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Public Treasures

UNH's Very Special Collections

By Suki Casanave '86G

The letter, postmarked 1836, is written on pale, pink paper, nearly translucent with age. Each line of minute script seems impossibly perfect, penned by the steady hand of a Shaker elder. There are other things, too: A trout, every scale depicted in vivid detail. A knife with a musket ball impression in its handle . A toy zebra, its eye catching the light as if winking.

Gathered on a table in Dimond Library's Special Collections, the assemblage is both fascinating and mysterious, a sort of kaleidoscope of history. Each item has its own story to tell about another place, another time. And each one is here, available for study, because someone, at some point, became captivated by these stories--and wanted to share them.

The best way to understand Special Collections, with its more than 100,000 published items and more than 300 manuscript collections, is to visit--in person or online. Those who do, for research or purely out of curiosity, can touch the past. Students open medieval chant books, observe the texture and gleam of magnificent Scheier pottery, read letters written by Civil War soldiers under fire. "It's not just information they are getting," says Bill Ross, director of Special Collections. "It's a process they are experiencing."

In this sense, Special Collections is a gathering place full of shared stories and intersecting lives. The words of Robert Frost, the sound of Duke Ellington, the music of Amy Cheney Beach--they are all here, alive still. The donors themselves are the "hosts," introducing scholars of today to people of the past. Here in the hush of a sunlit room, acquaintances are made, ideas are discovered. New stories begin.

INTO AFRICA The Margaret Carson Hubbard Collection

It was October of 1922 when Margaret Carson Hubbard arrived in Tara Siding, northern Rhodesia, a village she described as the "merest speck" on the vast African veld. She and her husband, Wynant, had come to collect big game for American zoos. Two days after settling into a mud hut, Carson Hubbard gave birth to their second child, Joe, while one-year-old Davy slept nearby. And so began her sojourn in the wilds of Africa.

For the next several years, while her husband disappeared into the bush for three months at a time, Carson Hubbard stayed home, caring for her babies--and a growing menagerie of wild animals, from lions to wart hogs. Before long, she was managing a staff of 250 Africans who were needed to attend to the 600 beasts.

Later, in articles she wrote for national magazines, Carson Hubbard recounted tales of her adventures: Davy napping with a pet leopard; run-ins with boomslangs, one of Africa's deadliest snakes; making cream puffs from buffalo fat and guinea-fowl eggs. In Vassar's alumni magazine, she told of handing her children off to Tickie, her "nurseboy," grabbing a rifle, and running off to shoot a lion. She was back in time to tuck the boys in bed.

After the war, she was appointed as the U.S. State Department's American vice consul in Johannesburg, a title that was actually a cover for a secret mission: her real job was to spy on surviving Nazis.

Decades later, when UNH's Doug Wheeler met Carson Hubbard, she was an elderly woman, living in Exeter, N.H. But her memories of Africa remained vivid, and he invited her to speak to his African history classes during the 1970s. "She was intelligent, hardy and tough," says Wheeler of Carson Hubbard, who died in 1989. " She was one of the most famous American experts on Africa who wasn't an academic."

Thanks to their friendship, UNH's Special Collections is now home to handwritten notes from Carson Hubbard's post-war stint as a spy, part of a larger espionage collection Wheeler describes as unique among American libraries. "Many have books," he says, "but except for Yale, virtually none of them has any unpublished papers."

Carson Hubbard's papers, along with photos, articles, documentary films--and a collection of central African art that resides in the UNH art gallery--provide a valuable perspective on mid-20th-century Africa, as experienced by a remarkable woman who led a remarkable life.

FISH TALES The Douglas and Helena Milne Angling Collection

Bill Ross was knee-deep in fly fishing books, in the midst of reorganizing the library's premier collection, when he met Helena Milne for the first and only time. Engrossed in his work, he didn't even notice when she entered the room. But when he glanced up, the donor herself was standing just feet away from the hundreds of precious books stacked on the floor.

Moments later, Milne had tears in her eyes--not because of the state of the collection, but because Ross had opened for her an oversized special edition, finely printed and beautifully illustrated. It was something he had recently purchased with funds from the endowment set up by Milne. "She thought it was something her late husband, Douglas, would have loved," says Ross.

The angling books given to UNH in the 1960s by the Milnes, both avid fishermen, marked the official start of UNH's Special Collections. Thanks to the endowment, the original collection has more than doubled, making it one of the largest of its kind in the United States. Today, more than 3,000 of the 3,500 volumes have been processed by the Special Collections staff and can be searched online by key word, title, author or subject.

