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The Carter Children's Literature Collection contains nineteenth and twentieth century volumes of juvenile literature collected by Ruth H. Carter (Class of 1924), and donated by her to the Special Collections in 1967. The collection includes works by Louisa May Alcott, Anna Sewell, Kate Douglas Wiggin, and Mark Twain.
Born in 1903, Ruth Harriet Carter was raised and educated in Massachusetts. She graduated from Framingham State Normal School in 1924. After receiving her B.A. from Boston College, Carter returned to her alma mater where she taught until 1945. In the late 1940s, Carter relocated to Oregon where she continued to teach until her retirement from Oregon State University in 1970. Throughout her long career, Carter was well known for her interest in and knowledge of children's literature and poetry.
Established in 1959 by Cora E. Morse (Class of 1908), the O'Connor Poetry and Travel Collection was named in honor of Martin F. O'Connor, president of Framingham State College from 1936-1961.
The bulk of the collection consists of contemporary American poetry ranging from the 1960s through the present. Some Authors include Adrienne Rich, Charles Bukowski, Amy Clampitt, Carl Rokosi, Anthony Hecht, Paul Blackburn, Robert Kelly, and Diane Wakoski.
The Wakefield Cookbook Collection is comprised of the donor's personal library of books on cooking, domestic science, etiquette, and other household topics.
Ruth Graves graduated from the Framingham State Normal School Department of Household Arts in 1924. After graduation, she worked as a dietitian and food lecturer. In 1930, she published a cookbook entitled Ruth Wakefield's Recipes: Tried and True. The book went through thirty-nine printings.
The most famous of her original recipes was the Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie, named for the restaurant that she and her husband Ken Wakefield owned, the Toll House Inn. Better known as the chocolate chip cookie, Ruth Wakefield developed this recipe in 1933 by breaking up a Nestle semi-sweet chocolate bar and adding it to a basic brown sugar cookie dough.
In the years that followed, the Wakefields enjoyed a pleasant relationship with the Nestle Company, which eventually featured the cookie recipe on the wrapper of its semi-sweet candy bar. When Nestle began the production of chocolate morsels, the recipe, too, was printed on the back of each package where it remains to this day.
Ruth's interest in seeking new and innovative recipes to serve at the couple's restaurant led her to amass a collection of cookbooks. In 1969, two years after the Wakefields sold the Toll House Inn, Ruth Graves Wakefield donated her cookbooks to the Special Collections.
Through a generous gift of the Alumni Association in 1972, the Special Collections received a number of limited edition volumes published by the Imprint Society. These reprints include classic works of history, exploration, travel, literature, and Americana.
The Imprint Society limited each edition to 1,950 numbered signed copies. Illustrations were selected from unpublished watercolors, historic engravings, or restrikes of rare copperplates.
Domestic Manners of the Americans. Francis Trollope. Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1969.
The Genial Showman: Being the Reminiscences of the Life of Artemus Ward. Edward P. Hingston. Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1971.
Great Locofoco Juggernaut. Malcolm Johnson. Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1971.
The Sea and the Jungle. H.M. Tomlinson. Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1971.
Travels into North America. Peter Kalm. Barre, MA: Imprint Society, 1972.
The rare books housed in the John Halpern Special Collection room have been identified as valuable to Framingham State University because of their local association, quality of production or illustration, date of printing, prior ownership, or condition of copy. Because of the University's distinguished role as the country's first publicly supported normal school, the collection as a whole takes on further value: it illustrates the evolution of educational theories and practices throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Additionally, many of the volumes reflect the changes and orientations of the school's curriculum during these years.
The Callahan Collection consists of nineteenth and twentieth century books pertaining to the forty towns located in the Middlesex County - towns such as Acton, Bedford, Cambridge, Dunstable, Everett, Framingham, Hopkinton, Malden, Newton, Reading, Stow, and Wakefield. The collection includes street directories, genealogies, town histories, travel guides, and works by or about local authors.
Raymond J. Callahan was the former editor-in-chief of the Framingham News, known today as the Middlesex News. Callahan had a deep interest in the history of Framingham and its surrounding area. This collection named in his honor is meant to support research in local history and genealogy.