By Emily Petermann, Library Assistant

“Dear March—Come in—
How glad I am—
I hoped for you before—
Put down your Hat—
You must have walked—
How out of Breath you are—
Dear March, how are you, and the Rest—
Did you leave Nature well—
Oh March, Come right upstairs with me—
I have so much to tell—“

In 1846 — Decades before she became Amherst’s enigmatic recluse – a young Emily Dickinson visited Boston. She told her friend Abiah Root: “I left for Boston a week before last…I have both seen & heard a great many wonderful things…I have been to Mount Auburn, to the Chinese Museum, to Bunker Hill. I have attended 2 concerts, & 1 Horticultural exhibition. I have been upon the top of the State house & almost everywhere that you can imagine” [i]

Today, let’s enjoy some fresh March air and tour 1846 Boston, following in Dickinson’s footsteps.

Let’s begin with Mount Auburn. Mount Auburn Cemetery was laid out to serve the Boston area in 1831 and had been open for 15 years when Emily Dickinson visited her Aunt Lavinia Norcross. Mount Auburn was the first of its kind in the country: a permanent resting place and pleasant place to visit, away from the ever-growing cities.[ii] The cemetery park design attracted many visitors like Emily, both mourners and people coming to enjoy the grounds. Visitors could wander around the numerous paths and enjoy the greenery. They could also buy a guidebook like this one by Nathaniel Dearborn, “A concise history of, and guide through Mount Auburn,” which details the history, lots, and occupants of Mount Auburn, along with the rules for visiting.

One of these rules, which may have slightly irked Dickinson, is that visitors to the cemetery were “prohibited from gathering any flowers, either wild or cultivated, or breaking any tree, shrub, or plant.”[iii] One of Dickinson’s greatest pleasures was gardening, and at time she visited Mount Auburn, she was finishing up her ‘Herbarium,’ a book, completed in 1846, in which she pasted pieces of plants with their everyday and scientific names. She seems to have thought highly of the grounds, telling Abiah “it seems as if Nature had formed the spot with a distinct idea of its being a resting place for her children, where wearied and disappointed they might stretch themselves beneath the spreading cypress & close their eyes ‘calmly as to a nights repose or flowers at set of sun.”[iv]

Dickinson also enjoyed a trip to the Chinese Museum.  The Chinese Museum was a museum that ran from 1845-1847 in the Marlboro Chapel on Washington St., and was made up of objects, drawings, and featured the work of two Chinese men who entertained and educated visitors, all brought to Boston by a recent diplomatic mission.[v] It was created by John R. Peters, who would later sell the museum to P.T. Barnum. Peters also wrote a guidebook that we hold here at the MHS, which walks the viewer or reader exhibit by exhibit through the museum with an explanation, facts, and historical background of each tableau. Peters claims that “This collection was formed without reference to labor or expense, and with the aid of the Chinese and of the American Missionaries who have resided so long…”[vi] Visitors would have wandered past 25 cases illustrating daily life and culture, and viewed items such as musical instruments and money, and smelled incense burning. Dickinson was particularly impressed by the “endless variety of Wax figures made to resemble the Chinese & dressed in their costume.”[vii]

After that, Dickinson visited Bunker Hill.  In 1846, the Bunker Hill Monument was only a few years old, and a popular tourist attraction. At its heart, a towering granite obelisk and a park dotted with memorials to those who had died at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Another great draw is the view from Bunker Hill, which is a panoramic scene over the city of Boston. Check out this engraved panoramic view of Boston from Bunker Hill in 1848. From here they could have seen the entire city of Boston stretching out below them.

For the next stop, we’re off to stop and smell the roses. On this day, Emily, Aunt Lavinia, and Cousin Louisa went to a Horticulture Exhibition for an “exhibition of fruits and flours.”[viii] The exhibition may have been held in the Horticultural Hall on School Street.