Especially rich in materials relating to fly fishing for trout and Atlantic salmon, the collection includes a vast array of books on fly tying, rod making and stream tactics. The most famous book in the collection is The Compleat Angler, written in 1653 by Izaak Walton, who is considered the Shakespeare of angling literature.

Fly fishing, it turns out, even has its radical side. The collection includes an original copy of a 1739 sermon by Reverend Joseph Seccombe that was likely a shock to most churchgoers. The Sabbath, he maintained, is not merely for rest and prayer. Diversion, especially the recreation of fishing, is beneficial to the human spirit, he claimed. Not surprisingly, Reverend Seccombe was an avid fisherman.

The compatibility of fishing and reverence was, apparently, not an entirely new concept. Before Seccombe, before Walton, even, there was Dame Juliana Berners, a prioress at a Benedictine abbey in England. Her book, A Treatyse of Fysshynge wyth an Angle, was penned in 1496 and is thought to be the earliest book on the subject.

Nearly six centuries later, modern fishing enthusiasts can visit UNH's Special Collections and study the words of Dame Juliana. The fly-fishing prioress describes various fish types, such as the carp, "a wicked fish to catch," and the salmon, "the grandest fish that any man can go after in freshwater." She suggests which bait to use for which conditions--"young frogs with their feet cut off," for example, or "a worm that breeds between the bark and the trunk of the oak." In short, she makes a convincing case for why "the finest sport is fishing with a rod, line, and hook." And who can argue with a nun?

A GIFT TO BE SIMPLE The David Proper Shaker Collection

One of David Proper's most prized possessions is something he no longer owns--a Shaker holy text inscribed to him from Eldress Gertrude Soule, one of the last of the Shakers. The worn, leather-bound volume now resides in Special Collections, along with a host of other valuable, original Shaker materials, from autobiographies and sermons to visions and songs.

"It's almost as if we have living, breathing Shakers from 200 years ago right in our library," says David Watters, English professor and director of the Center for New England Culture. Watters praises the Proper Collection both for its great range and its rarities. Proper, a 1955 graduate of UNH, "had an eye for comprehensiveness, offering us books across two centuries from villages all over the United States. But he was also able to get great rarities, items that exist in maybe only one or two copies," says Watters.

What's really exciting for students, he adds, is that they have a chance to look at materials scholars may not have seen before. "Not only does it humanize people from the past, it also helps students think about how people not all that different from themselves make difficult choices," he says. "Living in a celibate society, based on absolute equality--who does that today?"

Appropriately enough for someone who admires the Shakers, Proper is exceedingly humble about his contribution to UNH. "I consider myself a 'disciple,' not a scholar, of the Shakers," explains Proper, who often visited the remaining Shaker sisters in Canterbury, N.H., and Maine during the 1960s and 70s. "It was the simplicity, the quiet beauty of their beliefs and their lives that appealed to me," he says.

The sisters would likely be proud of Proper, who pieced together his collection purely out of passion for a way of life that exemplified goodness and a certainty that it deserved to be remembered and studied by generations to come. "His gift to UNH has made it possible for this to become a center of Shaker studies," says Watters. "He was the catalyst."

Today, the Shakers are best known for their furniture, tangible evidence of the simplicity and grace that characterized their lifestyle. But the Shakers always said their best product was good people. Given that definition, David Proper, disciple, would certainly qualify.

WAR STORIES The Col. Edward E. Cross Civil War Collection

One day in 1944, infantryman Walter Holden '49, '52G found himself trapped in a collapsing building, surrounded by attacking Germans. He escaped, just barely, and lived to tell the story of his World War II adventures.

Years later, when Holden was teaching English in Keene, N.H., he spent his spare time reading up on the Civil War. "The intensity of combat, the concern with maintaining democracy--I felt that the Civil War was closer to World War II than any other," Holden says.

He became intrigued in particular with a soldier named Edward Cross, who was known as a fearless leader. "If you fall," he wrote in a poem, "die like men with your hearts to the foe." The colonel, who had fought three duels before the war even started, led New Hampshire's Fighting Fifth, the infantry regiment that sustained more casualties than any other during the Civil War.

They had fought in different wars, in different centuries, but Holden felt a kinship with Cross. "He was a leader who knew how to get the most out of his men," says Holden, who himself fought under an outstanding general, Maj. Gen. Terry Allen. "You know the importance of good leadership if you've experienced it."

Holden recognized something else about Cross. He could write. More than a routine accounting of events, the words of this former newspaperman were opinionated and colorful, offering insight into the Civil War. And so Holden's search began.

