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Shortly after the Civil War began, volunteer women's associations throughout the North formed in order to provide for the needs of soldiers at the front. The New England Auxiliary Association, a regional branch of the United States Sanitary Commission, included women from virtually every town in Massachusetts. This letter, written late in the war to either Elizabeth or Fanny Wilson of Deerfield, acknowledges the receipt of pickles and lint that would be used for dressing wounds. The yarn referred to in the letter would have been knit into scarves or sweaters.

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