Perhaps they viewed the August exhibition of Dahlias that William Bordman Richards describes in his 1846 diary as “the best thus far I have been able to make.”[ix] Richards was especially proud of his ‘Cleopatra’ varietal, which was new to the Massachusetts Horticultural Society that year. Dickinson and her family may have wandered through the Walker & Co flower-seed store on their way out, picking up some of the new varietals of dahlias that were for sale, or some flower seeds to take home. We can wander through this seed shop through the Descriptive catalogue of flower-seeds for sale by Walker & Co.

In our final stop on the trip, we head to the top of the State House. The ‘New’ Massachusetts State House was built on Beacon Hill in 1798, to replace the older State House on State Street.  We’re extra lucky in this stop, as someone took photos of the views from the top of the State House in every direction. What a view!

You can check out the MHS’s collection of photos and take in the best views that Boston had to offer here.

Dickinson returned home to Amherst after a month’s sightseeing in Boston, telling Abiah she had been “almost everywhere that you can imagine.”[x] Over the course of her life, Dickinson would write over a thousand poems—including the one featured in this blog post—and slowly become more and more reclusive, choosing not to travel, eventually avoiding leaving the house if possible. Instead, she focused on her poems. Only a handful of her poems were published during her lifetime; it was only after her death and her sister Lavinia Dickinson’s discovery of her work that they were published in 1890. The MHS holds a beautifully illustrated first edition of this poetry, which can be viewed here.

“Who knocks? That April—
Lock the Door—
I will not be pursued—
He stayed away a Year to call
When I am occupied—
But trifles look so trivial
As soon as you have come”[xi]

Find out more about Mount Auburn’s history from the Beehive!

If you’re in the neighborhood check out the Homestead, the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.

[i] “Letter from Dickinson to Abiah Root,” Dickinson Electronic Archive, last modified February 25, 2008, http://archive.emilydickinson.org/correspondence/aroot/l13.html

[ii] “Rural Cemetery Movement Grows.” Mount Auburn Cemetery, last modified October 25, 2014, https://mountauburn.org/rural-cemetery-movement-grows/

[iii] Dearborn, Nathaniel., A concise history of, and guide through Mount Auburn (Boston, N. Dearborn, 1843)

[iv] Dickinson Electronic Archive, “Letter from Dickinson to Abiah Root.”

[v] Zboray, Ronald J., and Mary Saracino Zboray. “Between ‘Crockery-Dom’ and Barnum: Boston’s Chinese Museum, 1845-47.” American Quarterly 56, no. 2 (2004): 271–307. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40068196.

[vi] Peters, John R., The great Chinese Museum, (Boston, Farwell & Co, 1846)

[vii] Dickinson Electronic Archive, “Letter from Dickinson to Abiah Root.”

[viii] Dickinson Electronic Archive,” Letter from Dickinson to Abiah Root.”

[ix] William Bordman Richards diary, Walcott family papers, Massachusetts Historical Society.

[x] Dickinson Electronic Archive, “Letter from Dickinson to Abiah Root.”

[xi] Dickinson, Emily, “Dear March—Come in–(1320),” Poets.org, accessed March 16, 2022. https://poets.org/poem/dear-march-come-1320

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

I recently had the opportunity to do some fun detective work when an unidentified diary was donated to the MHS.

The diary was kept in a small leatherbound volume, just 6 by 3.5 inches, very typical of its time. It describes a Northern soldier’s Civil War service between 10 September 1862 and 8 June 1863, primarily at New Bern, North Carolina. The pages are clean, the handwriting neat and legible, and the content very interesting. But who kept it? There’s no inscription or other identification.

I started by skimming the diary for some names and dates. The writer tells us on the first page that he enlisted as a private in the 5th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, Company I, “having felt it [his] duty to serve [his] country in some way in this its hour of need.” On subsequent pages, he refers to a son Eddie and a wife Martha. He mentions his wedding anniversary on 16 Oct. 1862.

Fortunately, archivists and historians have a terrific resource in the nine-volume reference work Massachusetts Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines in the Civil War, published in the 1930s. This work lists, by regiment, all the soldiers from Massachusetts known to have served in the war.

