Summer students, interns, and staff take a workshop on using "Archivist's Toolkit" from PACSCL archivist Holly Mengel

Summer is a special time in Special Collections.  Gone are the regular Haverford student and faculty researchers that we work with during the school year.  And instead we keep busy with a steady stream of visitors, including faculty and graduate students from other institutions. And we’ll soon be welcoming a group of Gest Fellows to study in the Quaker Collection.  It’s also a time when we employ a team of student assistants to do intensive work on a variety of special projects we don’t usually have time for during the school year.  This summer we have a terrific team of seven students.  Together they work about 245 hours a week, and it’s always exciting to see how much gets accomplished during this time.  Our students this summer are working on several projects: Deanna Bailey and Patrick Lozada are processing papers from the William Warder Cadbury and Catharine J. Cadbury papers; Janela Harris and Jon Sweitzer-Lamme are processing the Morris-Shinn-Maier Collection; Christina Hurley is working on the Meeting House digitization project; Abdullah Ali Khan is working on the Friendly Association records conservation and digitization project; and Karl Moll is our “jack-of-all-trades,” helping out with a number of projects including our Online Finding Aids and learning the ropes of processing College Archives materials. Like summers past, they will be meeting regularly with Professor Emma Lapsansky to discuss the historical aspects of their work.  New this summer, they will be posting regularly on this New and Noteworthy blog (some have already started!) to tell you, dear reader, about their work as they go along.  Comments are open on the blog, so we invite you to join in the conversation!

We learned the happy news last week that we have been awarded a Save America’s Treasures grant from the National Park Services for the preservation and digitization of the papers of the Friendly Association. The papers are among our most heavily used collections, having been used by several published scholars, as well as Ph.D. candidates, Master’s degree thesis writers and undergraduate history majors from Haverford in recent years.

The “Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians by Pacific Measures” was established in 1756 by a group of eminent Quakers in Philadelphia following months of horrific violence between settlers and Native Americans on the Pennsylvania frontier. Self-consciously contrasting themselves with the British army, the militia, and the more militant representatives of the proprietary government, the leaders of the Friendly Association sought to establish peaceful relations with the Delaware Indians and other nearby tribes, and thereby prove the effectiveness of Quaker pacifism.

The Friendly Association was a private initiative, without the official sanction of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, but it quickly assumed a prominent role in many of the most important controversies of the day. Israel Pemberton and the other leaders of the Association sought to represent the interests of the Delaware in their ongoing dispute with the Pennsylvania government over the so-called “walking purchase.” They monitored and participated in a series of treaty negotiations in the late 1750s and early 1760s, and eventually their disputes with the proprietary government became one element in a broad Quaker campaign to establish royal government and rescind the colonial charter.

The Friendly Association papers contain hundreds of unique and detailed accounts of behind-the-scenes treaty negotiations; historical documents dating back to the early years of Pennsylvania related to Indian affairs; the correspondence of Pemberton and others relating to fund-raising and the exigencies of Pennsylvania politics; and missives from Indian leaders, transcribed or otherwise transmitted by an intricate network of Indian “go-betweens” who maintained almost constant contact with the Association.

Dating from 1745–1792, the papers were bound into five folio-sized, half-leather scrapbooks in the late 19th century. The documents suffer from embrittlement of their housing and support, iron gall ink corrosion and degradation of the documents themselves, and heavy use, greatly exacerbating the threat of continued damage from the preceding problems. Treatment will take place in our in-house conservation lab and will allow for removal of the documents from their embrittled scrapbook leaves and stabilization of the document inks and paper supports. Each document will also be scanned and the resulting digital images will be loaded into Triptych, our digital library system. The project will take two years to complete and will involve several staff members, preservation interns, and student assistants.