The Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections at UMass Dartmouth would like to announce a recently opened collection, MC 166, the Winthrop C. Durfee Personal and Business Papers, 1890-1930. This collection documents the history of Winthrop C. Durfee and his self-named business, The Durfee Dye Business, which was located in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. The collection was purchased in 2008 with private funds provided by the Osborne Fund, a Textile Science Foundation account.
Winthrop C. Durfee was born on April 23, 1858 in Fall River, MA. Durfee attended Fall River Public Schools and later completed his education at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Durfee graduated from college in 1878 and returned to Fall River where he became employed at a local cotton mill. In 1881, Durfee married Sylvie Whitney of Pawtucket, Rhode Island. They had three children together; Walter Chaloner Durfee, Philip Sherwood Durfee, and Pauline Elizabeth Durfee. Durfee was also able to trace his ancestry back to the first settlement of Plymouth Colony in Massachusetts Bay. Winthrop C. Durfee died on September 19, 1929 at 71 years old in his home located on 1 Dane Street, Jamaica Plain.
The collection pertains to Durfee’s career as an independent chemist and consultant who advised his clients in the mills and local textile industry about the purchase of dyewoods, dyes, waxes, and dextrin which he would procure for his contacts. The collection contains letters, reports, extensive correspondence, invoices from suppliers, invoices to clients, orders from clients, tests and samples of dyed materials, Durfee’s personal chemistry notes and calculations as well as product catalogs and miscellaneous artifacts. The Durfee Dye Business, was one of the last members of the Guild of Drysalters which had been founded in the Middle Ages. Durfee and his employees performed a number of dyeing’s under controlled circumstances in order to learn and demonstrate the effects of his chromate mordant with wool dyeing. Durfee promoted his chromate mordant throughout WWI and its consistent use and color results was demonstrated on military uniforms.
Due to Durfee’s success in his field he was nicknamed the “Tartar King” by his associates. Durfee was very involved with professional organizations regarding the dye business. His professional associations included the Drysalters Club, an association of chemical and dye dealers in New England and of whom Durfee served as President in 1921. Others included the Engineers Club of Boston, The American Chemical Society, of which he was a councilor of the Northeastern section between 1919 and 1929, and he was a founding member and treasurer of the American Association of Textile Chemists and Colorists in 1921. Durfee’s offices were located at 516 Atlantic Avenue, Boston, MA.
–Rachel Breen, Graduate Student Intern, Simmons College School of Library and Information Science
The collection sheds light on business practice in the early 20th century, as well the history of allied fields in the textile industry. For more information or to access the collection please contact Judy Farrar at the Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections at jfarrar@umassd.edu. The finding aid is available online at http://www.lib.umassd.edu/sites/default/files/archives/findaids/MC166.pdf
Rachel is pursuing her master’s degree in Library and Information Science through the school’s new online MLIS program. She lives in Bourne, Massachusetts and works part time at the Elizabeth Taber Library in Marion, MA. She tackled the processing of this large and complex collection to fulfill a 130-hour field study for Archives Management.
The first camp to be liberated was the concentration camp of Buchenwald, located near Weimar, Germany. The camp was liberated on April 11, 1945 by the soldiers in the Sixth Armored Division of the US Third Army, commanded by George S. Patton. There were about 21,000 prisoners at Buchenwald on the day it was liberated, including approximately 4,000 Jewish prisoners who were survivors from the death camps in Poland. There were also 904 children under the age of 17, many of whom were orphans. The most famous survivor from Buchenwald is the acclaimed author, Elie Wiesel.
with the 120th Evacuation hospital. He helped those who needed medical help. As a truck driver, he went to get food and clothing. He was sent out to help the 150th evacuation hospital move into Nordhausen Concentration Camp, a sub-camp to Buchenwald. He finally ended up in Cham taking care of displaced people. He didn’t stay in Buchenwald very long because the primary illness there was tuberculosis and they needed doctors trained in that disease.
16th of December until January. As he approached Buchenwald in late March 1945, he remarked about the odor all around. His group was there long enough to take pictures. This was a camp of all men.
Concentration Camp arriving there on day one of the liberation of the camp. After the war, Martin Damgaard worked for the US Army Corps of Engineers for the rest of his career until his retirement in 1973.
Eli Heimberg was born in Chelsea , Ma and his family moved to Yonkers, NY from where he was drafted. He entered the camp with Chaplain Eli Bohnen and the first thing they saw were mounds, 10, 15 feet high of clothing, and shoes. They went into the Jewish barracks and saw people who were gaunt. Captain Bohnen introduced himself to the prisoners who had been liberated that morning. He took names and addresses of people they wanted to contact. It was April 29, 1945. Before going into the barracks, they saw railroad cars with the prisoners dressed in ill-clad, striped pajama. Mr. Heimberg recalled a picture in his mind of a man sitting dead with his eyes opened . Eli Heimberg was with the 42nd infantry division and his job was as an aide and assistant to the chaplain.
