Six Generations
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Where it all began- The House was built in 1752 by Moses and Elizabeth Porter on a tract of land known as "Forty Acres and its skirts. "
- House tours May through October
The Porter-Phelps-Huntington House in Hadley Massachusetts is a unique historical resource. . .
Panel one: Introduction
What is special about this house?
For nearly a century after Hadley's founding in 1659, its residents huddled within a protective stockade. This house was the first to stand boldly outside the town center. Built in 1752, its layout was innovative and up-to-date for its time, featuring a central hall while most houses in western Massachusetts were still built around a central chimney. The family undertook a series of renovations in the late 18 th century to make the productive spaces, like kitchen and dairies, bigger, and to create more privacy by separating the rooms the family used from those the servants and slaves used. The last changes were completed by 1800. These changes also kept the house stylish. The elegant arch in the long room is a feature that the family particularly loved. The house has changed very little since then. From about 1879 the house served as a summer home; in 1949, it became the historic house museum you see today. The house stands as a good example of a wealthy family's home in the late eighteenth century, which can teach us about how families like this lived and what the domestic life might have been like for servants and slaves who worked here.
What is special about this family?
The family was more prominent and wealthy than most of their neighbors, but they were not famous in the usual sense. Instead they are unique because of what they left behind: a house that was continuously occupied by a single family for over 200 years, thousands of letters written between scores of relatives, and hundreds of objects original to the site. From this legacy, many stories can be uncovered, from accounts of early farming and artisanry to slavery and antislavery, religion and social reform. Like all families, their history is also American history.
Why so many names?
Who were the Porters, Phelpses, and Huntingtons? Actually, the house has three names for one interesting reason. Instead of passing from father to son, as was customary in early America, the house was owned by women for three generations. Elizabeth Porter passed the house to her daughter, Elizabeth Phelps. Elizabeth Phelps passed it to her daughter, Elizabeth Huntington. In 1855, 103 years after being built, the house went to a son, Frederic Dan Huntington.
Two hundred years of history
The world changed significantly between 1752, when the house was built, and 1949, when the museum opened to the public. Members of this family witnessed the major wars from the French and Indian War to the Korean War. They experienced the impact of public documents from the Declaration of Independence to the Social Security Act.
Their lives, however, also reflect changes in private life, no less important, embodied in new kinds of work, worship, and land use. Forty Acres lets us see how one family participated in their changing community and world.
