Happy Fall, y’all! Year round, our Technical Services and Digital Archives staff work on processing, cataloguing, and digitizing arrivals to the Hagley archives, and they worked through tons of materials over the past few months. Highlights include the declassified records of DuPont’s activities for the Manhattan Project and a collection of Pennsylvania Railroad photographs from the World’s Columbian Exposition.

Page of advertisements from Descriptive Catalogue of Standard Works, Treating on Occultism, Theosophy, Astrology, Mesmerism, Mind-cure, Spiritualism, Psychology, Physiology, Hygiene, Etc.

Welcome to the spookiest time of the year, earth mortals! This week, the Hagley Vault is offering the black arts, mesmerism, and witchcraft at a low, low price, courtesy of the ca. 1902 Descriptive Catalogue of Standard Works, Treating on Occultism, Theosophy, Astrology, Mesmerism, Mind-cure, Spiritualism, Psychology, Physiology, Hygiene, Etc.

The catalog was issued by the Prospectors' and Miners' Agency of Palmyra, Pennsylvania. The company, run by Abram Gingrich Stauffer (1862-1928) and his son Oscar (1883-1943), as well as the apparently unrelated Abraham Schopp Stauffer (1887-1951), was a distributor and manufacturer of inexpensive publications, novelties, and various nostrums and elixers. The Stauffers also operated multiple similar companies, including the Electric Motor Company, Gem Novelty Company, Diamond Publishing Company, Franklin Drug Company, Smith Remedy Company, Stauffer and Company, and Hall and Company.

Glass negative image of a large beech tree being moved for transplantation.

Leaf-raking season is here, but here's an arboreal chore to put that work into perspective.

This 1923 photograph shows workers hired by Pierre S. "P.S." du Pont (1870-1954) moving a beech tree from a nearby property to the north corner greenhouse of his Longwood Gardens estate.

The gardens had their roots in Peirce's Park, an arboretum created by Joshua (1766-1851) and Samuel Peirce (1766-1838), who planted their collections of native and exotic trees on the land near their family's farmhouse in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. After the brothers' death, the land remained in the family, but their arboretum deteriorated over the decades, as ensuing generations lost interest in the property.

In 1906, a lumber mill operator was contracted to remove the trees. But the park wound up being rescued by P.S. du Pont, who purchased the property in July 1906 with the goal of protecting the collection.

Record from the Cleveland Recording Company for the 'Ghosts of Mac-O-Chee' episode of the Ohio Story.

If Christmas Creep is real, surely the creepiest season deserves some creep of its own, no? This week's Hagley Vault offers a spooky campfire tale from the Ohio Bell Telephone Company's Ohio Story television and radio series, issued as a Halloween episode in 1947. 

In its time, the Ohio Story was the longest running regional scripted program in the nation, and at least 1,309 radio and 175 television episodes were produced. This episode of the series focused on the haunted history of the Piatt family's Mac-O-Chee castle in West Liberty, Ohio.

This recording is part of Hagley Library's Culley family collection of Cinecraft Productions audiovisual materials (Accession 2018.201). Cinecraft Productions was founded in 1939 by Ray Culley (1904-1983) and Betty (Buehner) Culley (1914-2016) in Cleveland, Ohio. 

Subscribe to