Beacon Street Blog

I will be the keynote speaker at this event next month! Any of our friends in the NYC/Newark area should sign up.

Winter Gathering – Internet 2.0: Now That You Have a Website, What's Next?

Come to the February 20 New Jersey Association Winter Gathering to learn more about how to make the internet support your church's ministry. This event is designed for "techies" and "non-techies" alike — pastors and lay leaders, church secretaries and historians, finance and evangelism committee members, workers with youth — everyone who wants to know how using the internet can help them be more effective.

Jessica Steytler, an archivist with the Congregational Library in Boston, will take us on a tour of internet gadgets including wikis, blogs, Google Documents, and social networking tools and open our minds to some possible church applications. Then you can learn more about Facebook and social networking sites from Betsy Richardson, or hear Jessica tell us how many of those boxes of old records in our church attics we really need to save and how to save them safely. After lunch, learn about how your church can take advantage of on-line giving or how you can improve and expand your church's website. Workshops will address issues of security and safety of these new tools, as well as their potential.

The Winter Gathering will be held at the Community Church of Cedar Grove, 65 Bowden Road, Cedar Grove, NJ, 973-239-3875. Registration will begin at 8:30 AM, with the program starting at 9:30 and finishing by 2:00 PM. The cost is $6 payable at the door. Please RSVP by Feb. 12 to newjerseyassociation@email.com or 973-748-7772.

-Jessica

The Congregational Library has again received a grant from the H. W. Wilson Foundation to continue its work in cataloging and digitizing its collection. The support from the Wilson Foundation enables us to provide increased accessibility to our historic and unique collections via the online catalog and the website. The total grant commitment is for $30,000 which will be paid out as $5,000 grants over the next 6 years.

We are extremely grateful to the Wilson Foundation for supporting us.

-Claudette

One of the most famous Americans of the late nineteenth century, Henry Ward Beecher was the youngest son of an equally famous family, headed by the redoubtable Lyman Beecher and most renowned by the work of his sister Harriet Beecher Stowe. As the popular and sometimes flamboyant pastor of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church, Henry Ward supported various social reforms, including women's rights and the abolition of slavery. His theology, sometimes described as "evangelical liberalism," emphasized the love of God and the importance of the sinner's emotional response — a conscious departure from earlier theological systems in New England Congregationalism which emphasized sin and judgment. In his later career, Beecher became embroiled in sexual scandal, from which his reputation never quite recovered; but by then he was, as one recent account has put it, "the most famous man in America," a public figure of enormous cultural and social influence.

The Congregational Library (and Archive) is back from its not-quite-long-enough winter nap and we are planning and plotting out what we intend to do over the next 12 months. Some of us are traveling out of state to attend conferences, give workshops, and spread the joy that is the Congregational Library's program. We are also gearing up for some big internship projects. If we have any Simmons archive students reading, I strongly urge you to get in on what we will be posting through the school's system later this month.

One great and wonderful milestone we can now report: Robin has successfully cataloged all our periodicals! Most of what we have is 19th century and just about never an unbroken run. Getting all the documentation sorted to say "this is really done" has taken years. So, many congratulations are in order. Rest assured, if you are searching our online catalog, they are present and accounted for.

-Jessica

Christmas.

In New England, the Puritans and Pilgrims did not recognize Christmas Day, December 25. The General Court of Massachusetts in 1659 banned the observance of Christmas and fined people for feasting and playing on that day.

For more information on the history of Christmas in America and its Christmas customs we recommend the following:

Christmas in America: a History by Penne L. Restad (1995) and

Merry Christmas! Celebrating America's Greatest Holiday by Karal Ann Marling (2000).

-Claudette

Our new volunteer, Talya Stern, has started to write up some historical snippets. The blog will continue feature her work in the coming months:

Lyman Abbott was a preacher during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Drawing greatly from popular preachers like Henry Ward Beecher, Abbott sought to convey spirituality over doctrinal specificity in his sermons. Though he read the Bible in a literal manner and believed in the possibility of miracles, Abbott felt strongly that human reason could take precedence over literal translation and thus maintained an open-minded view of man’s role within Protestantism. In addition to his role as a preacher, Abbott was the associate editor of Harper’s magazine and editor for both the Illustrated Christian Weekly and the Christian Union.

-Talya Stern

Our Fall semester Simmons GSLIS intern, Kim Kinder, has created two new exhibits in the library detailing the history of missions begun by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Mission (A.B.C.F.M.). These exhibits will be in place in 2010 to commemorate the 200th Anniversary of the A.B.C.F.M. If you are in the area, stop by to see these. We will be adding information to our website in 2010 regarding this anniversary.

