Beacon Street Blog
This new collection in our New England's Hidden Histories program comes from the Church of Christ in Westborough, Mass. These earliest records begin with the founding of the church in 1724 under Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, and chronicle the congregation's growth through 1787. During the First Great Awakening, both George Whitefield and Johnathan Edwards preached there.
This digital resource has been provided by the Westborough Public Library, where the original manuscript is held.
Westborough, Mass. Church of Christ
The single volume in this collection includes church meeting minutes, records of votes, marriages, baptisms, admissions and dismissions, membership lists, and church covenants.
Special Thanks
This digital resource has been made possible in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the human endeavor.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this resource do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
More digital content is now on offer via our New England's Hidden Histories program, in collaboration with the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum. These new collections include two personal diaries from the early 1700s, one belonging to a celebrated Salem minister, the other to an ordinary citizen from Lynn, Mass. Despite the authors' differences, the two accounts share striking similarities, such as a preoccupation with local weather, farming and husbandry, travel, and visits with family and friends. As if these personal records weren't fascinating enough, the third collection is a legal testimony by John Stockman of Salisbury, Mass. admitting to a physical assault on the King's Highway.
Joseph Green diary
Rev. Joseph Green was a celebrated minister of the First Church of Salem. Ordained in 1698, he inherited a divided and traumatized congregation after the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692. He replaced the controversial Rev. Samuel Parris, reuniting the church and facilitating reconciliation between perpetrators and victims of the witchcraft hysteria. His diary of 1700-1715 deals mainly with day-to-day concerns such as religious study, errands and meetings, though it also touches on more monumental events such as Ann Putnam’s public admission that she had falsely accused others of witchcraft.
The diary of this Lynn, Mass., man details a 43-year period of daily life, including agricultural tasks, notations on attendance at religious meetings, visits from his friends, and observations about the weather. The diary is contained within two bound volumes, the first comprising the years 1726-1750, and the second 1750-1769.
In this document John Stockman admits wrongdoing and apologizes to a Mr. Caleb Moody, Jr., whom he assaulted "in the Night under the temptation of Satan". The Moodys and Stockmans were both prominent families in the Newbury/Salisbury area during the early 18th century.
Have a look through these collections to get a sense of what daily life in New England was like during the early 1700s, through the words of those who lived it.
Special Thanks
These digital resources have been made possible in part by the Council on Library and Information Resources, through a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant.
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this resource do not necessarily represent those of the Council on Library and Information Resources.
These latest additions to our New England's Hidden Histories program come from our project partners, the Phillips Library at the Peabody Essex Museum. Both collections comprise the personal papers of two prominent Salem ministers, Rev. George Curwen and Rev. Samuel Fisk. The two men served consecutively as pastors in the First Congregational Church in Salem during the early 1700s, not long after church members had been rocked by the witchcraft hysteria of 1692. Rev. Fisk infamously caused a split in the congregation with his alleged mishandling of records and his doctrinal peculiarities. He and his supporters went on to form the Third Church in Salem, which would later become known as the Salem Tabernacle.
George Curwen papers
The collection includes an array of biographical material such as professional and personal correspondence, church administration, and posthumous legal records. A number of sermons delivered by Rev. Curwen during his time at Harvard are also included. These were preached under the auspices of various local ministers, including a "Rev. Mather" who was either the famed Rev. Cotton Mather or his son, Rev. Increase Mather.
These manuscripts are part of the Joseph Bowditch Papers, a larger collection at the Phillips Library. They contain a sizeable amount of correspondence concerning Rev. Fisk, both personal and legal. Most of the records relate to the split within the First Church's congregation during (and due to) Rev. Fisk's controversial ministry. These include heated letters back and forth, Rev. Fisk's official dismissal at the hands of an ecclesiastical council, and a legal ruling on the case by the Massachusetts House of Representatives.
Anyone with an interest in the history of the Congregational Church in Salem will find these collections a useful primary source, and — in Rev. Fisk's case — also quite a juicy read!
Special Thanks
These digital resources have been made possible in part by the Council on Library and Information Resources, through a Digitizing Hidden Collections grant.Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this resource do not necessarily represent those of the Council on Library and Information Resources.