To identify our mystery man, I started with a guess: maybe his son Eddie was his namesake. Well, according to Massachusetts Soldiers, Company I of the 5th Mass. Infantry included six privates named either Edward or Edmund. Online searches on each of them turned up nothing that corresponded to the diary. None of them, as far as I could tell, had a wife Martha or a son Eddie. At least one never married. The father of another died before the war (and our diarist wrote about his very-much-still-alive father).

The diary, in fact, has nothing in it to indicate our writer was an Eddie, Sr., so I dropped that hypothesis and went back to the text for a closer look. I noticed repeated references to people with the surname Wright. Was he a Wright? There were four Private Wrights in the company. But one thing gave me pause: “Father Wright,” which appears in several diary entries, sounded more like a father-in-law than a father. So I guessed that the Wrights were his wife’s family. Unfortunately, searches for “Martha Wright” also came up dry.

Other tantalizing but ultimately unhelpful clues included the name of a sister (or sister-in-law) Mary and the towns of Marlborough and Shrewsbury, Mass. None of these details were specific enough to narrow my search. I kept feeling like I was getting close, only to hit another dead end.

Eventually I came across a pivotal diary entry dated 27 Oct. 1862: “Our tent mess is composed of Geo. Fogg, E. E. Wright, C. W. Hill, W. W. Wood, J. F. Claflin, A. E. Wright, J. D. Barker, Frank Bean, Charles Adams, Geo. Works, A. L. Nourse, J. W. Barnes, Eph. Howe, E. A. Perry.” These are all names of men in Company I. Assuming our writer included himself in this list (albeit in the third person), I finally had a short list to work from. I eliminated a few fairly quickly—those mentioned in other diary entries, for example—but still couldn’t make a positive identification.

Then I discovered I’d made a critical mistake. As neat as our diarist’s handwriting was, I had misread one name. What I initially thought was Wright…was actually Wight. This was the proverbial break in the case. An online search for “Martha Wight” eventually led me to a family genealogy published in 1890. There she was at the bottom of page 280: Martha Eleanor Wight married Charles Willard Hill, of the 5th Massachusetts Infantry, on 16 October 1856. The couple’s oldest son, Edward Albert Hill, was born in 1857.

It was short work to verify all the details. Hill’s was one of the names listed in the “tent mess” above. Family members and towns in the diary checked out, as did the diary entry for Hill’s birthday, 5 June. I finally had my man.

Hill had been a teacher before the war and would return to it afterwards, eventually serving as headmaster of the Comins School in Roxbury and the Bowditch School in Jamaica Plain. Based on his diary, he was a very religious person and a loving husband and father. His entry about saying goodbye to his five-year-old son is particularly touching.

My parting with my dear Eddie was in the road near Father Wight’s house. The dear little fellow seemed fully to appreciate that I was going away for a long time. He said afterwards that he went back to the place alone to see if he could not see me again. I am glad I did not know of it at the time, as it would have unmanned me.

On 1 January 1863, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freed enslaved people in the Confederate states. That same month, Hill was detailed to work with the “superintendent of the freedmen” at New Bern. Hill spent his days answering questions, distributing donations, and writing passes. He loved the job and often expressed his wish to be of service to African Americans in the South.

Who was this superintendent of the freedmen? Well, in Hill’s diary, and even in the published history of the regiment, he’s just “Rev. Means.” It looked like I had a second mystery on my hands.

Fortunately, this one was much easier to solve. All it took was some creative keyword searching to find hospital chaplain James Means (1813-1863). Means’s many affiliations included Andover Theological Seminary, Middlesex County Temperance Society, Lawrence Academy, Spingler Institute, Tilden Female Seminary, and Lasell Seminary. (The MHS holds some of his correspondence in the Amos Lawrence and Amos Lawrence III papers.) Means was an inspiration to Hill, but he died just a few months after they met. Hill was apparently present at his death.

We’re grateful to our donors for all the terrific manuscripts they have sent us over the years! And we hope many researchers will come and take a look at the Charles Willard Hill diary for themselves.

by Kate Melchior, MHS, and Patrick McGravey, North Andover MS

Every year, the MHS awards the Kass Teacher Fellowship to one or more K-12 educators. The is designed to offer K-12 teachers the opportunity to focus on historical research that will support their classroom efforts, discovering new primary sources to use in their classroom and deepening their understanding of history and humanities.

