Owners of a butcher shop in Foxborough, Massachusetts. Includes customer names, prices of meat, form of payment (principally cash), and Belcher family information.
A weekly community newspaper from a small town in western Massachusetts, the Belchertown Sentinel began publication in 1915. Featuring a mix of news and features focusing on Belchertown and adjoining communities of Amherst and Granby, the Sentinel was edited and published by its founder, Lewis H. Blackmer, for fifty years. Since changing hands twice in the period 1965-1975, the Sentinel has been published by Turley Publications. In 2013, with the centennial of the paper drawing near, the publisher and the Belchertown Historical Society cooperated on a project to digitize 88 years of the Sentinel funded by a grant from the Community Preservation Committee.
The Sentinel collection consists of digital copies only of the newspaper from its founding through 2003.
The Belchertown State School Friends Association was established in 1954 to promote improved conditions at Belchertown State School and better treatment of “retarded” or “mentally challenged” citizens in Massachusetts more generally. The School was formally opened in 1922 as an institution to train children with developmental disabilities and prepare them for integration into society. By the 1960s, conditions at the school had deteriorated to a degree detrimental to the residents, precipitating a string of lawsuits, beginning with Ricci v. Greenblatt in 1972, eventually leading to closure of the facility in 1992.
The bulk of the School’s Friends Association collection consists of records of court appearances, briefs, the consent decree, and related materials, along with reports and correspondence relating to Massachusetts v. Russell W. Daniels, Ricci v. Greenblatt (later Ricci v. Okin), and other cases. Accompanying the legal files are clippings and photocopied newspaper articles; speeches; newsletters; draft of agreements; and scrapbooks.
The Massachusetts State Archives has a small amount of records related to Belchertown State School. They are housed under the Health and Human Services division in the archives.
The Belfast (Maine) Area Friends Meeting began as an independent worship group under the care of Vassalboro Quarterly Meeting in 1982. Two years after being set off as a monthly meeting in 1988, it changed its name slightly to the current Belfast Area Friends Meeting.
The Belfast Area Friends Meetings is sparsely documented, with only three state of the society reports from the early 1990s and an address listing of members.
A screenwriter and visual artist, Tom Benedek majored in film as an undergraduate at UMass Amherst, earning the distinction of becoming the first graduate of the Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration program in 1971. From early in his college career, Benedek worked as a photographer the newspaper, the Collegian, while studying with faculty such as Jerome Liebling (at Hampshire College) and Jerrold Maddox (at Amherst), and he spent his junior year in Paris studying at the Ecole du Louvre and l’Institut de Formation Cinematographique. In his career in Hollywood, he has written screenplays for the movies Cocoon, Zeus and Roxanne, and The Adventures of Pinocchio and worked with Robert Zemeckis, Lawrence Kasdan, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Richard Rush, and Harold Ramis, among many others. He is a member of the Writers Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and teaches screenwriting at the University of Southern California and the University of Michigan.
The hundreds of images in the Benedek Collection document the development of a talented photographer. While some of the images stem from his work for the Collegian, most were taken on his own around campus and beyond, including trips to Boston and New Orleans, and his year studying abroad in Paris following shortly after the events of 1968. The collection consists entirely of 35mm black and white negatives and color slides.
Peter Benes might be called the father of the Association for Gravestone Studies (AGS). In 1976, he organized a meeting in Dublin, New Hampshire, of people interested in colonial gravestones, naming the group the Dublin Seminar. Following a committee meeting in December 1976, the group met again in the summer 1977 to organize as the AGS. Benes served as Treasurer in 1977 and Archives Officer in 1978. He received the Forbes Award of the AGS in 1979 for his role in founding the organization and in recognition of the contributions made to gravestone studies by his first book, The Masks of Orthodoxy: Folk Gravestone Carving in Plymouth County, Massachusetts, 1689-1805 (1977). He is currently (2009) Director of the Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife at Boston University.
The Benes Collection contains 2,826 black and white photographic prints documenting a majority of the eighteenth century grave markers in southeastern Massachusetts, taken for his book The Masks of Orthodoxy. The images were taken in Plymouth and surrounding counties.
Labor historian John W. Bennett has researched the history of the labor movement since his days as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts (Class of 1952). A born collector, he began accumulating memorabilia associated with unions, drawn to their potential as a visual record of labor iconography and self-representation.
Extending back to the 1880s, the Bennett Collection includes examples from around the country, but with a particularly strong representation of New England unions between the mid-1930s and mid-1970s.
Beginning as an independent worship group in Arlington, Vermont, in 1949, the Bennington Monthly Meeting settled in Bennington in about 1959. It has been affiliated with the Northwest Quarterly Meeting in 1962, and two monthly meetings have been set off from it since: Putney (1969) and Wilderness (1978). Bennington has also cared for worship groups in Pawlet (1988-1989), Putney (1964-1968), and Williamstown, Mass. (1989-1992), as well as the Wilderness Preparative Meeting in Plymouth, Vt. (1977-1978).
Although lacking the earliest years of the meeting minutes, the records of the Bennington Friends Meeting contain consistent coverage between 1970 and 2004, along with a handful of state of the society reports and a disbound scrapbook that includes some details on the early years.
An avid birder and eminent ornithologist, Arthur Cleveland Bent was born in Taunton, Massachusetts, on November 25, 1866. After receiving his A.B. from Harvard in 1889, bent was employed as an agent for the Safety Pocket Company and from 1900 to 1914, he was General Manager of Mason Machine Works. His passion, however, was birds. An associate in Ornithology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, Bent became a collaborator at the Smithsonian and president (1935-1937) of the American Ornithologists’ Union. The culmination of his research was the massive, 26 volume Life Histories of North American Birds (1919-1968).
The Bent collection is a glimpse into the birding life of a remarkable amateur ornithologist. It contains the field notebooks of his collaborator, Owen Durfee (1880-1909), his own journals (1887-1942), photographs and negatives (1896-1930), correspondence concerning the photographs (1925-1946), and mimeographed and printed material. Bent’s records cover nest observations, egg measurements, bird sightings, and notes on specimens provided to organizations such as the Massachusetts Audubon Society, the Bristol County Agricultural School, and the United States National Museum.
Bernard B. Berger served as the Director of the Water Resources Research Center from 1966 to 1978 and was a world-renowned expert on water supply management and the effects of pollution. Berger was born in 1912 in New York City, earned a B.S. in 1935 from MIT and an M.S. in Sanitary Engineering in 1948 from Harvard. Before coming to the University of Massachusetts, Berger worked as a civil engineer for twenty-five years in the United States Public Health Service, where he researched and advocated policy on pollution control. While at the University, Berger served as the United States’ water resources specialist in the executive office of Science and Technology and worked as a consultant to Israel in 1972 on that country’s creation of the Israel Environmental Service, now the Department of the Environment and as a consultant to South Africa on a similar project in 1975. The year after retiring from the University in 1978, Berger earned an honorary doctorate of science. He died on December 8, 2000.
The Bernard B. Berger Papers includes correspondence and reports from his consultancy work with Israel and South Africa. The collection also includes several folders of Berger’s published and unpublished writings, personal and professional correspondence and documents relating to his receipt of his honorary degree and other awards and recognitions.
