Collecting area: Massachusetts

Born in the coal mining town of Blossburg, Pa., in 1913, Laura Ross (nee Kaplowitz) grew up in poverty as one of seven children of Lithuanian immigrants. In about 1932, Ross married Harry Naddell, a wine merchant, and settled into a comfortable life Brooklyn, N.Y., raising a son and daughter. During the Second World War, however, she became intensely politicized through her work with Russian War Relief, joining the Communist Party and eventually divorcing her les radical husband. Moving to the Boston area, she married Max Ross in 1963, an attorney for the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, and became a noted presence in a wide range of political activities, working for civil rights, the antiwar movement, and for many years, helping to run the Center for Marxist Education in Central Square , Cambridge. Perhaps most notably, between 1974 and 1984, Ross ran for Congress three times on the Communist Party ticket, taking on the powerful incumbent Tip O’Neill and winning almost a quarter of the vote. An activist to the end, Ross died in Cambridge on August 5, 2007.

The Ross papers are the legacy of a highly visible activist, organizer, educator, and member of the Communist Party USA. Heavily concentrated in the period 1967-1990, the collection includes material relating to her affiliation with CPUSA and her work with the Center for Marxist Education in Cambridge, Mass., including information on party membership, platforms, and conventions, minutes from various district committee meetings, material relating to the People’s Daily World, and course information and syllabi. Scattered throughout the collection are materials pertaining to contemporary political issues and elections, particularly the policies associated with Ronald Reagan. Ross was a vocal and persistent opponent of Reaganomics and the nuclear arms race that Reagan accelerated.

Founded as a Unitarian camp in 1924 for high school students and later adding a junior high component in 1947, the Rowe Camp and Conference Center now offers retreat programs in a variety of areas, including health care, exploration of rituals and dreams, astronomy, and workshops for families, couples, men and women.

This collection consists of newspaper clippings and the Rowe Conference Center and camp annual bulletin.

The Roxbury Action Program and Black Panther Party of Boston were both founded in the Roxbury section of Boston following the riots of 1968. RAP pursued community revitalization through Black self-determination and enjoyed success in its housing initiatives and in providing social services ranging from support for Black businesses to Black draft counseling, health and legal referrals, a Black library, and community awareness program.

Although the exact provenance of this small collection is uncertain, the materials appear to have been collected by an individual, possibly a woman, associated with the early days of the Roxbury Action Program and Boston branch of the Black Panther Party. Steeped in Black Power ideology, the collection includes publications of the Black Panther Party, the Nation of Islam, and other organizations, as well as an insightful series of transcripts of Roxbury Action Program meetings held during its first few months of operation.

A teamster from Newburyport, Mass., Samuel H. Rundlett operated a substantial business as a teamster and “truckman” from the 1830s through 1880s.

The three daybooks in this collection document Rundlett’s work for local businesses, including hauling bales of raw cotton and finished cloth, delivering coal, produce, fertilizer, and goods; as well as prices paid for freight handling and forms of payment (cash, credit at a store, and produce from a local farmer). Of note is Rundlett’s delivery of goods to the Newburyport branch of the Sovereigns of Industry, a workingmen’s cooperative association.

Rural Lives was a 13 part audio documentary series that aired on WFCR in the early 1980s and focused on rural communities throughout Western Massachusetts. Sponsored by the UMass Cooperative Extension Service, each episode focused on various aspects of rural life such as local business, jobs, the country fair, farming, the impact of development, etc. Some episodes featured local towns such as Hadley or the lost towns of the Quabbin Reservoir. The show was produced by Pat Lewis Zachary, Robbie Leppzer, and Gail Fuhrer.

Although printing requires a substantial capital investment in equipment before any hope of profitability can be entertained, there have been numerous attempts over the years to set up printing houses in communities with astonishingly small population bases. In even the most remote Massachusetts towns, people like John Metcalf (Wendell), Ezekiel Terry (Palmer), and John and Solomon Howe (Enfield and Greenwich) operated as printers during the nineteenth century, specializing in a quotidian array of broadsides, song sheets, almanacs, toy books, and printed forms, hoping to supplement, or provide, a decent living.

This small, but growing collection consists of materials printed prior to the twentieth century in small Massachusetts towns, defined as towns with populations less than about 2,500. Although few of these houses survived for long, they were important sources for rural communities. Typically simple in typography, design, and binding, even crude, the output of such printers provides an important gauge of the interests and tastes of New England’s smallest and often poorest communities.

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An attorney from Northampton, Mass., Carl Russo was a co-founder of the Florence Poets Society in 2004 with his friend Tom “Twilite” Clark. Born in Watervliet, NY, Russo worked as a social worker for several years after graduating from the University of Buffalo in 1967. Moving to Massachusetts to take a position with the Veterans Administration, he left social work for the law, earning his degree at Western New England College and setting up practice in Northampton. Creative and community-minded, he was a member of the city’s Arts Council and produced shows for Northampton Community Television and co-hosted a radio show on Valley Free Radio, in addition to writing poetry and supporting other local writers. Russo passed away in October 2012 at the age of 63.

The Russo Collection consists of drafts of Russo’s poetry, his poetry notebooks, and scattered ephemera from the Florence Poets Society.

The Sagendorph Woolen Company of East Brookfield, located about sixty miles southwest of Boston in Worcester County, Massachusetts, maintained sixteen looms and specialized in the carding of shoddy and the manufacture of cashmeres, repellents, and suitings. There is some evidence that Sagendorph also spun raw materials for other companies and sold some textile goods on commission.

This daybook records the daily transactions between the Sagendorph Woolen Company and other businesses, local residents, and the company’s labor force. These detailed entries present a dynamic picture of the company’s manufacturing operations ranging from the purchase of raw materials to the sales of finished products.

Named for a Polish saint, Stanislaus Kostka, the Saint Stanislaus Society of Turners Falls was Lodge 549 of the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, the oldest Polish fraternal organization in the United States. Like many ethnic fraternal societies, it served as a buffer between the customs and language that immigrants brought with them and the new traditions and language they were expected to learn upon entering American society. Fraternal societies like St. Stanislaus offered members a place to celebrate their Polish heritage and Roman Catholic faith, while also assisting them with some of the more practical matters of living in a new country, such as securing life insurance and home mortgages.

The two volumes in this collection contain minutes of monthly meetings of the Saint Stanislaus Society. The minutes are recorded in Polish.

One of the small number of Wilburite quarterly meetings, the Salem and Dover Quarter was established in 1851 when the Salem Quarterly Meeting and Dover Quarterly Meeting were merged. It oversaw two Wilburite monthly meetings: Berwick, Maine, and Salem, Massachusetts. When Salem and Dover was laid down in 1881, its remaining members were transferred to Sandwich Monthly Meeting (Wilburite).

This small collection is comprised solely of a complete set of minute from the men’s quarterly meeting.