He visited libraries and archives, wrote letters, and pored over news articles, hoping to find Cross's original journal. For a dozen years he persisted. And then, one day, after more letters and pleading and persuasion, he was standing in the same room with the journal of Edward E. Cross, Civil War soldier. "I was trembling with excitement," says Holden, who managed to convince the owner to part with the journal and other papers for $100. Thirty years later, when Holden donated the work to UNH, it was appraised at $14,600.

Holden's donation was inspired by his own experience. He knew the power these writings had had on his own life. And he knew that if Cross's work were made available to a wider audience, other young imaginations might someday catch fire.

With Holden's donation, a book project was born. Stand Firm and Fire Low (University of New England Press) is a readable collection of Cross's writings. Bill Ross, director of Special Collections, who edited the book with Holden and UNH archivist Elizabeth Slomba, calls the original journal "a remarkable piece," which the book amplifies with footnotes and further descriptions.

Holden's book accomplishes something else, too. It completes Cross's own mission. The colonel had hoped to tell his own story after the war, but never had the chance. After being wounded 13 times during the war, he was finally killed at the Battle of Gettysburg--presumably with his heart to the foe.

MUSIC MAN The Alvah Sulloway Sheet Music Collection

Alvah Sulloway finally had to do it. He added a room to his house. It was the 1970s, and it wasn't that the family was growing--in fact three of his four boys were already out of his house in Kittery Point, Maine. It was just that his sheet music collection was taking over.

The attorney-turned-English-teacher had started his collection back in the 1960s. While teaching a high school seminar on 20th-century literature, he invited pianist Herbie Sulkin and vocalist Ray Dorey to treat the class to some show tunes. The students loved it. So did Sulloway. Before long, he was searching antique shops and bidding at auctions for 78s and sheet music.

Today Sulloway's vast collection--thousands of pieces of music, 78s and theater programs--is housed at UNH. To his surprise, the songs and show tunes he loved so much throughout his life are part of the most actively used collection at the university. "There's a real passion for this music," says manuscripts curator Roland Goodbody '82, who gets requests from all over the world for specific songs. All it takes is a quick online search and an e-mail request, and someone, somewhere, can be enjoying "The Aba Daba Honeymoon" or "Doo-dah Blues." "People are ecstatic when they find something," says Goodbody.

When his wife, Susan, passed away recently, Sulloway himself had to contact Special Collections in search of "The Eagle and Me," a song they had both loved. During her career on Broadway, Susan had performed in a show that included the song, with these lyrics: "Eagle it like to fly./Eagle it got to feel its wings against the sky... We gotta be free--the eagle and me." Years later, at her memorial service, "The Eagle and Me" was, Sulloway thought, the only piece that would do. Fortunately, he knew just where to find it.

LIFE'S WORK The never-ending business of organizing history

Roland Goodbody '82 is on the move. The manuscripts curator marches up and down the aisles of the Library Storage Building, his compact frame dwarfed by towering metal shelves stacked to the ceiling with boxes. He carries with him two pages of yellow lined paper covered with scribbled text, an original draft of The Ox-Cart Man by Donald Hall, one of the country's premier poets.

When Goodbody spies what he's after, he reaches overhead and hauls Box No.14 from the shelf. He slips the draft into its neatly labeled, acid-free folder, snaps the box top shut and wedges Box No. 14 into place. Another treasure in UNH's Special Collections is back where it belongs. Unlike No. 14, most of the boxes here are filled with stacks of unorganized papers straight from the donors.

It will be years before everything is filed in neatly labeled folders. The numbers are staggering: 6,000 pieces of sheet music, thousands of 78s and LPs and 727 cubic feet of political manuscripts still wait to be processed. And then there's Hall's collection: 350 cubic feet of manuscripts, plus 75,000 letters--and this figure does not include the 150,000 letters Goodbody has already organized. "His collection contains correspondence with all the important poets of the last 50 years," says Goodbody. Keeping up with the astonishing amount of paper is a sort of sport, one that demands constant training to stay mentally agile. Do Hall's letters belong in chronological order? Should they be sorted by correspondent? By letters to Hall? Letters from Hall? The decisions are relentless, the task never finished. "It used to keep me up at night," Goodbody admits. "Hall's papers alone would take a lifetime. The best I can do is leave things well organized for the next generation."

Along with an infinite capacity to endure unfinished business, those who work in Special Collections have developed a generosity of spirit about the future and an awareness that the treasures entrusted to them represent individual lives and passions, ideas and dreams. Curators and archivists are keepers of the past, guardians of this gathering place full of shared stories and intersecting lives. Here in Special Collections windows open on other worlds. Ideas are discovered. New stories begin. ~

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