The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum, a seasonal historic house museum in Hadley, opens today for the summer. This museum contains a remarkable collection of artifacts from one huge extended family that lived in Hadley since 1659, and in this house from 1752 until the middle of the 20th century. And not only did the family amass a whole lot of interesting furniture, china, textiles, and other objects--they left behind a treasure trove of written material, too, which has been invaluable to social history studies done about the area. Elizabeth Porter-Phelps, the daughter of Moses Porter, who built the house, kept a diary for a few decades the late-18th to early-19th centuries, which has proved an invaluable contribution to women's history of the period. The museum sells a book about her diary called Earthbound and Heavenbent: Elizabeth Porter-Phelps and Life at Forty Acres by Elizabeth Pendergast Carlisle. It's worth a read if you're interested in this sort of thing. You can also read a facsimile of the diary itself in the Amherst College Archives.
This post might be a bit similar to one I posted last month about the museum, but I really do love this place and it really need your support to stay open. The 1-hour tours are a measly $5 and you can see a house that looks as if a the family just got up and left sometime around 1800. It's really a time capsule worth seeing.
I'll certainly post more about PPH in the future. It's located at 130 River Drive in Hadley, MA (River Drive is Route 47), about 2 miles north of Route 9.
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