Expanding the story: New research at historic Hadley home examines the lives of people who once lived or worked there
7/1/2022
by Steve Pfarrer, Daily Hampshire Gazette
As Joshua dos Reis led a group of visitors through the historic Porter-Phelps-Huntington house on a recent tour, he paused in a front room, known as the “Long Room,” of the 270-year-old Hadley home. Pointing to a graceful arch near some tall windows, he said “With this arch, the family was basically saying ‘We are rich. We are prosperous.’”
For years, that’s been a big part of the story of the historic house, a home that was owned by six generations of the same extended family before being turned into a museum in the mid-20th century. The people that originally built the home in colonial Hadley and then expanded it developed a prosperous farm with hundreds of acres of land, and the house later became a summer home for wealthy descendants of the original Porter family.
Because the home was owned by the same extended family, the property, once called Forty Acres, has been a treasure trove for historians, giving them access to thousands of original letters and documents as well as furnishings, providing a valuable window into 18th- and 19th-century life in the Valley.
But in the last few years in particular, research about the home and farm has broadened considerably, taking into account the lives of others who once lived and worked on the property: enslaved people, indentured servants, farm and dairy laborers, artisans and seamstresses. The museum is also learning more about the Indigenous people who lived on the land before European settlers arrived.
“We have a new version of representation and storytelling here,” Karen Sánchez-Eppler, a professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College, said earlier this week during a presentation at the museum. “We’re able to tell a broader story of the other families and people who make up the history of this land.”
In fact, Sánchez-Eppler, who heads the board of directors of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation, prefaced her remarks by noting “We’re gathered here on Nonotuck land” — land that was also used or crossed by Mohican, Nipmuck and other Native peoples who eventually “were displaced by European settlers … We recognize this is a difficult subject to contend with.”
Sánchez-Eppler was joined by a few other historians and three University of Massachusetts Amherst graduate students in history, all of whom have done fresh research about the Hadley property that was funded in part by different grants the museum was awarded in recent years.
The pandemic, which forced the museum to close to the public for two years, actually gave researchers more opportunities to dig into their work, says Susan Lisk, the museum’s executive director.
Brian Whetstone, one of the UMass students, spoke about James Lincoln Huntington, a family descendant and Boston obstetrician who in the 1920s began repairing the aging home and turned it into a museum in 1949.
Yet Huntington preserved a “romanticized” version of the property’s past, Whetstone said, by taking down aging farm structures such as an ice house and chicken barn and focusing visitors’ attention on the house and its colonial pedigree.
“He filtered what we see today to reflect what his vision of what the house was,” Whetstone said. “He erased the signs of a working landscape, sometimes by accident, but also by design … and reinforced the genteel image of life here.” (One old barn was moved in its entirety to the town center to become the Hadley Farm Museum.)
Yet the “refined, affluent lives” of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington family were only made possible by labor that Huntington had essentially “made invisible,” Whetstone added.
“That’s one of the things we’ve learned — just how deeply entangled life in our own area was in the Atlantic slave trade, even after slavery was outlawed in Massachusetts,” said Sánchez-Eppler.