UMarmot(SCUA)

During the 1870s, William A. Adams maintained a blacksmithing shop close to the intersection of Walnut and Hickory Streets in Springfield, Mass. His trade ran from farriery to repairing iron work, wheels, and wagons, and situated as he was near the southern end of Watershops Pond, one of the industrial centers of the city, his customers ranged from local residents to manufacturing firms, the city, and the Armory.

The Adams account book contains approximately 150 pages containing brief records of blacksmithing work for a range of customers located in the immediate area. Among the more names mentioned are the grocers Perkins and Nye, W. and E.W. Pease Co., J. Kimberley and Co., and Common Councilman William H. Pinney and J. W. Lull, all of whom can be located within a few blocks of Adams’ shop.

The Campano family, 1967

Anthony “Tony” Campano and Shizuko Shirai met by chance in January 1955 as Tony was passing through Yokohama en route to his new post in Akiya. Recently transferred to Japan, Tony enlisted in the U.S. Army a little over a year earlier, serving first in Korea. As their relationship blossomed, Tony and Shizuko set up housekeeping until his enlistment ended and he returned home to Boston. Determined to get back to Japan quickly and marry Shizuko, the two continued their courtship by mail, sending letters through Conrad Totman and Albert Braggs, both stationed in Japan. By the summer of 1956, Tony re-enlisted in the Army, this time stationed in the Medical Battalion of the 24th Division located in Seoul, Korea. There he remained until August 1957 when he was finally able to secure official authorization to marry Shizuko. Cutting their honeymoon short to deal with her medical emergency, Tony returned to his post in Korea. The couple reunited in November of that year after Tony secured a new assignment in Yokohama.

The letters of Tony Campano to Shizuko Shirai during the year or more they were separated document their unlikely romance. Soon after Tony returned home when his first enlistment ended, friends and family tried to discourage him from pursuing a relationship with Shizuko. Despite their age difference–Shizuko was eleven years older– and the language barrier, the two ultimately married. In addition to the couple’s long-distance courtship letters, the collection also contains about 100 letters exchanged between Campano and Conrad Totman, dating from their early days in the U.S. Army to the present; taken together they document a friendship of more than fifty years.

The details surrounding this book of accounts of personal expenditures are sketchy, but it appears that the author, identified tentatively by a name written on the front fly leaf, was based in Hartford, Conn., and traveled throughout western New England, often to Greenfield and Millers Falls, Mass. The accounts, dated between August 1887 and May 1891, are surprisingly detailed, recording the record keeper’s fondness for doughnuts, seasonal fruits, and the Opera House and Allyn Hall, and they record the range of foods and incidentals, daily trips, subscription to the Hartford Journal, piano rental, and visits to the Knights of Pythias and Red Men (presumably the Independent Order of Red Men or similar organization).

During the earliest days of the Civil War, publishers began to issue large numbers of “patriotic covers,” cheaply produced but often colorfully-illustrated envelopes commemorating the personalities and events of the war. The topics were highly varied, ranging military and political figures, significant battles and other events, nostalgia for home, slavery, and southern versus northern character.

Collected by James Ellis, the Patriotic Cover Collection contains over 250 envelopes published during the Civil War, primarily in the northern states. All envelopes are unused and in relatively pristine condition.

In the academic year 1908-1909, Sybil C. Green was a high school senior, boarding at the Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Mass. Born in Spencer, Mass., on August 22, 1889, to Charles H. and Ella M. Green, Green was enrolled in the college preparatory course at Cushing and apparently entered Smith College in the fall of that year. She died in 1984.

The Green scrapbook is a thick and typically chaotic record of a young woman in her senior year of high school in 1908-1909. The scrapbook consists of a bound volume stuffed (or over-stuffed) with tickets to basketball and baseball games, dance cards, invitations, notes, photographs, miscellaneous mementoes and ephemera, and a few letters from family and friends.

