One of the strengths of the Emily Dickinson Collection at Amherst College is the large number of manuscript fragments — scraps of paper, pieces of envelopes, and a range of other ephemera on which Dickinson jotted a few lines, or even entire poems. One such fragment is identified by Thomas Johnson as “Prose Fragment #96″ in his edition of Dickinson’s letters. It’s Amherst manuscript #868: “Of our deepest delights”

Emily Dickinson. “Of our deepest delights” Amherst #868

This fragment is clearly a piece of a concert program, but no one seems ever to have done the work to find out more about this piece. Fortunately, there is an important clue present on both sides of the paper:

Emily Dickinson. “Of our deepest delights” Verso.

If the program had been torn in half just a little higher up the page, the name Howard Parkhurst might have been lost. As it is, a quick check of the Amherst College Biographical Record (Sesquicentennial Edition, 1973) reveals that he was a member of the Class of 1873. It also tells us that he studied music in Stuttgart, Munich, and Berlin as well as Liverpool between 1873 and 1875. From 1875 – 1882 he taught music and served as organist for various churches around Boston, then it was back to Germany for a couple of years to study with Rheinberger and Kellarmann. Finally, Parkhurst settled in New York city where he taught music and published books about birds from 1884 until his death in 1916.

The next stop was one of our Class Albums for the Class of 1873, so we can put a face to the name:

From the Biographical Record and Class Albums I moved on to consult Parkhurst’s Biographical File — the Archives keeps a file for every student who ever attended Amherst College. Sometimes these files are overflowing with manuscripts and photographs and invaluable details, but sometimes they contain nothing more than the form the alumnus filled out for an alumni directory or class reunion book. Parkhurst’s file isn’t particularly full, but it does contain exactly what I hoped for:

“Organ Concert by Howard Parkhurst” Parkhurst Biographical File.

This clean copy of the same program found in the Dickinson Collection provides the next clues: the date and location of the Organ Concert. Inside, we can read the whole musical program performed that afternoon in June:

Now that the exact date was known, it was easy to pull the corresponding volume of The Amherst Student off the shelf to see what further details might emerge. I found two stories in the paper that fleshed out the circumstances of this concert.

The Amherst Student. June 14, 1873. Page 86.

The Amherst Student. June 28, 1873. Page 94.

One of the first things one learns about exploring the world of Emily Dickinson in and around Amherst is that Dickinsons are thick on the ground around these parts. The “Mr. Dickinson” who played the accompaniments for the chorus could have been Sidney Dickinson of Northampton, a member of the Class of 1874. Or it could have been Edward Dickinson, also of Northampton, or Frederick Billings Dickinson of North Hadley — these last two members of the Class of 1876.

It is highly probable that one, or possibly two, Dickinson men from Emily Dickinson’s family were also present. 1873 is the year that father Edward Dickinson stepped down as Amherst College Treasurer and brother Austin Dickinson took up that post. A fundraising concert for the benefit of the newly constructed College Chapel is likely to have brought at least one of these men to the concert, though we have no concrete evidence of either.

The chapel in question was featured here in July in a parallel campus tour of buildings that are no longer standing — Stearns Church. Only the steeple of the church remains, next to the entrance of the Mead Art Museum.

But to return to Emily Dickinson and the torn scrap of manuscript that started this search. What does all of this detail tell us about her? Having exhausted all of the verifiable facts in the case, we now step into the realm of speculation. It is likely that either her father or her brother or both attended this concert, which would easily explain the presence of a copy of the program floating around the Dickinson Homestead. But is it not possible that Dickinson herself might have attended the concert?

I suppose we haven’t quite exhausted the facts of the case. To be utterly thorough, someone really ought to look up the words to the pieces performed that June day. Do any of those words resonate with the lines Dickinson wrote on her copy of the program? Are any of the pieces performed that day known to have been particular favorites of the poet? Were any of the female members of the chorus friends of Dickinson? Then there’s the question of natural curiosity about the brand new building on the college grounds. And a detail that may or may not be meaningful — the church had not yet been formally dedicated. Would Dickinson have been more or less likely to visit a church that was not yet formally a church?

These are all tantalizing questions, and certainly further research may shed some light, but possibly not. One of the wonderful frustrations of the Dickinson Collection and all the supporting contextual materials here at Amherst College is that we are constantly reminded of the limits of historical knowledge. We know for certain that this piece of a concert program bears pencil marks created by Emily Dickinson. We know a few things about the concert, but beyond that, we must live with uncertainty and speculation.

