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Date: 7/5/2022
HADLEY – The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum (PPH) hosted a free public program funded by Mass Humanities on June 29 called “Three Generations of Reinterpretation at the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum,” which included numerous historians and graduate students presenting new information about the site that was discovered thanks to the grant and a box of receipts, journal entries, photographs and other documents that were recently retrieved from a nearby attic.
“We’re gathered here on Nonotuck land, the homeland [of Native Americans], all of whom were displaced by the arrivals of European families like the Porters who came to Hadley in the 17th century,” said President of the PPH Foundation’s Board of Directors Karen Sánchez-Eppler. “The museum recognizes the responsibility to acknowledge the peoples of this land as well as the histories of dispossession alongside enslavement that generated the wealth reflected in this historic property. [The museum] is working to examine, address, and reflect on these difficult but necessary histories. Today’s program reflects the ongoing nature of that work and the significant steps taken just this past year to start a new version of reparations and storytelling in this place.”
The museum is a historic house dating to 1752 and re-opened this June for its 73rd season of tours, concerts and educational programs after two summers of COVID-19-driven closure. It remained in the same family for over two centuries and retains a large collection of furnishings, papers and other documents to offer a detailed record of early American life in the Connecticut River Valley.
The speakers included three graduate students of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst that have undertaken different aspects of the museum’s reinterpretation funded by the grant. Brian Whetstone has focused on revising the site’s nomination to the National Register of Historic Places by uncovering changes made to the house and James Lincoln Huntington’s vision of family legacy, colonial heritage and historic preservation that prompted the opening of the museum in 1949.
Quotes from Huntington’s journals said that in his view, the house had remained structurally unchanged and suggested that it stood exactly as it did in 1799.
“If we look closer, we can see that Huntington introduced maybe some of the most significant changes at this site since 1799 and these changes comported with his ideas about the history of the site,” Whetstone said. “Above all, Huntington erased many of the most tangible signs of the homes’ working landscape, and those he didn’t eradicate he actually reincorporated into this more romanticized version of the past.”
While some of the changes were accidental, like a caretakers’ cottage that burned, Huntington also demolished other aging buildings on the property like the icehouse, henhouse and others that had started falling apart. Most significantly, he removed the home’s great barn and sold it to Henry R. Johnson and his brother Clifton, who moved the structure to Hadley’s Town Center and converted it into what is currently the Hadley Farm Museum.
Emily Whitted has spent the past academic year and a half documenting the museum’s collections and using that information to redesign the museum’s tour. Whitted investigated objects and often revealed labor histories which is a major theme of the new tour along with going beyond the ownership of the objects. She presented information about objects’ connection to local and Native craftspeople and labor performed in the house.
“There are an infinite number of rich histories embedded in this house, some of which have already been highlighted today,” Whitted said. “Collection object connections for visitors help them to remember these stories. In my talk today, I’m going to showcase some of those objects that help make these stories stick as part of the collection which interprets histories of enslavement, indigeneity, gender, labor, capitalism, consumption and family life.”
Whitted showed a picture of a pine chest that was retrofitted into a type of crib for a 9-year-old enslaved girl named Phyllis in 1775. Phyllis became ill with tuberculosis and was placed in the crib in a busy part of the house where family members and workers could observe her and try to nurse her back to health. Their efforts were unsuccessful as Elizabeth Porter Phelps’ diary entry documents experiencing her death.
A new grant from the National Endowment of Humanities helped Whitted redesign the tour in a way that tells broader, more inclusive stories about the family that built the house in 1752 and lived in it for successive generations as well as all the people who worked there.
The original grant from Mass Humanities permitted Alison Russell, the final graduate student speaker and researcher, to go through the financial accounts of Charles Phelps’ trading habits in the early 19th century. Part of the documents recently discovered were his trade ‘adventures’, packets of receipts that document profits made from trade.
“Charles Phelps went to Harvard, and he was going to be a lawyer,” Russell said. “He turns to what many young men imagined in that period which is the wider Atlantic and the global world that was being built and the economic opportunities that that offered.”
Phelps traded whatever he could starting with iron before graduating to rum, coffee, tobacco, indigo and sugar.
“He makes his first big sugar shipment about seven months into his career in 1800 and continues to make larger and larger sugar shipments,” Russell said. “The most impactful one that I think really anchors this story was sent on a ship that I think has a coincidental name of ‘Great America.’ He buys about 200 boxes of Havana sugar and pays about $7,000 for it. He gets that ship out of harbor right under the beginning of the 1807 embargo where goods were not able to be sent to Europe and he sends it to Rotterdam. Because he was able to beat the embargo, he makes $18,000 in profit. In today’s money that would be just north of $450,000 in a single shipment.”
Russell explained Phelps’ network of trade down the Eastern Seaboard, primarily in New York, Baltimore, MD, and Savannah, GA. In all of the business records or personal papers that Russell has gone through, she said Phelps never once mentioned the words slave or slavery.
“While you may have passed tobacco barns on your way here, there’s no sugar grown in Massachusetts,” Russell said. “He starts trading at the beginning of a boom in Cuban sugar, largely benefiting from the Haitian revolution and the collapse of the sugar industry in Haiti but that required the importation of a huge number of enslaved Africans to work in fatal conditions on the plantations in Cuba. Similarly, other cash crops in cotton, coffee, tobacco, those are all labor-intensive crops that was done predominantly by slave labor.”
Located at 130 River Dr., the PPH museum will be displaying its new guided tour on Saturday through Wednesday from 1 to 4 p.m. Admission is $5 for adults and $1 for children.