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Archives and Special Collections Blog
Kwanzaa, first celebrated in 1966-1967 and founded by Maulana Karenga, is a week-long celebration held in the United States, as well as other regions of the Americas. The celebration honors African heritage in African-American culture, and is observed from December 26 to January 1, culminating in a feast and gift-giving. On campus, Kwanzaa observances have been led by the African-American Cultural Center before students leave at the end of the fall semester.
Wilcox College of Nursing students set out to sing carols to their patients, undated
Caroling through neighborhoods, town greens and even shopping malls is a well recognized tradition frequently associated with tree and house decorating, cookie baking and travel plans throughout the Christmas season. Students over the years have observed holiday traditions while taking a break from their studies. At the Ona Wilcox College of Nursing in Middletown, Connecticut, the student nurses gathered to sing carols to the patients under their care in December.
Wilcox student nurses pose before setting out for an evening of caroling, undated
Best wishes for a melodic holiday season!
The New England Hurricane of 1938 was one of the most famous of weather disasters in the region’s history and for many years the standard upon which all other hurricanes were held. The devastation was enormous: after making landfall as a Category 3 hurricane on September 21 it is estimated to have killed between 682 and 800 people, damaged or destroyed over 57,000 homes, and caused property losses estimated at $306 million ($4.7 billion in 2013).
Letter from Thomas A. Edison to E.E. Dickinson & Co. of Essex, Connecticut.
Recently a researcher visited our reading room to look at the E. E. Dickinson Co. records and brought this letter to our attention. Written on March 16, 1916, from Orange, New Jersey, it is a letter signed by inventor Thomas A. Edison about his recommendation of Mr. V.L. King, who was seeking employment at the E.E. Dickinson Company, a maker of witch hazel and birch oil in Durham and Essex, Connecticut.
The E.E. Dickinson Company was established by Alvin Whittemore, who owned a drug store in Essex. By 1870, partners of Whittemore consolidated under the control of Rev. Thomas Dickinson and his family, including his son E.E. Dickinson, held the company as a family business until the 1980s. By the 1920s the company produced half of all witch hazel produced in the United States.
Archivists and historians value primary sources for their content and context — how they contribute to our understanding of historical events or a historical time. The value of a letter just because it has a famous person’s signature doesn’t usually fit in this category. It has a different sort of value, one where anything that attaches us to a famous person is automatically valuable. In any event, we are happy to know about this letter in our collection and hope you enjoy it too.
The “Hookset,” built in 1842 at the Hinkley & Drury Shops for the Concord Railroad. Was Locomotive #1 of the Boston, Hartford & Erie Railroad in 1863, then the New York & New England Railroad’s Locomotive #1 in 1871. From the Frances D. Donovan Papers, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Libraries.
One hundred and fifty years ago, in June 1863, the Boston, Hartford & Erie Railroad was incorporated with the goal of forming a gateway to western markets for New England goods and of bringing coal from Pennsylvania into New England by way of Newburgh, New York, to Waterbury, Connecticut, and beyond. Its lofty goal disintegrated when it came under the control of “as ribald a bunch of crooks as railroad history has ever produced,” wrote D.W. McLaughlin in his article “Poughkeepsie Gateway,” for the October 1968 issue of the Bulletin of the Railway & Locomotive Historical Society. The railroad ran into a myriad of troubles, including the realization that building an east-west route across Connecticut would involve navigating the state’s ridge lines, the problem of aligning with the non-standard gauge of track on the Erie Railroad (the western line it would hook up with once the railroad cars crossed the Hudson River), and the lack of a bridge for which to travel over the river. That apparently did not stop the railroad’s promoters from selling stock in the line, which they proceeded to mercilessly raid and pillage. The legislature of the state of Massachusetts was persuaded to give $3,000,000 in grants, odd in that the bulk of the railroad didn’t actually travel in that state, as it went into Connecticut. By the time the graft caught up with all the players, in 1870, the railroad was in bankruptcy with a mere $10.00 left in its accounts, Massachusetts was out all of the money it invested, and very little actual railroad track was ever laid. The remaining assets were transferred to the receivers of the New York & New England Railroad, who rerouted the railroad line from New York City to Boston and eventually became part of the New Haven Railroad system.
