Background
The boarding house may have been located among one of the Western Massachusetts town abolished in 1938 to allow the Swift River Valley to be flooded, thereby creating the Quabbin Reservoir to provide Boston with water.
Scope of collection
This twenty-four page booklet was printed in 1848 by a New York firm specifically as a time book for laborers or as a boarding house register by the week or month. It contains tables to figure accounts. Payments were kept very carefully for Feb.-Oct., 1850, but there are few clues as to the name of the boarding house owner or the town. A comparison of the list of boarders and workers (final page) to census lists for 1850 might help. It may have been a Quabbin town as the book came from Donald W. Howe, donor of many Quabbin-towns materials. The list of workers includes Irish surnames--Ellen O'Leary, Ellen Callahan and Margaret Murphy, for example, though 1850 is fairly early for finding Irish in the Quabbin region, if that is where it is. The list of boarders includes a few doctors and L.S. Hills, possibly Leonard S. Hills of the Amherst, Massachusetts hat factory.
Administrative information
Access
The collection is open for research.
Provenance
Acquired from Donald C. Howe, 1960.
Processing Information
Processed by Ruth Owen Jones, October 1985.
Language:
EnglishAcknowledgments
Encoding funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Copyright and Use (More information )
Cite as: Boarding House Register (MS 98). Special Collections and University Archives, University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries.
Search terms
Subjects
- Boardinghouses--History--19th century--Sources.
- Irish American women--History--19th century--Sources.
- Quabbin Reservoir Region (Mass.)--History.
Genres and formats
- Account books.
