Register for winter term 1873-1874 for School District No. 5 of Greenwich, Massachusetts. Includes list of students, attendance, headmarks, visitor records, and a few statistics all kept by teacher Ernest Howe Vaughan who later became a lawyer involved with handling claims associated with the taking of property for the Quabbin Reservoir.

Account book of Selectmen of the town of Enfield, Massachusetts from when it was incorporated in 1816 to 1846. Includes expenses of the town and orders drawn for services such as ringing the bell, supporting paupers, building coffins, or providing a yard to serve as a pound. The recorded names of many townspeople represent the full spectrum of society-tradespeople, laborers, paupers, town officers, and wealthy townsmen.

In the summer of 1967, members of University of Massachusetts Amherst campus groups, such as the Faculty Group on War and Peace and the Students for Political Action, joined with individuals from other area colleges and from the community at large to form the Valley Peace Center of Amherst for the purposes of opposing the Vietnam War, providing draft counseling, eliciting pledges from the government to avoid first use of nuclear and biological weapons, and reduction of the power of the “military-industrial complex”. The Center was active for more than five and a half years, drawing its financial support largely from the community and its human resources from student and community volunteers.

Correspondence, minutes, volunteer and membership lists, financial records, newsletters, questionnaires, notes, petitions, clippings, posters, circulars, pamphlets, periodicals, other printed matter, and memorabilia. Includes material relating to alternative service, boycotts, war tax resistance, prison reform, environmental quality, and political candidates.

Non-partisan political organization based in Amherst, Massachusetts that influences public policy through education and advocacy by registering voters, organizing candidate forums, publishing voting guides, and disseminating general information on the legislative process and the functioning of government on the local, state, and federal levels.

Includes minutes, annual reports, financial records, publications, extensive files on specific programs, photographs, video- and audio-tapes, scrapbooks, and newspaper clippings. Also contains information on two league members who rose to national prominence: Lucy Wilson Benson (Under Secretary of State in the federal government in 1977) and Jane F. Garvey (Administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration in 1997).

During the early phases of second wave feminism (1968-1978), the Pioneer Valley served as a center for lesbian and feminist activity in western Massachusetts, and was home to over 400 hundred, often ad hoc, groups, such as the Abortion and Birth Control (ABC) Committee, ISIS Women’s Center, the Mudpie Childcare Cooperative, and the Springfield Women’s Center.

The records of the Valley Women’s History Collaborative document the activities of these groups as well as the efforts of the founders of the Women Studies program and department at UMass Amherst to preserve this history. Of particular value are the many oral histories conducted by the collaborative that record the history of women’s activism in the Pioneer Valley, especially as it relates to reproductive rights.

Microfilm town records of Greenwich, Massachusetts consisting primarily of warrants for and minutes of town meetings as well as transcripts of meetings for state and national elections, militia lists, voter lists, and pew lists.

The collection contains five photographs of envelopes bearing the Greenwich postmark, 1826, 1829, 1831, and two unidentified. It also includes three photographs of W. Walker’s store and post office in Greenwich Village, showing the sign of the last owner, S.R. King, before the town was flooded for the Quabbin Reservoir in 1938.

The churches of Greenwich, Massachusetts were both places of worship and centers of fellowship. With the congregations disbanded and the buildings razed during the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir, this collection of programs, circulars, and news clippings preserves a snapshot of the churches and the communities they fostered.

Erected in 1832 in the business district of Enfield, Massachusetts, the Swift River Hotel began as a mealtime stopping place for travelers on stagecoaches running to and from Boston. The Quabbin Inn in Greenwich was built in 1900, and served as a vacation spot in summer, offering farm-fresh food and cool breezes off Quabbin Lake.

The collection consists of a menu from the Swift River Hotel proprietorship of William H. Galvin and two brochures depicting the bucolic setting and atmosphere of the Quabbin Inn in Greenwich.

Trained as a linguist, Audrey R. Duckert was a pioneer in the study of American regional English. Born in the small town of Cottage Grove, Wisconsin, Duckert took up the study of dialect while a student at the University of Wisconsin during the 1940s, and after completing her doctorate in linguistics at Radcliffe College in 1959, she joined the faculty at UMass Amherst, where she remained until her retirement forty years later. Among the highlights of her career, Duckert was a founding member of the Dictionary of American Regional English in 1965 and she became the first UMass woman admitted to Phi Beta Kappa. In addition to her linguistic work, Duckert developed an avid interest in local history and she was involved with a number of local historical organizations, including the Swift River Valley Historical Society in New Salem. On September 6, 2007, Duckert died in Hadley, Mass., at the age of 80.

The Duckert oral history collection consists of a series of 53 audiocassette tapes containing oral history interviews with persons displaced when the Swift River Valley was flooded in 1939 to create the Quabbin Reservoir. The histories include rich recollections of life in the towns of Greenwich, Enfield, Dana, and Prescott, with village life, education, family, and the changes that accompanied the inundation of the region. The original cassette tapes are the possession of the Swift River Valley Historical Society, which has allowed us to digitize the contents.