Westborough Local History Pastimes – For the Week of May 25, 2020

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halve cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke.

–Geoffrey Chaucer, opening lines of the Prologue
to The Canterbury Tales, 1387

Geoffrey Chaucer

I started the Pastimes newsletter back in March in response to the closing of our library during the coronavirus pandemic. In that first issue I featured Boccaccio’s The Decameron, which is a collection of 100 tales that are all framed by the story of a group of ten nobles who each agree to tell a story a day during the ten days while they are quarantined in the countryside avoiding the Black Death.

Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales is often discussed along with Boccaccio’s work because its collection of stories are also joined together by a frame tale: a group of religious pilgrims find themselves traveling together to Canterbury, England and each one agrees to tell a total of four stories to entertain each other along the way. But what also unites these two works is the specter of the plague. Chaucer’s pilgrims are traveling to visit the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral after praying for his help during the spread of the Black Death. So while The Decameron starts near the beginning of the plague, The Canterbury Tales begins at its end.

Unlike Chaucer’s pilgrims, we may have missed out on enjoying our April (and most of May), but now that we share with the travelers the emergence of spring and the beginning phases for ending our quarantine we should join them by getting outside and making some of our own “pilgrimages” around town (see the entries below for ideas)–and, if you were an English major in college and were required to memorize the opening lines to The Canterbury Tales as I was, recite some Chaucer along the way. 

–Anthony Vaver, Local History Librarian

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  • Make a “Pilgrimage” to the Burial Site of Our Town’s First MinisterRev. Ebenezer Parkman is buried in Memorial Cemetery on West Main Street (between the Forbes Municipal Building and Westborough TV), and his gravesite is so elaborate in comparison to the others that you will easily find it. 

Once you also finish wandering among the gravestones of other Westborough residents who lived during Parkman’s time, walk down the street to the Congregational Church, and, if you are lucky enough to find it open, visit the Parkman Memorial Chapel. The chapel has the same dimensions as Westborough’s original meeting house, and in it you can see Parkman’s Bible and stand behind the pulpit from which he gave his sermons.

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Blue Jay from Birds of New England and Adjacent States, 1870
  • Celebrate Along with the Birds the Arrival of Springtime and Our New Limited Freedoms – Chaucer describes spring as a time when smale foweles maken melodye,” so let’s pay attention and enjoy their songs. The New York Times has a nice set of seven tips to help those of us who have never engaged in formal birdwatching to become more attuned to the lives of birds. I, for one, plan to use it while sitting out on my back deck as the weather continues to warm up.

 

 

Westborough Local History Pastimes – For the Week of May 18, 2020

Spring, Alfred Thompson Bircher, ca. 1861–1897

The weather this spring has generally been cold, windy, and dreary. And even though we have had a few warm and sunny spring days, I still find myself longing for an end to “winter,” both for my garden’s and our mental health’s sake. 

But even if the weather and the coronavirus continues to keep us indoors, we can still enjoy a virtual walk in our community through the work of the Westborough Public Library’s Photographers-in-Residence. The first Pastime entry below has links to their work, some of which was before and some during the pandemic shut-down. In both cases, the positive spirit of our community shines through! 

If you want to “get behind the camera” yourself, the other Pastime entries will give you some ideas and opportunities to do so. And even if you do not have any photographic skills, be sure to submit your Face Mask Selfie to the Westborough Archive! You can view ones that have been submitted so far to gather some inspiration.

–Anthony Vaver, Local History Librarian

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Mill Pond, Brandin Tumeinski, 9/30/2018
  • Photographs of Our Community Before and During the Pandemic – View the latest work by the Westborough Public Library’s current Photographer-in-Residence (2019-2020), Adway Wadekar, at https://www.instagram.com/thewestborougharchive/. Many of his works currently posted show Westborough during more vibrant times and remind us of what we have to look forward to once the coronavirus threat finally ends.

Brandin Tumeinski, who was our Photographer-in-Residence from 2018-2019, continues to take photographs of our community. You can view his most recent work at https://brandintumeinski.instaproofs.com/gallery/#events/1731919/4013169. Once the library opens up again to the public, the Westborough Center will be offering an enhanced display of his “Westborough: Portraits of a Town” exhibit, and we will be looking forward to displaying Wadekar’s work in a follow-up exhibit once his current term ends. 

