The University of Massachusetts Amherst
Robert S. Cox Special Collections & University Archives Research Center
CredoResearch digital collections in Credo

Whitaker, Elizabeth W.

(Not fully processed)

Elizabeth W. Whitaker Collection

1802-1989
1 box 0.5 linear feet
Call no.: MS 682
Depiction of Gravestone, No. Guilford, Conn.
Gravestone, No. Guilford, Conn.

A physical education teacher from Rome, New York, Elizabeth W. Whitaker became an avid recorder of gravestone inscriptions in the 1940s. She died in 1992 at the age of 93.

The core of the Whitaker collection consists of 25 receipts and accounts relating to the early marble industry in western Massachusetts. The key figures in this series are Rufus Willson and his father-in-law, John Burghardt, who quarried stone near West Stockbridge, Mass., conveying it to Hudson, N.Y. The collection also includes a selection of photographs and postcards of gravestones, mostly in New England and New York; two folders of typed transcriptions and newspaper clippings of epitaphs from the same region, ranging in date from the early colonial period to the mid-19th century; and a price list of Barre granite from Wetmore and Morse Granite Co., 1934.

Subjects

Marble industry and trade--MassachusettsSepulchral monuments--Massachusetts

Contributors

Association for Gravestone StudiesBurghardt, JohnWhitaker, Elizabeth WWillson, Rufus

Types of material

PhotographsReceipts (Financial records)