The Daily Hampshire Gazette Supports Hadley's inclusion on the WMF Watch

Yesterday's leading opinion piece from the editorial board of the Daily Hampshire Gazette was a wonderfully well-written piece about Hadley's inclusion on the World Monuments Fund's 2010 Watch list of endangered heritage sites.

I don't think I can produce the piece verbatim here because of copyright laws, but here are some excerpts:

Hadley has long been known for its productive farmland and perhaps less for its history, though it can make a few claims on the latter subject. For one, the town is the birthplace of Civil War general Joseph Hooker, whose Union forces were trounced at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. And two regicides from the English Civil War, William Goffe and Edward Whalley, hid in colonial Hadley in the 17th century, giving birth to the "Angel of Hadley" legend in which Goffe allegedly emerged from hiding to help save the settlement from an Indian attack in 1675.

But recently, news arrived that seemed to merge Hadley's farmland and its history. The World Monuments Fund, a private organization dedicated to saving landmarks around the world, included a section of Hadley on a list of 93 sites in 47 countries it believes need to be preserved. The New York-based group cited the "cultural landscape of Hadley, Mass." as a value that deserves protection...

...A program coordinator for the World Monuments Fund told the Gazette the organization wants to work with local land preservation groups to prevent the Great Meadow from being developed, "not to museum-ify it, but to find out how it can be preserved as farmland."

At first glance, the Great Meadow's inclusion in the group's list seems curious, seeing as many if not most of the landmarks listed date back hundreds, even thousands of years. For example, the list includes Peru's famous Incan ruins, Machu Picchu, as well as a medieval Spanish town, castle ruins in Uzbekistan over 1,300 years old and ancient petroglyphs in Pakistan...

...Though the history of European settlement in this country can't compete with the longevity of many places around the globe, that doesn't disqualify sites such as the Great Meadow from consideration as a place of historic and cultural value. If anything, the inclusion of the Hadley land on the World Monuments Fund list corroborates what many local land preservationists have said for years: It's vital to protect farmland and open space in the Valley...

...There does not appear to be any immediate threat to development in the Great Meadow, even though much of the land is zoned for it. We hope this kind of national recognition will aid local conservation groups such as the Kestrel Trust - which helped protect some of the Great Meadow - attract more resources for preserving additional acreage.

The Great Meadow and Machu Picchu on the same list? If that might help preserve a historic part of Hadley and, more importantly, some first-rate farmland, why not?

Thank you, Daily Hampshire Gazette!

Publicity from Watch-Listing!

A few updates:

Hadley's Great Meadow and the Route 47 Scenic Byway (together encompassing the part of the "cultural landscape" included on the WMF Watch) have received some good coverage recently due to their inclusion on the Watch.

Aside from the front-page story in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, a photo of Hadley made it onto a slideshow on BBC News's homepage (which, incidentally, was the #2 most read story at one point!). It was also included in National Geographic! Thousands and thousands more people around the world now know about Hadley.

Let's hope the attention continues to focus on Hadley so that more and more people in the US and abroad recognize the importance of saving the Great Meadow and the rest of the cultural landscape!

Fantastic News on Moody Bridge Road!

67 acres of land on Moody Bridge Road in Hadley that could have been used for a housing development will now be saved following their sale to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The owner of the property, if my memory is correct, is the person who challenged the development-limiting law in Hadley several years back because she wanted to sell this land for a subdivision. Her efforts resulted in the State Supreme Court ruling the law unconstitutional, and thus it was repealed, paving the way for uncontrolled development.

Thankfully, the character of Moody Bridge Road will not be compromised (it's a really beautiful street if you've never driven it)! 82 acres on it were also preserved last year.

This isn't the end of the battle, though. There is plenty more land that needs to be saved from development!

Read the article in the Republican here.

Collections Information Now Up on Porter-Phelps-Huntington's Website!

I don't want to toot my own horn (too much), but I was so pleased to see these pages go up on the PPH Museum's website! I wrote these descriptions on the collections page and took the photographs when I worked there three summers ago. So glad to see it go up so that people get a better idea of what can be seen at this great historic house museum. Perhaps it will increase visitor numbers. There can only be benefits when enriching and broadening content on a website!

