Archival Work and Photographs

Our Association Receives 2-year Grant For Archival Work and Photographs

THE NANTUCKET HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION is proud to announce that it has received a two-year grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission to prepare appropriate finding aids and provide protective storage for the collections of historical papers and photographs housed at the Peter Foulger Museum. The grant makes it possible to hire Mrs. Jacqueline Haring, a professional archivist, who will direct and take part in the project.

Mrs. Haring has been a summer visitor and resident of Nantucket since 1927 when she and her parents first fell in love with the island. After attending Vassar College and the University of Michigan, she became Administrative Assistant to the Dean of Student Affairs at the University. During World War II, she served as a Red Cross worker attached to a combat regiment in the South Pacific, and moved with the troops through New Guinea, the Philippines and into Japan, where she was the first American woman to enter Kyoto, only ten days after the bombing of Hiroshima.

Following the war, she worked as a Research Assistant for the National Security Council. Marriage to a professor at Knox College took her to Galesburg, Illinois, where she became Curator of Special Collections of the College soon after their daughter entered school. Although she was originally responsible for only the extensive art collections belonging to the College, she assumed the duties of College Archivist as well upon the death of the retired professor formerly holding that position. These duties necessitated her return to graduate school at the University of Illinois where she studied Archival Administration under Theodore Schellenberg, former Deputy Archivist of the United States and one of the early authorities in the field.

When her husband retired from teaching, Mrs. Haring reduced her work at the College to cover merely the care of its manuscript collections. However, when the Knox County Historical Society needed help cataloguing and exhibiting its large collection, she accepted a parttime position to accomplish this for them. Meanwhile, the National Endowment of the Humanities, for whom she has been a consultant on archives since 1975, asked her to inventory the manuscript holdings of the Nantucket Historical Association in connection with a grant proposal they had submitted. This led indirectly to her working each summer since 1981 sorting, arranging, and writing finding aids for the Association's collections of historical records.

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Mrs. Haring is a member of many archival associations and has served as President of the Midwest Archives Conference and on several committees of the Society of American Archivists. She has taught the preservation of paper at workshops at the University of Iowa and in Boston for the Marianist Training Network and has lectured on the subject for Knox and Rosary Colleges as well as various local organizations. Her publications include a "Dear Archivist" column in the Midwest Archives Conference Newsletter in which she answered fellow archivists' questions about the care of their holdings.

The Association's manuscript materials date from 1660 to the present. Ships' papers and logs of whaleships and trading vessels document Nantucket's place in maritime history. Petitions to the British for safe passage for supply ships, and requests for release or fair treatment of captured ships and crews during the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, are included among the collections. Letters, diaries and business records of Nantucket settlers record the Island's changing fortunes and the social, religious and daily lives of people.

Genealogical information is found in charts, letters and handwritten records. Minutes of the Nantucket Society of Friends meetings from 1707 to 1944 report the growth and decline of the Quakers on the Island. Account books record the failures and successes of ship owners, sea captains and merchants. The unfortunate fate of the Island's Indians can be followed in the record books of a teacher who taught them and courts which judged and punished them.

Grace Brown Gardner's scrapbooks on Nantucket have been invaluable to many researchers. The papers of Nantucket women such as Maria Mitchell, astronomer; Phebe Ann Hanaford, ordained minister and activist; Kezia Coffin Fanning, diarist; and journals of the seafaring whalers' wives all contribute to the history of American women. Handwritten vital records of Nantucket families pre-1895 which include birth and death dates, relationships and incidental facts such as "killed by a whale", "emigrated to New York" are in constant use. Detailed notes of weather kept by harbor pilots and wharfingers, as well as the Island's farmers, provide information for studies of climate patterns.

Josiah Freeman, Henry S. Wyer, Maurice Boyer, H. Marshall Gardiner, and Louis Davidson are among the well-known Nantucket photographers whose work is included. Throughout the photograph collections, there is excellent documentation of the architectural development of the island. Farms, ships, people, streets, harbor changes, and house furnishings are also pictured, as are celebrations of the 1895 centennial of the renaming of the town, the 1959 tercentennial of its founding and the 1976 bicentennial. Other events, such as sheepshearing festivals, the coming of the railroad, parades, shipwrecks, visits of nationally famous people, are on record here too.