After two terms at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at UBC, I was lucky to spend twelve beautiful summer weeks in the care of the Archives with my co-intern Cristen Polley.

Ah, the Archives! Shelves of ancient, crumbling volumes disappearing into shadowed heights, honeycomb walls of coiled scrolls, one skeletal, omniscient archivist-monk carrying a lantern… I can imagine hypothetical archivists and conservators cringing in horror. If you’ve read as many fantasy novels as I have and have been afflicted with similar fantasies/nightmares, I can assure you that the inside of the modern archives is much more sensible altogether, all uniform rows of acid-free boxes, labeled and ordered. Dust is out, HVACs, environmental standards and lint-free gloves are in. The labyrinthine memory of the mortal archivist is vastly improved upon by systematic arrangement and archival description databases. Gothic architecture or no Gothic architecture, in the archives—the real archives—there is still a sense of awe in the presence of the remains of history, an awareness of its fragility before the ink-fading, data-corrupting streams of time.

Records from the Victorian Order of Nurses. Photo by Cristen Polley.

Earlier this summer, archivist Chak Yung showed us to the boxes of unprocessed records we would spend the next month with, closely examining, analyzing, inventorying, describing and rehousing in archival-quality containers. Based on study of the records, we would reconstruct the lives of the records’ creators, their activities, and the logic of their recordkeeping system for future researchers—not always a straightforward task, since most of us don’t organize or label our files with their eventual comprehensibility to total strangers in mind.

I was assigned the records of the Richmond-Vancouver branch of the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON), a non-profit society with over 100 years of charitable home nursing and community service history here in BC. A VON nurse has been in Vancouver almost as long as Vancouver has existed.

1939 Yousuf Karsh photo of Col. Elizabeth Smellie, O.B.E. Photograph by Cristen Polley.

The VON fonds turned out to be a rich and surprising collection of textual documents and photographs, as well as four transcription audio discs, stretching from about 1912 to the 1990′s. The records were originally created by as many as nine of the Victorian Order of Nurses branches that once operated in BC before they were all moved to one office, the Richmond-Vancouver branch. The Richmond-Vancouver Branch was the last remaining branch in BC and last custodian of the other regional branches’ records before it became the independent Health and Home Care Society of BC in 2006.

Next, under the supervision of conservator Sue Bigelow, Cristen and I cleaned and flattened architectural plans, and surface cleaned glass plate negatives and lantern slides before their digitization. We were given a crash course in photographs and plastics identification over a tableful of examples from the varied world of photographic processes. We also spent a day with volunteer Kathy Kinakin constructing custom boxes and sink mats for oversize glass plate negatives and a day with Jeffery Chong, staff member at the Archives, learning the basics of film identification, appraisal and repair.

The second major archival project that Cristen and I undertook was with digital archivist Glenn Dingwall, revising the Archives’ authority records for the City of Vancouver. Authority records describe records creators and the context in which archival records were created. The City of Vancouver is a complex and shifting organism: a division may experience different internal configurations, changes in name, and changing roles in the City’s administrative structure in the life of one file or one series of files. All of these developments need to be described and represented in the City authority records. In order to comprehend the history of the small section of the City government that Cristen and I were assigned, we needed to map its origins and formations in several ways before deciding how to most accurately represent the changes over time.

Administrative histories for City departments and divisions, diagrammed. Photo by Cristen Polley.

A fantastic twelve weeks! Thank you everyone, archivists, conservators, staff and volunteers, for your patience and generosity with us this summer.

Editor’s note: Melanie is Master’s of Archival Studies candidate at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies (University of British Columbia).

Robert D.W. Connor, the President of the Society of American Archivists (SAA) and recently retired first Archivist of the United States, in his address to the Society at their annual meeting in 1942 read a letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt who had been awarded an honorary membership in the organization.  He called for “…the duplication of records by modern processes…”

Letter from President Franklin D. Roosevelt to Robert Diggs Wembly Connor, 13 February 1942, Folder 668, Box 8 in the R. D. W. Connor Papers #2427, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

FDR acknowledged the magnitude of effort required:  “This involves, of course, a vast amount of work because of the volume of federal, state and local archives of all kinds—but I think that a broad plan would meet with hearty public support if it could be properly publicized.”