In 2021, Patrick McGravey of North Andover Middle School in North Andover, MA was awarded a Kass Fellowship to pursue research into North Andover resident William Symmes Jr and his role casting what was possibly the key vote that led to the ratification of the US Constitution. Patrick spent several months pouring through the MHS archives discovering primary sources for educators to use when teaching the history of civic action in Massachusetts.  Read about Patrick’s research experience and his findings at the MHS:

Civics in Action from the William Symmes Jr. Experience

Patrick McGravey, Grade Eight Civics, North Andover Middle School

In the fall of 1996, I began my teaching career at the North Andover Middle School which is in a New England community chock full of history from the colonial, revolutionary, and constitutional time periods. As I walked into the building that had just been newly renovated, I noticed a large banner that said, “Symmes House” which was obviously the name of the wing where my first classroom would be located named after someone of great importance. Growing up in this town, I had never heard of this name and as I asked around no one could tell me its overall significance including the building principal. It was twenty years later when I was reading an article about the annual Town Meeting where I saw that name again as the Manager of Town Meeting was dedicating part of the program to this man that had eluded me decades ago. It turns out that William Symmes Jr. was a representative at the Massachusetts 1788 Nomination Convention for the US Constitution who went against his constituents and voted yes for its approval. This became part of something that historians call the “Massachusetts Compromise” which was made up of an addition of a Bill of Rights combined with the US Constitution that eventually led to its unanimous adoption by all thirteen states.

This ratification process would eventually become part of my new curriculum in 2018 when my grade eight course went from U.S. History I to an intensive year of Civics based on a change in the Massachusetts History and Social Science Frameworks. It was a very exciting time for my students and I as we were creating something new together that would eventually have great meaning to them as civically engaged adults. Part of my instruction was to have various civic actors come into my classroom including the Town Manager who told the story of William Symmes Jr. to all of my students who were riveted with the overarching question of was this man a hero that helped bring about the ratification of the US Constitution by leading a group of voting members to change their positions impacting history forever or was he a villain who went against the wishes of his fellow townspeople who had instructed him to vote no on this crucial issue?

It was just a few years later that I received an email from the Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS) about offering the 2021- 2022 Kass Teacher Fellowship which would “offer an opportunity to focus on historical research that would fill a knowledge gap and address a need in the curriculum.” After my application and eventual acceptance, I was so thrilled to have the opportunity to explore this topic further and have a wide variety of resources available directly connected to the 1788 Massachusetts Ratification Convention for the US Constitution and possibly the story of William Symmes Jr. What follows is a story that truly impacted me as a civic educator and strongly presents evidence that the MHS is one of the best places for all educators to learn from materials and resources that are easily accessible which can be used in multiple ways to interact with students learning both Civics and U.S. History.

After having my preliminary meeting with staff from the MHS, I immediately found two online resources created by them which were websites dedicated to the 1788 Massachusetts Ratification Conference. This was an amazing place to start with a detailed examination of this process which is not always covered in such an impressive manner. The website was so user friendly with a multitude of artifacts digitized and only a click away for the researcher. I was able to find a map of communities across Massachusetts that detailed their votes on ratification, newspapers from the week on the Ratification Convention, and a voting register with all of the members that were present including Symmes. I was so excited to not only be researching Symmes but also gaining knowledge about the ratification of the US Constitution process which will now become an integral part of my Civics course.

After just a few hours of research, I was able to find North Andover which was called Andover on the map detailing the overall votes (unrecorded due to a clerical error), a newspaper article from this time period that actually quoted Symmes, and the voting register with his “Yes” vote written in black ink. This was such an exciting and quickly developing process and personalized all that I was doing within my research of this topic as well as this man. At this point, I realized that William Symmes Jr.  was not just an isolated learning topic and experience for my students but rather an integral part of my curriculum unit on the ratification of the US Constitution. I could now literally bring Symmes into my classroom showing my students that he played a huge role in this process as he was quoted on the front page of the newspaper and went on record as voting for ratification going against his constituents at the Massachusetts convention.

