Wilbraham Charter
A copy of the Wilbraham Charter is on permanent display in the Wilbraham Public Library and was digitized in 2013 by State Senator Gale Candaras (D-Wilbraham) and State Representative Angelo Puppolo (D-Springfield) to celebrate the 250th anniversary of establishment of the Town of Wilbraham. The original is preserved in the Massachusetts State Archives in Boston. Click on the thumbnail above for a larger image.
Glass Plate Negatives
Photographic prints made from glass plate negatives dating from 1890 to 1943 from the Wilbraham Town Archives, Atheneum Society of Wilbraham, and Wilbraham Monson Academy. Prints are available to view at the Wilbraham Public Library; original negatives are in archival storage.
Town Archives
The Wilbraham Public Library's Town Archives collection includes 10 archival boxes of several hundred photographs, mostly dating from the late 1800s to the 1960s. At some point, they were divided up loosely by subjects such as Churches, Agriculture, Businesses, Private Schools, Public Schools, and more. Those subjects roughly correspond to chapters in the 1964 book, "History of Wilbraham, U.S.A.," edited by Charles Merrick for the 200th anniversary of the Town of Wilbraham. Many of the photographs were published in that book. The more than 140 images digitized here have been determined to be in the public domain. All of the photographs are available to view in the library during regular hours.
Glendale Collection
The Glendale Collection includes miscellaneous photographs of unknown provenance. The earliest are tintypes from the mid-19th century. The majority are photographs and postcards from the early 1900s, primarily of families and locations in the Glendale section of town, near the Glendale Methodist Church and cemetery at the intersection of Glendale and Monson Roads. Only those we identified as public domain have been included for digitization.
Stella Greene Farr collection
The Stella Greene Farr collection was donated to the Wilbraham Public Library by Cynthia Brown in 2009. The photographs were discovered in a desk drawer and trunk in the attic of the Farr farm in Granby, Massachusetts in the 1970s. Many of the items were loose; some were inserted into a leather-bound album and were removed from that album for preservation.
Stella Greene was born in Wilbraham on December 2, 1879 and married Charles Howard Farr on October 21, 1908. These photographs are primarily of the Greene-Farr family or neighbors, but in some cases the relationships between the subjects and the family are unknown. Both Greene and Farr family members continued to live in Wilbraham, so some of the photographs in the collection are from as late as the 1950s. Only those we identified as public domain have been included for digitization.
Gertrude Smith Collection
Nine photographs donated to the Wilbraham Public Library by Gertrude Smith. They primarily relate to the Seaver and Bennett families in Wilbraham in the early 1900s.
Wilbraham COVID-19 Archive
This born-digital archive includes photos and PDFs of documents collected from March 2020 to 2022. They were created by the Town of Wilbraham and departments, the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District, and the Wilbraham & Monson Academy in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. On March 12, 2020, the library and senior center closed to the public. After that date, services from many town departments changed in response to what we learned about the spread of SARS-COV-2, the local numbers of sickness, vaccinations, and the eventual reopening fully to the public. This archive strives to collect that information, created in the moment, for future generations.
Maps Collection
The Wilbraham Public Library has a collection of maps of Wilbraham and some of Hampden County. These maps range in date from 1894 to 2005 and include street and zoning maps over the years.