Collections
The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation's collections comprise the family home and furnishings, the surrounding gardens and agricultural property, and an extensive collection of family papers. The museum's collection of family artifacts is expansive, including numerous original paintings, over 100 linear feet of family papers including correspondence, diaries, printed materials, financial and legal papers, occasional books and account books, and home furnishings spanning from the 17th to 19th centuries. Below you will find more information about some of the more interesting pieces of the museum's collection.
An Architectural History of the House
The architectural history is particularly interesting. The house that Moses Porter built in 1752 was an amalgam of architectural styles. He blended aspects of Georgian architecture with earlier regional styles to create a unique, though relatively ephemeral (the house had been significantly altered by 1799), monument. First, Moses perpetuated the architectural tradition of the second-floor overhang that had characterized his family’s homestead in the center of Hadley (which still stands as the oldest house in town), built by his grandfather Samuel Porter, Jr. in 1713. When Samuel’s house was built, it most certainly stood out from the other houses around. So too did Moses’s. While Moses employed the traditional overhang, he sided his house with boards scored and then painted to look like Longmeadow sandstone. This Georgian effect, called rustication, was not at all popular in the Connecticut River Valley. In the eighteenth century, some upper class families in urban areas built houses with rusticated facades, and some civic buildings had it as well, but in Hadley it was unheard of: the rustication combined with the overhang produced a distinctive dwelling.
Gaylord's Design - One of the chairs described below against paneling installed by Gaylord in 1775 in the northeast bedchamber.
The Central Hall Plan
Inside, the central hallway illustrates another departure from the traditional architecture of Hadley, including the 1713 Porter house. Central hall plans were more characteristic of Georgian style houses, coming into fashion around the time that Moses was building his home in the middle of the eighteenth century. But Moses’s house was not a Georgian house. While rustication was a feature of Georgian houses, Moses did not incorporate Georgian decorative elements on the interior, such as joined, pained wooden paneling lining the rooms. Instead, Moses kept the traditional bare feather-edged pine paneling in all his rooms. So, while incorporating novel, fashionable architectural and decorative styles into his new home, he preserved his connection to the Valley via the retention of many traditional aspects of Connecticut Valley houses.
The Georgian Style
After Charles Phelps took over control of the house at Forty Acres following his marriage to Moses and Elizabeth Pitkin Porter’s only child Elizabeth, the Georgian style came to replace much of the traditional interior. Charles hired local joiner Samuel Gaylord, Jr. to remodel many of the rooms in the house in 1775 and 1786. In addition to adding joined wainscoting in some of the rooms and the central hallway, Charles also purchased six side chairs from Gaylord. Two of them survive in the house to this day (see above). Although Moses’s house was revamped into a much more Georgian edifice by Charles Phelps, this too proved ephemeral; by 1800 much of the house had been remodeled again (inside and outside) in the new Federal style. The survival of some Georgian elements in certain rooms attests to the evolution from an eclectic blend of traditional and trendy Georgian to a house that has become, by and large, Federal.