-Claudette

This week I was doing a quick sort of a church collection that piggy-backed in on another acquisition. It's a very small set of records, about 2 folders total. One of the items was a scrapbook. It's a standard mid 20th century design with horrible, acidic paper and an unreasonable use of adhesives: scotch tape, duct and electrical tapes, and some glue. In the process of rescuing the material (aka, getting them out of the scrapbook) — the bit of preservation/conservation horror that made me go looking for the camera was as you see here:

The explanation — the photograph was on the opposite page from the program. The acids in the paper and photo development chemicals were such that it burned a mirror image into its neighbor. It's creepy, interesting, and a good reason why it's good to use acid-free paper as a buffer between pages of questionable material. That way the paper takes the brunt of acid burn and can be changed out. At least this happens in an ideal world.

-Jessica

The New England Archivists are continuing to come up with more ways to help out the unemployed professionals amongst us. They have created a job posting page on their site -- check it out.

Our advanced archive class intern shares his experience with his project:

The Congregational Library is home to more than books, manuscript collections, and archival collections. A hidden collection exists alongside the books and paper. We have known about the existence of these artifact collections for some time, but a project is now underway to reveal the three-dimensional materials. The project, led by an intern from Simmons College GSLIS, is only in the beginning stages, but a researcher can view the records for these objects by searching "Object Collection" under 'Series' in the Congregational Library Catalog.

Revealing these materials is more complicated than simply taking a camera and photographing the object. How does the cataloger describe the object? How does the cataloger describe varied objects, ranging from Hebrew scrolls to Buddhist texts, and from ceremonial gavels to communion sets? The Congregational Library has developed a set of procedures and guidelines, modified from the bibliographic standard AACR2, which allows the cataloger to apply similar standards across a wide array of material.

Two examples of items cataloged under this project are from the S. Brainard Pratt collection. Pratt was a prolific collector of Bibles and religious artifacts. We have a scroll in Hebrew of the Book of Ecclesiastes. This scroll is primarily made of wood and parchment. The scroll was procured for Pratt through the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem.

Pratt also obtained a set of human bones "formerly worn as ornaments." These are from the Sandwich Islands, dating to around 1840.

These two artifacts illustrate the variety of collections at the Congregational Library. Please continue to check for updates in this blog on what is happening at the Congregational Library.

-Abraham Miller

We were browsing through some scrapbooks in the stacks recently and spent some time reviewing 13 volumes plus an index of clippings from The Congregationalist of the column "Conversation Corner", a column for children. The author of this column, Mr. Martin, was in reality Rev. Charles C. Carpenter (1836-1918) of Andover. Rev. Carpenter was the son of Dr. Elijah Wood Carpenter of Bernardston. This collection of columns was published in The Congregationalist from 1886 to 1906. Additionally, there are two scrapbooks of letters to Mr. Martin from both children and adults. Rev. Carpenter as Mr. Martin also filled two albums of pictures he received from children. The scrapbooks and albums were gifts from Rev. Carpenter.

This struck me as appropriate for the season from "Conversation Corner" November 17, 1892:

It is all right about those apples. I am fully convinced that that particular variety is still raised in abundance! The paper containing the reference to them was scarcely printed when a gentleman, apparently nearly as old as the pictured veteran "at the head of the column," rang my bell and, when I opened the door, poured out an armful of apples, saying, "There are your gillyflowers!" He added that they came from the "Cape district," but I did not think to ask him whether it was Cape Cod or Cape Ann. Coming into Boston a gentleman on the cars gave me a message from a lady in Springfield that she had a supply from Connecticut which I could have by calling. At the Congregational Library I found a basket of the real old egg-shaped beauties I had longed to see — these were from Lakeville, Mass. In the editor's office I found a request to call at the Home Missionary rooms, where I found another sample lot left by a Maiden gentleman — they were from Byfield. I had hardly reached home when one large apple came in a box all by itself through the mail; ...

--Claudette

In 1897, Rev. Morton Dexter made a gift of the Pew Back from Scrooby Church to the American Congregational Association. Rev. Dexter was the son of Rev. Henry M. Dexter and editor of The Congregationalist. The carvings of the grape vine on the pew are believed to be a reference to Christ from John 15:5, "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing." A another pew back picture can be found in John Brown's book, The Pilgrim Fathers of New England and their Puritan Successors (1895).

