Available Publications

Earthbound and Heavenbent: Elizabeth Porter Phelps and Life at Forty Acres
Elizabeth Pendergast Carlisle
Scribner: New York, 2004

Born in 1747, Elizabeth Porter Phelps spent all but five years at Forty Acres. Her remarkable life spanned three wars, a major uprising, and the emergence of a nation. During that time, alterations in the house reflect aesthetic and practical changes in the occupants' lives. Rooms in the house, spared from overzealous restoration, retain traces of the family members who lived within its walls.

Another record exists in the wealth of family papers preserved and passed from generation to generation. Diaries and letters re-create the ordinary and extraordinary; they make audible individual voices. They put flesh on the bone of history. Phelps's papers create for us a vivid picture of a brief time when people were united by mutual needs, a common religion, and a belief in the existence of a "promised land." This belief tied them to their land and to the close-knit community that they created. It was a succoring community, its foundation the seventieth-century covenant in which inhabitants promised to watch over one another. In many ways, the world described by Elizabeth Porter has disappeared, but as we explore that world, we find ourselves on surprisingly familiar ground: lives disrupted, in some cases extinguished by war, threatened by rampant epidemics, destructive natural catastrophes; people overworked, men torn between public and private aspirations, women yearning after food for the spirit; marriages unsettled by lack of communication, depression, financial loss, prolonged absence, anxiety for children's welfare. One cannot gain an accurate sense of what it was like to live in eighteenth century New England without recognizing the ways in which Calvinism continued to influence people's thinking, particularly among farming communities. Though single-minded Calvinism of seventeenth-century Puritans does not characterize the religion of all eighteenth-century New Englanders, its enduing strength can be seen in the multiple revivals that occurred well in to the nineteenth century. Millennial dreams were nourished from the meetinghouse pulpits. The dissensions that arose in the late eighteenth century within the Congregational Church kept theological debate alive among the clergy and laity alike.

Whether the inhabitant of early New England were pious believers or not, everyday life was suffused with signs of the divine intention. Respondent to that intention demanded both and active and contemplative life, one in which love of one's neighbor was demonstrated through acts of kindness, and the love of God through meditation and prayer. For the devout to fulfill both demands produced inner conflict. Writing was a way in which Elizabeth Phelps could explore this dichotomy in her own life.

The content of a house—beds, tables, chests of drawers—can be bequeathed from one generation to another. But what about ideas, principles, creed; can a house nurture and preserve a family legacy based on these intangibles? Can those convictions be passed from generation to generation like teapots and shawls? Elizabeth Phelp's story provides one answer to these questions.

(Elizabeth Carlisle in the introduction, i-iv)

Forty Acres, The Story of the Bishop Huntington House
By James Lincoln Huntington, photographs by Samuel Chamberlain
Hastings House Publishers, 1949
$15.00

Hadley Memories
By David M.G. Huntington
Chestnut Press, 2002

How and Why the Families of Porter, Phelps, and Huntington Came to Hadley and Built the House at Forty Acres
An address by James Lincoln Huntington at Forty Acres in Hadley June 25 and August 13, 1966
$3.00