John A. Y. Andrews - Reflection for a Family Reunion
Table Conversations at Forty Acres:
Reflection for a Family Reunion
John A. Y. Andrews
July 20, 2024
As we gather here over lunch, I thought to offer you the following thoughts on the
numberless conversations shared in this place over a common table and across more
than two and a half centuries:
Among the many things that Mark Twain never quite said is that “History doesn’t repeat
itself, but it rhymes.”
Here at Forty Acres, history rhymes in temporal cycles and rhythms – the ticking of
clocks, the passage of hours and days, the coming and going of moons, the seasons of
planting and harvest. As a family home, this house pulsed with the comings and goings
of its human community—births, marriages, deaths, comings and goings and gatherings
like this one. As a lively museum, its scheduled hours and calendar of events now
maintain their own rhythm and pace.
Yet history rhymes here also in quite another sense—in the counterpoint between the
intimate family and household dinner conversations of this house and the larger,
contested narrative of our national life as Americans.
I invite you to consider with me two versions of that narrative. The first is Robert Frost’s
poem “The Gift Outright”, recited at John Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961:
The land was ours before we were the land’s
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.
Kennedy’s New Frontier was a male-assertive, muscular time – the ripe adulthood of
those who had performed “many deeds” of World War II, my father’s and uncle’s
generation. Frost’s mythic incantation of frontier and sacrifice, through war or otherwise,
likely resonated in the mind of a six-year-old boy with the origin story of this house –
daringly built outside the Hadley Stockade by a young husband and father soon killed in
battle on a more distant frontier. In that naïve haze, Moses Porter might have looked to
me something like a New Frontiersman 200 years avant la lettre – and in that sepia
view, this house and farm, his project, became an imperfect realization, tinged with
tragic sacrifice, of the aspirations of grownup and serious men.
Conversations at and about Forty Acres took on a patriarchal overtone for me then. This
was a place of men of ponderous importance: Squire Phelps, Rev. Dan Huntington
(protégé of Yale President Timothy Dwight), Bishop Frederic Dan Huntington, and his
son (“the Prophet”), Father James O. S. Huntington. Portraits of these last two hung on
my dad’s rectory study wall at home—as his own, in clericals, now appears in the
Bishop’s Study here. That room, and maybe the Prophet’s Chamber, would be Nigel’s
preferred haunts here.
Around the dinner table, law, theology, politics, and more distantly farm management
would (I imagined) be the important subjects from which other conversations would
necessarily recede into filler—while the land, the submissive but beckoning She outside
the window, waited silently to receive the labors and the aged bones of those men of
mind and sinew.
Sixty years on, this picture of Forty Acres seems as cringingly myopic and blinkered as
the Manifest Destiny tropes that many people hear and shudder at in Frost’s poem.
Decades of work by the PPH Foundation and guest scholars have taught us to listen to,
and helped us hear, the many other voices and conversations around the table and
along the benches on the back stoop.
Women’s voices are inescapably central in the narrative of this house. For most of its
first three generations, the men of this farm first came here as guests, through marriage
or employment. The munificent detail of our foremother Elizabeth Phelps’s diaries, like
those of her mother and daughter and the memoirs of Arria Huntington and Ruth
Huntington Sessions, are the heart, the hearth, and the vitality of conversation in and
about Forty Acres. The first century of this farm was an age of Elizabeths, and their
independence, discernment, faith, and conviction laid down long warp-threads through
which are woven the vigorous voices of many strong daughters and granddaughters of
succeeding generations—voices that claimed their place in the national discourse with
increasing success and benefit for us all.
Young voices: Visiting Huntington children and cousins of the middle years brought
lively intellectual, literary, scientific, spiritual, musical, and social policy discussions to
the back stoop. Amid the summer play and haying, the overlap in generations of
cousins fostered a continually formative ferment of learning and perspectives across
ages and subjects, drawing from and feeding back into each young person’s life beyond
Hadley and Forty Acres. This summer Chautauqua seems to have been a lively
practicum for two or perhaps even three long generations, for whom the economy of the
farm offered a world in miniature for ingenuity, engagement, and improvisation.
Enslaved persons, along with those indentured and employed here, had their places in
this conversation, too. In recent years, the Foundation has worked hard to recover the
voices and tell the stories of persons who were literally possessed here by that which
they were not allowed to possess—bound permanently to our family initially by
purchase and sale, and now, much later, by a moral reckoning: Peg Bowen, Zebulon
Prutt, Phillis, Rose, Phillis, and Caesar Phelps. Their voices, and their labor, are a vivid
part of the narrative of this house and its extended family.
Neighbors’ voices figure here, too. Though built boldly beyond the stockade, this
house has always been surrounded and enfolded—by turns warmly and heatedly—in
the broader discourse of this community. Happily, the most recent evidence of that
continuing conversation is reflected in the very generous support of the voters of Hadley
to support the stabilization of the old house at Phelps Farm, where my parents spent
their honeymoon eight decades ago.
Finally, the Foundation’s work has reminded us to listen to the voices of the land
itself—this land of our living that we are possessed by—these generous fields annually
reawakened by the river, the pollinators, the earthworms, and the work of those here
who heed them and mindfully add our human notes to their murmurings, buzzings, and
scritchings. These sounds of the land itself are the oldest voices around our table here,
and are, we may even say, in the deepest sense, our hosts.
Sixty years after Frost recited his poem at the Capitol, a different poet echoed these
voices in a much broader version of our national narrative:
…If we’re to live up to our own time
Then victory won’t lie in the blade
But in all the bridges we’ve made
That is the promised glade
The hill we climb
If only we dare
It's because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
It’s the past we step into
and how we repair it…
We will not be turned around
or interrupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burdens
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change our children’s birthright.
[Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb”]
