Collections: mss

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.

Conflict over doctrinal matters in the Salem Monthly Meeting of Friends was endemic in the first half of the nineteenth century, beginning with the New Light agitation after the War of 1812. With the Separation of 1845, a Wilburite monthly meeting was established there that persisted until 1863. Part of the Salem Quarterly Meeting (Wilburite) from 1845-1851 and Salem and Dover Quarterly (1851-1863), Salem Monthly’s remaining members were officially transferred to Berwick, however many members chose to join the Otisite (or Primitive) Nantucket Monthly Meeting instead. Their worship group lasted until about 1911.

The slender collection for the Salem Monthly Meeting of Friends (Wilburite) include complete minutes for both the men’s and women’s meetings.

Among the oldest Quaker quarterlies in the United States, Salem Quarterly Meeting of Friends began meetings for business in 1705. Over the years, two additional quarterlies have been set off from Salem: Falmouth in 1794 and Dover in 1815. Salem Quarter currently oversees ten monthly meetings, all in Massachusetts, however historically it included meetings in both Maine and New Hampshire.

The records of Salem Quarter are a fairly robust cross section of the activity of one of the oldest quarterlies in New England. The records are relatively richer for the eighteenth century and quite sparse for the mid-twentieth.

In the mid-1970s, the Center for the Study of New Russian Literature in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at UMass Amherst began collecting the self-published and underground literature of the Soviet Union as a means of documenting social and political dissent in the Communist state.

The Samizdat collection includes writings in several genres — chiefly fiction, poetry, drama, and literary, social, and political criticism — in handwritten, photocopied, and printed form, as well as photos, a passport application for Mikhail Baryshnikov, and memorabilia from an American production of one of the plays in the collection.

Iron foundry in Taunton, Massachusetts that produced stoves for individuals and several large local companies. Includes monthly labor payments to workforce of thirteen, as well as monthly accounts of sales, merchandise on hand, and rent. Also documents the company’s worth, annual profits, and the worth of company partners in 1870.

A native of Minneapolis and graduate of the University of Minnesota, Craig Sandgren received his doctorate at the University of Washington (1978) for research conducted at the Friday Harbor Marine Biological Laboratories on the resting cysts of chrysophyte plankton. After a stint on faculty at the University of Texas Arlington, Sandgren landed at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, where he remained for twenty five years, emerging as a leader in the field of phytoplankton ecology. Although widely known for his work on reproductive patterns in chryosphytes and on the fine structure of their various life stages, his work extended to both marine and fresh water environments and included studies of algae and plankton, aquatic ecology, and intertidal life, among other topics. A popular teacher and avid field biologist, he maintained a strong connection to Friday Harbor throughout his career but maintained active projects in lakes across the northern Midwest as well. Sandgren passed away on Dec. 24, 2011, after a battle with pancreatic cancer.

The Sandgren papers includes a small quantity of professional correspondence, grant proposals, offprints, and other miscellaneous materials relating to his career, along with hundreds of electron micrographs of chrysophytes, videotapes, and photographs.

The oldest continuously-organized Quaker meeting in North America, Sandwich Monthly Meeting began holding meetings for worship on 1657 and has been a center for the faith in Cape Cod ever since. Surviving the turbulence of nineteenth century Quakerism in relatively good order, the meeting today oversees three meetinghouses and four centers for worship on the Cape.

The records of Sandwich Monthly Meeting are suitably rich for a meeting of such age, including over three hundred years of minutes of meetings for business. Although the early years of the twentieth century are underdocumented and records of committees are mostly absence, coverage since the 1980s is relatively strong.

One of the first quarterly meetings to be established within the New England Yearly Meeting of Friends, Sandwich has been conducting meetings for business since 1705, with meetings for worship extending back to as early as 1680. Sandwich Quarterly oversees monthly meetings primarily in Bristol County, Mass., Cape Cod, and the Islands. The Wilburite Sandwich Quarterly separated in 1845 and remained apart until the general reunion of Friends in New England in 1945.

Spanning more than three centuries, the records of Sandwich Quarterly Meeting contain a nearly complete run of minutes of meetings, records of Ministers and Elders, and other miscellaneous materials.

Sandwich Quarterly Meeting was one of four original Quarterly Meetings comprising the New England Yearly Meeting (Wilburite), along with Rhode Island, Dover, and Salem. Formed in the split of 1845, Sandwich oversaw Monthly Meetings in Dartmouth, Nantucket, New Bedford, and Westport. It suffered its own split when the Nantucket Monthly Meeting separated to form an “Otisite” meeting between 1863 and 1911. Sandwich absorbed the Wilburite Salem and Dover Quarterly meetings in 1881, and was eventually merged itself into the combined Rhode Island and Sandwich Quarterly Meeting in 1935. After the reunification of New England Friends in 1944-1945, it became the Narragansett Quarterly Meeting.

The records of the Sandwich Quarterly Meeting (Wilburite) include minutes of the Men’s and Women’s meetings from the start of the meeting in 1845 to its merger into the Rhode Island and Sandwich Quarterly Meeting in 1934, along with two volumes of records of Ministers and Elders. One volume containing minutes of the Men’s Meeting (1845-1863) paired with the records of Ministers and elders (1845-1857) is part of the collections of the Nantucket Historical Association.

A life-long resident of Illinois, Myrtle Sapora was born on February 14, 1916, the daughter of William and Jeanie Kenney. After marrying Allen I. Sapora, a member of the teaching staff in leisure studies at the University of Illinois, in 1948, and settling in Champaign-Urbana, Myrtle became an ardent activist in the antifluoridation movement, working a both the state and national levels. She was a member of the Illinois Pure Water Committee for many years and died on August 3, 1995 at the of 79.

The depth of Sapora’s commitment to the antifluoridation movement is reflected in this rich collection, which includes research materials, newsletters and ephemera from antifluoridation groups, informational handouts, news clippings, and a few audiotapes of meetings. Concentrated in the later 1970s through early 1990s, Sapora’s correspondence is particularly revealing, with interesting exchanges with politicians, letters to the editor, and other lobbying targets, as well as a number of important figures in the movement, including Albert Burgsthaler, Ellie Rudolph, and John Yiamouyanis.