It didn’t take long. Our new website showcasing the late 19th century images of “The Lost Slides of L.H. Kingsley” was posted just a few days before our first ID came in of an unidentified slide.
 
I thought the shell of a large building might have been from a big city somewhere in New England. Turns out it was in our own back yard -- it’s the MAYNARD HOE FACTORY of Northampton!
 
On the website, which includes more than 200 images, you’ll find it under Box One – Miscellaneous, #11.

Here’s what we learned from our researcher:
 
It was located about where the Smith College Faculty Club is now at the end of Green St. and just below the Paradise Pond dam. Forbes Library has a picture on its website HERE:

(As a side note, this is near where Northampton's mill was located in the 1600s.)
 
Here’s a shot from the other side, circa 1885, when the dam was being rebuilt, from Forbes Library's Digital Commonwealth site:

A History of the Mill River in Northampton that includes the following description of the Maynard Hoe Factory may be found HERE:
 
"At the Lower Mills, the site of Northampton’s first grist mill, a series of entrepreneurs from basket makers to wire factories to hoopskirt makers appeared and disappeared.  The grist and sawmills of Upper Mills at Paradise Pond burned down in the 1850s, but two owners of a cutlery in Bay State, Maynard & Clement, built a large hoe factory in 1866 at Paradise Pond.  The factory was plagued with financial, flood, and fire problems, and burned for the last time in 1919.  A factory building remains at the Lower Mills, but there is no sign of the Hoe factory."
 
The following PDF identifies the location of the building on the Smith College campus.

And on this interactive website from Smith College, you’ll find three images of the factory, plus shots of what it looks like today.

Look what we have learned, prompted by L.H. Kingsley’s unidentified shell of a factory. Can you tell us about any of the other slides in the collection?
 
Check out the rest of the images HERE, where you’ll also find out how this treasure trove was discovered and donated back to the town where the images began.

Compiled by Kathie Gow, curator of the Hatfield Historical Museum

Author
Meguey Baker studied early American textile history and material culture at Hampshire College. She is a member of the Mohawk Trail Quilt Guild, on the board of the Historical Society of Greenfield, and does textile repair and conservation for private clients.

By Meguey Baker

One of the most delightful things about material culture and conservation work is the process of discovery. Every artifact is interesting for various reasons, and I love when I encounter something entirely new. I have seen a lot of different examples of decorative arts, but on my first day as the collections assistant at the Hatfield Historical Museum, I saw something I had never seen before. Curator Kathie Gow handed me a box of items to write up accession sheets for.  There were a few fans, a needlepoint piece, and what appeared to be a booklet of faded construction paper, fastened with a bow on one side.

As soon as I opened the cover, however, I knew it was something special (click on image at left). The delicate pressed ferns and flowers were still crisp and bright, the fringed edge was shining golden, and the netting ground was fully intact. The whole thing sang "Victorian fancy work!" clear as a bell.
     When I went home that afternoon, I couldn't stop thinking about the wreaths and the golden fringe and the not-quite-geometric netting that supported the pressed plants. Thankfully, we now have modern technology as well as old books of fancy work ideas and directions. To the internet I went. My first search was for “Victorian pressed flowers.” My goodness there are a lot of folks making things in the Victorian style these days. Next search: “vintage Victorian pressed ferns” That brought me to Etsy, a marketplace for new and vintage crafts, where there was a very similar construction paper doily.
     This artifact looked so much like the one I'd seen earlier in the day I felt it must be the same technique, particularly in the close-up of the not-quite-geometric netting. How exciting! And a new lead, with new search terms -- the caption mentions Jamaica, the U.K., and fundraising in the 1870s.
     My next search, “1870 pressed ferns Jamaica,” took me to the last step on this discovery quest: A PDF of a paper on Jamaican lace-bark, which has an inner bark that can be stretched and expanded to make a sturdy, flexible natural netting. The article even shows a picture of a wreath like ours and identifies the golden outer fringe as the seed hairs of French cotton, Calotropis procera – which is basically a giant milkweed. The link is absolutely clear, and there remains no doubt in my mind that what we have in Hatfield is an authentic 1870s Jamaican fern doily. This allows us to include a date on the record for this piece, and to understand more about how it may have wound up in Hatfield – these artifacts were made and sold either as souvenirs or as fundraising items to support mission work in Jamaica.

