Author: Christian Ryder, Archival Field Fellow
In 1940, during the first year of World War II, a small town in New England made the decision to start a hostel to take in refugees from Europe. As a result, over forty people left their lives behind to avoid persecution for religious, ethnic, or political reasons, and found themselves living in Cummington, Massachusetts. Almost all of them would end up leaving the town to live somewhere else. But the experience of living there would have a lasting effect on their lives – whether it was the work that they did, the people that they met, or the new lives that they started in the United States. There would even be a fictionalized documentary made about the town by the U.S. Office of War Information, entitled The Cummington Story and scored by Aaron Copland.
This story was the basis for the collection that I worked with during my archival field fellowship with the Cummington Historical Commission. The commission had a large variety of materials related to the subject of the hostel that they were looking to formalize into a full collection with a finding aid, which would be the end goal of my fellowship work.
The first step towards this goal was to survey the collection so I could work with my supervisor from the SHRAB, Roving Archivist Sarah-Jane Poindexter, in order to form a processing plan, a potential arrangement, and a list of archival materials that would need to be purchased for rehousing. Immediately, the most notable thing about the collection was its arrangement. The materials were collected in different methods from different sources over the years, which meant that a new arrangement for the collection would have to combine materials that had been arranged differently from each other in a way that still gave some attention to original order.
We ultimately made the decision to divide the collection into three series. The first covered the hostel itself along with the refugees who stayed in it, the second was for materials related to the movie The Cummington Story, and the third covered the Cummington Press, a letterpress in the town that operated during the time. For the physical arrangement, the majority of the collection would be placed inside acid-free folders and archival document boxes, while the items too large to fit in these boxes and folders (mostly full-sized newspapers) would be placed in larger newspaper-sized folders and a corresponding box. All of the materials, save for two larger reels of The Cummington Story, would be completely rehoused for the sake of future archival storage.
The majority of the materials in this collection had initially been stored in either photo albums or folders. While materials were ultimately separated by format within each series, this storage was a guideline of sorts for how the future arrangement of the collection was formed. There were two albums, initially entitled Refugee Hostel part 1 and 2, that had been created by former commission volunteers based on what seemed to be largely materials owned by Rev. Carl Sangree (1894-1977), an avowed pacifist and the minister at the town’s congregational church who had led the effort to start the hostel. I initially thought to separate these simply as a “Carl Sangree Papers” series, but when talking with people from the commission it became clear that these did not represent all of Sangree’s papers but instead a portion of the papers which had been separated and arranged by the aforementioned volunteers. There was also an additional album of materials related to the artist and hostel resident Gustav Wolf (1887-1947) that had been compiled by one of the same volunteers, which had initially motivated me to create separate series for the individual refugees who stayed in the hostel, but the nature of the other two albums and the difficulty and granularity of separating papers between the two series made us decide to keep the hostel and refugee series as one. The other two series were much more straightforward to arrange. The existing materials related to The Cummington Story and the Cummington Press had already largely been separated, except for a few newspaper clippings and pieces of correspondence about the movie that I moved into the Cummington Story series. There were some difficulties in arranging the materials because the provenance was not documented in most cases, but things became much clearer once we settled upon the series and general approach to arrangement.
Going through these materials – not just in my initial survey but also the more straightforward processing work of moving items into folders – gave me a much deeper understanding of the stories that intertwined at the hostel. It was fascinating to learn about people like Paul Wieghardt (1897-1969) and Nelli Bar (1904-2001), two married artists who emigrated to America by making the journey through Russia and Japan before arriving in Cummington and teaching at multiple universities across the country, or Paul Amann (1884-1958), an author who left Austria after the Nazi occupation and had recorded correspondence with Thomas Mann. All of these people came to Cummington with the backdrop of World War II and the rise of Nazi Germany. In the end, what made this collection stand out was how these seemingly individual and local stories connected to a broader context of war and human migration, as these themes seemed to consistently come up throughout the collection.
As an early career archivist, I found this to be a very positive experience. My previous positions in archives as a volunteer and intern had been similarly informative but were in very different situations in different institutions. This project not only provided me with the chance to work in a new environment, but also to interact with people from the local community who were involved with the historical commission and stakeholders in the project. I’d like to thank the SHRAB for giving me this opportunity and the Cummington Historical Commission for welcoming me. Thank you to Sarah-Jane Poindexter for her guidance and feedback, and Carla Ness and Grayson Hawthorn for their day-to-day assistance and for providing background information on the collection.
The Archival Field Fellowship is a grant offered by the Roving Archivist Program. The Fellowships increase hands-on assistance to Massachusetts repositories and provide emerging archivists with professional experience and mentorship. In 2025-2026, two institutions representing a diverse cross-section of archival repositories are hosting field fellows. As the fellowships are completed, field fellows share reflections and insights about their site experience on the MA SHRAB blog. This program is funded through support from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission.