Mack Family Correspondence
Scope and Contents
This collection contains nine letters written to David Mack, 22 letters to his daughter Isabella Hinckley (Mack), and two letters written to his wife Lucy Mack by various friends, including William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Celia Thaxter, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Elizabeth Peabody, and Lucy Stone.
Dates
- 1828-1922
- Other: Date acquired: 01/02/1969
Creator
- Mack Family (Family)
Conditions Governing Access
The collection is open for research.
Conditions Governing Use
Items in this collection may be subject to copyright restrictions. In most cases, the Boston Public Library does not hold the copyright to the items in our collections. It is the sole responsibility of the user to make their own determination about what types of usage might be permissible under U.S. and international copyright law.
Biographical / Historical
David Mack (1804-1878), graduated from Yale College in 1823 and studied law under his uncle, Judge Mack, in Salem, Massachusetts. He practiced law in Andover for a short time until he began teaching. Mack was one of the signers of the original agreement to establish Brook Farm. From 1831-1836, he was the principal of the Friend’s School in Bedford. For several years he ran a girls boarding school in Cambridge, until 1841 when and together with George William Benson (1808-), Samuel Lapham Hill (1806-1882) and others, he helped found the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community, located near Northampton, Mass. Based on communal living and racial equality, the Association set out to reform the existing industrial system based on competition and division of labor to one of mutual cooperation. Mack and his wife Lucy were teachers in the Association’s progressive school. Among the supporters and members of the Northampton community were William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Samuel May, and Sojourner Truth. Mack left the Association in 1835.
Extent
31.00 Items
Language of Materials
English
Arrangement
Arranged chronologically.
Source of Acquisition
Goodspeed's Book Shop, Boston, Mass
Method of Acquisition
Purchase
Processing Information
Finding aid written by Rare Books and Manuscripts staff.
Processing Information
This electronic finding aid is transcribed from legacy data. In many cases, transcriptions were not verified against collection materials at the time of transcription. As a result, this finding aid could be incomplete and might only reflect a partial understanding of the material.
Statement on harmful description
Archival description reflects the biases of time periods and cultures in which it was created and may include direct quotations or descriptions that use inappropriate or harmful language. Creator provided descriptions may be maintained in order to preserve the context in which the collection was created and/or used. Legacy description and potentially offensive content may be made available online until a collection can be reprocessed because the access that they provide to primary source materials is uniquely valuable to the research community at large. Our efforts to repair outdated descriptions and to describe our collections more equitably are iterative and ongoing.
- Collective Settlements — United States — History — 19th Century Subject Source: Library of Congress Subject Headings
- Northampton Association of Education and Industry Subject Source: Library of Congress Subject Headings
- Title
- Mack Family Correspondence
- Author
- Rare Books and Manuscripts staff, 2014
- Date
- 09/10/2014
- Description rules
- Describing Archives: A Content Standard
- Language of description
- English
- Script of description
- Latin
Revision Statements
- 2014-09: Updated by Kimberly Reynolds, September 2014.
About this library
Part of the Boston Public Library Archives & Special Collections Repository
