In 1969, Harbhajan Singh Khalsa introduced Kundalini Yoga to the United States. A charismatic former public servant from India, Yogi Bhajan, as he was known, taught the yoga of the Sikh gurus, centering his practice on self-discipline and self-awareness, but emphasizing worldly engagement, rather than ascetic withdrawal. Through his 3HO (Healthy, Happy, Holy) organization, Yogi Bhajan rapidly built an avid following among the so-called hippies, offering a holistic spiritual alternative to the prevalent drug culture. In the five years that followed the Yogi’s arrival in the States, more than one hundred yoga ashrams were established throughout North America and Europe, to spread his teachings.

Established by Stephen Josephs (Gurushabd Singh) in 1972, the Guru Ram Das Ashram quickly became a regional center for instruction in Kundalini Yoga and Tantric meditation. After attending a course in Tantric Yoga in Paeonia, Colorado, Josephs acquired a house for his new ashram on Taylor Hill Road in rural Montague, Massachusetts, and almost immediately began to attract students, many of whom lived communally on site. Their day, Josephs recalls, began at 3.30 AM, with two and a half hours of rigorous yogic practice and music, followed by meditation and the work of the day. At its peak, the ashram had as many as twenty one residents, whom the ashram was able to feed for a mere dollar a day per person.

Josephs met his wife Alice (Gurushabd Kaur) in 1972, while the two were attending a tantric yoga course in Washington, D.C. During that course, Yogi Bhajan singled the couple out and called them onto the stage, saying he saw an arc of white light between them. After asking the audience if he had permission to engage them in marriage, and finding enthusiastic approval, the Yogi married the Josephs four days later. Although they left the ashram in 1983, their marriage has endured.

Josephs completed his doctorate in education At UMass Amherst in 1974 for a study of the Guru Ram Das Ashram, Education of the spirit; the dynamics underlying personal and spiritual growth into spiritual commune.

The thirteen digital images in the Stephen Josephs Collection document the early years of the Guru Ram Das Ashram, and its founders Stephen and Alice Josephs (Gurushabd Singh and Gurushabd Kaur). The collection includes images of Yogi Bhajan, the Josephs, and their infant son Sean (Sat Narayan Singh).

Shortly after their marriage in Longmeadow, Mass., on May 2, 1907, Charlotte (nee Allen) and Edwin St. John Ward set off together as missionaries with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. For seven years on the cusp of World War I, the couple lived in the Ottoman Empire, raising a family in a succession of cities in present day Turkey and Lebanon.

Given the scope of the Wards’ activities, the term “missionaries” might be somewhat misleading. A medical doctor, Edwin (b. 1880) worked in ABCFM hospitals and universities, and he eventually left the Board to focus on medicine. While in the Levant, Edwin lectured at Aintab College (Turkey) and Syrian Protestant College (Beirut) — the latter of which became the American University in 1920. While at Aintab, he and his wife struck up a friendship with the college president, Fred D. Shepard, who gained a measure of fame when his biography, Shepard of Aintab, appeared in 1920. The book, by Alice Shepard Riggs, was intended to give Sunday School students a positive role model, but since its republication in 2001, it has become a resource for those interested in exploring missionary life in the Middle East during the 20th century.

In Beirut, the Wards became acquainted with Howard Bliss, the second president of Syrian Protestant College, and the son of the college’s founder, Daniel Bliss. Established in 1866, Syrian Protestant College became an important intellectual hub and center of newspapers and scientific publication, and it played a prominent role in bringing Beirut into the 19th century Arab Renaissance, al-Nahda. Most of the scholarship on Protestant missionaries in the Middle East centers on the time of Daniel Bliss, with comparatively little addressing the 20th century. The efforts of the 19th century missionaries to bridge cultural gaps between the West and the East, however, clearly affected the second generation of missionaries, of which Charlotte and Edwin were a part. At the conclusion of World War I, when the Ottoman Empire disintegrated and much of the Arab world looked to America for support in rejecting European colonialist expansion, it was Howard Bliss who suggested to Woodrow Wilson to convene a commission to plumb Arab opinion regarding the building of states in the Middle East. The King-Crane Commission determined that there should be a single Arab state comprised of Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan, however its conclusions were completely ignored in Europe.

The Wards appear to have left the Ottoman Empire at the start of the First World War. In her final letters, Charlotte discusses the sight of British warships off the coast of Beirut becoming a common sight, and she mentions that she and Edwin were supposed to take a furlough.

