. Under the financial stress of the Great Depression, the school closed in 1935, but was purchased four years later by William F. Carlson and reopened on the newly acquired Robert Gould Shaw II estate in Newton Centre. Mount Ida officially became a college in 1967, began admitting men in 1976, and in the late 1980s it merged with Chamberlayne Junior College and the New England Institute of Funeral Service Education. However, after a period of protracted financial difficulties in the early 2000s, Mount Ida College closed its doors on May 17, 2018, and the land and campus buildings were purchased by the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

The Mount Ida College Records contain the historical records of the college, including photographs, yearbooks, course catalogs, student scrapbooks and memorabilia, publicity materials, the college’s web and social media presence, and artifacts that document Mount Ida’s athletic programs. The records of the New England Institute of Funeral Service were moved with the program itself to Cape Cod Community College.

Subjects

Education, Higher--Massachusetts--NewtonSingle-sex schools--United StatesUniversities and colleges--Massachusetts--NewtonWomen--Education--United States

Contributors

Mount Ida College
Mount Pleasant Cemetery (Taunton, Mass.)

Mount Pleasant Cemetery (Taunton, Mass.) Records

1835-1885
1 box 0.25 linear feet
Call no.: MS 1100
Depiction of Consecration of Mount Pleasant, 1836
Consecration of Mount Pleasant, 1836

Situated on ten acres, Mount Pleasant Cemtery in Taunton, Mass., was designed by Joseph Wilbar and consecrated on July, 1836, just the third rural- or garden-style cemetery in the United States. After a long period of decline in the mid-twentieth century, it was taken over by the city in 1985.

The records of Mount Pleasant Cemetery include an account book with detailed records of expenditures, work performed, and compensation received at the cemetery, and a small selection of ephemera, including two surveys at the time of its establisment.

Acquired from Between the Covers, Oct. 2019

Subjects

Cemeteries--Massachusetts--TauntonWilbar, Joseph

Types of material

Land surveysMapsPhotographs
Murdock, Charles N., 1835-1904

Charles N. Murdock Ledger

1866-1869
1 vol. 0.25 linear feet
Call no.: MS 251

A grocer from Stow, Massachusetts, Charles N. Murdock catered principally to farmers and the country trade.

The accounts of Murdock’s store include mention of products sold (groceries and other items) and payment received, usually in kind (lard, eggs, fruit, butter, potatoes, cigars, beans, cash, and labor).

Subjects

Barter--Massachusetts--Stow--History--19th centuryDerby, ReubenGrocers--Massachusetts--Stow--Economic conditions--19th centuryGrocery trade--Massachusetts--Stow--History--19th centuryStow (Mass.)--Economic conditions--19th centuryStow (Mass.)--Rural conditions--19th centuryTemple, RufusWages-in-kind--Massachusetts--Stow--History--19th century

Contributors

Murdock, Charles N., 1836-

Types of material

Account books