Reflections on the Objects Collection

Guest post by Kate Smith ’25

For the past few months, I’ve been tackling the Archives and Special Collections’ objects collection. While historical objects might not immediately come to mind when thinking about an archive, A&SC’s collection is vast. Spanning from a Civil War-era decorative sword to keychains celebrating the official opening of Gooding Field, A&SC’s collection has it all.

The collection hasn’t been reviewed in quite a while, so my job is to sort through every object we have in the stacks, assess its condition, make a note in a 1500+ row spreadsheet, and confirm we hold a physical record in the collection’s filing cabinet. After working through shelves and shelves of objects as large as a trunk for traveling or as small as a lapel pin since October of 2024, I can confidently say I’m maybe…almost halfway through the collection. 

Despite any tedium, the work is rewarding. I love working in archives because I love history; every day, I see a new glimpse of college history, and I’m always learning. We have lots of objects related to the College’s athletic department, including wooden weights and medals of all kinds. The objects collection tells the story of Amherst’s connection to Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan, complete with a Doshisha tea set and calligraphy set. 

Working with the objects collection also reminds me of the changes this college has undergone. Recently, I’ve been going through boxes and boxes of lapel pins and medals, many of them relating to the College’s bygone fraternities. The collection also contains tons of old flatware. In one of the files for a set of plates was a clipping of the Student from the 1940s about the construction of the new Valentine Hall. The clipping contained details about the project – including the upstairs dormitory rooms reserved for members of the Lord Jeff’s Club, a club intended to provide an alternative to fraternity living with a less-than-savory name. The article also described another object in A&SC’s holdings: the dishes used from Val’s opening in 1940 to the mid-1970s, which depicted an armed Lord Jeffrey Amherst  on horseback chasing a Native American. Working with the objects collections reminds me how much the college has changed, both in a practical sense regarding what kind of objects we use and what our buildings look like, but culturally and socially as well.

So why am I going through the objects collection? The Archives and Special Collections haven’t thoroughly looked through the objects collection in a while – the spreadsheet is inherited from a defunct database that we no longer use. Thus, I’m going through the collection to make sure our records are accurate, but also to understand just what we have in the archive. Lots of archival theory involves responsibly building an archive – making sure people and events are accurately and comprehensively recorded for future study or simply for posterity. While this may seem to mean that we should keep everything we possibly can, accurately and efficiently keeping an archive also means shedding whatever is deemed unnecessary. In this massive spreadsheet I work with, I occasionally have to write a note: “Why do we own this?” This acts as a bookmark – I’m telling someone other than myself to review our ownership of this item, whether it seems out of place, irrelevant, or sometimes, just garbage. Examples of items in this “Why do we own this?” category include an unidentified metal ring, a landline phone from the 1990s, and building scraps from the renovation of James Hall. However, someone might assess the object collection after me and decide these remnants of the college are too valuable to discard, and that’s okay! Having multiple sets of eyes on a collection is never a bad thing. 

Aside from objects that make me reconsider college history and “Why do we own this?”s, we have objects that remind me of the pedagogical and material differences of “now” and “then.” A&SC has a number of historic scientific objects that were used in Amherst College classrooms. These objects particularly interested me – so much so that when A&SC Preservation Manager Mariah Leavitt asked if there were objects I felt like I could make an exhibit out of in Frost, I immediately thought of those objects. I was given the opportunity to construct and design my very own exhibit! This process was immense fun. I ended up selecting eighteenth-century microscope lenses, an unassembled “solar” microscope, drafting tools, a Kodak projector, and old weights for use with a balancing scale. With these objects, Mariah helped me find related archival materials to supplement my findings.  I selected a textbook from 1810, an essay entitled Chemical Metamorphoses from 1830, and two photos of early laboratory classes. Mariah also advised me on the more practical aspects of building the exhibit – how the objects would be best displayed and arranged. With this advice, the exhibit was almost ready. But I needed to provide a little more information. I dove into the archive. In that aforementioned physical filing cabinet, files contain miscellaneous information about the objects. Looking through them, I found correspondence between a 1970s A&SC archivist and an expert at the Harvard Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments about the solar microscope I had selected. This discovery was especially interesting – I was holding letters from fifty-some years ago about a microscope nearly two centuries old. It was some kind of compounding historical study. With that information and a couple of other tidbits of accession information, I wrote a few blurbs for the objects on display and titled the exhibit “STEM Students of Yesterday.” Every time I see someone even glance at the display case, I feel my efforts rewarded.

As I continue to work on the object collection, I am continually reminded that I am participating in the construction of history while I work. The advice I give on an object’s condition or its relevance to the archive can directly impact the narrative story of Amherst College. Though this might sound intense or like an overstatement, I love going through the objects collection. I’m constantly learning, questioning, and thinking.