Elizabeth and Moses Porter’s Forty Acres, 1752-1770  |  Elizabeth Porter and Charles Phelps’ Dairy Enterprise, 1770-1817  |  Farm to Summer Home, 1817-1928

Elizabeth and Moses Porter’s Forty Acres, 1752-1770

Hadley’s earliest settlers directly benefitted from the land stewardship of Indigenous peoples that preceded them. Like the Nolwottog, Anglo-European settlers practiced forest burning to increase pasturage away from established homes and settlements. These practices continued throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as English settlers sought additional acreage to increase crop yields alongside steady population growth. Hadley’s earliest settlers, including the Porter family, turned to cultivating grains like wheat and corn throughout the town’s rich pastureland which could then be exported further down the Connecticut River. During this period, proprietors in Hadley set aside some forty acres two miles north of the center of town for use as a “field” held in common by the town proprietors. In 1675, town proprietors gave permission to "remove the fence eastward and run it around the boggy meadow and under the mountainside" of the Forty Acres meadow, adding several additional acres to the meadowland. The addition enclosed within this fence was known as the Skirts of Forty Acres.

It was here in 1752 that Elizabeth and Moses Porter established their farmstead and accelerated the surrounding landscape’s turn towards more specialized agricultural and land management practices. In 1753, Hadley’s town proprietors voted to turn over Forty Acres and Its Skirts to private ownership, reallocating nearly 382 acres for private use. Between 1749 and 1753, Moses Porter acquired some 67 acres of the former Forty Acres and Its Skirts through direct purchase and several hundred more through inheritance and his marriage to Elizabeth Pitkin in 1746. The farmstead they built in 1752 became known as “Forty Acres” after the common meadow on which it was built.

Elizabeth and Moses engaged in land stewardship practices at Forty Acres that mirrored the trends of their neighbors and created a dynamic synergy that sustained human, plant, and animal life. Elizabeth and Moses, with the assistance of enslaved, free, and indentured laborers, cleared surrounding woodland for increased cultivation and sold the felled trees as lumber or used this lumber to build necessary outbuildings. On this cleared acreage, the Porters planted fields of wheat, Indian corn, oats, and barley. From their initial harvesting, wheat and corn transformed from raw materials into staple elements of the Porter family and their free and enslaved workers’ diets as well as feed for livestock. A vegetable garden delivered other sources of protein in the form of peas and beans. An orchard on or near Mt. Warner and a cider mill near the farmstead’s barn—likely north of the house at this time—cultivated apples and pressed them into cider for the family to sell or consume themselves. Additional acreage was cultivated as grasslands to provide the farmstead with grass for grazing livestock and hay as bedding for livestock during winter. From an inventory taken after Moses’ death in 1755, the livestock at Forty Acres included five cows and calves, five heifers, two steers, two horses, two sheep, and twelve pigs. Sheep would maintain a stable presence at Forty Acres for nearly 250 years, and in Elizabeth and Moses’ tenure at the farm they provided wool for spinning cloth. After her husband’s death, Elizabeth Pitkin Porter brought on a series of farm managers to assist in the farmstead’s operation, a decision that brought a young Charles Phelps, Jr. to Forty Acres in 1770. That same year, he married Elizabeth Pitkin Porter’s daughter, Elizabeth, and set the farmstead in a new direction that would introduce new land management practices to Forty Acres in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.

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