LIVERMORE FALLS — Buried in the back room of Treat Memorial Library for a number of years, a box labeled “The Butterfield Collection” lay dormant and untouched until Library Director Brianna Rush and Assistant Director Alana Knapp uncovered it last year.

Upon opening the box, the pair were met with collections of postcards, most of which belonged to the first cousin of the Treat family, Miss Stella May Butterfield.

Born in Bethel in August 1865, Butterfield was an avid traveler and the first cousin of Elsie Reynolds Treat. The collection of postcards reflected the places in which Butterfield had traveled during her lifetime, and she continued to travel until her death in 1931 in Bangkok, Siam (now Thailand).

Butterfield was the only child of Samuel Butterfield and Belista (sometimes spelled Balista) Reynolds, and though she was born in Bethel, her family moved several times before ending up in Somerville, Massachusetts. Her father worked as a mechanical engineer for International Pulp and Paper, where he designed and supervised the construction of lumber mills throughout Maine and Canada.

Despite living in Massachusetts, Butterfield was close with Elsie and George Treat and would frequently travel to Livermore Falls to visit Elsie’s parents, Dr. Henry Reynolds and Perfenda Chaney Reynolds. Notably, on her passing in 1931, it was Elsie who was the identification witness on Butterfield’s 1912 passport application and George was listed as her next of kin on her death notice.

“They were just in shoe boxes,” Knapp shared. With the help of their library aid, they sorted through all the postcards, put them into sheet protectors, and organized them into binders, each labeled with the country Butterfield was visiting at the time.

“I started going through all of these postcards,” Knapp said, “and I started looking around, and I’m like, ‘where did these come from?'”

Knapp’s best guess is they were donated to the library by Elsie Treat herself when she had the building constructed in 1954.

In the collections, one can find articles and book excerpts exemplifying Butterfield’s connections to Livermore Falls and Maine, her passport application, ship passenger list, her notice of death, and her numerous postcards along with entries from Butterfield’s diaries from when she was 12 years old to her death. Knapp said the entries were provided by Catherine Keim of New York, who has a personal collection of Butterfield’s belongings including her diaries.

Knapp shared that she came into contact with Keim through findagrave.com and the two have been corresponding about Butterfield through email and over Zoom since then.

In her passport application, Butterfield was described as 5 feet, 5 inches tall with blue eyes, dark hair, light complexion, round chin, and a “medium” mouth. Despite being a single woman, Butterfield appears to  have traveled the world fearlessly to places like England, Switzerland, France and Holland.

Beyond Europe, Butterfield also traveled through the North Cape of Africa before having a “shock” upon her arrival to Liverpool in August 1930. By Knapp’s best guess, Butterfield suffered a stroke, but that did not stop her from continuing her travels.

She stayed in Liverpool until December, then traveled with an accompanying nurse to Algeria, where her final postcards were collected. She caught a world cruise that was destined to Los Angeles in the spring of 1931 which, according to Knapp, was going to be her final adventure before she settled down for good.

Tragically, she never completed the journey, having died at age 65. Her remains were left to the Treats, who had her buried in Wilton. Though gone for almost a century, her postcards remain as a reminder of the life she lived.

“That’s something that I’m really interested in with our local history archives,” Knapp shared, “because we have such rich history in this area and hear a lot about the men who were involved, but there are a lot of really interesting women.

“If I hadn’t dug into these postcards, I never would have known about Stella,” she added.

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