Which brings to mind the language in our draft Strategic Plan, one of the objectives under our goal of Making Access Happen.  In an effort to make an ever-increasing number of records available to the public we have promised to streamline processes, innovate, and collaborate with others to significantly increase the number of NARA records that are available to the public.  In fact, we have been so bold as to suggest that we “Digitize all analog archival … [ Read all ]

The topic of tax-exempt status has been much in the news lately—who gets it, what they do with it, and what IRS hoops they have to jump through in order to secure it. In spring 2013, news outlets revealed that the IRS had singled out some conservative and liberal groups’ applications for tax-exempt status under 501(c)(4) for extra scrutiny, sometimes allowing their applications to languish for years. Political wrangling over tax exemption is nothing new. The case of the Charles E. Merrill Trust provides an interesting mid-20^th century example of the way political influence was leveraged to change the tax code.

Charles E. Merrill (AC 1908), Founder of Merrill Lynch & Co.

Charles E. Merrill (AC 1908), founder of Merrill Lynch & Company, attended Amherst College for two years. Even though he left before graduating, he remained devoted to Amherst College, attending many reunions and donating large sums of money, including paying the tuition of more than 300 Amherst students during his lifetime, funding the construction of on-campus faculty housing, and hosting the Amherst College Merrill Center for Economics at his estate in Southampton, NY. Merrill was equally generous to Amherst College in his will. In his will, Charles Merrill established the Charles E. Merrill Trust, which would exist for twenty years and distribute his estate (a large portion of which was his personal stake in Merrill Lynch & Co.) to various institutions and charitable organizations.

The Orchard, Charles E. Merrill’s (AC 1908) estate in Southampton, NY, where the Amherst College Merrill Center for Economics was held

Amherst College stood to gain the largest single chunk of this trust fund—twenty percent of the total pool of money. As the tax code stood in 1956 when Merrill died, however, any interest from his limited partnership in Merrill Lynch & Co. stood to be, “taxed to the Trustees at the rates imposed on individuals as ‘unrelated business income’ even though all the uses are charitable.” [Letter to Senator Albert Gore, Sr., March 14, 1958, J. Alfred Guest Alumni Biographical File (1933)]. Interested parties at Amherst College—including politically-connected faculty and alumni—and Deerfield Academy, which was also a named beneficiary in the will, went into action, lobbying U.S. Representatives and Senators to change tax law.

Letter from Amherst College president and Charles E. Merrill Trustee Charles W. Cole to then-Senator John F. Kennedy asking for support of the Merrill Trust bill

The Amherst College Archives and Special Collections have a folder of letters and memoranda that document this campaign. One memo, dated March 11, 1958, details who is responsible for contacting which senator, with notes including the following for the person responsible for lobbying Senator Albert A. Gore, Sr. of Tennessee: “J.A.G. [J. Alfred Guest (AC 1933)] to ask Vic Johnson [Victor Johnson (AC 1938)] to go ahead, reminding Johnson that Maryville College in Tennessee has already received $50,000 from Charlie Merrill.” [March 11, 1958 memo, J. Alfred Guest Alumni Biographical File (1933)].] In his book The Checkbook: The Politics and Ethics of Foundation Philanthropy, Charles E. Merrill, Jr. suggests that House Majority Leader John W. McCormack was prompted to introduce a bill changing the tax code by an agreement that the Trust would fund a pet project for his friend Cardinal Richard Cushing, who was building a home for “wayward girls” near Boston [pg. 12]. Unfortunately, while we hold the grant records of the Charles E. Merrill Trust from September 1959 onward, we do not have the records of their earliest grants, so it is unclear whether the home was funded or not.

U.S. Public Law 85-367

Ultimately, the US Congress approved a very narrow statue, Public Law 85-367, on April 7, 1958, which gave tax-exempt status to the funds for the Charles E. Merrill Trust. The Merrill estate is not mentioned by name in the law, but the language in the act is highly specific. To wit: “In the case of a trust (A) created by virtue of the provisions of the will of an individual who died after August 16, 1954, and before January 1, 1957…” and, “…the amendment… shall apply to taxable years of trusts beginning after December 31, 1955.”

The Charles E. Merrill Trust went on to donate over 114 million dollars to various organizations—including Amherst College—during its twenty-three year existence (extended from the original twenty year time frame laid out in Merrill’s will). According to Charles E. Merrill, Jr., the Trust only spent an average of 2.8 percent of its income on overhead costs, apparently making quite effective use of its tax exemption.

