The Special Commission on the Reorganization of Higher Education was established to investigate and review Massachusetts laws concerning elementary and secondary education. In order to determine the existence and extent of unequal educational opportunity services, the commission reviewed the state’s school systems as well as the educational laws, programs, and school systems of other states.

Consists of records of the Special Commission on the Reorganization of Higher Education Records, including materials relating to the Boston Community Reorganization, a federal finance proposal, lottery distribution, and school finance reform.

The Special Commission on the Reorganization of Higher Education was established to investigate and review Massachusetts laws concerning elementary and secondary education. In order to determine the existence and extent of unequal educational opportunity services, the commission reviewed the state’s school systems as well as the educational laws, programs, and school systems of other states.

Consists of records of the Special Commission on the Reorganization of Higher Education Records, including materials relating to the Boston Community Reorganization, a federal finance proposal, lottery distribution, and school finance reform.

Author, English professor at the University of Massachusetts, and alumnus of the same school. Includes correspondence, typescript manuscripts, poems, travel journals, and class materials including syllabi and lecture notes.

The New Salem Academy was founded February 25, 1795, “for the purposes of promoting piety, religion, and morality, and for instruction of youth in such languages and in such of the liberal arts and sciences as the trustees shall direct.”

The collection consists of the student exercise book of Ernest Howe Vaughan, later a teacher in Greenwich and an attorney in Worcester, along with an issue of the alumni magazine, The Reunion Banner.

Nearly two thirds of this town treasurer’s account book from Bridgewater (later Brockton), Massachusetts, is devoted to a monthly accounting of money paid to the families of Civil War volunteers, beginning in April 1861 and carrying through 1881, made mostly by town treasurer R.P. Kingman; accounts of school district expenses and revenues for the years 1858 to 1869, for the 14 school districts in North Bridgewater (teacher salaries, supplies, and accounts with textbook publishers such as Harper & Bros. and Heath & Co.); and listings of salaries paid town officers, including the Superintendent of Streets, Overseer of the Poor, city clerk, city treasurer, and the Police Department.

The North Center School District in Hatfield, Massachusetts, was established in 1812, when the town divided into three school districts.

The collection consists of seventeen handwritten documents including financial records, a report and recipes relating to the North Center School District in Hatfield, Massachusetts, representing the period from 1818 to 1833. While not a comprehensive collection, the items nonetheless offer insight into education at the turn of the century, especially the sorts of expenses accrued in maintaining a small town schoolhouse.

A resident of New Ipswich, N.H., Clark Obear (1881-1888) was an ardent supporter of the temperance and antislavery movements, and was deeply involved in the affairs of his church and community. Obear and his wife Lydia Ann Swasey (b.1820), whom he married June 8, 1848, were long-time teachers in Hillsborough County, but he worked at various points as a farmer and in insurance, and served in public office as a deputy sheriff, a Lieutenant Colonel in the militia, a fence viewer and pound keeper, and for several years he was superintendent of schools. Obear and his wife had two children, Annabel Clark (b. June 25, 1852, later wife of George Conant) and Francis A. (b. July 7, 1857).

The Obear collection consists of four diaries dated 1845-1851 (252p.), 1871-1877 (ca.280p.), 1878-1883 (280p.), and 1884-1888 (203p.). Although most of the entries are brief, they form a continuous coverage of many years and offer details that provide a real sense of the rhythms of life in a small village in south central New Hampshire. Of particular note, Obear carefully notes the various lectures he attends in town and the organizations of which he is part, including middle class reform movements like temperance and antislavery.

Sid Stockwell

A member of the Massachusetts Agricultural College class of 1919, Ervin Sidney Stockwell, Jr. (1898-1983) was born in Winthrop, Mass., to Grace Cobb and E. Sidney Cobb, Sr., a successful business man and owner of a wholesale dairy. Entering MAC as a freshman in 1915, Stockwell, Jr., studied agricultural economics and during his time in Amherst, took part in the college debate team, winning his class award for oratory, and dramatics with the Roister Doisters. He performed military service in 1918 at Plattsburgh, N.Y., and Camp Lee, Va. Stockwell went on to found a successful custom-house brokerage in Boston, E. Sidney Import Export, and was followed at his alma mater by his son and great-grandson.

The extensive correspondence between Sidney Stockwell and his mother, going in both directions, provides a remarkably in-depth perspective on a typical undergraduate’s life at Massachusetts Agricultural College during the time of the First World War, a period when MAC was considered an innovator in popular education. The letters touch on the typical issues of academic life and social activity, Stockwell’s hopes for the future, his military service and the war. Following graduation, Stockwell undertook an adventurous two year trip in which he worked his way westward across the country, traveling by rail and foot through the Dakotas, Wyoming and Montana, Washington state and California, taking odd jobs to earn his keep and writing home regularly to describe his journey. An oral history with Stockwell is available in the University Archives as part of the Class of 1919 project.

Ruth Totman and Jean Lewis, ca.1935

Trained as a teacher of physical education at the Sargent School in Boston, Ruth J. Totman enjoyed a career at state normal schools and teachers colleges in New York and Pennsylvania before joining the faculty at Massachusetts State College in 1943, building the program in women’s physical education almost from scratch and culminating in 1958 with the opening of a new Women’s Physical Education Building, which was one of the largest and finest of its kind in the nation. Totman retired at the mandatory age of 70 in 1964, and twenty years later, the women’s PE building was rededicated in her honor. Totman died in November 1989, three days after her 95th birthday.

The Totman Papers are composed mostly of personal materials pertaining to her residence in Amherst, correspondence, and Totman family materials. The sparse material in this collection relating to Totman’s professional career touches lightly on her retirement in 1964 and the dedication of the Ruth J. Totman Physical Education Building at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Supplementing the documents is a sizeable quantity of photographs and 8mm films, with the former spanning nearly her entire 95 years. The 8mm films, though fragile, provide an interesting, though soundless view into Totman’s activities from the 1940s through the 1960s, including a cross-country trip with Gertrude “Jean” Lewis, women’s Physical Education events at the New Jersey College for Women, and trips to Japan to visit her nephew, Conrad Totman..

Responsibility for academic affairs at Massachusetts Agricultural College initially fell to the college President, however in 1906, the Board of Trustees created the office of Dean of the College to oversee issues relating to student attendance, scholarship standing, the enforcement of faculty rules, and general student discipline. In 1953, the office of Provost was created to provide leadership in all areas of academic activity, and in 1970, the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost became the chief academic officer of the campus, responsible for advising the Chancellor on the whole of the University’s academic program.

The bulk of the record group consists of the files of individual Deans of the College, Provosts, and Vice Chancellors for Academic Affairs, as well as the University Year for Action (1971-1976). Also included are the records of the interim and special appointees that report to the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs and Provost, and the special programs, committees, institutes, and centers that were initiated by or developed from those offices.