In writing this up and recreating my searches, I came across a few other interesting sites with more information on these beautiful handcrafts:

Jamaican Fern Doyleys
Fern Gully Jamaica

I wonder what discoveries my second week will bring?

Two years ago, not long after my “In Praise of Provenance” post where I talked about the issues raised in Craig Childs’ book Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession, I got an email from a Virginia man who organizes Civil War relic hunting trips. He’d purchased a gold badge that had belonged to Hatfield Civil War soldier Sgt. Edwin Graves, of the 37th Massachusetts Regiment, Co. F, and he wondered if the Hatfield Historical Society might have any additional information on Graves.

Since I’d recently helped to organize local archaeologist Randy Daum’s presentation on his “Old Farms” archaeology dig – our town’s own notable piece of buried history (a Colonial village from the late 17th century) – I might have been quick to pass judgment on a relic hunter as someone stealing history from the rest of us for their own gain. But I had just read Finders Keepers, and that brought my understanding to a much higher level, where the “good” and the “bad” were not so easily distinguished.

This relic hunter’s name is John Kendrick, and he and I went back and forth several times via email. I have to admit I learned more about Sgt. Graves than he did. Today, in the week before the opening of our revamped Civil War exhibit, including Edwin Graves, it seems appropriate to share his reply (with his permission).

I have found quite a few references to Edwin. The best one is from Recollections of the Civil War by [Mason Whiting] Tyler, printed by Putnam and Sons in 1912. You can read it online and on page 146,  Capt. Tyler writes almost a whole page on Graves. Another is The Civil War Letters of Joseph K. Taylor of the Thirty Seventh Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry by Kevin C. Murphy. Taylor was Graves hut-mate the winter of 1863/64 and mentions him numerous times in his letters home.

I am interested in any information on Graves. I will most likely travel to Hatfield this coming Spring and would love to show you the shield. I want to visit his grave and maybe see his home if still standing. 

By recovering and documenting artifacts for present and future generations to see and hold, not simply to be measured, recorded and put into some warehouse somewhere never to be seen again, we are doing some good.

Our business maintains a forum called mytreasurespot.com. My wife and I run the forum and business. We work very hard to run a decent organization and have donated close to
$100,000 in seven years to Civil War and community-based charities. We took donations for our local food closet at a recent event and collected 7,500 items for the closet. The money we give landowners for the event helps improve the farm operations in our area and pay taxes for some struggling farmers.

I have retraced [Edwin’s] steps south from the camp to the place of his wounding. Much of the landscape is unchanged today and sometimes I can almost feel his presence...the more I learn about him, the more he becomes alive for me. History is wonderful and I have a wonderful hobby! Thank you for your interest Kathy.

--John

Childs’ Finders Keepers is about exactly this conundrum: leave it in the ground where it
will likely rot and never be seen by anyone? Or be covered by a mall parking lot or development? Or, dig it up, either by archaeologists or relic hunters and a) pack it away in a drawer in a university archive? b) sell it to the highest bidder, who may be a private collector and keep the artifact to themselves or c) share it (in some fashion) with others interested in history? The author does not come down cleanly on any side, except on the value of provenance.

To my mind, what John Kendrick and others like him are doing here – searching out and sharing background and detail, the provenance, effectively, that had been lost – is what makes history come alive -- and not just for kids.

P.S. Speaking of provenance, here’s a post from a blog called “Touch the Past,” where a relic hunter recommends taking a GPS reading of your find so you don’t lose the historical value of its placement in the ground. Now that seems like something folks could agree on.