In addition, I was able to find his speech against ratification at the beginning of the convention and a second speech a few days later advocating for approval with the stipulation that a Bill of Rights would be added to the US Constitution which eventually became a development in other states’ ratification deliberations. This could not be more clear evidence that this organization not only knows its history but is on a mission to make it accessible to educators and students in interactive and meaningful ways which I was experiencing throughout this fellowship.

In the fall of 2021, I was actually able to visit the MHS library and do authentic research with the artifacts themselves which was a huge highlight for me especially with the COVID 19 restrictions over the past year and a half. The staff was so diligent both before and during my visit. The ABIGAIL request system was such an efficient experience and I was able to find even more resources including books about this topic, newspapers from this time period which actually quoted Mr. Symmes and the official voting ledger from the Convention with his signature and “Yes” vote right in front of my eyes. I was able to take a video of this that I will share with all of my students to deeply personalize this moment. I strongly encourage all of my fellow educators to not only use the resources of the MHS but to also apply for all of these multiple fellowships where you will have rewarding experiences and opportunities like the one I went through and be treated like a historian with access to so many resources along with the impressive knowledge and expertise of the staff.

I was also able to find more information about William Symmes in follow up research within college textbooks about this time period where actual chapters were dedicated to this man that I had no knowledge of years ago. I also found a periodical that documented a series of lectures in Andover and North Andover entitled a “Memorial Discourse on William Symmes, Esq” that took place in the winter months of 1859- 1860 asking history to take another look at this historical figure. The central theme of these highly attended talks was that Symmes was someone that was courageous who did the right thing for his community and should be revered in the history of the Andovers not vilified as someone that went against the wishes of his constituents.

In addition, I made a new connection with the North Andover Historical Society to learn even more about this topic and controversial local historical figures. One important part of this story was the reaction of Symmes’ constituents to his voting change which was described in one publication as “for his perfidy, Symmes’ constituents retired him from public life.” In my research, I learned that he left Andover with his successful law practice to move up north to Portland, Maine which was then part of Massachusetts. This then led me back to the MHS where I was able to find two speeches that Symmes had made to his new community with one being on the twenty third anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1797 which was a few years before his death in 1807. Once again, an opportunity presented itself for my students to learn the “What Happens Next ” as part of this remarkable story of history where Symmes was able to move on, form another successful law practice and proudly serve as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives as well as a School Committee member for his new community in Portland.

As I wrap up my research for this fellowship, I am now working on a curriculum unit about the ratification of the US Constitution making Symmes the centerpiece of this historical event. I am also inviting the Manager of Town Meeting back into my classroom to facilitate a debate on the legacy of William Symmes Jr for  my students. In addition, my students and I are going to work together on a mini Civic Action Project to rededicate the Symmes wing in a more meaningful way to guarantee that all members of our school community now know who this man was and the impact that he had not only on the community of North Andover but on the legacy of the United States. These meaningful and engaging experiences for my students and I could not have taken place without this fellowship as well as the impressive work of the Massachusetts Historical Society as an organization. They clearly want to not only keep history alive in all of our minds but also make it accessible for all, proving that we are all “historians” and deserve to be treated in this manner with access to incredible resources in a way that is both welcoming and meaningful at the same time.

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

For today’s blog, I’d like to give you a behind-the-scenes peek at the work of archivists, specifically some of the small challenges we face in processing and preserving manuscripts for researchers. Collections come to us in all shapes, sizes, and physical conditions. While the work is interesting and rewarding, you may be surprised how long it takes to get a collection ready for use. Here are a few of the issues that make our jobs a little harder.

First, let’s talk about processing. Processing involves physically arranging a collection and describing its contents in a catalog record or collection guide. Imagine taking the carton shown above, removing all the letters from their envelopes, arranging them chronologically, identifying correspondents and subjects, etc. So, what are the most common hurdles?

