"A Legend of Mt Tom"

"A Legend of Mt Tom"

Chicopee (Mass.); Mount Tom (Mass.); Springfield (Mass.)--Colonization; King Philip's War, 1675-1676--Fiction

A 19-leaf booklet, hand-bound with (possibly brass) pronged fasteners (removed for digitization. The booklet is a typed poem, with annotations and corrections in pencil and in ink, as well as one small insert with a note. The covers are the same paper as the inner leaves, and the title is hand-written in ink. The back cover is blank, but a brief note written in ink on the last page dates the poem to June 30, 1905. While the poem refers to a real moment during King Philip's War (the siege of Springfield, MA, in 1675, everything else mentioned is a fictionalized narrative and utilizes racialized tropes and language. [Interestingly, it references a colonist named Patience Worth; while there is no record of her being real, in the 1910s there was a sensation surrounding a woman who claimed to be in contact with a (deceased) Patience Worth via a ouija board, through which Patience dictated novels and poetry.] *Processing note: the insides of both covers are deliberately blank; we refrained from scanning the blank reverse of inner pages to reduce the file size.

1905

Spence Collection

Document

CPL-Spence-089