Beacon Street Blog

We were honored to be one of the libraries visited by Simmons GSLIS students. Eleven students toured the library and viewed special items in our collections. The tour included visits to the stacks and to the archive and rare book room. The students had questions about our catalog, how we are funded, and what we do to conserve old books and manuscripts.

Following the tour of our Library, the students went up to the sixth floor for dinner at the Yvonne Pappenheim Library on Racism at the Community Change office. I joined them there because I was interested in learning about this collection that is in our building. The collection contains over 3,000 books on topics of race and racism. There is a link to their catalog on the Community Change website. I had the pleasure of meeting Paul, the Executive Director, and Susie, the volunteer Librarian.

I hope that the students enjoyed the tour of the Congregational Library.

-Claudette

This morning the confirmation class from First Congregational United Church of Christ of River Falls visited the Library. I gave them a tour of the Library and spoke about the friezes on the front of the building and their meaning in Congregational tradition. I had brought down from our archives and rare book room a volume of the chained Bible, our smallest Bibles including a locket Bible, a Geneva Bible from the Pilgrim era, and a record book from Old South Church which lists Benjamin Franklin's baptism.

We also walked through the stacks so they would have a sense of how large a collection we have and to view the burial ground.

Thank you to Chris Myers and the other chaperons for bringing them here.

-Claudette

This week I began trolling through our local church history section. I'd tended to avoid it, mostly because it looked like an almost impenetrable mass of tattered envelopes full of aging church bulletins and books put together by committee.

But now I'm in search of authentic Congregational voices, of ordinary people who loved their local churches and thought about what it meant to be a Congregationalist. In other words, I'm trying to tell a story that goes beyond the deeds of denominational officials and seminary professors.

I discovered that local church histories are a great source. My favorites are anniversary volumes from the turn of the last century, a time when American culture in general was becoming more interested in commemorating historical events. The best parts of these books are "reminiscences" by elderly church members — which means getting a look at the rhythms of church life from the early 19th century. Some are funny, some are hard to believe, and some are pretty inspiring.

One of my favorites is the First Church in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. In the late 1800s, a lightning bolt went through the choir loft, a fact not lost upon many — the choir members were apparently a fractious lot.

"When the people had gathered to see the effect of the lightning bolt, good old Deacon Fenn quietly remarked: "It seems to me that the lightning speaks rather plainly to the members of our choir, and I think they had better fix things up." It is said that the choir troubles at once ceased, and that harmony again prevailed."

Some time later, as Mary Brewster recalled, the ladies of the church decided to give a tea, "an unheard of proceeding" deemed a little too fancy for the average resident of Pittsfield. Undaunted, she said, two of the women "borrowed a stove and kindled a fire. But as if awe-stricken at finding itself in such a sacred place the thing smoked voluminously." The pastor came running in, convinced that lightning had literally struck twice in his building. " 'You'll burn up the church,' he said. 'Well if we do, we can run away by the light of the fire,' quickly replied one of the offending sisters." It is recorded that the women found some old doors, laid them across the backs of benches, and tea was served outside on the lawn, "without benefit of clergy."

-Peggy

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The part that impresses the staff and I particularly is the rapid increase in visits. Thanks, everyone for taking interest in our activities.

-Jessica

Today's activities included a few visitors in to do research, my usual meeting with my trio of Old South interns, but on top of that we had a photographer in from WGBH. 'GBH (our local public television station) is doing a documentary that will feature a portrait of venerated Jonathan Mayhew. Shortly on the heels of the photographer's visit, Peggy and I received seven boxes from members of the First Church in Cambridge. We have been in negotiations with the Congregation for over 4 years, working on getting the material that had been kept at the Houghton Library at Harvard transferred to us. At long last, I they are now under our roof:

Here's a quick reminder for any of our readers who are 1. In Massachusetts and 2. Work for a library / archive.  We have until April 23 for people to participate. Our coordinator, Gregor Trinkaus-Randall reminds:

"However, while we have been fortunate to have been able to develop an extensive statewide preservation program over the past two decades, the results of this survey will go a long way towards setting our course for the future.  We have received around 200 completed surveys so far from the list of 1,816 institutions we have compiled, but we really need a significantly larger number to be able to obtain as complete a picture of conditions statewide as possible. Therefore, I really hope that you will be able to take the time to complete the survey in the next couple of weeks."

The original post we published is here.

