Enfield. Mass., a welcoming place, was destroyed to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir in the 1930s.
W.E.B. Du Bois with his son Burghardt and his wife, Nina.
The Drill Hall, the Chapel, a band stand and the campus pond at Mass. Aggie, pre-1912.
International Union United Automobile Workers of America Pin (1939).
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Special Collections and University Archives preserves everything from rare books to cookbooks.
In 1854, an Enfield, Mass., general store sold, among other things, “No Nothing” hats. Just what they were (dunce caps, perhaps?) is lost to time. The hats, the storekeeper, the store, even the village are long gone; Enfield was one of the towns destroyed and then flooded over to make way for the Quabbin Reservoir in the 1930s. But the records of what James Leland sold for cash and traded for cider—offering a unique slice of Victorian rural New England life—are still intact and preserved in UMass Amherst’s W.E.B. Du Bois Library.
Its Department of Special Collections and University Archives (SCUA) is home to a nationally recognized and diverse collection that includes 22,000 rare books, manuscripts, records, maps, photographs, and objects. Among its specialities are collections that focus on the political, social, economic, and cultural history of the western Massachusetts, and that delve deeply into labor history, the history of the natural sciences and agriculture, and African-American history. The papers of W.E.B Du Bois, notable scholar, writer and the founder of the NAACP, for whom the library is named, are here: 160.75 linear feet, 357 boxes of correspondence, manuscripts, and files of speeches, articles and other documents. So are more than 300 books and dozens of rare maps brought back from Japan by the nineteenth-century geologist Benjamin Smith Lyman—an “ace collection,” in the words of Robert Cox, head of special collections. The official records of UMass Amherst can be found here as well—more than 7,000 linear feet of materials including budgets, course catalogs, yearbooks, floor plans, and photographs.
Although some of its treasures are more than 400 years old, SCUA also acquires collections of more recent vintage, like the papers it just obtained of the Liberation News Service, a left-wing news agency founded as the Vietnam War raged, in 1967. Not long ago, local historian John Bennett ’52 donated hundreds of buttons, badges, watchfobs, and other ephemera collected over a lifetime that reveal the aspirations of the labor movement, through its iconography of beehives and handshakes and such slogans as “Don’t tread on us!”
“The collection is primarily of interest to researchers,” Cox says, but the materials are available to everyone, including the freshman writing a term paper on insects (see Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum, written by “the prince of entomologists” to his peers, Thomas Moffett, 1553-1604); a poet seeking inspiration (see Wallace Stevens papers, 1900-1954); and the cub reporter trying to get a handle on local politics (see Amherst town records, on microfilm, 1633-1891)… Curious about sci fi? Communes? Bee-keeping? PTO cookbooks? Medieval herbals? A browse through Umarmot, the SCUA Web site’s online guide, turns up entries on these subjects and legions of others that are by turns intriguing, amusing, and poignant, e.g., “Civil war letter (unidentified correspondents) 1863.”
In the twenty-fifth floor reading room, SCUA staff will set you up with the materials you’re interested in. Bring your laptop, but leave your Sharpie ultra fine point behind. Only pencils can be wielded when perusing the contents of its archival boxes. If your mind wanders, you can rest your eyes on the room’s copy of the classical sculpture “Winged Victory” or the spectacular views. Worth a deeper look are the samplings from collections, which are showcased in the reading room, as well as online. (One current online exhibit, curated by senior archives assistant Mike Milewski, features photographs of the campus pond through the years.)
What makes the Special Collections special, says Cox, is hard to pin down. Some materials are rare, even priceless, others are of relatively modest monetary worth but hefty intellectual value.
And although the staff is expanding the Web site constantly to make it more of a resource, Cox urges researchers, “Start talking to us, start a conversation with us by e-mail, or phone, or in person, recognizing that it is a conversation. Sometimes a query uncovers just the tip of the iceberg. In exchanging information about what you’re looking for and what we have, we can help you go beyond the obvious.” And one last piece of advice from the archivist that he is (and with a B.S. in paleontology): label those old family photographs now!
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UMass Amherst Special Collections and University Archives