he was in the Armored Infantry Patrol. Nate was on an open-top tank with a 105 Harronson Locomotive and in the right corner of the tank was a turret. Mounted on that turret was a 50-caliber machine which Nate operated. Nate’s outfit landed on Omaha Beach in July 1944. He fought in the battle of Ramangan Bridge, on the Arno Rive and their last big fight was an SS outfit outside of Munich. Nate’s outfit arrived at Dachau about an hour after the first troops. They were on a 2-lane road and as they were going along, they suddenly saw ghost-like figures in the striped uniform, in striped outfits, screaming on both sides of the road. They were Polish. They were alive, hardly healthy, but as soon as the gates were opened, they just got out, and they wanted to get out. When they approached the camp, Nate saw a little boy standing at the fence and gave him his chocolate from the sea ration. Then the Medics came by and said not to feed them. Nate explained that the camp itself was unbelievable; he was looking at carloads of skeletons and pits full of bodies and he didn’t know the extent of what they had done. Dachau was only 12 miles out of Munich so they went there to get dignitaries to show them. The same name on the gate as in the other concentration camps was here, “Arbeit Mach Frei,” and Nate said the camp was terrible to see.
Walter Lalor was born in Dorchester, Massachusetts on March 20, 1916. He was living in Framingham when he was drafted into the medical service branch. Walter was a bacteriologist in the medical corps. He was in the Battle of the Bulge and arrived in Dachau a week after it was liberated by the Third Army. Mr. Lalor was in the Sixth Army. He found the experience in Dachau very shocking and the chaos was out of this world, from his prospective, humanity destroying other humanity the way it did.
Mauthausen was a concentration camp located in Austria for communist, political prisoners and German criminals. It was also an “end destination” for Jews from the death camps in Poland. On May 5, 1945, the official date of the liberation of this camp, a platoon of 23 men from the 11th Armored Division of the U.S. Third Army, led by staff sergeant Albert J. Kosieki, arrived at the main camp near the town of Mauthausen. The local liberator from New Bedford was Dr. Konstantine Yankopoulos.
Dr. Omer E. Boivin, a prominent Fall River physician, was a life-long student of the French language and culture. He believed that Southeastern Massachusetts University (now UMass Dartmouth) represented the best opportunity to keep the French language alive, and to educate area residents about the culture and history of France. To that end, in April of 1985, on behalf of himself and his late wife Laurette M. Boivin, Dr. Boivin donated an annuity worth $100,000 for the creation of Omer E. and Laurette M. Boivin Center for French Language and Culture. At left is a photograph of Dr. Boivin and SMU President Brazil announcing the gift at the SMU Board of Trustees Meeting, April 11, 1985.
catalyst for French studies at the university and in the region. The Center was founded to be an enduring symbol and constant testimonial to the interest of Omer E. and Laurette M. Boivin in the study, promotion, and preservation of French language and culture.
of L’Union St. Jean Baptistse d’Amerique and was its medical director from 1930-1934. Dr. Boivin maintained a long relationship with Bishop Connolly High School in Fall River and the Brothers of Christian Instruction who taught there. In 1987 he established a $100,000 scholarship fund. In October of 1985 he presented St. Anne’s Hospital with an endowment, and in 1987 presented a similar endowment to Charlton Memorial Hospital. Dr. Boivin died in 1989 at the age of 99.
The Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections and the Library Systems and Digital Services Divisions are pleased to announce the public availability of the new UMass Dartmouth Library Digital Archives. At this time the collections available are the UMass Dartmouth Historical Images Collection, including over 400 images of UMass Dartmouth and its predecessor institutions from 1899 to the present; the Schooner Ernestina-Morrissey Archives, with over 600 images of this historic schooner and the many individuals who have worked on or for her benefit; and a special exhibit on the 
There are currently about 1,200 items in the Digital Archives, with more added daily as the collections are scanned, identified and uploaded. Eventually it will include all formats — images, audio, video, artwork, documents, finding aids, and artifacts — and represent all of the university records and manuscript collections in the Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections.
Sunday, April 12, 2015 at 11 a.m.
For Open Access Week, I’d like to highlight a current project which makes many of our rare and fragile pre-1923 texts readily available online. Since 2008 the Claire T. Carney Library Archives and Special Collections has sent selected older monographs from the library and archives to the scanning center at the Boston Public Library in Boston, where they were carefully digitized. The books were returned to the library, but digital files were sent to the Internet Archive (www.archive.org) for inclusion in their massive online database of freely-accessible digital content.
October is Archaeology Month in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Begun in 1992 as Archaeology Week, it is now a “month-long celebration of archaeology in Massachusetts and around the world. Museums, libraries, archaeologists, and many more people and institutions join Secretary Galvin and the State Archaeologist in hosting exhibits, lectures, walks, and events for adults, children, and teachers.”
In 2001, at the September 20 AHA night in downtown New Bedford, College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) students and faculty invited the public to join them in the creation of a three-week public memorial to the victims of the tragic attacks on September 11.
This summer, while UMass Dartmouth celebrates the 50th anniversary of the official groundbreaking for the North Dartmouth campus, which took place on June 14, 1964, another significant celebratory mark in our history came only two weeks later, on July 1, 1964. On this date the 
