Annual Meeting

    November, 1952

    THE Annual Meeting of the Society was held at the Algonquin Club, No. 217 Commonwealth Avenue, Boston, on Thursday, 21 November 1952, at a half after six o’clock in the evening, the President, Hon. Robert Walcott, in the chair.

    With the consent of those present, the reading of the records of the last Stated Meeting was omitted.

    The Recording Secretary, on behalf of the Corresponding Secretary, reported the receipt of letters from Mr. Warren Ortman Ault accepting election to Resident Membership; from the Reverend Warner Foote Gookin, Mr. Douglas Edward Leach and Mr. Alexander Orr Vietor accepting election to Non-Resident Membership, and from Mr. Carl Purington Rollins accepting election to Corresponding Membership in the Society.

    The Treasurer submitted his Annual Report as follows:

    Report of the Treasurer

    In accordance with the requirements of the By-laws, the Treasurer submits his Annual Report for the year ending 14 November 1952.

    Statement of Assets and Funds, 14 November 1952

    ASSETS

    Cash:

       

    Income

    $19,063.45

     

    Principal

    10,677.00

    $8,386.45

     

    Investments at Book Value:

       

    Bonds (Market Value $157,777.70)

    $161,389.52

     

    Stocks (Market Value $216,924.75)

    101,535.36

     

    Savings Bank Deposit

    3,159.73

    266,084.61

    Total Assets

     

    $274,471.06

    FUNDS

    Funds

     

    $248,594.88

    Unexpended Income

     

    25,876.18

    Total Funds

     

    $274,471.06

    Income Cash Receipts and Disbursements

    Balance, 14 November 1951

     

    $15,166.47

    RECEIPTS:

       

    Dividends

    $8,782.05

     

    Interest

    3,432.92

     

    Annual Assessments

    850.00

     

    Sales of Publications

    243.85

     

    Miscellaneous

    15.00

    13,323.82

    Total Receipts of Income

     

    $28,490.29

    DISBURSEMENTS:

       

    New England Quarterly

    $3,300.00

     

    Editor’s Salary

    1,500.00

     

    Annual Dinner

    796.38

     

    Secretarial Expenses

    900.00

     

    Postage, Office Supplies and Miscellaneous

    149.50

     

    Notices and Expenses of Meetings

    231.50

     

    Storage Charges

    300.72

     

    Auditing Services

    125.00

     

    Safe Deposit Box Rental

    24.00

     

    Interest on Sarah Louisa Edes Fund added

       

    to Principal

    1,826.08

     

    Interest on Albert Matthews Fund added to

       

    Principal

    273.66

     

    Total Disbursements of Income

     

    $ 9,426.84

    Balance of Income, 14 November 1952

     

    $19,063.45

    Report of the Auditing Committee

    The undersigned, a Committee appointed to examine the accounts of the Treasurer for the year ended 14 November 1952, have attended to their duty by employing Messrs. Stewart, Watts and Bollong, Public Accountants and Auditors, who have made an audit of the accounts and examined the securities on deposit in Box 91 in the New England Trust Company.

    We herewith submit their report, which has been examined and accepted by the Committee.

    Willard G. Cogswell

    Arthur S. Pier

    Auditing Committee

    The several reports were accepted and referred to the Committee on Publication.

    On behalf of the committee to nominate officers for the ensuing year the following list was presented; and a ballot having been taken, these gentlemen were unanimously elected:

    President

    • Hon. Robert Walcott

    Vice-Presidents

    • Samuel Eliot Morison
    • Richard Mott Gummere

    Recording Secretary

    • Robert Earle Moody

    Corresponding Secretary

    • Zechariah Chafee, Jr.

    Treasurer

    • James Melville Hunnewell

    Member of the Council for Three Years

    • Clifford Kenyon Shipton

    After the meeting was dissolved, dinner was served. The guests of the Society were Mr. Thomas Boylston Adams, Mr. Arthur Stanton Burnham, Mr. Chiang Yee, Sir Richard Livingstone, Rear Admiral John Livingstone McCrea, Mr. Liensheng Yang. The Reverend Henry Wilder Foote said grace.