1. Undated manuscripts. I give this issue pride of place in my list because of how common and how frustrating it is. Archivists may be able to date a letter based on a postmark (if we still have the envelope), a partial date, or internal clues, such as the passing mention of a recent event. The black border on the letter pictured here tells us a relative of the writer has recently died. However, archivists don’t read all the letters in a collection and seldom have time to do the digging necessary to date undated letters.
2. Unattributed manuscripts. I’ve seen this primarily with diaries, which is understandable. After all, most people probably don’t think their diaries will ever be read by anyone else. (God forbid!) But so much information is lost without this context. Who was this person? What experiences did they live through? Like letters, diaries can often be identified with some investigation, but it’s time-consuming.
3. Unidentified photographs. I wrote a few years ago about processing a large collection of family photographs and having to identify the baby pictures of three sisters who looked almost identical. We see so many terrific photographs come through our doors, it’s a shame when we can’t tell you who’s in them.

4. Difficult/illegible handwriting. Archivists get better at this with practice, but it never really stops being tricky. If you’re responsible for processing a large collection of someone’s papers, you’ll become intimately familiar with their handwriting and the way they form certain letters, but then you’ll move on to the next collection and start all over again. Centuries-old writing sometimes barely even looks like English.

5. Cross-writing. It was very common for correspondents, when they were running out of space but had a little more to say, to return to the first page and write across it at a 90-degree angle, as shown in this letter by Margaret Fuller. In this example, the end of the letter is right on top of the beginning. I’ve seen many variations of this, including writers who scribble along the margins or even turn a letter upside down and write in the gaps between the lines.
6. Duplicate copies. For modern collections, one of the biggest problems is excessive duplication. A collection, particularly the records of an organization, will usually contain multiple photocopies of documents that take up unnecessary space and need to be weeded.

Next up is preservation, the key to the long-term survival of our collections. Preservation encompasses everything from conservation—the physical repair of individual documents—to temperature and humidity control, light management, and the selection of acid-free enclosures. It also includes all the little steps we processing archivists take to ensure that a given document lasts as long as possible.

7. Acidic paper. Newspaper clippings, as they deteriorate, will not only become more brittle themselves, but they’ll also emit acid that does the same thing to the papers that touch it. You’ll see the pattern of staining on documents that have lived next to clippings for a period of time. It’s not just newspapers, either; the same kind of poor-quality wood-pulp paper was used for telegrams and some 20th-century copy paper. MHS archivists generally, time-permitting, photocopy newspaper clippings and remove the originals, or at least isolate any acidic paper.
8. Onion-skin paper. This unmistakable thin paper was common in airmail because of its light weight. It was also used for carbon copies of typed business correspondence. The ink on these copies is frequently faint to the point of illegibility, and the paper tears very easily.

9. Metal fasteners. Ah, staples and paper clips. I often think archivists should be sure to keep up with their tetanus shots. Some past recordkeepers even used straight pins to attach pages together. And if a collection has been kept in a damp and/or warm environment before coming to the MHS, the rust (and rust stains) resulting from these metal fasteners can be epic. Rubber bands get an honorable mention here, too, because as they dry and harden, they will also stain paper. When fasteners are necessary, we use plastic paper clips.
10. Post-it® notes, tape, and other forms of adhesive are dangerous for paper even after they’ve been removed. Some residue of the adhesive remains on the paper and will damage it over time. Best to avoid them altogether.

11. Red rot. Red rot is what happens to leather that has been exposed to humidity and/or high temperatures. This image shows how poor the condition of leather-bound volumes can become. Red rot is also, as any archivist or special collections librarian can tell you, a huge mess; it will crumble onto shelves, desks, your clothes, everything. Volumes that are literally falling to pieces can’t be handled by researchers, so the MHS measures each volume and orders custom-fitted cases.
12. Organic material. More than a few collections contain other forms of organic material, such as leaves and flowers pressed into volumes, as well as locks of human hair. These items are removed.

This is only a partial list; I haven’t mentioned digital records or issues related to the reference side of things. If my fellow archivists or librarians out there want to add anything in the comments, you’re more than welcome!