Summary of Charles E. Merrill Trust grants from 1956-1978

In June, the Digital Projects Priorities Team met to assess this year’s project proposals and came up with the following list of projects in order of priority:

1. Textiles, Teachers, and Troops Year 2:
   This is the second year of a two-year LSTA-funded project documenting the history of Greensboro from Reconstruction to World War II.
2. Class of 1951 to present:
   Encompassing approximately 25,000 digital images, this project will make available the subject files that have been compiled on each graduating class since 1951. The files through 1950 have already been digitized as part of Textiles, Teachers, and Troops. 
3. UNCG Creative Writing:
   This project will digitize the Robert Watson and Randall Jarrell Papers (approximately 15,000 items) as  a pilot project for the for next phase of North Carolina Literary Map. 
4. Home Economics Pamphlets:
   This is the second year of a project to digitize public domain pamphlets from this collection, this phase mostly dating from 1923-1963.
5. Lois Lenski Pilot:
   This project will digitize several children’s books from the Lois Lenski Papers as a pilot for a larger project and as a means of testing some new equipment in the unit. 
6. Music Recital Programs:
   This will make avilable some five hundred born-digital programs for recitals held in the UNCG School of Music and is envisioned as a way to provide easy reference access to recordings held in the Harold Schiffman Music Library. 
7. Music and Theatre Productions Materials, 1897-1963:
   Encompassing some 20,000 digital images, this collection will provide access to programs and other production information for musical and stage performances held at what is now The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. 
8. Ege Project:
   This project will involve digitizing one hundred pages from medieval manuscripts purchased as a set by UNCG in the 1950s. Other institutions have sets drawn from these same manuscripts and it is hoped that some day they can be reconnected digitally.
9. American Publishers Trade Bindings, Phase 6:
   This will complete the one hundred or so items that have not yet been digitized for this project. The Digital Projects Priorities Team may consider a later proposal to expand the project.

With the 50^th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech today, we revisited the collections we hold regarding the Civil Rights Movement right here in Tallahassee. Among our most popular and unique is The Tallahassee Civil Rights Oral History Collection, which chronicles the experiences of nineteen individuals who were involved in the civil rights movement in Tallahassee during the late 1950s and early 1960s.

March 27, 1964, an estimated 1,500 march near the Florida State Capitol urging the passage of the Civil Rights Act

The interviews were conducted and donated to Special Collections by Dr. Jackson Lee Ice, a professor of religion here at FSU. Ice arrived in Tallahassee in 1955, nine months before the Tallahassee bus boycott. He was a witness to and a participant in the civil rights activities and social changes that affected Tallahassee during those years.

Ice came under heavy criticism from local political figures for his statements supporting the rights of African-Americans to demonstrate and perform civil disobedience for their cause. He was almost fired from his FSU teaching position. It was because of his work with the Tallahassee Council on Human Relations that he became acquainted with many local African-American leaders and participants and familiar with the issues and problems they faced.

Through this experience, Ice became convinced of the importance of the activities of the Tallahassee Civil Rights Movement in our nation’s history. Primarily, he wanted to record these events, as told by individuals who witnessed them, before they faded from memory. He also wanted to enlighten his students about what took place during this era of racial tension, courage, and sacrifice and the role that Tallahassee played nationally in the civil rights struggle.

Working for the Florida State University Center for the Study of Southern Religion and Culture with funding supplied by a Rockefeller Foundation grant, Ice taped a series of interviews with people who were residents of Tallahassee during that era. He selected a representative sample of civil rights advocates and their opponents and interviewed them during the summer of 1978.

Reverend C.K. Steele accepting a check given to him by Reverend Raymond Henderson.

In 2003-4, the audiocassettes were transferred to CDs with help from a National Historical and Publications Records Commission grant. Three of the interviews are currently available online: Reverend C. K. Steele, Charles U. Smith and King Solomon Dupont. Detailed descriptions of the interviewees and summaries of the interviews can be read in the full finding aid for the collection here.

Through these interviews, we discover how Tallahassee was both being affected and contributing to the civil rights movement of the early 1960s, a volatile time in the south during which Dr. King delivered his famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Photo credits: Florida State University Office of Multicultural Affairs Records, Special Collections, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida.