Annual Meeting

    November, 1950

    THE Annual Meeting of the Society was held at the Algonquin Club, No. 217 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, on Tuesday, 21 November 1950, at a quarter after six o’clock in the evening, the President, Augustus Peabody Loring, Jr., in the chair.

    With the consent of those present, the reading of the records of the last Stated Meeting was omitted.

    The Treasurer submitted his Annual Report as follows:

    Report of the Treasurer

    In accordance with the requirements of the By-Laws, the Treasurer submits his Annual Report for the year ending 14 November 1950.

    Statement of Assets and Funds, 14 November 1950

    ASSETS
    Cash:

    Income

    $15,173.52

     

    Loan to Principal

    13,764.85

    $1,408.67

    Investments at Book Value:

    Bonds (Market Value $154,891.00)

    $155,440.67

     

    Stocks (Market Value $172,293.25)

    102,582.18

     

    Savings Bank Deposit

    3,010.29

    261,033.14

    Total Assets

     

    $262,441.81

    FUNDS

    Funds

     

    $242,857.00

    Unexpended Income

     

    19,584.81

    Total Funds

     

    $262,441.81

    Income Cash Receipts and Disbursements

    Balance, 14 November 1949

     

    $14,826.48

    RECEIPTS:

    Dividends

    $7,806.05

     

    Interest

    5,940.19

     

    Annual Assessments

    810.00

     

    From Martha Rebecca Hunt Fund

    434.00

     

    Sales of Publications

    433.00

    15,423.24

    Total Receipts of Income

     

    $30,249.72

    DISBURSEMENTS:

    Publications

    $4,840.90

     

    New England Quarterly

    3,000.00

     

    Editor’s Salary

    1,500.00

     

    Secretarial Expense

    900.00

     

    Annual Dinner

    593.92

     

    Notices and Expenses of Meetings

    399.54

     

    Storage

    300.72

     

    Auditing Services

    125.00

     

    General Expense

    119.35

     

    Postage, Office Supplies and Miscellaneous

    111.91

     

    Joint Dinner with M. H. S.

    87.00

     

    Insurance

    86.40

     

    Safe Deposit Box

    24.00

     

    Interest on Sarah Louisa Edes Fund added to Principal

    2,242.54

     

    Interest on Henry H. Edes Memorial Fund added to Principal

    491.48

     

    Interest on Albert Matthews Fund added to Principal

    253.44

     

    Total Disbursements of Income

     

    $15,076.20

    Balance of Income, 14 November 1950

     

    $15,173.52

    James M. Hunnewell

    Treasurer

    Report of the Auditing Committee

    The undersigned, a committee appointed to examine the accounts of the Treasurer for the year ended 14 November 1950, have attended to their duties by employing Messrs. Stewart, Watts and Bollong, Public Accountants and Auditors, who have made an audit of the accounts and examined the securities on deposit in Box 91 in the New England Trust Company.

    We herewith submit their report, which has been examined and accepted by the Committee.

    Willard G. Cogswell

    Arthur S. Pier

    Auditing Committee

    The Treasurer’s Report was accepted and referred to the Committee on Publication.

    On behalf of the committee appointed to nominate officers for the ensuing year the following list was presented; and a ballot having been taken, these gendemen were unanimously elected:

    • President Augustus Peabody Loring, Jr.
    • Vice-Presidents Hon. Robert Walcott
    • Samuel Eliot Morison
    • Recording Secretary Robert Earle Moody
    • Corresponding Secretary Zechariah Chafee, Jr.
    • Treasurer James Melville Hunnewell
    • Registrar Robert Dickson Weston
    • Member of the Council for Three Years Palfrey Perkins

    The Treasurer moved the adoption of the Suggested By-Laws that had been considered at the Annual Meeting in 1949 and had failed, by a fraction of one vote, to receive the approval of three quarters of the members present at the meeting. On this occasion, forty-four votes being cast in the affirmative, four in the negative, and one blank, the By-Laws were adopted in the firm printed in the Handbook of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts 1892–1952 (Boston, 1953).

    After the meeting was dissolved, dinner was served. The guests of the Society were Mr. John Goodbody, the Reverend Duncan Howlett, Mr. William Caleb Loring, Mr. David McCord, Mr. David McKibbin and Mr. Alex Murphy. The Reverend Henry Wilder Foote said grace.

    After dinner Samuel Eliot Morison read the Mayflower Compact, and the Annual Report of the Council was read by Mr. Zechariah Chafee, Jr.

    Report of the Council

    SINCE the last Annual Meeting the Society has had, as usual, three Stated Meetings; in December and February at the Club of Odd Volumes, and in April at the house of Mr. Augustus Peabody Loring, Jr. On 28 December the Society joined with the Massachusetts Historical Society in giving a dinner at the Club of Odd Volumes to their Corresponding Members who were attending the American Historical Association meeting, and on 6 June Mr. and Mrs. Peter Oliver invited the Society to luncheon in Middleborough.

