Collecting area: Massachusetts (West)

A peace activist since the 1960s, Margaret Goddard Holt not only demonstrated against war, she led efforts to educate others about the effects of war. A member of the Gray Panthers of the Pioneer Valley and a co-founder along with her husband, Lee Holt, of the Amherst Vigil for a Nuclear Free World, she was sent as a delegate to Rome, Italy to visit Pope John XXIII advocating for a world without war. In addition to her dedication to peace and nuclear disarmament, Holt’s concern for prisoners developed into an involvement in prison-related issues.

The Holt collection of publications, brochures, news clippings, and correspondence reveals her interests and documents her role as a community activist during the 1980s.

Holyoke Co-operative Bank was the third bank organized in Holyoke during the boom years of the 1870s and 80s. It was organized on July 24, 1880 and was the third bank organized there by E. L. Munn. The bank was located at 243 High Street in 1919 and 319 Appleton St. in 1951. In 1971, the bank merged with Community Savings Bank, which was a combination of Chicopee-Falls, Mechanics, and Springfield Five Cent Savings Banks. In 1988, Community merged with Heritage Bank to become the largest bank in Western Massachusetts. Heritage failed in 1992 and was taken over by Fleet Bank.

The collection here, which was acquired from the Holyoke History Room and Archives at the Holyoke Public Library in 2020, consists mostly of cash journals from the late 1920s to the late 1960s. There is also one box of Board of Investment minutes and shareholder lists. The collection originally resided at the Springfield History Library & Archives, who most likely acquired it after the bank had merged with Community Savings Bank in 1971, since the material in the collection ends in 1970.

For more information on the merger see:
Piccin, N. (1992, December 6). Heritage failure brings to close 158 years of WMass banking. Sunday Republican (Springfield, MA), A26.

Inventory

Funded by a grants from the National Library of Medicine and other agencies, the Holyoke Consumer Health Library was a freely-available community resource that provided the general public with access to reliable health information. With the goal of enabling citizens to make informed decisions about their health needs, the Library collaborated with six community partners (the Holyoke Public Library, Holyoke Health Center, Mercy Women’s Health Center, Girls Incorporated of Holyoke, and the Holyoke Council on Aging), training the staff at each site to use the available resources and to conduct outreach to potential clients.

The HCHL collection contains organizational records from an experiment in health information equity in the earliest years of the internet, including planning documents, grant applications, and promotional materials.

Alvah, Walter, and George Howes brothers traveled the Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts in the last two decades of the 19th century, taking photographs of the residents and documenting the customs, fashions, architecture, industry, technology, and economic conditions of rural New England.

The Howes collection includes 200 study prints selected from 20,000 negatives held by the Ashfield Historical Society. An inventory of the study prints is available online.

Partners who manufactured harnesses, saddles, and trunks in Springfield, Massachusetts. Includes the prices paid for harnesses, whips, trunks, valises, and a variety of repair jobs such as splicing, coupling, and repairing of the hoses of the Springfield Fire Department. Also contains method and form of payment (principally cash, but also wood, leather, and leather thread in exchange) and twenty pages of clippings with the names of Lyman’s daughters, Mary and Frances, written on them.

Born in 1792, Ashley Hubbard was raised on a farm in Sunderland, Mass., and spent a life invested in agriculture. Prospering in both work and family, Hubbard owned one hundred acres of land at the height of his operations and had a successful, though relatively small scale run of livestock, including horses, oxen, milk cows, and sheep.

In this slender volume, a combination daybook and memorandum book, Hubbard maintained a careful record of breeding and maintaining his livestock. Succinctly, the memos make note of the dates and places on which he serviced horses, took heifers or cows to bulls, or pastured his stock, and there are occasional notices on sheep.

Born in Torringford, Connecticut in 1806, and educated at the Torringford Academy and Berkshire Medical College (MD 1827), Erasmus Darwin Hudson became well known as a radical reformer. While establishing his medical practice in Bloomfield, Conn., and later in Springfield, Mass., and New York City, Hudson emerged as a force in the antislavery struggle, hewing to the non-resistant line. Touring the northeastern states as a lecturing agent for the Connecticut Anti-Slavery Society and general agent of the American Anti-Slavery Society, he regularly contributed articles to antislavery periodicals and befriended many of the movement’s leaders. In his professional life as an orthopedic surgeon, Hudson earned acclaim for his contributions to the development of modern prosthetics. During the carnage of the Civil War, he introduced remarkable improvements in artificial limb technology and innovations in the treatment of amputations and battle trauma, winning awards for his contributions at international expositions in Paris (1867) and Philadelphia (1876). Hudson died of pneumonia on Dec. 31, 1880.

