Features

A GIFT TO BE SIMPLE
The David Proper Shaker Collection

One of David Proper's most prized possessions is something he no longer owns--a Shaker holy text inscribed to him from Eldress Gertrude Soule, one of the last of the Shakers. The worn, leather-bound volume now resides in Special Collections, along with a host of other valuable, original Shaker materials, from autobiographies and sermons to visions and songs.

Shaker sisters creating dust mops, from the David Proper Shaker collection.

"It's almost as if we have living, breathing Shakers from 200 years ago right in our library," says David Watters, English professor and director of the Center for New England Culture. Watters praises the Proper Collection both for its great range and its rarities. Proper, a 1955 graduate of UNH, "had an eye for comprehensiveness, offering us books across two centuries from villages all over the United States. But he was also able to get great rarities, items that exist in maybe only one or two copies," says Watters.

What's really exciting for students, he adds, is that they have a chance to look at materials scholars may not have seen before. "Not only does it humanize people from the past, it also helps students think about how people not all that different from themselves make difficult choices," he says. "Living in a celibate society, based on absolute equality--who does that today?"

Appropriately enough for someone who admires the Shakers, Proper is exceedingly humble about his contribution to UNH. "I consider myself a 'disciple,' not a scholar, of the Shakers," explains Proper, who often visited the remaining Shaker sisters in Canterbury, N.H., and Maine during the 1960s and 70s. "It was the simplicity, the quiet beauty of their beliefs and their lives that appealed to me," he says.

The sisters would likely be proud of Proper, who pieced together his collection purely out of passion for a way of life that exemplified goodness and a certainty that it deserved to be remembered and studied by generations to come. "His gift to UNH has made it possible for this to become a center of Shaker studies," says Watters. "He was the catalyst."

Today, the Shakers are best known for their furniture, tangible evidence of the simplicity and grace that characterized their lifestyle. But the Shakers always said their best product was good people. Given that definition, David Proper, disciple, would certainly qualify.

WAR STORIES
The Col. Edward E. Cross Civil War Collection

One day in 1944, infantryman Walter Holden '49, '52G found himself trapped in a collapsing building, surrounded by attacking Germans. He escaped, just barely, and lived to tell the story of his World War II adventures.

Years later, when Holden was teaching English in Keene, N.H., he spent his spare time reading up on the Civil War. "The intensity of combat, the concern with maintaining democracy--I felt that the Civil War was closer to World War II than any other," Holden says.

He became intrigued in particular with a soldier named Edward Cross, who was known as a fearless leader. "If you fall," he wrote in a poem, "die like men with your hearts to the foe." The colonel, who had fought three duels before the war even started, led New Hampshire's Fighting Fifth, the infantry regiment that sustained more casualties than any other during the Civil War.

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