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ABSTRACT
In 1752, on land cultivated by Nonotuck and other Indigenous people for millennia, Moses and Elizabeth Porter established a farmstead along the Connecticut River in Western Massachusetts. This property remained in the family for 200 years, becoming a museum in 1949. A traditional historic house museum for decades, more recently the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum has shifted focus to the site’s enslaved, indigenous, and hired laborers. More inclusive storytelling is necessary, but the museum also seeks more direct impacts. In spring 2021 the museum collaborated on a Reparative Farming project enabling Somali refugees to grow their own crops. The museum plans to expand this pilot-project into a permanent program for communities of color – enacting links between racial and environmental justice. This co-authored provocation situates this fledgling project within larger interpretive genealogies, suggesting ways small museums can begin to confront the histories of colonization, enslavement, and displacement they narrate.
Disclosure statement
In 2021 Karen Sánchez-Eppler was elected president of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington board of directors, an uncompensated volunteer position.
Notes
1 See http://www.pphmuseum.org/. To better preserve its archival record, and increase its accessibility to scholars, the Museum recently donated some 300 linear feet of archival collections to be housed and stewarded by the staff of the Special Collections and University Archives of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
2 The authors would like to thank longtime Porter-Phelps-Huntington director Susan J. Lisk for the institutional insight and information she provided to inform this essay.
3 Much of this urgent work has been funded by the Massachusetts Historical Commission’s Preservation Projects Fund.
5 The museum continues to operate: see http://hadleyfarmmuseum.org/. See also Johnson (Citation1932).
6 The next decade saw a burgeoning of research grounded in these materials, among early Americanists as well as students in the Five College Consortium; see “Bibliography of Research,” Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum, https://www.pphmuseum.org/bibliography.
7 This was a significant shift, but one still aligned in important ways with longstanding family attitudes: both Elizabeth Porter Phelps and Elizabeth Whiting Phelps Huntington had married men of lesser economic and social standing, raised their own families in the house that had belonged to their parents, and devoted significant resources to the education of their own daughters. In naming the Museum as he did James Huntington himself acknowledged this matrilineal tradition, but it would be decades before women’s history was actively embraced as the site’s driving intepretive narrative. Several papers would be generated by the two-phase reinterpretation initiative, in 1992 and 1994, including the 1994 colloquium “Through Women’s Eyes: A Colloquium Presenting New Research on Women at “Forty Acres,” 1750–1850;” materials from this event are available on the foundation’s website: http://www.pphmuseum.org/bibliography/. A doctoral student at the time, Marla Miller was pleased to contribute to those efforts, alongside historians Christopher Clark, Daniel Horowitz, Elisabeth B. Nichols, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, and others.
8 The information packet for visiting scholars and all the 1992 reports remain available on the bibliography page of the Museum’s website. https://www.pphmuseum.org/bibliography.
9 For more on this project see https://blogs.umass.edu/pvhn-blackhistory. Both authors here were active participants in this initiative.
10 “Account of the Expence [sic] of building kitchen, woodhouse & cornhouse Began Oct 3 1797,” Phelps and Rand papers, Baker Library, Harvard University.
11 Elizabeth Huntington letter to Edward Huntington, June 16, 1837, and her undated draft letter to William Lloyd Garrison are preserved in the Porter-Phelps-Huntington family papers.
13 Some of these workers are hired through the federal government’s H-2A visa program, which enables local farmers to bring non-immigrant international workers to the area for seasonal agricultural work; see the U.S. Department of Agriculture, H-2A Visa Program (https://www.farmers.gov/working-with-us/h2a-visa-program), and also e.g. Richie Davis, “Area farmers plan meeting on immigrant labor concerns,” Daily Hampshire Gazette, April 2, 2017.
14 See the discussion of the 2017 Massachusetts Agricultural Census in “Demographics of Primary Producers: Race,” Center for Agriculture, Food, and the Environment, University of Massachusetts Amherst, https://bit.ly/3v2NSEE.
15 See https://www.allfarmers.world/.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Marla R. Miller
Marla R. Miller, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, is a historian of early American women’s labor history; in four books and several articles she has explored social relations of work in early New England, with particular focus on rural western Massachusetts. A public historian and public history educator, she has consulted and collaborated with a wide range of organizations, from the National Park Service (NPS) to local history museums – including the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum in Hadley, Massachusetts. She was a coauthor of the 2011 study “Imperiled Promise: The State of History in the National Park Service,” awarded the National Council on Public History for excellence in consulting. She has served on the editorial board of The Public Historian and is the founding editor of the prizewinning UMass Press series Public History in Historical Perspective. In Spring 2020, Miller concluded her term as President of the National Council on Public History.
Karen Sánchez-Eppler
Karen Sánchez-Eppler is L. Stanton Williams 1941 Professor of American Studies and English at Amherst College. The author of Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism and the Politics of the Body (1993) and Dependent States: The Child’s Part in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (2005), she is currently working on two book projects The Unpublished Republic: Manuscript Cultures of the Mid-Nineteenth Century US and In the Archives of Childhood: Playing with the Past as well as co-editing with Cristanne Miller The Oxford Handbook of Emily Dickinson. Her scholarship has been supported by grants from the NEH, ACLS, American Antiquarian Society, the Newberry Library, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Winterthur Library, and the Fulbright Foundation. She is one of the founding co-editors of The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, past President of C19: The Society of Nineteenth-Century Americanists, President of the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation Board, and a longtime member of the Emily Dickinson Museum’s Board of Governors.