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”]