The Great Barn

The raising of the Great Barn in 1782 coincided with Charles Phelps’ broader expansion of Forty Acres’ farming capacities. In 1770, the same year Elizabeth Porter and Charles Phelps wed, Charles began his ambitious plans to increase the original 500-acre Forty Acre Farmstead Moses Porter amassed by purchasing new land in the region. When plots in Western Massachusetts were no longer available, Charles began to speculate on land in Maine, Vermont, and New York, and by 1782 had amassed nearly 1,000 acres of property. By this time the Porter-Phelps were among the highest grain and hay producing families in the region. In his book, Dwight’s Travels in New England and New York, the former President of Yale, Timothy Dwight, praised the Porter-Phelps family’s extensive agricultural setup: “[T]he farm is remarkably well fitted for every kind of produce suited to the climate, abounds in pasture and yields an inexhaustible supply of timber and fuel. It is also furnished with every other convenience. On one border are excellent mills; on another a river; furnishing cheap transportation to market.” Given Dwight’s estimation of the farm, the need for a new barn to store crops comes as no surprise. 

Charles Phelps first appeared in Elizabeth Porter’s diary in June 1768 when he temporarily ran the farm while farm manager Daniel Worthington accompanied Elizabeth Pitkin Porter on “strawberrying” expeditions. Phelps continued working at the farm until eventually being hired as its next full-time manager. After Charles and Elizabeth’s marriage, his jurisdiction over the property grew. In addition to the land purchases by Charles Phelps early in their marriage, the couple also increased the number of livestock on the farm. The cattle were important assets for both Elizabeth, who required milk for butter and cheesemaking, and Charles for meat consumption, “fattening cows for beef and slaughtering calves for veal.” Charles also owned many hogs, reporting “400 pork” in a 1777 account book, which he used for meat products such as sausage, salt pork, suet, and bacon. According to letters and diary entries from Elizabeth and Charles, raising cattle was an important aspect of daily life, and Charles made frequent trips to Boston and other areas in Massachusetts to trade and purchase farm animals during 1782-1790. 

The family began planning the building of the Great Barn in 1782, and the earliest mention of the construction process appears in Elizabeth’s diary. In March 1782, she wrote, “Thursday, our folks began to get timber for a barn.” On May 27th later that year her diary reads, “We had a great number of men here to raise a barn, move an old one and a house, all done and safely.”

The design of the Great Barn reflected the shifting architectural style of New England barns during the late 18th century. Before the American Revolution in 1776, most barns were modeled in the English style, with the main doors located on the longer sides of the barn leaving the area within the barn between the two main doors, called the “drive,” to be shorter and more manageable. Following the Revolution barns in New England began to change form, and the main doors were moved to the shorter gable ends of the barn increasing the length of the drive. This New England Barn design allowed for the barn to be split in two, with stanchions on one side to hold cattle and other livestock, and hay and produce on the other. This design suited the couple’s needs, as the Great Barn housed cattle and dairy cows and provided ample storage for the farm’s bountiful harvests. The Great barn, approximately 60 feet by 40 feet, was located on the south side of the property with the New England Barn-style doors facing north to south. The hay and crops were stored on the west side of the barn, while the cattle and other livestock were kept on the east or riverside.

Following the death of Charles Phelps in 1814 and the financial difficulties of supporting a large family on a minister’s salary, Elizabeth Whiting Phelps Huntington, her husband Dan, and their nine children relocated from Middletown, Connecticut to Hadley to assist her elderly mother with the farm. After her mother’s passing in 1817, Elizabeth and Dan continued the family legacy of running Forty Acres.

Of their children, Elizabeth and Dan’s son Theodore (1813-1885) wrote extensively about life on the property: sheep shearing, driving oxen, grazing the livestock, and “bring[ing] home the horses to go to church.” Agricultural production still remained a central role on the farm during Theodore’s childhood, “When I was a boy, my father used to raise large fields of rye on those pastures, generally having ten or a dozen acres every year.” Theodore also mentioned apple gathering and collecting lumber from Mount Warner. Frederic Dan, Elizabeth and Dan Huntington’s youngest son, writes about life on the farm: “cutting and drawing wood to the house for the year’s fuel” and taking “entire charge of a team of two yokes of oxen for the day.”Elizabeth and Dan Huntington’s granddaughter, Mary Huntington, fondly recounted seeing the lambs and cows on the farm. During Frederic Dan Huntington’s tenure on the farm, from 1857-1904, he especially focused on expanding the number of cattle and producing hay. The barn continued to be an important site for grain storage and holding farm animals during this period of agricultural production.

With the death of both Frederic Dan and his eldest son George Putnam Huntington on the same day-- July 11, 1904-- the legal ownership of the property shifted to Frederic Dan’s wife, Hannah Dane Sargent Huntington, who continued to run the farm on a smaller scale. After Hannah’s death in 1910, the estate transferred to George and Lilly St. Agnam Barret Huntington’s eldest son, Henry Barret. Henry purchased more cattle and built an additional cow barn but the coming of the First World War soon disrupted his hopes to run a dairy farm. The estate was abandoned until 1920, when Henry Barret and his siblings-- Constant, James, Michael Paul, Catharine, and Frederic Dane-- decided to operate the farm again and provide their mother, Lilly, with a summer home. The barn was maintained for a few years following Lilly’s death in 1926, but by 1929, James had purchased his sibling’s shares of the property, consolidating the estate to eventually open as a historic house museum as a shrine to his ancestry. As James was no longer interested in managing the farm, the Great Barn no longer served a purpose for his new vision for the property and sadly the Great Barn would soon be uprooted from its foundation and original use.

The Great Barn’s Transformation

In 1929, on the phone with fellow Hadley resident and avid local historian Clifton Johnson, James Huntington struck a deal. Clifton Johnson and his brother, Henry, were hoping to open a farm museum in Hadley in a building emulating Charles Phelps’ iconic 1782 barn. Dr. Huntington suggested they use the most authentic structure to celebrate Hadley’s agricultural history— the Porter-Phelps’ Great Barn. The farm museum was to be located in the town center, nearly two miles south of the PPH property. To retain the integrity of the original structure the brothers opted to move the barn in its entirety. Transporting the massive barn was an ordeal-- telephone poles and trees were felled to widen the roads, and cars were halted on the Central Massachusetts Railway. Years of weathering had left the barn in poor condition, requiring the Johnsons to undertake repair including a new roof and covering the original 1782 planking with new white clapboards to match other buildings in Hadley center. Once fully refurbished, Clifton Johnson filled the barn with antique farm equipment he and Henry had been collecting: cowbells, cheese presses, bellows, yokes, plows, grain tubs, and even the first broom-making machine in the country, to showcase the centrality of agriculture to Hadley’s history. Johnson described the museum as “soothing… for frayed nerves,” a refuge from the increasing urbanization and supposedly decaying moral standards of the 1920s: “There are people who are tired of jazz and its accessories, and feel refreshed by contacts with the wholesome, simpler phases of life in an earlier period.” The Hadley Farm Museum opened to the public in 1930 and remains a prominent fixture on Russell Street just behind the Hadley Town Hall.

The Sunken Garden

The Sunken Garden, designed in the foundation of the Great Barn in 1930, is a newer addition to the grounds and marks an important step in the site’s transition from homestead to an official historic landmark. With the barn relocated to Hadley center, Dr. Huntington hoped to establish a new gathering place for the family while still recognizing the historical roots of the site; thus, the Sunken Garden was born. Sunken gardens typically sit below the surrounding grounds with organized terraces and symmetrical garden beds, allowing for better water collection and controlled drainage in the plots. Sunken gardens originated in England, surging in popularity during the Victorian period for their elegant formality and well-drained soil, which was conducive to rose-gardening. Dr. Huntington likely took inspiration from the English-gardening technique in creating his sunken garden but also looked to American gardening trends as well. Following the style of the meticulously symmetrical European parterre gardens, Dr. Huntington used the existing stone foundation of the barn to create formal terraces. While the evergreen trees lining the perimeter, and the white cedar, eastern red cedars, and eastern hemlocks along the eastern upper terrace conformed to the pioneering American gardener Ellen Biddle Shipman’s practice of surrounding a garden with an “enclosing curtain of trees.” Dr. Huntington also planted the garden with both traditional English and American ornamentals, including peonies, roses, English ivy, daffodils, tulips, bleeding hearts, coral bells, irises, phlox, baby’s breath, and ferns. In the northeastern corner, an old water source for the Great Barn was repurposed to fill a rectilinear lily pond. The finishing touch was an old millstone, which serves as a constant reminder of the land’s deep connection to Hadley’s agricultural roots. Today the Sunken garden still holds an important function and has been used for weddings, reunions, and, of course, the forty-year-long Wednesday folk traditions.

Written by: Jane O’Connell and Harry Blackman

Sources:

Carlisle, Elizabeth Pendergast. Earthbound and Heavenbent: Elizabeth Porter Phelps and Life at Forty Acres (1747-1817). New York: Scribner, 2004.

“Hadley Farm Museum.” Digital Amherst. The Jones Library, Inc. Accessed July 19, 2021.

Huntington, James L. “The Phelps-Huntington Barn.” Essay, n.d.

Huntington, James Lincoln. Forty Acres: The Story of the Bishop Huntington House. New York: Hastings House, 1949.

Huntington, Theodore G. Letter to H. F. Quincy. “Sketches.” Hadley: Hadley, n.d.

Izard, Holly V. “Barn Design in Connecticut.” Connecticut History | a CTHumanities Project. CTHumanities, May 7, 2014.

Leonard, Regina S. “The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Property, 1659-1955: History of the Vernacular Landscape in Context.,” 2000.

Tankard, Judith B. “Ellen Biddle Shipman’s New England Gardens.” Arnoldia 57, no. 1 (1997): 2–11.

Townsend, Bryan. Rep. Cultural Landscape Report: Part I Site History, Existing Conditions, Analysis & Evaluation, 2002.

“The Victorian Sunken Garden.” Grim's Dyke Hotel London. Best Western Plus, March 17, 2017.