Yesterday, I came across a box of Anna Morris Shinn Maier’s personal books. They are mostly diaries from her adult life, but included in the box were a guest book, and autograph book, and two sketchbooks, as well as an assortment of “Cookery Cards.” While the sketchbooks are largely blank, they are interesting because the pages Anna did fill hold careful sketches that are simple yet charming. 
Most of the drawings are pen and ink images of scenery; mountains,  trees, and lakes. I was curious about the forest-like setting  of the sketches, which were initialed “A.M.S.,” (Anna before she married Paul D.I. Maier), and dated. I spent a little time investigating the diaries in the box, found the year, 1896, and read several of the August entries. There, Anna wrote about a trip that she took with a number of family members and friends. Thanks to Anna’s detailed diary accounts,  I now know that their weather was nice and clear, even “splendid” on the third day. For five days, the party spent their time together or in groups, walking the mountains and boating. Anna recorded that she enjoyed spending a lot of time with “Nancy,” and when the others went fishing, she preferred to sit on the shore and read or draw.
Reading these accounts of what sounds like a delightful trip makes me simultaneously remember summer trips I’ve been on in the past, and muse about the possibility of someone else skimming one of my journals in the future, looking for clues to what my life is like now.

For more information on this (or other) collections, please feel free to come in to Special Collections, or email hc-special@haverford.edu.

Today marks my completion of going through half of all the links in the finding aid for Special Collections. This means that I have read the descriptions of, and checked the links for, HALF of all the collections in Special Collections. That is a lot of collections. And I have to say, there is some really interesting material in here. For instance, in the ” Baltimore Monthly Meeting Homewood records,” there are signed letters by Abraham Lincoln! Then, there are pictures of William Lloyd Garrison, noted abolitionist and newspaper editor, in the “Friends Historical Association” collection. Add to that documents from 1 A.D. (“Dean Putnam Lockwood”), correspondence with John Updike (“John R. Hawkins”), letters from Alexander Graham Bell (“Edward Drinker Cope”), documents from William Penn (“William Penn papers”), hundreds of recordings of concerts by Haverford students, faculty and others (“John Davison papers”), and a sampling of letters by U.S. Presidents (“William Pyle Phillips collection”)! And those are just the things that immediately jumped out at me! There are definitely some major gems for the curious explorer to find here. If one is interested in people standing up for there beliefs, there are multiple mentions of a Thomas Story (1670?-1742) who was a former fencer and musician turned Quaker, a friend of William Penn, discussed Quakerism with Tsar Peter the Great,and was arrested for preaching Quaker faith in Kilkenny (the warrant for his arrest is in the “British Friends’ letters”). For those interested in the history of the library, there are the “James Phineas Magill papers” (after whom our library is named) and the “Michael S. Freeman papers” (who was a major proponent of Tri-Co library cooperation). If your fancy is more American history, I would direct you to the “John Ewer letters” which are from one merchant to another regarding the early signs of the American Revolution.

If you aren’t necessarily interested in the above topics, but you are colored intrigued, you can always check out the Finding Aid (which I would generally recommend!). I’ve been working here for a semester, and I didn’t have any idea that this was all here. This leads me to believe that most of the college doesn’t even know what awesome resources are back here. So come check it out!

If you have any questions, you could email me at kmoll@haverford.edu, or, if you want the good help, email Haverford College Special Collections at hc-special@haverford.edu.

Mary Esther Williams Dasenbrock spent her early years in Michigan and graduated from Vassar College in 1943. While a student there, she happened to hear a speech by Haverford professor Douglas Steere, who was also to head up the Relief and Reconstruction (R&R) program at Haverford College. Later, the chaplain at Vassar recommended she join R&R and that’s how she ended up in the R&R masters’ degree program at Haverford in the fall of 1943. There were 22 members in that first group of R&R students, all but one of whom were women. Only two of them were birthright Quakers, but by 1990, almost all of them were Quakers, which Dasenbrock felt demonstrated the impact of the program. The group was unified by age and socio-economic background and they were well-received by Haverford students. They lived in Language House (2 College Lane) and Professor Manuel Asensio and Elisa Asensio were their house parents.

The R&R curriculum included language (she took Polish & advanced German) and area studies, international relief administration, social case work, bookkeeping and an “applied work” program, as well as philosophy taught by Douglas Steere. Dasenbrock thought Haverford was lenient with them. She wrote her thesis on “Camps for Migrant Laborers…” in 1945, which is now in the college archives. The following summer she spent in a Federal migrant labor camp in Texas, both screening people for communicable diseases and running a day care – even though she never liked children – where everyone spoke Spanish and she didn’t.

Directly after, she was sent to Puerto Rico for 11 months to work in a Quaker Civilian Public Service health clinic. She averred “I never have felt that I was capable for what I was supposed to do….” Upon returning home in 1946, she began work with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) and was sent to Poland working on clothing and food distribution. After the relief effort was disbanded, she helped establish a work camp in Poland that succeeded in building a school.

Mary Esther Williams married Henry Dasenbrock in Poland in 1947. Shortly thereafter, they returned to the U.S. and spent a year as directors of a work camp in Mexico. After their children were born, they lived in Ohio and she was asked by the superintendent of schools to help found a college, now a branch of Wright State University. She was on the Board of that college and thought that one of the most worthwhile activities she had ever undertaken. When Henry got a job with AFSC as a fundraiser, they moved to Baltimore, and Dasenbrock volunteered in the local AFSC office. Under the auspices of the AFSC, she was able to go to Poland again in 1958 to lead an international work camp, again building a school. She was the executive of the World Federalist office in Baltimore, then worked with UNICEF. Finally, the family came to live in Haverford and she became a member of Haverford Monthly Meeting. She served on the board of Haverford College from 1979-1990 and worked to raise an R&R Scholarship for the college, all the while keeping the R&R group together through a newsletter that she wrote continuously from the early 1950s. Toward the end of the 90s, she and Henry moved to Quadrangle, a Haverford retirement community. She was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters from Haverford in 2004. Mary Esther Williams Dasenbrock died in March 2011.

This information primarily comes from an oral history interview recorded in 1990. What this summary cannot convey is Dasenbrock’s lively intelligence, self-effacing character and personality so full of a zest for life, but which the interview so amply affords. The interview can be heard at: thesis.haverford.edu/dspace/handle/10066/1644 Unfortunately, the very beginning of the interview conducted by Carolyn Tolles is not on the recording but it is set down here:

Q. I understand, Mary Esther, that you were brought up in Grosse Point, Michigan and graduated from Vassar in 1943. What did you major in?
A. I majored in euthenics and nobody ever knows what that is. It’s from the Greek “well-being.” It was a catch all. I didn’t know what …

Today we’re delivering 172 audio tapes to Safe Sound Archive in Philadelphia where they will be put in cold storage to ensure their longevity. The tapes come from both the Quaker Collection and College Archives and include such content as the 1941 acceptance speech of Haverford honorary degree recipient Herbert Hoover and Howard Brinton’s 1960s lectures on Quakerism as well as a series of oral histories conducted from the 1990s through early 2000s on the history of Haverford College. The recordings, comprised of reel-to-reels and cassettes, have all been digitized and are gradually being uploaded to our DSpace repository. The digitized recordings will help to make the content more easily accessible, while the storage of the originals at one of the country’s premiere commercial audio archives will ensure that the master recordings remain viable should we ever need to transfer them again.  Special Collections maintains hundreds more audio and video recordings and as time and funding allow we will continue to digitize and upload more content.