The people of Gloucester—the English one, not its namesake in Massachusetts—are remembering their native son, George Whitefield, in a very practical way. The St. Mary de Crypt Church, where he was baptized educated, and preached his first sermon, has undertaken an ambitious restoration project. The Discover DeCrypt project is bringing the church into the twenty-first century as a place of worship as well as community center and part of a Whitefield heritage trail.
Last fall we met Mark Jones and Richard Atkins, who came to the Library from Gloucester. They were, like George before them, traveling up and down the East Coast, tracing Whitefield’s career for a BBC radio program. What was the connection with the Congregational Library? Rev. Whitefield was not, of course, a Congregationalist, but we possess a rare portrait that hangs prominently in our reading room. And I was glad to be interviewed for their program, which aired last winter.
Both of the de Crypt buildings are very old, and as the renovations have progressed, more of their history is unfolding. Below the schoolroom floor, archeologists on site discovered remains from the fifteenth-century (maybe not old by English Gloucester standards but pretty impressive here). The congregation also discovered a collection of Whitefield sermons from 1742, given to the church in 1899.
Projects like this one are expensive, and we are passing the word along about the renovation in hopes that some of our readers might want to contribute. US donors can give directly through the website (www.discoverdecrypt.org.uk). It’s gratifying to see George Whitefield’s home town remembering one of the most famous people of the eighteenth century in such an ambitious and thoughtful way.
Our reading room will be closed to the public on Friday, May 4th from noon to the end of business. The staff will be doing some reorganizing of our stacks, and don't wish to disrupt any researchers with the noise.
All of our online resources will be available as usual. If you have questions that require staff assistance, please send an email or leave a voicemail, and we'll get back to you as soon as we can.
- Church records from the “praying Indian” church at Natick;
- Ministerial association record books from nearly every county in Connecticut;
- Lists of men and women admitted to the First Church of Ipswich, Massachusetts, site of one of the largest religious revivals of eighteenth-century North America;
- Minutes from the Grafton, Massachusetts, church record book, with transcription, detailing the troubled pastorate of the ardent revivalist clergyman Solomon Prentice and his separatist wife, Sarah;
- Disciplinary records resulting from the bitter New Light church schisms in Newbury and Sturbridge, Massachusetts;
- Miscellaneous church papers from Granville, Massachusetts, featuring letters by the celebrated African American preacher Lemuel Haynes;
- And a wide range of sermons, theological notebooks, and personal papers by eighteenth-century Congregational clergymen, including luminaries Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, and Samuel Hopkins.
This blog was originally featured in Douglas Winiarski's blog The People Called New Lights.
On Tuesday, April 17, James “Jim” Matarazzo, Dean and Professor Emeritus, Simmons College School of Library and Information Science, passed away in Boston. To those of us in the Library and Archives’ field, Jim was a legend. For almost 50 years, he guided students from the classroom to successful careers, always being available and never forgetting anyone and their life. His gentle and humble nature belied a brilliant and cagey navigator of the working world…and he always paved the way into that world for his students.
The mention of Jim’s name always elicits a smile to the many whose lives he touched. The image of Jim’s pleasant smiling visage with his beloved pipe will forever be etched in my heart. His ability to remain calm and understanding while subtly being relentless in your behalf were the building blocks of his success. He was the Will Rogers of the Library and Archives world…never meeting a person he didn’t like and he took that easy-going nature a step further and always connected good people with each other.
Here at the Congregational Library and Archives, we are forever indebted to Jim for his tireless work on our behalf to help move many projects and endeavors forward with wisdom and funding. Many a student has walked through our doors with confidence and abilities that Jim helped craft.
We are among the many who will miss Jim dearly, but his confidence in us (and everyone) is contagious. A day won’t pass without someone whispering thank you for a successful path he started.