The Madeline and Winthrop Goddard Hall collection contains 67 letters addressed to the Halls by Protestant missionaries in the Levant and China during the years immediately prior to the First World War. The majority of these letters (39) were written by Charlotte Ward to Madeline (Taber) Hall, with the remainder from Charlotte’s husband, Edwin St. John Ward, to Madeline’s husband, Winthrop Goddard Hall (1881-1977). The letters are arranged chronologically.

During their years in missionary work, the Wards kept a regular correspondence with their friends at home. Even before arriving in Turkey in late 1907, they wrote 10 letters while traveling on their honeymoon through England (from Leeds, Stratford, and Chester) and Paris, and while cruising off the Greek coast aboard the SS Bagdad. The first stops on their mission were at Aintab and Harpoot, both in central Turkey (now known as Gaziantep and Elazig, respectively), from which Charlotte and Edwin discuss the missionary community, Edwin’s work at Aintab College, and their acquaintance with the president of the College, Fred Shepard.

Late in 1908, the Wards moved to Diarbekir (also Diyarbakir), Turkey, another ABCFM missionary and educational center. During the three or four years there (there is a 16 month gap between the last letter from Diarbekir and first from Beirut), the Wards wrote 21 letters, and had two children. Much of their efforts during this period revolved around Edwin’s oversight of the construction of a hospital, however the letters touch on a range of subjects, including helping Edwin deliver a baby, and abortion among Turkish women.

From July 1912 to July 1914, the Wards worked in Beirut and the near-by city of Aleih. Edwin worked long hours at a hospital — Charlotte discusses how he is gone for days at a time — but during this time, the couple found enough time together to have a third child. In her letters, Charlotte mentions attending the funeral of Samuel Jessup, one of the last survivors of the first generation of American missionaries in the Levant; taking in a baseball game that Americans in Beirut played on July 4; and British warships off the coast of Beirut.

The remainder of the collection consists of 13 letters from Margaret (probably Margaret Hall), Gertrude (Blanchard?), and Ruth P. (Ward) Beach, missionaries in China. Written from Ponsang Women’s College, Foochow [Fouzhou], Shanghai, and Tientsin [Tianjin], China, 1911-1914, the letters are primarily personal in nature, discussing family and friends within the missionary community, but provide some perspective on life in China after the Revolution of 1911.

Roaming the intellectual hinterlands at the turn of the twentieth century, Aurin F. Hill was a free thinker, a carpenter and labor activist, a building inspector, unemployed worker, a Spiritualist, and a self-styled “insane architect” of Boston. Born in Wakefield, N.H., in 1853, Hill landed in Boston in the mid-1880s and found employment as a laborer making improvements to the Charles River Basin, later operating as a draftsman, carpenter, and architect. Already inclined toward progressive or even radical views, he enlisted in the union movement with the Knights of Labor, and over the course of the next decade, he claims both to have helped organized Local 33 of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters of Joiners of America and to have led the campaign for an eight hour day as Secretary to a Committee of the Boston Central Labor Union.

In his activism as in his personal life, Hill stood out, his dreams more expansive than his position in the social order. Like many radicalized workingmen, he railed against class privilege and the various centers of social power, from the organized church to the police, politicians, capitalists, and industrialists, and he transformed his rage into an idiosyncratic form of action. The year 1890, he wrote, was a turning point. Thrust by the financial downturn into three years of unemployment, Hill concluded that “there was no God in the whole earth” and dedicated himself to the people of Boston. Starting with a campaign to bring a World’s Fair to the city, he went on to carry the torch for issues large and small: the nationalization of railroads and corporations, civil rights, and women’s rights, as well as opposition to vaccination, Comstockery and censorship, capital punishment, and lynching.

Although he worked with a variety of organizations, Hill waged his reformist campaigns largely through a series of letters to the editors of both the liberal and mainstream press. From a cramped hallway apartment at 13 Isabella Street — described as “chair less and in cold weather cheerless” — he dreamed of becoming known as a writer, even, as he wrote, “if I have to sleep in a smaller room and eat more bread and beans” (Old Maid, 1894). Taking as a motto the free thinker’s phrase, “I am my own God until I find a better man,” Hill also began to delve deeply into the most progressive religion of the day, Spiritualism, developing himself as a writing medium. Throughout the remainder of his life, he communed regularly with Indian spirits such as Red Jacket, White Flower, and Tecumseh, from whom he received counsel and comfort, and insight into the inner workings of the city and American society.