Thanks.
-Jessica

This has been my first foray into the world of archives and so far the work at the Old South Church in Copley Square has proved to be quite an introduction to the profession. We have come across many objects from the mundane photocopied receipts to the unique manuscripts handwritten by former ministers of the church in the late 18th century. As a record of the church the sermons strike me as something extremely valuable and useful. They essentially document and record the public voice of the church in one of the most direct ways possible. From these sermons one can tell what topics were important to the Church at that time and also what the Church's perspective was. All in all pretty important historical documents for the Church's record and institutional memory. Here are some pictures of some manuscripts we found randomly in a nondescript box. These were in a box I was going through and were the first, clearly important and old documents I found and it was exciting, for a first timer.

There are more documents similar to these as well. I imagine these will be useful for research and I hope that someone is looking forward to using them. Hopefully, we will get them to the library soon where they can be studied.

These discoveries also had me thinking about how the current sermons would be preserved. We have found sermons of one of the more recent ministers, James Crawford dating up to 2001. I am sure by this point they are being composed on a computer and are therefore “born digital” documents. It will be interesting to see how these born digital sermons will be preserved and if, once lost or stored indefinitely, they could ever be found and read as these manuscripts have been. This does not even begin to address the issue of e-mail. We have found box after box of correspondences dating back to the 19th century. Right now, after surveying an extensive aggregation of records, I can say that they have a rich historical record. However, all the effort and foresight it took was to throw old papers into boxes. With the new "born digital" documents that is not possible.

There is an old computer lying in the basement that we have not even considered looking at.

If this is the future of the records then how useful would this be if another batch of interns comes across it in fifty years. It is good that the Church is doing this survey now and I look forward to continuing the processing work of the collection and perhaps this will help to understand the new issues with the current documents.

-Derek Jackson

Many of you may have heard about our Members Section on our website. I have put together a brief video that may help some of you get started either as a member or after in the section itself.

-Jessica

This past month I discovered a trove of journals in the archives, written by William Harvey Young, who pastored several small churches in rural Illinois in the early part of the last century. They provide a fascinating view of parish life a hundred years ago, as Young copes with hospital visits and fractious church members without the aid of a cell phone or a Blackberry.

What interested me most was Rev. Young's dogged commitment to improving himself through reading. In December 1928 he gave an evening talk entitled "Is Man Thinking?" based on an article by social critic Joseph Wood Krutch, published that November in the Atlantic magazine. He read Sinclair Lewis's caustic novel Babbitt, Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture, the Christian Century, and of course The Congregationalist. Young often reflected on what he was reading — he had little good to say about Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, which depicted Jesus as a "go-getter" with a flair for organization. Jesus was "masterful enough, no doubt," Young wrote. "But there is something professional about the modern motif of business organization which makes it seem a sacrilege to apply its vernacular to him. He was too genuine, too largely interested in human values for the comparison to be quite in keeping."

Young also read Shakespeare — this after talking shop with another minister friend who went on at length about his study regimen and those of other successful clergymen, including one California preacher who read a play of Shakespeare every week for style and language. Within a few days Young was plowing through Macbeth, writing out quotations to use in an evening talk. Unfortunately, when he finally delivered it, the lecture was almost an hour long — and not well received. He did not record his feelings about this, but it’s not hard to imagine a bit of frustration.

But all in all I don't think this discouraged him because the next day he was reading again about Christian education — all the latest books by Coe, Hartshorne, and Soares — and dipping back into Babbitt, though I would guess with a deep sigh.

-Peggy

Four years ago I wrote a records management booklet and started teaching classes. Last year I created videos that will provide the majority of what that class offers for those who can't join us at the library. (Those videos are available in our Members section) The process of creating those videos helped hone my topics and overall lesson plan, which meant it was time to rewrite the original document.

Some of the improvements include an expurgated retention schedule, organization tips, and an overall restructure of the whole booklet. For those interested in my preservation booklet, it has been incorporated into this document.

The PDF is now available in our Records Management section of the site.

-Jessica

Please note: we are having technical difficulties with our website. We are aware and working on the situation. Thank you for your patience.

-Jessica

Anyone who spends any amount of time near me in a professional or personal setting will eventually discover my deep and abiding hatred for scotch tape and most commercial adhesives. This is not a distaste that is unique to me. Most people who deal with caring for older records for the long haul are with me on this. I talk about the detriment such adhesives can inflict in my classes on records management and preservation and therefore end up scarring my audience on the topic of Post-It notes.

A brilliant person has figured out how to market to this very small niche via a Cafe Press store front.

Without further ado: I may now purchase a mug or magnets with this on it:

-Jessica

I spent most of yesterday trying to get to know the Congregationalists of the 1920s. I came in to work, took off my coat, and then ran up into the stacks for an armful of books — I had determined that this was going to be a day fully devoted to research, with as few interruptions as I could manage.