Goodspeed Opera House, East Hampton, Connecticut, from the Connecticut Historic Preservation Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Libraries.
The architectural surveys in the Connecticut Historic Preservation Collection are a tremendous source for those who are researching historic properties in the state, and one of our most regularly requested collections here in the archives. But there are several other ways to find information about historic properties, including:
The Historic American Buildings Survey at the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/hh/
The National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places: https://www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/index.htm
The Connecticut State Library’s database of 1930s WPA Architectural Surveys/Census of Old Buildings in Connecticut: https://cslib.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p4005coll7#:~:text=Often%20called%20%22The%20WPA%20House,clipped%20to%20the%20survey%20forms.
List of Historic National Landmarks in Connecticut: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_National_Historic_Landmarks_in_Connecticut
Let me know if you know of others so that I can add them to the list.
The New England Limited, better known as the White Train, or Ghost Train, which traveled from New York to Boston on the Air Line Division (formerly the Boston & New York Air Line Railroad) of the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad in the early 1890s. Leroy Roberts Railroad Collection, Archives & Special Collections, University of Connecticut Libraries.
Let’s get on board to celebrate National Train Day on Saturday, May 11! Amtrak organizes this event to celebrate the ways trains connect us all and to learn how trains are an instrumental part of our American story.
We here in the Railroad History Archive in Archives & Special Collections are celebrating this day by enjoying the rich resources in the collection that document how the railroad was pivotal to the lives of the people of New England in the Golden Age of Railroads in the late 1800s. This photograph shows the New England Limited on the Air Line Division, formerly the Boston & New York Air Line, which was built to provide a direct route diagonally across the state of Connecticut to connect the important financial centers of New York City and Boston. At the time this photograph was taken, in the 1890s, the B&NYAL was taken over by the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad and then known as the Air Line Division. The New England Limited reminds us of a time when luxurious trains were ridden by the Gilded Era’s captains of industry.
In the early 1950s the New Haven Railroad phased out use of its steam fleet in favor of its electric and diesel locomotives. Shown here is a menu and photographs taken on an excursion trip from Boston’s South Station to New Haven, Connecticut, through the route of the old New York & New England Railroad with stops in Willimantic and New London, Connecticut. The photographs were taken by Seth P. Holcombe and Ralph E. Wadleigh, both of whose photographs we hold in the Railroad History Archives.
Menu for New Haven Railroad’s last steam trip, April 27, 1952. Donated by Frank Morrissey, University Railroad Collection, Archives & Special Collections of the University of Connecticut Libraries.
White Caps Scrapbook 1944
The School of Nursing at the University of Connecticut was established in 1942 and accredited the following year. The first students received their caps in 1944, an event commemorated in a scrapbook created by the “White Caps,” the nursing student club. The capping ceremony took place on the evening of October 12, 1944 at the Community House situated near the Storrs Congregational Church. Dr. Albert Jorgensen provided the welcome and Dean Carolyn Widmer spoke, reminding “the girls to keep up high ideals in their future years of nursing. Mrs. Widmer then capped each girl, after which Miss Dolan, assistant to Mrs. Widmer, lit each girl’s Florence Nightingale candle. The newly capped girls then took the Cadet Nurses’ Pledge, as all are entering the Cadet Nurse Corps.” [Connecticut Campus, October 1944] The members of the first class in the University of Connecticut School of Nursing included Rhoda Grodin, Marijane Johnson, Selma Mag, Marilyn Olsen, Barbara Payne, Anne Pickett, Elaine Raymond, Shirlee Weinberg and Ann Winchester.
In November 2012, the University opened the Carolyn Widmer Wing of Storrs Hall, the long time home of the School of Nursing. Named in honor of the first Dean of the School, the wing “provides nursing students with a learning environment tailored to the special needs of nursing education and practice” (UConn Today, 11/5/12) underscoring the University’s ongoing commitment to the education and training of nurses symbolized in the capping ceremony so many years ago.
The White Caps’ scrapbook is part of the School of Nursing Records in the University Archives.
Yukon Cap, V. 1, no. 1, November 1944
“There comes a time when silence is betrayal,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) said from the pulpit at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on April 16, 1967, “I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettoes without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government.”
“Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam” – Dr. Martin Luther King jr. Dodd Center, Archives & Special Collections LP’s.
This edition of Martin Luther King Jr. day means many things this year. A significant day to reflect on historical achievements in the United States for African Americans and people of color regarding civil rights and segregation, and as a nation, its first African American Commander in Chief takes office today. Though the Archives & Special Collections at the University of Connecticut may not contain Lincoln’s bible which will be used today in the swearing in of President Obama for his second term, we do have important materials that help contextualize why the issues of human rights for people of color in the United States and around the world matter now as ever.
A linkage between the US government’s role in violence in the third world during the War in Vietnam and the violence against people of color at home was a major topic of King’s speeches in the last year of his life. Other important figures like Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcolm X and Angela Davis have also taken the stance on racism and human rights abuse to the internationalist position that a violence against people of color around the world is a violence to all. On this inaugural day of the President of the United States, taking the steps of the building which he will stand upon, built by African Americans enslaved 150 years ago, will symbolize an overwhelming achievement in a nation’s history. For the role of African Americans in the making of this country that has systematically seen its power turned to their oppression, the event symbolizes an equally outstanding time in history which lays deep within the meaning making of the citizen, the culture, and the class. The struggles of African American draftees, Medgar Evers of the NAACP, Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad, Freedom Riders from North to South and The 54th Regiment of Massachusetts all became witness to the atrocity and injustice brought to their people. The contextual archive, such as Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam, also bears witness to those injustices which continue on to lay the groundwork for the now, the tomorrow and thereafter.
“We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values, we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing oriented society to a person oriented society, when machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies…true compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.” – Martin Luther King Jr., April 4, 1967.
Materials on Civil Rights and Human Rights can be found at the Dodd Center’s Archives & Special Collections such as the LP Why I Oppose the War in Vietnam. For access to other radical LP’s from our Alternative Press Collection, please contact the Curator.
In January 1878 George Coy founded the District Telephone Company of New Haven, Connecticut, less than one year after telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his invention at Skiff’s Opera House in that city. Coy’s new company was the first commercial telephone company in the world.
Seventy-five years later, in 1953, the company now known as the Southern New England Telphone Company produced a charming comic book — Pioneering the Telephone in Connecticut — to celebrate its history. In 1998 the company records were donated to Archives & Special Collections, and the comic book was among the materials.
Here are just a few cells of the comic book, a captivating way to learn about this important company’s history.
East Thompson train wreck, December 4, 1891
Known as “The Great East Thompson Train Wreck,” it involved four trains of the New York & New England Railroad: the Long Island and Eastern States Express from New York to Boston; the Norwich Steamboat Express from new London to Boston; the Southbridge Freight, a local train to Southbridge, Mass.; and freight train no. 212.
It started with the eastbound 212. To keep it from delaying the eastbound Long Island and Eastern States Express and the Steamboat Express, conductor William Dorman got orders in Putnam, Connecticut, to shift to westbound track no. 1, pass East Thompson and switch back to the eastbound track no. 2 in East Douglas, Massachusetts, 19 miles away. But no one notified the East Thompson station that an eastbound train was on the westbound track. As the train crew was coupling cars to the Southbridge freight train on the westbound track, Dorman’s freight train slammed into the engine. Several cars jackknifed and one was thrown across both tracks.
Moments later, the Long Island and Eastern States Express rounded the sharp curve at about 50 mph and crashed into the thrown car on track no. 2. The engine spun around, vaulted off the embankment, struck a telegraph pole and crashed. Steam plowed the soft gravel for about 150 feet and destroyed a home.
That crash killed Express engineer Harry Tabor and fireman Jeremiah Fitzgerald of Boston. Dazed trainmen tried to send a flagman to signal the Norwich Steamboat Express but it was too late. That train barreled around the curve and drove nearly 8 feet into the rear Pullman sleeper of the Long Island and Eastern States Express, setting the sleeper and engine cab on fire.
All this occurred in the space of 5 minutes.
Hundreds of passengers were injured. All four engines were destroyed, as were the sleeper and a baggage car, and the track was torn up for about 500 yards east of the passenger station.
