Hadley Town Meeting – in-person- May 2, 2024 at 7 PM
in the Hopkins Academy Cafetorium
On May 2nd, Hadley Town Meeting will vote on a proposal to dedicate $150,000 of Community Preservation Act funds to stabilize the 1816 farmhouse at Phelps Farm, donated to the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation in 2022. Learn more about this project in advance of the vote at an in person conversation in the Hadley Library at 5:00 PM on April 23, 2024.
Hadley residents, please spread the word and attend Town Meeting and vote for CPA funding to stabilize Phelps Farm. The history documented by the artifacts, papers, structures, and fields at Phelps Farm is your history too, a history of farmers and families shaped by the land and in need of your advocacy and care.
Watch a video of Dr Brian Whetstone talking about Phelps Farm to learn more: https://drive.google.com/file/d/13qfG_zfJV_9z9lx5hMwGTwDT63p3aN1_/view?usp=gmail
The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum is a unique historical resource in Hadley, Massachusetts. Its significance goes beyond the well-preserved eighteenth century architecture of the house itself: the house was continuously occupied by a single family from its construction in 1752 until the death of Dr. James Lincoln Huntington, the museum’s founder. The house contains the family’s belongings accumulated and preserved over 300 years. The family also left a rich collection of personal letters, diaries and account books, photographs and other material that tells their stories and the stories of the diverse people who labored at this site.
The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Family Papers are now housed at the University of Massachusetts Amherst Archives and Special Collections (SCUA). The house was the heart of the large farmstead known as “Forty Acres” that included over 600 acres stretching from the banks of the Connecticut River to the top of Mount Warner, in North Hadley. Today, the house is surrounded by over 350 acres of protected farmland land, forest, and river frontage retaining its original rural setting. The house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and is located on the National Tri-State Connecticut River Scenic Farm Byway.
The Museum will reopen in May of 2024 for tours and programs.
Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan: The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation is grateful for the National Endowment for the Humanities and MassHumanities SHARP grants that sustained this unique historical resource through difficult years.
The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum at "Forty Acres" stands on the unceded homelands of Nonotuck peoples displaced by the arrivals of European families like the Porters who arrived in Hadley in the seventeenth century. The Museum recognizes our responsibility to acknowledge the peoples of these lands, as well as the histories of dispossession, alongside enslavement, that generated the wealth reflected in this historic house and museum. Using our collections, interpretation, programming, and through collaborative relationships, we seek to examine, address and reflect on these difficult histories.