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  • Submit Your Photographs to Westborough Connects! – Westborough Connects is collecting photographs and brief stories meant to capture our experiences and reactions to the coronavirus pandemic during the month of May. Even better, their fourteen different contribution suggestions are activities that we can do to break up the monotony, bring some joy to our lives, and/or get us out of the house and into Westborough’s fresh air. 

The project is called “Together. Apart. Always. Stories of Connections and Resilience in Westborough,” and you can learn more about it by visiting the Westborough Connects website or by going to their special Facebook page for this project. Contributions will be collected into a book that the organization will sell as a fundraiser. So pull out your cameras or smartphones and contribute to this fun and reflective project. 

(By the way, the book will be added to the Westborough Archive, so your contribution will truly become a part of history!) 

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ca. 1977
  • Become Involved in Photographing Westborough – Are you interested in photography? Do you want to connect with other photographers and help the Westborough Center document life in our town so that future generations can gain a better understanding of who we are today? 

The Westborough Public Library will be revamping our Photographer-in-Residence program in the upcoming year. We do not yet know what this new program will look like (although we already have some ideas), but if you are interested in participating either with planning the new program or simply adding your name to a notification list for when it gets going, let me know by emailing me at avaver@cwmars.org

Westborough Local History Pastimes – For the Week of May 11, 2020

pas·time – /ˈpasˌtīm/ – noun

  1. an activity that someone does regularly for enjoyment rather than work; a hobby. “his favorite pastimes were shooting and golf [and local history!]” (Source: Lexico – https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/pastime)

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In last week’s issue of Westborough Local History Pastimes, I discussed the importance of collecting images, stories, websites, and other formats that document how Westborough is responding to the current medical crisis and what that collection may mean to Westborough in the future. But we can also look back in time to see how Westborough handled medical issues in the past.

This issue highlights ways for you to explore how Westborough responded to pandemics, disease, and other physical ailments at various points in its history. 

[And be sure to add your Face Mask Selfie to the Westborough Coronavirus Pandemic Response collection! The ones that have been submitted so far are really fun and interesting.]

–Anthony Vaver, Local History Librarian

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  • Rev. Ebenezer Parkman and Eighteenth-Century Medicine – If we cannot diagnose Rev. Ebenezer Parkman, Westborough’s first minister, as a hypochondriac* given the historical distance between his time and now, we can at least say that he was highly attuned to medical matters during his time. In the absence of modern medicine, who can blame him? Parkman actively chronicled both his own ailments and those of the people of Westborough in his diary, and he collected recipes that supposedly cured or provided relief to those afflicted with disease or illness.  

Here are a few places where you can explore and learn more about disease and medicine in eighteenth-century America through Parkman and his writings.

  • Read about how diseases as various as measles, sore throat, and rickets affected Westborough in the eighteenth century by visiting this page from the Westborough Public Library’s online edition of Parkman’s diary: http://diary.ebenezerparkman.org/diary-themes-topics/.
  • You can find some of the cures that Parkman collected–such as “The Blood of a Pigeon is a most Excellent Remedy in all Wounds & Contagions of the Eyes”–in New England’s Hidden Histories’s online collection of Parkman Papers. Click the “Close and View Content” button in the bottom right of the page after visiting each of these pages:
  • Read more about Parkman’s medicinal recipes in “A Most Excellent Remedy,” a Beacon Street Diary blog post from Congregational Library and Archive.

* According to Leo Damrosch in The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age (available as an ebook through the WPL with the Libby app), hypochondria in the eighteenth-century “didn’t mean wrongly imagining a physical illness; it meant suffering from a very real mental disorder, which was assumed to be linked to some bodily imbalance” relating to “blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile” (17).