    After dinner, Samuel Eliot Morison read the Mayflower Compact. In the absence of the Corresponding Secretary the Annual Report of the Council was not read but was ordered placed on file.

    Report of the Council

    SINCE the last annual meeting the Society has held the usual three stated meetings; in December and February at the Club of Odd Volumes and April at the Peabody Museum of Salem.

    At the December meeting Samuel E. Morison read a paper on “The Pilgrims’ Destination and Their Patents.” Through a regrettable typographical error, the notice of the meeting announced his title as “The Pilgrims’ Destination and Their Parents” thus arousing false hopes among a few genealogically minded members.

    At the February meeting Mr. Sumner C. Powell was to have spoken upon “The Settlement of Sudbury, Massachusetts,” but because of his illness Messrs. Henry J. Cadbury, W. M. Whitehill and Ernest S. Dodge presented brief contributions, and Mr. Samuel E. Morison read portions of the memoir of our late president, Augustus P. Loring, Jr., that he is preparing for publication in the next volume of Transactions.

    At the April meeting our corresponding member, Mr. Marius Barbeau, and Mr. David P. Wheatland spoke.

    During the year the Society has elected the following members:

    Resident:

    • Sumner Chilton Powell
    • Howard Arthur Jones
    • Augustus Peabody Loring
    • James Otis John Adams
    • Alexander Whiteside Williams
    • Warren Ortman Ault

    Non-Resident:

    • Joseph Raphael Frese
    • William Lewis Sachse
    • Whitfield Jenks Bell, Jr.
    • Harral Ayres (declined)
    • Warner Foote Gookin
    • Douglas Edward Leach
    • Alexander Orr Vietor

    Corresponding:

    • Lyman Henry Butterfield
    • Louis Booker Wright
    • John Edwin Pomfret
    • Marius Barbeau
    • Foster Stearns
    • Douglass Adair
    • Arthur Pierce Middleton
    • Oliver Morton Dickerson
    • Lawrence Henry Gipson
    • Carl Purington Rollins

    The Society has had the misfortune to lose three of its members by death since our last annual dinner.

    Winthrop Howland Wade, a Resident Member for forty-nine years, died on 26 January 1952. A Boston lawyer practicing by himself and a citizen of Dedham, very active in town affairs without holding any public office or even seeking to hold one. For over seventy years an alumnus of Harvard, an organizer of the Harvard Law School Association and its first treasurer, a founder of the Harvard Graduates Magazine who was long its treasurer and business manager, secretary of the Board of Overseers. In the noblest sense of the phrase, “a Harvard man.” He cared little for fame and few members of this Society could say what he did, “I have written no books, pamphlets, or articles of any description.”

    George Parker Winship, a Resident Member since 1916, died on 23 June 1952, at the age of eighty-one. After graduating from Harvard College in 1893 and assisting there in History, he directed the John Carter Brown Library in Providence for twenty years. Lured back to Harvard for a less exciting task, he was librarian of the Harry Elkins Widener Collection from 1915 until 1926, and then assistant librarian of the university for ten years. Author and editor of many books, starting with Coronado and the explorers along our Atlantic coast and shifting to the intricate problems of books as books, exemplified in his Census of XV th Century Books owned in America. A scholar who encouraged younger scholars and showed them the way.

    Sir Reginald Coupland, a Corresponding Member since 1935, died on 6 November 1952 at the age of sixty-eight. Going from Winchester School to New College, he made Oxford his lifelong home. As Fellow of All Souls, he was for twenty-eight years a professor without students, an opportunity envied by teachers in this country although they might not use it so fruitfully as he did. He made American historians his debtors by his study of the Quebec Act and his inquiry into the American Revolution and the British Empire.

    Mr. David McCord, observing the coincidence of the Society’s meeting with the publication of Fleet Admiral King, A Naval Record, proposed a toast to the book’s coauthor, Walter Muir Whitehill, the Society’s Editor.

    Sir Richard Livingstone, sometime President of Corpus Christi College and Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University, addressed the Society and its guests.