Collecting area: Religion

Although a Friends Meeting under the care of New York Yearly Meeting gathered in West Hartford from 1805 to 1819, the recent history of Friends in the Connecticut capitol began in 1935, when meetings were held as part of the independent Connecticut Valley Association of Friends. During the general unification of Friends in New England in 1944, the Association formally joined New England Yearly Meeting and Hartford Friends Meeting was officially set off.

The records of Hartford Monthly Meeting are unusually complete and extensive for a meeting from western New England, including nearly unbroken runs of meeting minutes and newsletters from the start of the meeting to the present.

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.

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.

The Howland family of East Greenwich, R.I., figured prominently in New England Quakerism during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and contributed to the state’s public affairs. Brothers Daniel (1754-1834), an approved minister, and Thomas Howland (1764-1845), an educator, were active members of the Society during the tumultuous years between the 1780s and 1840s, caught up in the moral demands for a response to slavery and other social issues and in the divisions wrought by evangelical influences.

Centered largely on the lives of Thomas Howland, his brother Daniel, and Daniel’s son Daniel, the Howland collection is an important record of Quaker life in Rhode Island during trying times. As meeting elders, the Howlands monitored and contributed to the era’s major controversies, and the collection is particularly rich in discussions of the impact of slavery and the passionate struggle between Friends influenced by the evangelically-inclined Joseph John Gurney and the orthodox John Wilbur. Thomas’ complex response to his commitment to the antislavery cause and his fear of disrupting meeting unity is particularly revealing. Also of note is a series of responses from monthly meetings to queries on compliance with Quaker doctrine, obtained during the decade after the American Revolution.

Preparing to translate the Bible from Hebrew into Latin, St. Jerome relocated to Palestine, where in 388, he began, as he wrote, to “set forth a book of Hebrew Names, classing them under their initial letters, and placing the etymology of each at the side.” His Interpretationes nominum Hebraeorum (Interpretations of Hebrew Names) enjoyed wide popularity throughout the Middle Ages and was a regular part of early medieval Gospel books as an exegetical aid.

This incomplete copy of the Interpretation of Hebrew Names begins with “A[h]az apprehendens” and continues through “Tirus angustia v[e]l tribulatio s[i]v[e] plasmatio aut fortitudo.” Internal evidence suggests that it was once part of a larger manuscript, presumably a Bible.

Organized at the New England Peace Pagoda in Leverett, Mass., the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage was a twelve-month walk through the eastern United States, the Caribbean, Brazil, West Africa, and South Africa in 1998-1999, reversing the direction of the Middle Passage symbolically and geographically. A “living prayer of the heart, mind, and body for the sons and daughters of the African Diaspora,” the Pilgrimage was intended by the participants to contribute to a process of healing the wounds inflicted by hundreds of years of slavery and racial oppression. Along the way, participants visited sites associated with the history of slavery, from slaves’ quarters in Virginia to stations on the Underground Railroad and villages that had been raided in Africa, offering prayers for those who had suffered under slavery and commemorating the dignity of those held in bondage and those who resisted.

Chronicling the course of the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage from conception to conclusion, this collection contains a rich textual and visual record of a spiritual approach to addressing the legacy of slavery in the Americas. The collection includes the range of materials collected by participants during the Pilgrimage, including lists of reading materials, information on the sites visited, a handful of mementoes and souvenirs, some correspondence, and notes and photographs taken along the way.

Rufus Jones: A Luminous Life documentary

The 2001 documentary Rufus Jones: A Luminous Life was produced by members of Wellesley Friends Meeting in Massachusetts. Documentary film maker Sharon Mullally recorded interviews with people who knew Jones as a colleague, teacher, or mentor, and with Quaker scholars about placing Jones’s life and legacy into context. Mullally and Barbara Attie served as Producers and Directors, and Frederic G. Corneel served as Executive Producer of the 40-minute documentary. A 28-minute broadcast version aired on PBS in 2002.

Rufus Matthew Jones (1863-1948) was a Quaker leader, mystic, philosopher, and activist, born in Maine. One of the most influential Quakers of the 20th century, Jones was widely published; helped found the American Friends Service Committee; was a world traveler, lecturer, and learner; helped instigate the Quäkerspeisung feeding program after World War I; and worked to heal the divide between two branches of American Quakerism that split in the mid-19^th century. Jones attended the Providence Friends School in Rhode Island and Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and having obtained an MA from Harvard, returned to Haverford as a professor of Psychology and Philosophy.

The Rufus Jones: A Luminous Life Collection consists of the raw, edited, and final versions of the materials used to create the documentary, Rufus Jones: A Luminous Life. It contains videotaped interviews with people who knew Jones as well as Quaker scholars, archival film footage and archival audio of Jones and the places he lived and worked, as well as several copies of the completed documentary. Formats include Betacam SP, DVCAM, and DVD.

The Guru Ram Das Ashram was founded in Montague, Massachusetts, in 1972 by Steve Josephs under the inspiration of Yogi Bhajan. Affiliated with the 3HO (Healthy Happy Holy Organization) and the Sikh Dharma Brotherhood, the ashram provided instruction in Kundalini Yoga and Tantric meditation, and at one point, there were as many as 21 residents of the house. Yogi Bhajan married Josephs and his wife Alice in an arranged marriage in 1972, and the couple (then called Gurushabd Singh and Gurushabd Kaur) left the ashram in 1983.

The Josephs Collection includes 13 digital images depicting the Montague ashram and its residents. The collection includes images of Yogi Bhajan and the Josephs.

Between 1948 and 1951, Chicagoan Ethel A. Killgrove worked as a missionary with the Sudan Interior Mission. A graduate of the St. Paul Bible Institute, Killgrove was based in Aden, Yemen, and worked spreading the gospel and in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. After returning home in 1951, Killgrove studied education at Wheaton College (Bed, 1959) and Roosevelt (MEd., 1963), teaching in elementary schools in Illinois and Chester County, Pa. She died in Lancaster, Pa., in 2002.

The 142 letters that Killgrove wrote home to her parents and brother Tom include fascinating information on life as a missionary in British-controlled Aden and Ethiopia during the transitional years following the end of World War II. From her perspective on the southern rim of the Middle East, Killgore was witness to the of the impact of the formation of the state of Israel and the growing hostility toward colonial domination in the Arab world and Africa. The collection includes an excellent photograph album with 55 images of her time in mission, along with 65 other images.

Independent Order of Scalpers club, ca.1900

One of five villages comprising the western Massachusetts town of Montague, Lake Pleasant was founded by the New England Spiritualist Campmeeting Association in 1870 as a rustic summer resort. Formally incorporated in 1879 under the guidance of Henry A. Buddington and Joseph Beals, Lake Pleasant grew into a community of nearly 200 small cottages, hotels, train station, and a Spiritualist temple on the edge of a serene lake, with a high-season population approaching 2,000. The village began a slow decline in fortunes after a disastrous fire in 1907, but retains its small cottage feel to the present.

The collection includes an assortment of materials relating to the history of Lake Pleasant, including over forty 8×10 glass plate negatives taken by local photographer George L. Scott (ca.1900-1907), other assorted photographs (ca.1885-1905), deeds to village properties, publications, and materials relating to the Lake Pleasant Water Commission. The collection also includes a handful of other images taken by Scott from elsewhere in Franklin County.