Researching your family's history

I recently purchased a copy of the now-rare history of the Montagues, one of the original settler families of Hadley. The book, with the incredibly long title History and Genealogy of the Montague Family of America, Descended from Richard Montague of Hadley, Mass., and Peter Montague of Lancaster Co., Va..., was published in 1886 following a meeting of Montague descendants in Hadley in 1882. It is an invaluable volume, with interesting pictures, drawings, anecdotes, and, of course, excellent genealogical lists.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, historians, writers, and genealogists--professional and amateur--produced countless volumes on various American families--far more than I would have thought before I began researching. There was an index to genealogies of American families printed in 1900 and written by Daniel Steele Durrie that runs to over 350 pages. It was the fifth edition of a work first published in 1868. At first it had 10,000 references. At the fifth printing, it had 50,000, giving some idea of how popular genealogical research was at this time.

For Hadley and surrounding towns, there are other genealogies of families that lived in the area other than that of the Montagues. In addition, Sylvester Judd included some genealogical notes in his History of Hadley, first published in 1863. First editions are, not surprisingly, rare and hard to come by, but it has been reprinted numerous times. Lucius Boltwood used some of Judd's notes for his own Genealogies of Hadley Families (published in 1862), which, in later editions of Judd's work, was tacked on as a supplement. Editions published more recently include both works in one volume.

For people interested in researching their genealogy, there are obviously the online sites, such as ancestry.com. But there is a certain satisfaction--and, dare I say it, romance?--to sitting down in a library with a musty old volume and looking up your ancestors by hand. In western Massachusetts, the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum in the Springfield Quadrangle has an excellent genealogical library--including over 20,000 genealogical books--and would be an excellent place to begin research.

If you'd like to purchase genealogy volumes, Higginson Book Company of Salem, MA specializes in reprinted volumes. For old editions, I recommend abebooks, eBay, Barnes & Noble's used and out of print section, etc.

Two Regicides Hidden in Hadley

The following is a something I wrote on facebook a few years ago when I was in graduate school studying "early modern" English history. I am reproducing it here because it concerns Hadley--perhaps one of the most interesting parts of its history...

One of my favorite mysteries of history is the question of what happened to two of Cromwell's Major-Generals of the English Civil Wars, William Goffe and Edward Whalley. Its particular interest to me lies in the fact that it connects the period of English history I study with the history of my own family and hometown, (South) Hadley, Massachusetts. Both men were regicides - that is, they cast their votes in favor of the execution of Charles I in 1649. After the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy, the only options open to these men (and the rest of the surviving regicides) was to stay in England and face the extreme likelihood that they would be executed by the (understandably) vindictive government of Charles II, or flee into exile. I'll let the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography explain what is known of their fates:

At the Restoration, Goffe and his father-in-law Whalley, who as regicides were both excluded from the Act of Indemnity, fled to New England. Goffe travelled under the name Stephenson. He and Whalley arrived at Boston in July 1660 and lived initially in Cambridge. They moved to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1661, where tradition has it they lived in a cave in the woods outside the town for three years to avoid discovery by the agents sent from England to capture them. In 1664 they moved on to Hadley, Massachusetts, where they remained until their deaths. All efforts to arrest them proved fruitless as the colonists were generally sympathetic to the fugitive regicides and refused to reveal their whereabouts. A report in the colonial state papers declares that they were held in ‘exceeding great esteem for their piety and parts’ and that they ‘held meetings where they preached and prayed, and were looked upon as men dropped down from heaven’. Another later report stated that they were feasted in every place they visited and provided with horses and guides (CSP col., 5.54, 345). Details of the attempts by the agents of Charles II to apprehend them are also recorded (ibid., letters 45, 80, 81, 96, 160–62, 1103, 1300).

According to legend, in September 1675 Hadley came under attack from Metacom's (King Philip's) warriors, and Goffe emerged from his hiding place to rally the settlers and save them from defeat. This unknown figure appearing out of nowhere passed into local history as the story of the 'Angel of Hadley' (the famous image of which is above), which, from my interest in family and local history, is how I first learned the tale. After this brief emergence from over a decade of concealment, he vanishes again from the historical record, and nothing more is known of him or Whalley. The attack may never have taken place, but the legend remains.

None of the original buildings of Hadley survives (the oldest dates to 1713), but a marker stands on the spot of Rev. John Russell's house (the minister who supposedly sheltered Goffe and Whalley). I remember reading somewhere (I wish I could find it to cite!) that the footprint of Russell's house was once examined and an apparently secret room in his cellar was found. If this is true, then it would support strongly the assertion that Goffe and Whalley hid in Hadley from Charles II's agents.