The Ceiling Beam from Scrooby Manor was a gift of the Rev. Henry M. Dexter, editor of The Congregationalist and the Congregational Quarterly, in 1898. In Rev. Dexter's opinion, the beam was over the heads of the Pilgrim fathers as the worshiped.

The Scrooby Separatist Church was organized in the Scrooby manor house by William Brewster in around 1607. Brewster fled to Amsterdam in 1608, moved to Leiden in 1609, and left from England in 1620 on the Mayflower as the elder of the group we now know as the Pilgrims. In New England, they founded Plymouth Colony.

Most of the manor house and its outbuildings were demolished around 1636-7 following the orders of Charles I. Around 1750 part of one wing of the manor house was renovated and can be seen today.

--Claudette

Emily Glinert, one of our interns this semester wrote today's piece on her project:

As an intern at the Congregational Library this semester, I have been working with the collection of Rev. Maxwell (Max) and Elizabeth (Betty) Welch. Max and Betty were both born in 1913 in Maine. After they were married, they lived in Maine and Massachusetts before deciding to become missionaries in Portuguese Angola, West Africa. By the time Max and Betty departed for Portugal in 1947 to learn the Portuguese language, they had two young sons, who traveled with them.

The Welch family lived in Portugal for about one year and then they went to the missions in Angola. During their time in Angola, Max and Betty had two more children, bringing their family to six people.

After a furlough year from 1952-1953, the whole family returned to Angola until 1957. The collection contains correspondence, photographs, slides, books, recordings and scrapbooks from this time in their lives, as well as the years after their time in Angola as they continued to be involved in the efforts of the missionaries who came after them.

I have been amazed while organizing the Welch collection. It must have been very difficult to travel to Angola with small children and to be away from their families and friends in the United States. In order to keep in touch, they used sound recordings and written correspondence, both of which give a good picture of their experiences. Max and Betty were also extremely good at documenting their journeys through photographs. Some of my favorite pieces in the collection are the photographs of the family’s daily activities, such as the children playing at school or Betty leading a meeting in their home. The collection has been very interesting from an archival point of view as well because there are both digital and analog items that are being preserved. In my preservation class, we have been studying the use of digitization as a means of preservation and I have gained a greater understanding by working with digitized materials within this collection. This also means that when I am finished, the collection will be available to be accessed through the website.

I am so thankful to the Congregational Library and the Welch family for giving me this enriching opportunity. It has been a wonderful experience.

Edward Dorr Griffin (1770-1837)

Edward Dorr Griffin was born in East Haddam, Connecticut in 1770.

Griffin graduated from Yale in 1790. He was ordained in New Hartford, Connecticut in 1795. Griffin received his Doctor of Divinity from Union College in 1808. In 1811, Griffin became the first minister of the Park Street Church. Griffin gave numerous sermons in opposition to New Divinity during his time at Park Street Church. Griffin served as the President of Williams College from 1821-1836.

Both his memoir and a collection of his sermons have been digitized by the Google Books project.

- Sam

It's been too long since we've had the chance to add to our Instant History section of the website. We now have the much-requested recording of our own board member and eminent historian, Rick Taylor, reading his paper "Congregationalism's Biggest Mistake" [mp3 format]. This lecture on October 21 was part of our ongoing Brown Bag Lunch series. Be sure to listen or read the original paper on our website.

-Jessica

Photograghs by Steven Rosenthal; essay by Verlyn Linkenborg; afterword by Robert Campbell; published by the The Monacelli Press; 136 pages, 12 x 14 inches, 80 tritone photographs.

This beautiful book has been added to the Library collection. Mr. Rosenthal began photographing New England Churches in the mid-1960 to preserve a sense of place in the New England landscape. Some of the churches pictured in the book are: First Congregational Church, Kensington, NH; First Congregational Church, Newfane, VT; First Congregational Church, South Paris, ME; First Congregational Church, Nantucket, MA; and South Ferry Church, Narragansett, RI.

Book Signing and Exhibit: October 30, 2009 at Cape Ann Museum, 27 Pleasant Street, Gloucester, MA at 6:00 PM. Call 978-283-0455.

For more information about this book, click here.

-Claudette

That, as I learned this past month, is the exclamation that Ellen White used to shout when she was about to have a vision. Ellen Gould Harmon White was the founder of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church, a dynamic woman with a prophetic gift; she's also the subject of a four-day conference I'll be attending in Portland, Maine, this weekend.