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Westborough Chronotype, September 20, 1918
Westborough Chronotype, September 27, 1918
Westborough Chronotype, October 4, 1918
Westborough Chronotype, October 11, 1918

Westborough Local History Pastimes – For the Week of May 4, 2020

pas·time – /ˈpasˌtīm/ – noun

  1. an activity that someone does regularly for enjoyment rather than work; a hobby. “his favorite pastimes were shooting and golf [and local history!]” (Source: Lexico – https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/pastime)

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Help Us Document Life During the Coronavirus Pandemic!

As we keep up our social distancing during the pandemic, I hear over and over again that “we are witnessing history.” Well, we are always witnessing history, but it is also true that some events have a greater impact on our lives than others. What we really mean to say is that we are witnessing a significant event that will perhaps impact us for years to come, and so people in the future will want to study and understand the ways that this event changed us.

In last week’s newsletter, I bemoaned the difficulty of finding articles on the Spanish Influenza pandemic of 1918 in the Westborough Chronicle (more on that next week!). But wouldn’t it be great if we had an archival collection that documented how Westborough responded to that crisis? Such an archive could teach us how the people of Westborough in the past coped with their fears, made difficult decisions in an attempt to curb infections, and adapted to having their normal routines interrupted in the face of a public health emergency. By coming to understand their struggle, we might find solace in the fact that our town has already gone through something similar to what we are going through now, that we bonded together as a community, and that we came out of the crisis together to live another day.

Your response to the current pandemic is historic! Below are some ways that you can help the Westborough Historical Society and the Westborough Center collect our impressions, our experiences, and our coping mechanisms for future Westborough residents. We are indeed witnessing history, and, as always, you are an important part of creating that history! Here is your chance to help us document this history and preserve it for generations to come.

–Anthony Vaver, Local History Librarian

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Submit Your Written Reflections on the Coronavirus Pandemic! – The Westborough Historical Society and the Westborough Center for History and Culture are asking residents to write their reflections/impressions/reactions to living in this global pandemic. Here are some ideas for what to write about:

  • Discuss how the “world shutting down” has impacted you and altered your normal activities:
      • Sheltering in place
      • No sports
      • No school
      • No graduation
      • No Boston Marathon
      • No shopping
      • No restaurant dinners
    • Of interest also is daily life under these conditions: 
      • How do you spend your time at home all day? 
      • What is it like to visit the supermarket? 
      • How do you keep in contact with loved ones? 
      • How do you feel about wearing a mask or about maintaining social distancing?
    • Looking to the future:
      • What do you miss most? When do you anticipate being able to do that activity again?
      • When do you think everything will return to normal? Will it? If not, how will it be different?
      • Was there anything positive to come out of this quarantine experience? What were they? Do you anticipate these outcomes continuing into the future?

Kris Allen, Westborough’s eminent town historian, is offering to “put on her editor’s hat” and assemble our writings.

Deadline: June 1

Length: 500-750 words, or however long it takes to write what you want.

Submission: Send your reflections to Kris Allen (krisallen2@verizon.net) or submit them online by going to https://westboroughdigitalrepository.omeka.net/contribution and selecting the “Coronavirus Pandemic Written Reflection” option.

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Compulsory mask during the Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918 (the design is meant as a joke).

Here Are Some Other Ways to Contribute – Writing may not be your thing, but here are some other ways to contribute content to the Westborough’s Coronavirus Pandemic Response collection:

  • Take a selfie of yourself wearing your mask. Be creative. Can you quickly add a note commenting on your mask or about what it is like to wear it? 
  • Contribute a photograph that shows how life has changed. Here are some ideas for what to photograph:
          • Empty grocery store shelves.
          • Empty Westborough streets.
          • Signs relating to the crisis.
          • People practicing social distancing.
          • Closed stores or restaurants.
  • Scan or photograph an item or object relating to the crisis.
  • Contribute a picture or cartoon.
  • Conduct an oral history with someone.
  • Take a short video showing how your life has changed.
  • Share your journal during this time (just make sure you want to make it public!).

Submit your contribution at https://westboroughdigitalrepository.omeka.net/contribution.

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Take a look at what is already included in the collection, and if you think we are missing a Westborough-related web or social media site that is taking action during this crisis, fill out this “Suggest a Web or Social Media Site” Form and we will consider adding it to the collection.