Collection Highlight
Learn about Josiah Allen’s diaries.
Finding Aids
Finding aids for selected, curated items from our extensive collection:
- Family Papers
- Diaries
- Business, Association, and Church Records
- Broadsides, Handbills, and Posters
- Research Collections
- List of Account Books
- Deerfield Town Papers
Digital Collections
A selection of documents in the library collection are digitized.
Search for a specific document or topic at
Memorial Hall Museum’s Past Perfect Catalog
or
here at our American Centuries website.
The PVMA Library collection
The PVMA Library collection represents the life and thought of one small town and its environs from the close of the 17th century through the 20th century. Together they embody three centuries of reading fare—literature, sermons, history, travel, biography, periodicals, and works on agriculture, animal husbandry, and domestic economy—many of which exist in rare imprints.
The PVMA library, part of the Memorial Libraries (the PVMA library and Historic Deerfield library), is open year-round, Tuesday through Friday, 9 am–12 pm and 1–5 pm; closed Mondays and holidays.
For general inquiries, call 413-775-7125 or email
library@deerfieldmuseum.org.
PVMA Library manuscripts include:
- The library owns more than 600 account books and daybooks of local origin, ranging in date from the late 17th to the mid-20th century. Kept by merchants, professionals, farmers, craftsmen, and business firms, these ledgers yield valuable material for studies in economic and local history.
Finding aids to the most extensive collections of family papers are available
here. - Manuscript sermons document the work of various local ministers, occasionally in considerable depth. Included are the writings of the Reverends Jonathan Ashley (1712–1780), Samuel Williams (1743–1817), and Edward Hitchcock (1793–1864). Each offers an opportunity to study religious life and thought in rural New England. Records of churches in Deerfield and surrounding towns have also been preserved.
- More than 200 diaries provide an intimate and often detailed view of life in an earlier day. Represented are the writings of 90 individuals—men, women, and children who recorded their personal and family concerns, and their activities as farmers, politicians, artists, physicians, ministers, craftsmen, and travelers.
- Of particular interest to social historians is the library’s collection of records of voluntary societies in Deerfield and surrounding towns. An extensive miscellany of 17th- to 19th-century Deerfield town records and documents from other western Massachusetts towns provide additional research opportunities.
See a large number of items from the PVMA library collection scanned and transcribed on our
American Centuries
website.