The Ellen White Project, as it's called, has assembled some twenty authors and twice as many commentators to discuss an essay collection now in process. That's a lot of historians in one place, and I have to confess I am a little giddy at the prospect.

White's background does actually connect to the Congregational Library, particularly our large cache of materials from the Christian Connection. She was part of a group that formed in the wake of the "great disappointment", when the world did not come to an end in 1844, as seer William Miller had predicted it would. White's visions helped one part of the remnant to regroup, reinterpreting what looked like failure as a simple misreading of divine events. White was originally a "shouting Methodist" from Portland, but many of the other ex-Millerites came and went from the Shakers and from the Christians, who were also quite comfortable with charismatic female leadership and open to novel religious ideas.

The rest of her story is just as colorful as one would expect. She was a great advocate of health reform (having been permanently disfigured by a rock thrown at her face when she was a young girl) and after she moved to Battle Creek, Michigan, she took up with Harvey Kellogg, another reformer interested in water cures and, yes, healthy breakfast cereals. If you're interested in knowing more, we have a biography or two of White in our collection -- and then, of course, there will be a great collection of essays coming out sometime in the near future (but no predictions of when...)

-Peggy

This past Wednesday night I had the honor of attending a dinner given by the Massachusetts Historical Society, in honor of historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich. She received their Kennedy Medal, a high honor given to the likes of Edmund Morgan, Oscar Handlin, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (She's also the historian who coined the phrase that "Well-behaved women rarely make history.")

I sat in a room upstairs in the Harvard Club, feeling out of my element but bemused by all the oil portraits of eminent Harvard graduates lining the walls -- nearly all of them Congregationalists.

Ulrich's talk was about a diary she was reading about Wilford Woodruff, an early leader in the Mormon Church. He kept a regular chronicle of his daily life, including three trips to Boston in the 1830s. (He ended up not much liking it here.)

It reminded me of a project I did last year with Sam Smallidge, one of our Simmons interns. We combed through the entire archives and Sam created a document that listed and described every diary and journal in our collection. There were a lot, and most of them looked fascinating -- many were records kept by traveling ministers about the places they visited and people they baptized. It was easy to imagine that these would be grist for a lot of wonderful projects.

Sam and I found a lot of other treasures too -- 18th century manumission papers (handwritten) to free a slave in Massachusetts, a lottery ticket from the Revolutionary War era, and of course many records of ancient church fights and controversies. They're all still up there in the archives, waiting for the next Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to open the secrets they’ve been keeping for all these many years.

-Peggy

I remember very clearly the first time I read Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind in 1994. It was a powerful and astonishing book, decrying the deep-seated anti-intellectualism among conservative Christians. It kind of floored me, for lots of reasons, some having to do with my own scholarly interests and some having to do with Noll's virtuoso command of evangelical history.

Last week I was part of a conference considering this same question, fifteen years later — and I can report that the most recent news is definitely mixed. Without question, evangelicals have made progress in graduating Ph.Ds and M.B.A.'s and M.D.s. My own field, American religious history, has been transformed by historians like Noll, George Marsden, and Nathan Hatch. But the larger evangelical public doesn't read their books — the most popular historical expert among conservative Christians is David Barton, former co-chair of the Texas Republican Party and a best-selling author of books about the faith of the founding fathers (deists mostly) and overblown paeans about the spiritual destiny of the United States.

Evangelicals may buy a lot more books than other Protestants, but my guess is that they don't have any kind of a corner on the anti-intellectual problem. The people who put this Library together understood that their Christian faith required a lot of careful thinking, reading, and learning. It wasn't just about personal growth or emotional enrichment — it was about the life of the mind as well.

It's discouraging sometimes, to see how little demand there is for thinking in the religious world, how little interest in books and ideas that take time to absorb. People often seem too busy loading their guns for the next encounter with a liberal or a conservative or an atheist.

Last week a woman came into the Library and she said she wanted to learn more about the Puritans — apparently John Cotton was one of her ancestors. It's hard to suggest just one book about the Puritans, and most of the ones I know are pretty dense material. So I suggested a book I read in college, Edmund Morgan's The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop, written way back in 1958.

I kind of didn't expect that she'd really read it — most people want something quick and dirty (so to speak). But next I saw, the woman was sitting in the Library reading. She stayed there for a long time, and then she came back the next day. And the next!

The best part of the day was walking through the Reading Room and seeing her still sitting there, reading away. It was a great reminder of why we are still here.

