Papers of Henry Dunster and the Dunster and Glover families

Most of the papers of Henry Dunster and the Dunster and Glover families record business transactions and other affairs of the Dunster and Glover families. Many items in the collection, including estate inventories, lists of books printed, income and expense reports, and lists of household property, were introduced as evidence in the various lawsuits relating to Henry Dunster's administration of Elizabeth Glover Dunster's estate. The documents included in the Dunster-Glover lawsuits insight into the workings of the early colonial legal system, including accounts of testimony, evidence, and court rulings.

A few documents in the collection relate specifically to Dunster's tenure as president of Harvard and document his academic reforms, some of which gave significant shape to the development of American higher education. These documents include:

Dunster's Memorandum of 1653 December provides an assessment of the condition in which Dunster found Harvard upon his arrival in 1640 and summarizes his activities as president. The Quadriennium memoir, written by Dunster in 1654, outlines Harvard's implementation of a four-year residency, similar to the academic program at the University of Cambridge, England. In his 1654 petition to the General Court, written at the time of his resignation from Harvard, Dunster requested financial considerations from the Court, including permission to remain in the president's house until his accounts with the College were settled. He also requested a reversal of the Court's vote to require an examination of the accounts of the Glover estate.

In addition to records relating exclusively to educational developments at Harvard, the collection includes three documents that pertain to the education of Native Americans and to the printing business in colonial America:

Dunster's account of expenses for the colony refers to his work preparing young Native American men for college. The list of books printed in Cambridge contains an entry for an "Indian primmer" printed on the Harvard College printing press, which was originally operated by the Glover family, and later by Henry Dunster. This press, first in the colonies, issued among other titles The Freeman's Oath, The Bay Psalm Book, and later the first Bible printed in North America in the Algonquin language known as the Indian Bible or the Eliot Bible. Stephen Day's testimony of 1656 lists printing jobs which used paper provided by Joseph Glover.

Along with documents recording Henry Dunster's legal and educational activities, the seventeenth-century papers also contain a few personal letters to Dunster. Eighteenth and early nineteenth-century papers, including parish records, letters, leases, and receipts, record Dunster family history and genealogy in England and the colonies.

The papers are arranged chronologically. Titles were assigned by archivists and generally correspond to the titles of published transcriptions or prominent text on the documents themselves. Dates assigned by archivists appear in brackets.

Insofar as archivists are aware of published transcriptions, the transcription is cited in the document description below. Principal sources for these transcriptions are the Publications of the Colonial Society (volume 49), Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, (volume 2, series 4), and Henry Dunster and His Descendants.