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HISTORIC NANTUCKET

These materials have not remained unused. The Department of Pacific History at the Australian National University and the General Society of the Church of Latter Day Saints have come to Nantucket to study the manuscripts at the Peter Foulger Museum. The University of Florida has used the photograph collections in its "Preservation Institute" to study architecture and urban design in a contemporary community noted for its historical heritage.

The American Civilization Program of the University of Massachusetts — Boston offers a "Nantucket Seminar" every year. Its students rely heavily on the collection housed at the Peter Foulger. The Historic American Buildings Survey organized a major traveling exhibit entitled The Historic Architecture and Urban Design of Nantucket for the Smithsonian Institution using the Association's collections.

Other users of the manuscripts and photographs include amateur and professional genealogists, biographers of particular Nantucketers, authors of books and articles on whaling and, of course, college and high school students doing research for their school assignments. The photograph collection was relied upon heavily in 1982 for a documentary film entitled Nantucket — The Gray Lady which is shown daily locally. Many books carry credit lines to the Association and its staff.

Unfortunately, such continued use, as desirable as it is, has threatened the life of the materials on file here because they have not been housed and prepared for use according to archival standards.

The manuscript collections of the Nantucket Historical Association were housed in the Friends Meeting House on Fair Street, which became the headquarters of the newly organized Association soon after the property was acquired in 1894. When Susan E. Brock became the first Curator she immediately began her quarter century of preserving and protecting the manuscripts placed in her care. With the advent of the Whaling Museum in 1929-1930, the whaling logbooks and manuscripts were housed in the new library of the Museum on the second floor, where they were located for the next forty-two years. The Fair Street Museum had a small closet-like room where the other manuscripts were kept under lock and key. These continued to be the chief repository centers for the manuscript collections for over half a century in one case and forty-two years in the other.

When the Peter Foulger Museum was opened in 1971, the Library of the Association was established in this new structure. A fire-proof vault served as the principal location for the manuscript collections. In 1973 the Whaling Museum's collections of logbooks, account books and shipping papers were also transferred to the Peter Foulger's new head-

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quarters. Over a period of a decade these collections grew steadily an., a number of important acquisitions were recorded. These included logbooks and account books, original manuscripts related to early Nantucket History, genealogical records, the original Nantucket Society of Friends records, and documented drawings of Nantucket's architectural treasures.

In assuming the Directorship of the Peter Foulger Museum in 1971, Edouard A. Stackpole began arrangement of the various categories in the manuscript collections. When Mrs. Louise Hussey came from the Library of the Whaling Museum, she was appointed Librarian of the Peter Foulger Museum, a post she continues to hold. The logbook collection and the genealogical material have been her special prerogatives, and she has been a valuable asset to the Association in these fields.

Andre Aubuchon was hired in 1979 to make an inventory of certain parts of the manuscript collection. This was done over a period of a year, and the work has included the important Obed Macy papers, (one of our most important); the Phebe Bunker diaries; the Anna Gardner papers; the Easton family collection; the papers of Paul West, and other shipmasters; the Phebe Ann Hanaford papers and other important Nantucket collections.

The books of the Nantucket Society of Friends have been microfilmed, as has the imposing collection of Nantucket logbooks, together with some loans of logbook material; the Nantucket farms collection, and the valuable Henry Barnard Worth papers inventoried. The Walter Folger, Jr., collection has also been so itemized. Such categories as the Nantucket Arts, Entertainment and Tourism have been examined and inventoried. Considerable work with filing Nantucket photographs and negatives has also been accomplished in the past several years.

Thus, the work of preserving and making accessible our manuscript collections has continued as a regular part of the work at the Peter Foulger Museum.

In recent years, the contribution of Mrs. Haring towards this work has been significant and the Association is grateful for her interest and willingness to continue in this important field.

A conviction of the importance of the Association's holding led to Mrs. Haring's preparation of a grant proposal submitted to the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, requesting funds to preserve, arrange, and prepare written guides for the manuscript and photograph collections housed at the Peter Foulger