The tanner Phinehas Hemenway was born in Bolton, Worcester County, Mass., in September 1794, the fourth of six children born to Simeon and Mary (Goss) Hemenway, but he resided nearly his entire adult life in the Franklin County hill town of Shutebsury. Although little is known about his life, Hemenway appears to have married twice, to a Polly or Mary Gray in about 1816, and to the widow Mary Sears of Prescott in Aril 1838. Hemenway died in Shutesbury on December 21, 1850.

With approximately 150 pages of brief, but closely written records of daily transactions, the Hemenway daybook documents the range of activities of rural tannery in antebellum Massachusetts. Along with the names of clients, the date and amount, and a brief notation on whether the work was for dressing, tanning, currying, or (apparently) the sale of finished product, Hemenway records work in a variety of leathers, from calf to sheep, hog, and horse and from sole leather to upper leather, sometimes specified as for shoes. The daybook also includes credit entries for labor performed, the purchase of hemlock bark or hides, or more rarely for cash to settle accounts.

The proprietor of a general store and postmaster in Wendell Depot, Mass., W. W. Hunt carried on a thriving business for a small Franklin County town during the 1880s and 1890s. Selling a range of dry goods, foodstuffs, and other goods, Hunt catered to residents in Wendell and neighboring communities up and down the Miller River.

An extensive ledger, marked No. 5, the W.W. Hunt account book contains records of sales of a surprising range of dry goods and foodstuffs, snaths and scythes, stamps and envelopes, and other goods useful to a rural community. Although most of Hunt’s customers were individuals seemingly purchasing for personal consumption, he also sold goods to the Farley and Goddard Wood Paper Companies, the Ladies Aid Society, and the town of Wendell, with some accounts marked “Town Farm.”

A specialist in the cryptophycaea, Paul Kugrens was born in Latvia in 1942 and lived in Pegnitz, Germany, until he emigrated to the United States with his parents at the age of eight. After receiving bachelors and masters degrees in zoology at the University of Nebraska and a doctorate at Berkeley (1971), Kugrens joined the faculty at Colorado State, remaining there for thirty-seven years. His research centered on the cell biology and ultrastructure of the cryptophytes Chroomonas, Cryptomonas, and Rhodomonas, and microalgae such as Prymnesium and Cyanophora.

The Kugrens papers include extensive documentation of the research and professional activities of a phycologist, including correspondence, grants proposals, manuscripts, and field data, along with thousands of electronic micrographs.

A talented musician and member of the UMass Amherst faculty in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, Henry A. Lea was born Heinrich Leachowski in Berlin in 1920. With the rise of the Nazi Party, the Jewish Leachowskis left their home for the United States, settling in Philadelphia and cimplifying the family name to Lea. Henry studied French as an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania (1942) but shortly after graduation, he enlisted for military service. After training in Alabama and in the ASTP program at Ohio State, he was assinged to duty interrogating prisoners of war with the G2 (intelligence) section of the 1st army; he later served as a translator at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials in 1947-1948 and for the military government in Frankfurt (1948-1949). Lea returned to his alma mater for a masters degree in German (1951), and accepted a position teaching at UMass in the following year. In 1962, he received a doctorate for a dissertation under Adolf Klarmann on the German expatriate writer Franz Werfel. Lea remained at UMass until his retirement in 1985.

The Lea Papers contain over 200 letters written by Henry A. Lea during his military service in the Second World War. Although self-censored, the letters provide an excellent sense of the the experience, from training through deployment and return. The collection also includes notebooks and notecards from Lea’s research on Werfel, a pre-war album containing commercial photographs collected during a vacation, and a baby book from an American family living in occupation-era Germany.

Born on July 31, 1818, the fifth of eight children of Squire and Patience (Root) Loomis, Lyman Loomis spent his life as a farmer and agricultural worker in Westfield, Mass. Loomis married Elmina Hayes in March 1846, and died in May 1902.

A slender and rough hewn volume kept by a farm laborer, the Loomis account book contains sketchy records detailing work performed and crops tended, with occasional notes on commodities purchased.