The Congregational Library & Archives is happy to announce that our “New England’s Hidden Histories” project, which seeks to locate, digitize, transcribe, and place online New England’s earliest manuscript church records, has been selected to receive a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Humanities Collections and Reference Resources Grant supports projects that provide an essential underpinning for scholarship, education, and public programming in the humanities. Funding from this program strengthens efforts to extend the life of such materials and make their intellectual content widely accessible through the use of digital technology, which closely aligns with the mission and directive of “New England’s Hidden Histories.”
“New England’s Hidden Histories” will collect and publish an additional 18,000 pages of records from the nation’s founding era from the archives of churches in the American Northeast; 7,000 of these pages will be transcribed. The documents are of immeasurable value to anyone "exploring political culture, social history, linguistics, epidemiology and climatology...as well as to genealogists and members of the public interested in a range of subjects," The National Endowment for the Humanities said in its announcement.
Early New Englanders recorded the most intimate details of their lives and communities in their manuscript church records. Spirited church debates, disciplinary hearings, personal narratives, and vital statistics listing marriages, births, and deaths, can all be found in often lost or hidden church records. “New England’s Hidden Histories” looks to reveal the texture of early New England society, sharing the stories of ordinary people in extraordinary detail. The project has already produced tens of thousands of digital images of these documents in its ongoing effort to freely share this historical resource with scholars, teachers, genealogists, and all interested members of the public on the website of the Congregational Library & Archives.
Created in 1965 as an independent federal agency, the National Endowment for the Humanities supports research and learning in history, literature, philosophy, and other areas of the humanities by funding selected, peer-reviewed proposals from around the nation. Additional information about the National Endowment for the Humanities and its grant programs is available at: www.neh.gov.
All of our online resources will be available as usual. If you have questions for the staff, please send an email or leave a voicemail, and we will get back to you when we return to the office next week.
We hope you have a lovely Easter weekend.
image of Springtime (ca. 1860) by Charles Jacque, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art
When I was ten, my personal hero was Patrick Henry. He was the Revolutionary War figure who demanded "liberty or death" — in retrospect, not a surprising choice for a bookish, secretly rebellious pre-adolescent. But by the time I reached college, I had switched to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the outspoken leader of the woman suffrage movement. I had discovered "women's history".
I shouldn't have had to choose one over the other, but that's the way history had been done for a long time. The stories revolved around wars and politics, and so in spite of an occasional Molly Pitcher or a Queen Elizabeth, the average textbook was pretty male-dominated. When changes came, they were incremental. In the new textbooks famous women appeared in text boxes, set off to one side, and probably not on the final exam.
Women's historians called this the "add women and stir" approach, a way of writing history not unlike adding chocolate chips to cookie dough. The cookies would certainly be edible without the chocolate chips and the chips don't turn the cookie into a ham roast. But the chocolate chips — and the women — are extra. They don't really alter the final product.
How much we miss! Lately one group of women has fascinated me, at least partly because I've found so much material about them in the Congregational Library. These women lived in the mid-twentieth century, after the suffrage amendment but well before the National Organization for Women and The Feminine Mystique. They lived out their faith in organizations like United Church Women, but also as deeply loyal Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists. These were women who enjoyed taking leadership, lobbying presidents and generals and atomic scientists — but who hated being called feminists.
In fact, they always preferred to go by their husbands' names. They were "Mrs. Harper Sibley", "Mrs. Samuel Cavert", "Mrs. Theodore Wedel", and "Mrs. Douglas Horton". Their husbands were prominent, accomplished men, but thee wives were incredibly competent on their own. Cynthia Wedel had a Ph.D. in psychology and was the first female president of the National Council of Churches. Mildred McAfee Horton was the president of Wellesley College and in World War II commander of the WAVES (Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service, the women's division of the Naval Reserve).
To me, these stories are every bit as much "hidden history" as are the church records we collect and digitize on our website. It's not hard, for example, to find Douglas Horton, the main architect of the merger that created the United Church of Christ, in our collection — but where is the intrepid Mildred Horton?
These are some of the stories we'll consider next week at the library, as we observe Women's History Month. You are all cordially invited to attend or watch live-streamed a talk I'll be giving on "Liberal Women in Conservative Times" at 4:00pm on Tuesday, April 3rd. Please RSVP on Eventbrite.
-Peggy Bendroth