COLL 1: Gould Academy Archives

The Gould Academy Archives are a large collection of books, photographs, artifacts, works of art, and paper ephemera produced by the trustees and staff of Gould Academy.

33 boxes ; 13.2 linear feet + additional material still in processing

The majority of the items that make up the Gould Academy Archives were received from Gould Academy in 2014. The collection includes materials that had been accrued by the Academy since its founding in 1836.

Because the materials were frequently moved and shifted at the school to make room for other, more immediate needs, much of the original order and provenance of the collection has been lost. In addition to this, preserving the material was never under the charge of a paid staff member and responsibility instead fell to various dedicated volunteers, each with their own system of arrangement.

In his The Gould Academy Story: 1836-1976, Francis Parkman included an extensive bibliographic essay, which included descriptions of the current status and arrangement of materials at the school. Some files were still as he described, while others had been rearranged or were missing.

In more recent years, the overseeing of the archives was conducted almost entirely by James Owen, a former teacher at the school. Owen sorted and created files for a large amount of correspondence, and created catalog records in an older version of a cataloging software also used by the Museums of the Bethel Historical Society. Although these records were not directly transferable to our system, efforts have been made to preserve Owen's system of arrangement as much as was practicable. The first 13 series (COLL 1.1 - COLL 1.13) are composed of these materials.

COLL 1.14 is a group of materials that originated from the Alumni and Development Office.

COLL 1.15 is a large collection of materials that appear to have been donated to Gould Archives by Dexter Stowell, a member of both the Gould Academy board of trustees and the local MSAD44 school board.

COLL 1.16 consists of planners/calendars used by William P. Clough, III, during his time as headmaster of the school.

COLL 1.17 consists of materials that were apparently transferred to the school from the law office of Davidson, Dawson, & Clark, LLP, the law firm to which Gould Academy trustees Sidney W. Davidson and William M. Throop, Jr. belonged. These items were apparently arranged in a manner consistent with the filing system used at the firm for their legal cases. After they were received by Gould, they were assigned numbers beginning with 2001 by James B. Owen, who apparently mostly followed the existing arrangement of the papers. This order has been preserved to the maximum degree possible.

COLL 1.18 consists of Gould Academy self-evaluations and New England Association of Schools and Colleges accreditation reports for 1969, 1971 (interim), 1979, and 1989.

COLL 1.19 is a group of materials from the Gould Academy Association. These materials were found in two file boxes that were apparently transferred at some point from the Alumni Association to Jim Owen for the Gould Academy Archives.

COLL 1.20 consists of letters received by Frank Hanscom in reply to a fundraising effort to raise money for new sports.

COLL 1.21 consists of agenda books for miscellaneous Gould Academy Board of Trustee and Executive Committee meetings between 1967 and 1970. Most of the Agenda books bore the name of the trustee they were prepared for.

COLL 1.22 includes correspondence and collected miscellania that most likely came out of the Park-Mason House after it was acquired by Gould Academy. Most of the correspondence is directed to Mary Stearns Park (Mrs. E.C. Park), while a few items are to Ellery C. Park or their daughter Muriel Park Mason.

COLL 1.23 is a small series of papers that belonged to Daniel Gould. A note attached to the original folder reads: "Includes some papers from Parson Gould, - the figuring of eclipses, etc. plus his receipt in 1778 of articles for him to take to college, + agreement to return them to his [house?] mother four years later - this could be transcribed, and written up in the Bethel paper, in the Gould alumni news bulletin, etc. - maybe in 1978 (200 years old).

COLL 1.24 consists of groups of materials archived every school year between 1959 and 1965, a brief period during which there seems to have been a conscious effort at preservation.

COLL 1.25 consists of many smaller files of items. Many of these items were arranged by Jim Owen, who assigned them catalog numbers beginning with 1836 (the year of school's founding) to indicate that they were found in the collection rather than donated at a known time.

The final five series from the initial transfer of items in 2014 (COLL 1.26 to COLL 1.30) consist of materials in other formats, blueprints and maps, loose photographs, photo albums and scrapbooks, bound manuscripts and typescripts, and videos. These materials are still being processed at this time.

COLL 1.31+ are made up of additional materials received after the initial transfer in 2014.

Access to some parts of this collection may be restricted.