Jane C. Crowell Papers

Jane Caroline Crowell (born 1872) was one of three daughters of Edward Payson (AC 1853) and Mary Warner Crowell. Jane's father arrived in Amherst as an undergraduate, but her mother was a native of Amherst and the daughter of Rev. Aaron Warner (professor of Rhetoric) and Mary Atwood Warner (who died a few days after her daughter's birth in 1834). Mary Warner Crowell was also a childhood friend and schoolmate of Emily Dickinson.

The Crowells seem to have been an exceptionally close family. Of the four children, only Jane's brother, Robert W. Crowell (AC 1889), married and moved away, while all three daughters (Mary, Annie, and Jane) remained unmarried and lived at home into the late 1940s. Jane was the last Crowell to live in the house, almost until her death in 1950. The photograph album in series 2, Photographs, documents the family home and suggests the attachments among its inhabitants.

Jane (sometimes called Jean or Jennie) Crowell aspired to be a published writer. She wrote poems, short stories, and essays, some of which were published in newspapers and magazines. The collection contains many of her works, most as typescripts in a finished or nearly finished form.

Although the Warner-Crowell family lived in one home in Amherst for a century, there seems to be little remaining in the way of family papers. That there is not more than what is represented in the Jane C. Crowell Papers is probably because the family, or at least Jean Crowell, deliberately destroyed their correspondence. Writing about Mary Warner Crowell in his "Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson," Jay Leyda noted that "in the last illness of her daughter, Jean Crowell, a friend stoked the furnace with Mary Warner Crowell's correspondence" (page lxxviii). It's likely that other family papers met the same fate.