And so I sat at my desk for hours, reading through old issues of The Congregationalist, taking notes or copying off articles that caught my eye. I quickly became engrossed in some of the controversies of the day. "King of Kings" had just hit the movie theaters and many church people were outraged and perplexed by Hollywood's take on the life of Christ, a story that they thought they still owned in some fashion. Another spate of articles took on the problem of religion at Amherst College, sparked by an openly atheist talk in the school chapel. The editors defended British churchwoman Maude Royden, who had been disinvited from an event by Chicago Methodist when they learned that she smoked cigarettes. Congregationalists also worried about prohibition, about war, and about race relations. After a while I began to feel like I knew some of these people, as familiar names and faces began to form a recognizable pattern.

Hours went by like minutes, and I was deep into 1926 when Suchesta, the tenant coordinator here at 14 Beacon Street, came in with news of something I needed to see on the sixth floor. It took a minute to come up for air, and I followed her a little bit reluctantly. What she showed me was well worth the interruption.

John and David, the trusty maintenance crew at Congregational House, had taken down the large square of painted plywood that had long served as a directory of the tenants on the sixth floor, and had uncovered the original marble one underneath. The marble hadn't seen the light of day for many decades. In fact, some of the old Congregational tenants were still listed in neatly painted gold leaf letters: the Board of Pastoral Supply, the Massachusetts Conference of Congregational Christian Churches, and at least one office of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.

But that wasn't the exciting part. As we looked at that old marble directory, we began to see other seemingly random shapes that gradually formed into letters, like ghostly figures materializing into flesh. There was the Boston City Missionary Society, the Church Building Society, and Anatolia College. The more we looked at the marble, the more names we could make out.

It was like all of those old Congregationalists I'd be getting to know while I was sitting at my desk suddenly decided to pop out from behind a bush and say "boo". They were not just figures in old periodicals, but real flesh and blood people who used to work here, who loved this building and all it stood for. It's not often that historians who study the past get to bump right up against it the way that I did yesterday — but perhaps they should. There's nothing better than reading about people who haven't gone away gracefully, but love a good surprise every now and then.

-Peggy

Sometimes a project comes together that you know will be somewhat sizable, but the magnitude of it may not hit you until you're in the midst of it. This past December I formulated one that I think I knew would be pretty epic. I think I was correct.

Old South Church is one of the very few collections we have at the library of a living organization. They deposited records dating back to 1669 up to the late 20th century in several installments over the years. Nevertheless, this is a big church with a lot of activities. They have as yet unplumbed depths in regard to historical documents still on site. They have had historians over the years that have kept things in check, at least. This is much more than many Congregationally-based churches can boast.

This is a moment of transition for the church, a changing of the guard. Previous historian, Susan Campbell, has retired and Jeff Makholm has stepped into the role. I am in a position to organize a group of Simmons archive students to help us determine exactly what's at the church and of that, what should be transferred to the archive here. I have done similar work with our other major living collection from Park Street Church, which is on the other side of the block from the library. In the Park Street case, I used two students at a time, but this time three seemed necessary.

We are taking full advantage of various 2.0 technologies to keep us on track and in good communication. I suspect working without a wiki would make our lives much sadder. Expect to hear more about this in the weeks to come.

-Jessica

Not only do we now have a live members section, but we have just established a Congregational Library YouTube channel where we will post videos from various events and activities. Please be sure to subscribe. Our current only video so far is from my New Jersey trip from this past weekend. It's the introduction to my new tech in church settings keynote, but it's a summary of our library's online activities at the moment.

-Jessica

Are you member of the Congregational Library? You can sign up for an account that will give you access to our new "members only" content. It includes recent issues of our bulletin and a video seminar, with much more to be added over the coming year.

If you're already a member, don't miss out. If you haven't joined yet, please consider making a donation.

--Robin

Jessica's addendum: I will see about creating an intro video to orient the members and tantalize our future members. I link to this will be available via this blog once it is done.

Just a reminder that we welcome groups for tours of the Library. Advance notice is required. In the past, we have hosted conference groups, church committees, women's groups, local and international tourists, Confirmation classes, historians, librarians, genealogists, archivists, and teachers. We're happy to discuss your group's interests. If you are coming into one of our Brown Bag events, we can arrange a tour before or after the event.

Please contact Claudette or Peggy to make arrangements.

-Claudette

For those who haven't seen it, here is a link from my recent article in the Christian Century, "The Past Isn't Past." If you want to know what the Congregational Library is all about, and why we do what we do, this should give you a good start.