Spanning five generations of a family of physicians and social reformers, the Hudson Family Papers include particularly significant content for Erasmus Darwin Hudson documenting his activities with the Connecticut and American Anti-Slavery societies. Hudson’s journals and writings are accompanied by a rich run of correspondence with antislavery figures such as Abby Kelley, Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Isaac Hopper, and Samuel May and a unique antislavery campaign map of New York state and surrounding areas (1841). Hudson’s medical career and that of his son Erasmus Darwin Hudson, Jr. (1843-1887), a thoracic physician, is equally well documented through correspondence, medical notes, and handwritten drafts of lectures, with other material ranging from family records and writings of and other family members to genealogies of the Hudson, Shaw, Clarke, Fowler, and Cooke families, and printed material, memorabilia, clipping and photographs.

The proprietor of a general store and postmaster in Wendell Depot, Mass., W. W. Hunt carried on a thriving business for a small Franklin County town during the 1880s and 1890s. Selling a range of dry goods, foodstuffs, and other goods, Hunt catered to residents in Wendell and neighboring communities up and down the Miller River.

An extensive ledger, marked No. 5, the W.W. Hunt account book contains records of sales of a surprising range of dry goods and foodstuffs, snaths and scythes, stamps and envelopes, and other goods useful to a rural community. Although most of Hunt’s customers were individuals seemingly purchasing for personal consumption, he also sold goods to the Farley and Goddard Wood Paper Companies, the Ladies Aid Society, and the town of Wendell, with some accounts marked “Town Farm.”

Actress, producer/director, theater company founder, teacher, activist, avid gardener, and devoted family-member, colleague and friend, Catharine Sargent Huntington was born in Ashfield, Massachusetts on December 29, 1887. She attended Radcliffe College, graduating in 1911, and taught English and Theater at The Westover School in Middlebury, Connecticut from 1911 to approximately 1917. By the end of 1918 she had begun her theater career in earnest, working as a dramatic coach in the Boston area. In January 1919, she became the Radcliffe College representative to the Wellesley unit of the Y.M.C.A., working in France on war reconstruction before returning to Massachusetts to continue her work with the theater, particularly experimental theater, which was to endure for the next 60-plus years through her patronage, and her many performances, productions, and theater companies.

Spanning as it does almost a century from the late 1800s to the late 1900s, this collection captures Catharine Sargent Huntington’s many interests, professional and personal activities and connections, and close family relationships, through more than 2,300 pieces of personal and business correspondence; photographs; photographic negatives; theater programs; scripts; original manuscripts of her poems, speeches, stage notes, and theater production scenarios; newspapers and newspaper clippings; estate and will information; organizational documents of the many organizations she helped direct; personal financial documents; and other printed material and items of ephemera.

Born on December 13, 1887, Gladys Theodora Parrish to wealthy birthright Quaker Alfred Parrish and Katharine Broadwood Jennings. Gladys married Constant Davis Huntington on October 17, 1916, who had been chairman of the London office of G. P. Putnam’s publishing company since 1905. The couple first resided in Hyde Park Gardens in London and then at Amberley House in Sussex. They had one daughter on January 11, 1922, Georgiana Mary Alfreda (Urquhart). Gladys Huntington wrote many plays and novels, including the bestselling book Madame Solario, published anonymously in 1956. Other published titles include; Carfrae’s Comedy (1915, novel), Barton’s Folly (1924, play), and Turgeniev (c. 1930, play). She died at St. George’s Hospital (Westminster) on May 31, 1959, at the age of 71.

The Gladys Parrish Huntington Papers is primarily composed of the correspondence of Gladys Huntington with her mother, Katharine “Kate” Parrish, husband Constant, daughter Alfreda, various friends, relatives, and professional contacts. Additionally, the collection contains a sizable amount of Gladys’ correspondence and traded manuscripts, short stories, poetry, and drafts with fellow authors such as Leo Myers, Nicolo Tucci, Helen Granville-Barker, Viola Mynell, Eric Clough Taylor, Cynthia Asquith, Clifford Bax, and others. Many of her own manuscripts and typed drafts of novels and plays (Madame Solario, Turgeniev, her unfinished final work, The Ladies’ Mile), along with childhood writings, photo albums, datebooks, and diaries spanning her lifetime are contained within the collection.