--Peggy

This morning we hosted approximately 50 visitors from Tallmadge, OH. The group was in Boston as part of the 200th Anniversary celebration of the First Congregational Church of Tallmadge. This church is the oldest Congregational Church in Ohio. Peggy took half the group to the Park Street Church for a tour while the other half remained with Claudette to tour the library and view some of our treasures. Then we switched groups. We were happy to have this opportunity to spend time with them.

At noon, we heard Rev. George E. Peters of the Pawtucket Congregational Church (RI) read his paper, "Riding the First Wave: The Education, Life and Times of Mary Emma Woolley". Rev. Peters became interested in the Woolley family through its connection to the Pawtucket Congregational Church where Mary's father, Joseph Judah Woolley, had served as the fourth pastor. Rev. Peters has provided the Library with copies of this paper as well as his pamphlet, "A Century of Woolley Family History", published by the Rhode Island Conference, United Church of Christ. Thank you for this educational lecture. We hope more of our fans can join us at future Brown Bag lunches.

--Claudette

Click on the icon to join

My friend, Paige Roberts, who until recently worked at Special Collections at the Massachusetts State House has created a social networking site through Ning for other un/der-employed archivists, called "Seeking Archivists." Since I set up a Lone Arrangers* group on Ning two years ago, Paige asked me how it would work and what other foibles there might be in the creation process, so I'm glad to see that the project is taking wing.

I strongly urge folks to sign up -- it's free, of course, and can be very low-traffic: individual users can determine their settings on new content alerts. The purpose is to help the unemployed of the profession connect with each other, get help with updating resumes, sharing job leads, and staying connected. Please pass this new resource on as you see fit. We have to stick together.

*Lone Arrangers is a term used by archivists to describe those who have to work by themselves -- processing or arranging -- solo.

-Jessica

First the news: The tech class scheduled for Saturday is canceled due to low registration.

Second an observation: This is a really great class that is perhaps hard for its target audience to recognize as something they would benefit from. When I offered this class at a church conference a few months ago, it was a towering success: a lot of participants with great energy and questions. It's possible that offering the class on a Saturday in town is a stumbling point. It might do better during the week here at the library or at an off-site location.

Third a request: If there are local folks out there who already are convinced they would like to take this sort of workshop, please comment on the blog, in Facebook, or email me directly to suggest when and/or where might work better. Under the correct circumstances, I'm willing to tailor a session if I can get at least 5 participants. The irony of using the blog/Facebook (both discussed in my class) to inquire about where I'm going wrong, does not escape me.

-Jessica

image from the NEDCC website

Here's a little vignette from the act of getting a new collection into the archive and dovetails nicely into last Tuesday's links post:

Most of our collections are from local New England churches. There are times when we will get a church farther afield that has 1. closed and 2. has heard of us. Part 2 is clearly an important detail and sadly not as guaranteed as we would like. In this case, the church was a middling distance of upstate New York. By a twist of fate, a nearby local library, which had been temporarily holding the church's records, had to come to Northeast Document Conservation Center (NEDCC) to pick up a restored map that was too big to ship.

The New York folks had no idea when we started talking that I have a close working relationship with NEDCC. Originally they thought they'd have to fit driving from Andover to Downtown Boston. What a surprise for them when I successfully negotiated to have my new collection left at NEDCC.

It felt good to be able to help out someone who was really doing me a favor in the first place by hauling my new collection. Also, I'm grateful to be an active member in a helpful community. Finally, I had the pleasure of visiting an organization that I rely on and I'm quite fond of. I probably could have spent all morning talking to the conservators about their projects, the building, the view from their windows, the history of the town -- you get the idea.

-Jessica

Hey Boston-area folks:

Are you curious about some of these newer tools that are available online these days, but perhaps you either don't get what their point is, or you'd really prefer to have a bit of a guided tour? Well, I've got the answer for you. I'm teaching a class that discusses some of the new technologies that have become so popular in the past few years. Given our mission and patron-base, I put it into the context of using them in conjunction with churches and their activities. However, all these tools are extremely flexible and can be used for just about any setting in which you need to interact efficiently with other groups.

The class is here at the library, 14 Beacon Street, Boston (2nd floor) on Saturday October 3 from 10am-noon for the reasonable price of $10. Here's a link to the original event flier [PDF format]. Attendees may bring their laptop with them to try out what we discuss, but it is not required. We can accommodate up to 10 participants, so do sign up soon. If you are interested, please contact Susan Thomas to register.

-Jessica