On June 19, a moving company transported the Marlboro College archives and some special collections from Marlboro's Rice-Aron Library to the Silver Special Collections Library at UVM. Marlboro is merging with Emerson College in Boston and selling its Vermont campus. “We are thrilled to have our invaluable archives going to UVM, where they will join historic collections from several other Vermont colleges,” said Kevin Quigley, Marlboro president. “It has been extremely important to many in our community that the collections remain in Vermont, with easy access.”

The Marlboro College Archives collection dates to the mid-1940s when Walter Hendricks founded the college. The collection contains college catalogs and handbooks, The Citizen newspaper, yearbooks, scrapbooks, issues of Potash Hill, photographs of campus life, and historical ephemera. The collection includes cassette and VHS tapes that captured concerts featuring notable musicians, such as Blanche Moyse and Luis Batlle, and speakers, like Loren Pope and Saul Bellow, as well as oral histories of alumni from the first few graduating classes.

One of the most valuable parts of the archives collection is more than 2,500 Plans of Concentration submitted by graduating students from the early 1950s to the present. The plans represent the range of creative and scholarly exploration by Marlboro students over the years, and remain the clearest legacy of the college’s student-centered pedagogy.

Marlboro Archive Plans of Concentration

Curator of Manuscripts and University Archivist Chris Burns arranged the transfer to UVM. “Silver Special Collections Library is pleased to be able to provide a home for the Marlboro College archives,” he said. “Marlboro’s legacy of a high quality, small-scale, egalitarian, and individualized approach to education will continue to live on in the college archives that will be preserved and made accessible at the University of Vermont. Our special thanks go to our friends at the Marlboro College Library who collected and organized these records over the years.”

Marlboro’s highly prized Rudyard Kipling Collection has also found a home at UVM. The collection includes many rare and first editions, a photograph collection that primarily focuses on Kipling’s Vermont years (1892-1896), and documents and other primary source materials that were stored in a Brattleboro bank vault for nearly 100 years, apparently left behind when the Kiplings departed Vermont in 1896.

Rudyard Kipling in his Brattleboro, Vermont home.