As the nation recovered from the depression of 1893, Hill landed employment with the city of Boston, though his precise title and position are difficult to confirm. Having tried to establish himself as an architect as early as 1889, he claimed association with the city Building Inspector’s office and with the Bathing Department of the Board of Health. Even as he found financial stability, however, he remained zealous in pursuit of universal reform, zealous enough to earn the title (in his own mind, at least) of “the insane architect.” Insanity was the operative word. Hill was confined to an asylum at least twice (1891 and 1901), winning release on both occasions through the intervention of his friend and fellow Spiritualist medium, Izetta (Etta) Sears.

Hill’s experiences with the authorities did little to dissuade him, and during the 1890s, his radicalism may have increased. Having been imprisoned himself, he became keenly interested in the issues surrounding prisons and insane asylums, but he also took up radical positions on marriage, divorce, sexuality, social equality, race, and freedom of the press as well as more exotic ideas such as flat earth theory. Informed by Spiritualist and phrenological philosophy, his view of reform was holistically integrated, his observations on city life and social ideals intermingling. While visiting a jail in 1893, he wrote a passage that suggests his characteristic flow of thought:

A dreamlike quality permeates Hill’s writing about the urban environment, the lines between reality and imagination blurring on occasion. On an excursion in 1894, for example, Hill wrote:

Literal dreams were critical to Hill’s life. Never shy about his own significance, he wrote that “Nations may remember me and wonder at my force. The pen is mightier than the word or sword. Dynamite is less severe in its work than mind.” His dreams, however, were the true social dynamite: “A whore beset me in my dreams, though the sight of her secrets did not affect my mind nor body; for in my dream I smiled at her desire to show me her secrets without cost to me. Women have as good a right to ventilate their secrets as cats and dogs, horses or cattle. We may soon expect an order from some person that the secrets of dogs and cats may be enveloped in cotton or wood, or wool.” (Spirit Combine, 1894).

Hill attained a measure of prominence in Spiritualist circles in the new century. His spiritual stock rose when he led opposition to an effort by the Commonwealth to license clairvoyants in 1905, and his marriage to his long-time friend and Spiritual lecturer, Etta Sears, brought him more connections. When the National Spiritual Alliance (TNSA) broke away from the New England Spiritualist Campmeeting Association in Lake Pleasant, Mass., in 1913, Hill became a leading voice. One of the organization’s founders, Hill succeeded G. Taber Thompson as president of the TNSA, serving in that capacity for two years.

Hill’s later life is somewhat harder to delineate. His passion for spirit communication clearly continued, and he and his wife continued to summer at Lake Pleasant. Etta remained active as a spiritual evangelist almost to the time of her death in 1928, and Hill continued to write spirit-influenced letters to public officials as late as 1930, remaining in the progressive camp until the end.

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.

Much of the Hill collection defies accurate description. An indefatiguable diarist, essayist, and writer of letters, Hill’s writing is dense and forms a free flowing stream of consciousness. Although a few essays are relatively coherent and tightly focused, the majority are far from it. The diaries do indeed include standard diary-like entries, but they may also incorporate essays, rants, and letters and they are often interspersed with prints, newspaper clippings, advertising cards, labels and wrappers, or other pieces of ephemera. Even the essays that bear formal titles ramble through a succession of topics and they too include letters, spirit communications, records of dreams and visions, and other items that may (or may not) bear an obvious connection to the putative topic.

The highlights of the collection include the extensive records of Hill’s spirit communications and records of his dreams and visions (both is sleep and awake). There are, as well, two notebooks associated with the early years of the National Spiritual Alliance, recording transactions and events relating to that organization, along with several letters and notes stemming from Hill’s activities as President.

For additional material related to the history of Spiritualism in Massachusetts and Lake Pleasant see:

• Louise Shattuck Papers (MS 563)

Louise Shattuck, ca.1945

In her long life, Louise Shattuck wore many hats — artist, teacher, dog-breeder, writer, and Spiritualist — but to her, she only wore one: that of an art-making, skill-teaching, dog-breeding, writing, and spirit-talking resident of Lake Pleasant, Mass. Somehow, Shattuck managed the difficult feat of knitting these disparate strands into a single, seamless life, her professional and personal interests weaving together in a uniquely creative way.