-Peggy

Donna La Rue will return next Wednesday at noon to continue her illustrated lecture begun on February 17. Donna will discuss the history of the Congregational churches as well as tell stories about the Baptist, Quaker, Anglican, Presbyterian, Huguenot, Universalist, and Swedenborgian congregations of the pre-Revolutionary period.

Please join us and bring your lunch to hear this engaging discussion and learn about Boston history. Free and open to the public. You don't have to have been here on February 17.

-Claudette

Don't forget our rescheduled brown bag lunch with Donna La Rue is tomorrow. Her topic: Congregational Boston in a Colonial Era.

Donna La Rue, a local church historian, gravestone researcher, and expert tour guide, has planned a three-part presentation on the history of the city’s thirteen Congregational churches. She will be discussing their known buildings, worship practices and music, as well as their ministers' and congregants' homesites and gravestones. Donna will also tell their stories about their neighbors: the Baptist, Quaker, Anglican, Presbyterian, Huguenot, (secret) Catholic, and later Unitarian, Universalist, and Swedenborgian congregations of the pre-Revolutionary period.

The lecture will start at noon.

This is a note that was emailed to me earlier:

You are receiving this message because the staff at the State Library of Massachusetts would like to extend our sincere thanks for signing our online petition to save the State Library. We are pleased to let you know that $170k has been reinstated to the library's FY2010 budget. Additionally, the Governor's FY2011 Budget Recommendation proposes a $684k appropriation for the State Library. The Governor's Budget Recommendation is the first in a series of steps in the budgetary process, which is explained on the state's website.

This is great news! Congratulations to our colleagues across town.

-Jessica

I have been on the advisory committee for this project. Our Massachusetts colleagues — do look this over.

-Jessica

On February 22, 2010, The Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners will begin administering a comprehensive statewide survey of preservation activities as part of its IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) Connecting to Collections grant.

The Commonwealth's cultural institutions have not been surveyed on preservation issues since 1990.

Connecting to Collections will:

• Provide a thorough picture of current cultural preservation activities in the Commonwealth
• Serve as a basis for future funding that supports preservation efforts
• May be used by your institution as a needs-assessment tool
• Provide survey results to participating organizations

More information is available at the Mass. state "Connecting to Collections" survey page.

Please Help:

• Take the survey. It will be available online from February 22, 2010 through April 23, 2010. The URL is pending.
• Spread the word. MBLC's goal is to include all the Commonwealth's nonprofit cultural institutions with collections. Please take a moment to check our listings on the "Connecting to Collections" survey contacts list and let us know of ones we have overlooked or forward this email to cultural institutions that are not listed.
• Contact the MBLC. If you have questions about the survey, please contact:
  • Gregor Trinkaus-Randall, MBLC Preservation Specialist, at gregor.trinkaus-randall@state.ma.us
    or
  • Angelina Altobellis, NEDCC Assessment Program Coordinator, at aaltobellis@nedcc.org
• If you know of an organization we have overlooked or may be difficult to contact, please contact:
  • Rebecca Meyer, MBLC Connecting to Collections intern, at rebecca.meyer@state.ma.us.

Join us Wednesday, February 10 at noon to hear an illustrated lecture on "Congregational Boston in the Colonial Era" by Donna La Rue. Ms. La Rue's lecture and slide show will cover the history of the city's thirteen Congregational churches, their known buildings, worship practices and music. She will discuss the homes and grave sites of Congregational ministers and congregants.

Ms. La Rue is a local church historian, gravestone researcher, expert tour guide, and historical interpreter. She holds degrees from Ohio State University, Lesley College, and has done doctoral level research at Boston University on "The Arts for Then and Now". She brings a wealth of knowledge on American colonial church art and architecture.

This event is free. Please bring your lunch.

More information about Donna can be found in this article in the BU Bridge newsletter.

Middleboro Church record book's title page

As many of you have seen, we have been working with Yale's Jonathan Edwards Center to make church records accessible. The First Church Natick records are on their site, and we have plans to share 12 more collections this year. In the meantime, I am combing through each ledger book to generate accurate meta data. The ultimate goal is for researchers to be able to search by key word and/or year whenever possible. It's a very good thing that we are taking the time to do this since it's not unusual for the minister/clerk to intermingle events (baptisms, confessions of faith, communion), or jump back and forth between noting activities. On several occasions the record keeper would backtrack a few years to note ones not previously mentioned. Veteran researchers are likely used to these foibles and may even enjoy the opportunities for serendipity when going through a ledger page by page. However, as an organizationally-minded 21st century person, one asked to answer reference questions, I like the option of being able to go directly to the text in question.

-Jessica