    The Society has continued its support of the New England Quarterly as in past years. Volume 35 of our Publications, containing Transactions for the years 1942 to 1946 is now in page proofs and will be printed as soon as the index is completed. Mr. Frederick S. Allis, Jr., who has been editing two volumes of Collections on the Maine land grants has nearly finished his work, and it is hoped that these may go to press in 1951.

    The Society has elected the following members:

    Resident:

    • Francis Whiting Hatch
    • Lucius James Knowles

    Corresponding:

    • Wendell Stanwood Hadlock
    • William Greenough Wendell
    • John Marshall Phillips

    During the past year the Society has lost from its rolls by death seven members:

    Waldron Phoenix Belknap, Jr., Resident, 1948, died 14 December 1949. He was a member of this Society for only one year, but his name will be long remembered among scholars. A graduate of Harvard College in 1920 and a Master of Architecture, he munificently repaid his indebtedness to his Alma Mater. The untimely illness which cut short his fruitful life did not end his devotion to his close friends and to art and literature. He will be to Harvard what the Earl of Clarendon is to Oxford, an unceasing giver of beautiful books for all men to read.

    George Richards Minot, Resident, 1929, died 25 February 1950. His service to mankind was prolonged many years by the doctors who produced insulin, and in return he lengthened countless useful lives by discovering in 1926 the curative effect of liver on pernicious anæmia. Few were the learned societies which did not honor themselves by putting his name on their rolls and bestowing on him their supreme awards. Probably no other member of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts will ever receive the Nobel Prize in Medicine. Yet one would never guess all this while talking with him delightfully. Despite his great knowledge of organs and diseases, they were never isolated entities. Whether it was a sick woman seeking help or an eager young research worker to be put in the right laboratory or a colonial doctor brought to life in a paper for this Society, the individual human being was what counted with George Minot.

    Charles Knowles Bolton, died 19 May 1950 in his eighty-third year. He was the oldest member of the Massachusetts Historical Society and joined our Society in 1898, before any member now living. Resigning in 1912 after contributing many papers, he again became a Resident Member in 1926. As Librarian of the Boston Athenæum for thirty-five years, he exceeded the service of all his predecessors. In 1933, at the age of sixty-six he retired but did not cease work. “I very much enjoy growing older.” For the Works Progress Administration, he supervised the survey of early American portraits in New England and New York. He wrote many books and a manuscript check-list of false and doubtful portraits in public institutions.

    Clarence Eldon Walton, Resident, 1934, Corresponding, 1946, died 25 May 1950, aged fifty-two. Born in Madison, Maine, and a graduate of Bates College, he soon became a librarian at Stanford University and then at New York University. In 1930 he came to Harvard and served sixteen years as Assistant Librarian, notably in the Order Department. His New York experience in collecting and arranging the complex output of the League of Nations broadened into a mastery of the mechanical problems of documents. He drew up and applied a classification for the University Archives and taught a course on Historical Archives, Principles and Practice, one of the first of the kind in the country. For the Tercentenary, he prepared the Library’s exhibit, which was recorded in his Historical Prospect of Harvard College, 1636–1936. During World War II, he was active in civilian defense. In 1946 he went to the War Department and afterwards the State Department, with especial responsibility for overseas libraries, distributing material over fifty-six countries and getting the New York Times by air to remote parts of China.

    Fred Tarbell Field, Resident, 1934, and Vice-President since 1938, died 22 July 1950. A descendant of Roger Williams, who came back to Massachusetts. Born in Springfield, Vermont, he went to Brown University, which he later served devotedly on its Board of Fellows. After leaving Harvard Law School in 1903, he became an expert on tax law, in public offices till 1919 and then in practice in Boston. Ten years later he was raised from the bar to the Supreme Judicial Court, which is rare in Massachusetts, and in 1938 he moved to the Chief Justice’s chair, which had been occupied years before by his uncle. A true judge, he said, “should be a man with his feet on the ground and his head in the clouds.”

    Harry Andrews Wright, Resident, 1940, died 20 October 1950, aged seventy-eight. He was a descendant of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins and of Miles Standish, too. A lifelong resident of Springfield, his business interests shifted from insurance to corsets to the development and patenting of mechanical devices. His great interest in local history was shown in his Indian Deeds of Hampden County, Early Maps of the Connecticut Valley, and the recent editing of four volumes of The Story of Western Massachusetts. During the 300th anniversary of Springfield, he exploded the city’s traditions by insisting that William Pynchon and his band of pioneers sailed up the Connecticut in sloops instead of paddling and then failed to build a cluster of log cabins, inasmuch as these were not known in America until the Finns brought them to Delaware in 1663.

    Charles Eliot Goodspeed, Resident, 1926, and our President in 1945–1946, died on 31 October 1950. At the age of fourteen he went to work. What college could have taught him what he knew? An angler for trout and rare books, a merchant venturer in history, ever ready to give the knowledge in his mind away to needy scholars.

    Mr. John Marshall Phillips, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, addressed the Society and its guests upon the subject: “Food and Drink in the Colonial Period,” illustrating his remarks by lantern slides of colonial silver.