Geographically, intellectually, and spiritually, the center of Shattuck’s life was the village of Lake Pleasant, Mass. One of five villages in the town of Montague, Lake Pleasant was established in 1870 when George Potter, a real estate agent from neighboring Greenfield, sensed a business opportunity. Acquiring the land around the southern tip of the lake, Potter set up picnic tables and invited local residents to use the area as a park. It was an instant success, so much so Potter rapidly decided to cash out, selling the property to the Boston and Maine Railroad Company in 1872 so that it could be expanded into a regional destination for summer tourism. Taking advantage of the scenic lake front and deep woods, the Railroad erected a railroad stop, a pavilion and bandstand, hotel, and other amenities. Waging an aggressive marketing campaign, they lured dozens, and eventually thousands of tourists per year. From the outset, some of these visitors came in groups: Odd Fellows, Freemasons, Congregationalists, Unitarians, and Spiritualists among them.

It was Spiritualists, more than any other group, who exerted the greatest influence on the development of Lake Pleasant, and particularly those associated with the New England Spiritualist Camp-meeting Association (NESCA). Formed in 1874 and incorporated in 1879, NESCA was part of the first wave of truly successful regional- and national-level Spiritualist organizations, built upon the evangelical model of holding seasonal (and later permanent) camp meetings. From the beginning, NESCA found a home in Lake Pleasant, paralleling other Spiritualist groups that attached themselves to camps in Etna, Maine, Lilydale, N.Y., Chesterfield, Ind., and Cassadaga, Fla. Spiritualism soon transformed the look and feel of the community in the pine woods. “There never was a summer night when one did not have a choice of attending any number of [Spiritualist] ‘circles’,” Shattuck wrote in Yankee Magazine in 1968 (p.141). In 1913, a number of Lake Pleasant Spiritualists affiliated with NESCA split with their peers over some philosophical differences (reincarnation among them) to form the National Spiritual Alliance (TNSA). For over sixty years, the village hosted two Spiritualist temples, one for each faction.

When Louise was born on December 24, 1919, the only child of a railway electrician Frank Shattuck and his wife Sarah (Bickford), Lake Pleasant was in its heyday. Like their adopted village, the Shattucks were committed Spiritualists: Louise’s maternal grandmother, Anna (Dyer) Bickford, was one of the early mediums at the resort, and Sarah Shattuck (also called Sara or Sadie) followed suit, delivering spirit messages and inspiration from spirit sources up until the time of Louise’s birth. Louise inherited mediumistic tendencies from her women forebears, and although she never acted as a professional medium, throughout her life she engaged in automatic writing and in use of the planchette and Ouija board to contact spirit beings.

In the years following the First World War, Lake Pleasant experienced a slow decline, driven in part by the decrease of summering as a middle class activity and of Spiritualism as a religion. Although the rise of the automobile and decay of the American rail system hurt many summer resorts, Lake Pleasant was hit particularly hard after access to the lake was curtailed, then shut off, when its waters became a reservoir for the town of Montague. The Shattucks, however, remained loyal. Although Louise was born and raised in Medford, Mass., she and her family continued to summer in the cottage that Frank had built barely twenty yards from the TNSA temple, and following Frank’s death in 1948, Sarah became a full time resident.

Louise emulated her mother in more than just mediumistic talent: the two shared a passion for animals, particularly dogs, for art and teaching. By her senior year at Medford High School, was already set on her future life course, entering Massachusetts College of Art (class of 1941) intent on making a career in the graphic arts. Although she taught art off and on for many years, beginning with a stint teaching ceramics at Garland Junior College in Boston (later absorbed into Simmons College), she began as early as 1943 to produce ceramic, clay, and bronze figurines for commercial distribution. Striking her first contracts with the Boston firm Contemporary Arts, and taking her grandmother’s maiden name (Ann Dyer) as a pseudonym, she began to distribute work through Hudson Pewter, Lance Corporation, and the American Pewter Company.

