We’re delighted to share these written memoirs of life in Whately. If you know of others, please share them with the Society so we may include them as well.
Calla Jones, “Memories of the Land: Observation, Inquiry, Historical Narrative and Personal Experience,” high school senior project, exploring historic changes in land use in her own Whately neighborhood, 2018-19.
The project includes Stories of Whately, a digital memory map with links to audio clips of Whately memories by long-term residents Virginia Allis, Adelia Bardwell, Fay Bardwell, Kit Fleuriel and Sylvia Nye. The audio links are sited where the memory took place.
Charles H. Waite, The Memoirs of Charles H. Waite, written in my Eighty-fourth Year, 1953
An engaging first-person account of life in Whately by Charles Waite (1869-1956) in 1953. He writes of his education, of life on a tobacco farm, of his three marriages and four children, only two of whom survived past infancy, and of his travels to many destinations across the United States.
Olive Warner Kellogg Damon, Memoirs, Things I Remember with an afterword by Stephen L. Stange, 1999
Learn more: Inventory to the Olive K. Damon Papers in the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College
Olive Warner Kellogg Damon (1911-2003), born in Williamsburg, MA, moved to Poplar Hill Farm in Whately when she married Alan Damon in 1937. She grew up on a self-sufficient family farm, which both parents and all seven children working around the clock to keep going, and her journal is rich with vivid anecdotes of family life. She became a successful oil painter, producing many small canvases representing Whately farms, landscapes and still-lifes, a number of which hang in the Whately Town Offices at 4 Sandy Lane today.
Blanche Cooney, “In My Own Sweet Time,” (excerpt from her autobiography) Massachusetts Review, Vol. 33, No. 2, pp 221-257
Learn more: Lyuba Basin, “From the Ashes: The Phoenix Quarterly” Book of the Week blog post, University of Utah Library, 3 Jun
Blanche Rosenthal Cooney (1917-95) was born on New York’s Lower East Side. She moved with her husband, James Cooney, and children to a large farm on Nash Hill in West Whately in 1941, where daily life was quite different than it had been in the milieu of art, literature and politics in which they had previously lived. In 1970 they resumed publication of The Phoenix, a pacifist quarterly that had first been published from 1938 to 1940.
