An ornithologist by training, David Kenneth Wetherbee lived in the Franklin County town of New Salem for many years. Transforming his house, Hop Brook Farm, into a sort of commune, Wetherbee became a student of the history and natural history of New Salem, self-publishing and distributing works such as Heare Lyes Salim New Grant (1980) and Natural History West of Walden (1980) under the Hop Brook Community imprint.

Collection consists of Wetherbee’s history of the early settlement of New Salem, Massachusetts, including transcripts of eighteenth century documents as well as his rough research notes on the demography and settlement of the town. These materials were used in preparation of Heare Lyes New Salim Grant.

The first public radio station in western New England, WFCR Five College Radio has provided a mix of high quality, locally-produced and nationally syndicated programming since May 1961. In 2012, the station reached over 175,000 listeners per week, with a mix of classical and jazz music, news, and entertainment.

The WFCR Collection contains nearly 4,500 reel to reel recordings of locally-produced radio programs, reflecting over fifty years of the cultural and intellectual life of western Massachusetts. Drawing upon the talents of the faculty and students of the Five Colleges (Amherst, Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges and UMass Amherst), the collection offers a remarkable breadth of content, ranging from public affairs to community and national news, cultural programming, children’s programming, news and current events, scholarly lectures, classical music, and jazz.

First settled in the seventeenth century, in an area along the Connecticut River that belonged to the Norwottucks, or Fresh Water Indians, Whately, Massachusetts was officially incorporated in 1771. Microfilm of the town’s records include lists of baptisms, marriages, deaths, as well as minutes of meetings.

A resident of Haydenville, Mass., during the 1930s, C. H. Wheeler was evidently captivated with the profound political changes sweeping the nation during the years of the Great Depression.

Containing hundreds of political cartoons clipped from local newspapers and national media, C. H. Wheeler’s scrapbook documents media reactions to the Great Depression and New Deal, the presidential election of 1936, Alf Landon and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and national and international political currents.

One of twelve children of Obadiah and Agnes (Tuttle) Wheeler, Truman Wheeler was born in Southbury, Conn., on Nov. 26, 1741. After completing his education, reportedly at Yale, Wheeler moved north to Great Barrington, Mass., in the spring of 1764. Acquiring property about a mile south of the center of town, he soon established himself as a general merchant trading in silk, fabrics, and a variety of domestic goods.

The Wheeler account book represents the initial years of a thriving, late colonial mercantile business in far western Massachusetts. Beginning in June 1764, not long after Wheeler set up shop in Great Barrington, the account book includes meticulous records of sales of domestic goods ranging from cloth (linen, silks, and osnabrig) to buttons, ribbons, and pins, snuff boxes, a “small bible,” “jews harps,” and tobacco. Among the prominent names that appear as clients are members of the Burghardt and Sedgwick families.

William Wheeler, ca.1876

The civil engineer William Wheeler was a member of the first graduating class of Massachusetts Agricultural College in 1871, and was one of its most prominent alumni of the nineteenth century. In 1876, Wheeler joined MAC President William Smith Clark and two other alumni of the college in helping to found the Sapporo Agricultural College in Japan (now Hokkaido University), succeeding Clark as president of SAP from 1877 to 1879. In later life, he was a successful hydraulic engineer and long-time trustee of MAC (1887-1929).

A small, tightly focused collection, the Wheeler Papers consist largely of letters written home by Wheeler while working at the Sapporo Agricultural College, 1876-1880. Typically long and descriptive, the letters include excellent accounts of travel in Japan and Wheeler’s impressions of Japanese culture, but they provide detailed insight as well into the work involved in establishing Sapporo Agricultural College.

A noted journalist, editor, and first ombudsman for the Boston Globe, Charles L. Whipple was born in Salem, Mass., on May 8, 1914. A descendant of both a Salem witch and of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Whipple was a political radical as a young man, joining the Young Communist League during his sophomore year at Harvard in 1933, and taking part in a small communist study group within the American Newspaper Guild after joining the staff of the Boston Globe in 1936. Unfit for military duty due to a bad eye, Whipple served with the Red Cross for 30 months in Europe during the Second World War, earning a purple heart. He severed ties with the Communist Party when he returned to the Globe and civilian life, becoming the paper’s first opinion page editor, garnering attention in the 1960s for writing the first major newspaper editorial opposing the war in Vietnam. His last positions were as the paper’s first ombudsman in 1975 and, following his retirement from the Globe, as editor of the Beijing Review and the China Daily, China’s first English-language daily. Whipple died in Northampton, Mass., in 1991 from complications following surgery.

Containing both personal and professional correspondence, the Charles L. Whipple Papers document a long and distinguished career in journalism. The collection includes important information on Whipple’s experiences during the Vietnam War, as an employee of the Boston Globe, and as an American living in China in the late 1970s. Many of the correspondents in the collection reflect upon Whipple’s feelings toward his profession and the people he encountered along the way. Of particular note is the extensive correspondence relating to the American Newspaper Guild, including meeting minutes, schedules, and correspondence. The Subject Files include groupings of articles, news clippings, and writings collected by Whipple over his lifetime. The balance of the collection consists of printed materials with a few photos.

As an undergraduate at the University of California Berkeley, Howard Whisler was introduced to the study of zoosporic fungi, beginning what would become a lifelong interest in evolutionary protistology. During his graduate work at Berkeley, Whisler focused on fungi associated with invertebrates, receiving his doctorate in 1960 for a study of the entomogenous fungus Amoebidium parasiticum. He joined the faculty at the University of Washington in 1963, where he remained until his retirement in 1999. A prolific researcher, and developer of the fungal research program at the Friday Harbor Marine Biological Laboratory, he became noted for his work on zoosporic fungi and protists, particularly of parasites or commensals in arthropods, with publications ranging from studies of reproduction in the Monoblepharidales to the molecular systematics of Saprolegnia in salmon, and the sexual stages and life cycle of Coelomomyces, a fungal pathogen of mosquitos. An active member of the Mycological Society of America, Whisler was also a founder of the International Society of Evolutionary Protistology with Max Taylor and Lynn Margulis. Whisler died on Sept. 16, 2007, at the age of 76.

The Whisler Papers contain correspondence, notebooks, scanning electron micrographs, and motion pictures dating primarily from the mid- to late 1970s.

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.

Cyrus White, a cooper in South Hadley, Massachusetts, made tubs and barrels of all varieties: soap tubs, leach tubs, oil barrels and casks, cheese presses, butter churns, and buckets. In his daybook, White lists and his customers including Springfield Cotton Manufacturing Co., Whitney and Wells, Byant and Bird, and Medad Clapp Lumber, as well as his family genealogy.