Thematically and stylistically, Louise’s early work was quite diverse, ranging from a figurine of a ballet dancer to a small sculpture of an Arab rider on horseback (one of her favorite pieces) that was sculpted under the influence of a spirit named Charles Memling. By the mid-1940s, however, her work acquired a real focus when she settled into a niche as an animal artist, dogs being her distinct favorite subject. An early member of the Society of Animal Arts), she also did a great deal of graphic work for magazines, particularly those associated with dog breeding, producing pen and ink drawings and cartoons, as well as pastels and paintings, both for private commission and retail distribution. Her love of dogs extended well beyond her artwork, and dogs assumed a greater prominence in her life as she grew older. As proprietor of Carry On Kennels, she became well known as a breeder of English Cocker Spaniels and stalwart in the English Cocker Spaniel Club of America.

Louise also became an author. In addition to two humorous works on her experiences with dogs, From Riches to Bitches (1979) and In Stitches Over Bitches (1983), Louise wrote and illustrated a children’s book, The Donkey and the Tree (1999). Her last book, co-written with her friend David James, was “portrait of the body, mind, and soul” of her beloved Lake Pleasant, Spirit and Spa (2003).

Never married, Louise joined her mother in Lake Pleasant in 1967 as Sarah’s health began to fail. Louise remained active as a sculptor and illustrator well into her 80s, remaining in her family cottage until her death in October 2005.

The Shattuck Papers offer a window onto the eclectic life of artist, dog breeder, and Spiritualist Louise Shattuck and onto the equally eclectic Spiritualist community of Lake Pleasant, Mass. Organized into five series, the collection documents Louise’s life from her childhood until her death, with an emphasis upon her connections to her community. Her diverse interests interweave throughout the collection, appearing in correspondence and writings, newspaper clippings and photographs, and in her voluminous diaries, kept sporadically between 1928 and the mid-1970s and regularly from then until 2005.

Of particular note in the collection are a small, but rich assortment of materials relating to Spiritualism. Among the photographs, pamphlets, and realia are items reflecting both Louise’s Spiritualist practices and her interest in the history of Spiritualism and the Lake Pleasant community. A Lake Pleasant photograph album, along with a few publications and objects provide sketchy, but intriguing documentation of the Independent Order of Scalpers, a fraternal club in the village, but the collection also includes extensive samples of Louise’s automatic writing, transcripts of Ouija board sessions, and four excellent examples of spirit slates with chalk inscriptions, dating from the time of Louise’s grandmother (ca.1900-1910). Also included in a small assortment of Spiritualist pamphlets published by the Star Publishing Co. of Springfield, Mass., is H. A. Budington’s History of the New England Campmeeting Association at Lake Pleasant.

See also the Aurin F. Hill Papers (MS 579), President of the National Spiritual Alliance and sometime resident of Lake Pleasant.

Several books were separated from the Shattuck Papers and added to the Rare Books collection.

• Gatlin, Dana. Unity’s Fifty Golden Years: A History of the Unity Movement 1889-1939. Kansas City, Missouri: Unity School of Christianity, 1939.
• Massey, Gerald. The Historical Jesus and the Mythical Christ. Springfield, MA: Star Publishing Co.
• Miller, Peter S. and Kyle J. Scott. Images of America: Montague. Charlston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2000.
• Shattuck, Lemuel. Memorials of the Descendants of William Shattuck. Boston, MA: Dutton and Wentworth, 1855.
• Shattuck, Louise F. In Stitches Over Bitches and Now Your Vet Wants a Rolls-Royce! New York, NY: Howell Book House Inc., 1983.
• Shattuck, Louise F. From Riches to Bitches and a Cadillac for Your Vet! New York, NY: Howell Book House Inc., 1985.
• Shattuck, Louise F. From Riches to Bitches: Pick of the Litter. Wheat Ridge, CO: Hoflin Publishing, Inc., 1996.
• Shattuck, Louise and David James. Spirit and Spa: A Portrait of the Body, Mind and Soul of a 133-Year-Old Spiritualist Community in Lake Pleasant, Massachusetts. Greenfield, MA: Delta House Press, 2003.
• Spiritualist Hymnal: A Revised Collection of Words and Music for the Congregation. Boston, MA: R.D. Music Company, 1998.
• Thompson, G. Tabor. Is the Devil the Father of Spiritualism? Philadelphia, PA: G. Tabor Thompson, 1911.
• Thompson, G. Tabor. Ministry of Song. Philadelphia, PA: G. Tabor Thompson, 1892.
• Thompson, G. Tabor. The Psychic Songster. Kila, MT: Kessinger Publishing, Inc.