Guest Blog Post by Wayne Schlegel

We’ve come across a letter in the Hatfield Historical Museum written in 1862 that sheds some light on the life of older single women in the middle of the 19th century. (You can read its transcription HERE.) It was posted from Manlius, New York, an area opened up after the Revolutionary War, when a minimum of 100 acres was given to all enlisted men as a reward for their service (known as the Military Tract of Central New York). It was developed further by the opening of the Erie Canal. Manlius apparently attracted Hatfield, MA, resident Euroclydon Gerry, who moved there and married a local woman, Paulina Avery.

Writing to her Hatfield sister-in-law Martha Gerry, Paulina speaks of the difficulties of a 60-year old widow trying to keep afloat financially and spiritually. Widowed for 12 years, she finds herself burdened by the day-to-day job of just getting by. As she relates, “I cannot furnish but a small part [of my house] as I divided my things with my children keeping but two beds and I have but one of them.”

To make ends meet, she is forced to take in three borders. She is plagued by buyer’s remorse at having bought a house “larger than I need but it is the cheapest place that was for sale in the place and I was foolish enough to buy it at six hundred dollars.”  She continues to beat herself up over the $100 it took to furnish the place as “it looks so foolish to me now that it almost upsets my mind and makes me very unhappy indeed.” She seems so unsure of herself, in fact, that she chooses not to tell relatives that she has bought the house and  is determined to “sell it as soon as I can turn it well and not loose [sic] any thing “ as “it seams [sic] as if will make me to [sic] much care.”

Flirtation with spiritualism

The letter also shows Paulina’s flirtation with spiritualism, a movement which originated in upstate New York and attracted overwhelmingly female adherents. She writes of how a medium helped her contact the spirit of Martha’s departed sister Lucretia, who had died in 1851, and now reported that her “Spiritual home was a pleasant one” but less so than if she had “understood the phylosephy [sic] of Spiritualism while on earth.”  We do not know if Paulina suspected a business pitch in the last remark, but she ends her letter unconverted.

Interestingly enough, the great political affairs of the nation (the Civil War, for example) are not mentioned. What remains is an intimate letter focusing on family matters tempered with some rudimentary speculations on the larger issues of life and death.

Wayne Schlegel, in addition to being a volunteer for the Hatfield Historical Museum, has been a teacher for the last 40 years, both in English and ESL, in the United States as well as in China, Japan, Qatar and Myanmar. He lives with his wife Leslie (also a teacher) in a historic house in Hatfield Center.

The great thing about letters is that they give you a window into the life of the sender, and sometimes into the life of the receiver. But they often leave mysteries in their wake, and this letter is no exception. It was written in the fall of 1843 by Hatfield native Dr. Waitstill Hastings from Erie County, Ohio. He’d married Lucinda Wood in Herkimer County (NY) around 1796, and thereafter they raised eight sons in Ohio. He wrote this letter to his “dear Sister” Mary (Hastings) Wait – the widow of Daniel Wait, who’d died 10 years earlier.

It wasn’t easy being a physician in the 19th century, and this letter suggests a few reasons why. Dr. Hastings was late in writing to his sister because he was chasing a fugitive who’d skipped town in the middle of the night without paying his medical bill!

“He made his escape from this county on Saturday, of last week, about 2 O’clock A.M. I started on Saturday after noon [sic], overtook him in the city of Monroe, in the state of Michigan on the succeeding Monday, after riding on horseback that day and late at night, I traveled 74 miles & [?] took the fugitive and family, about 100 miles from my place of Residence,…”

To find out what happened, you’ll have to take a peek at the letter itself, alongside its wonderful transcription done by Williamsburg historian Ralmon Jon Black*.

So, here are a few mysteries we’re left with: Was chasing after clients to get paid a common practice for doctors in the mid-19th century? We typically think of physicians today as making better wages than other professions, but in the 19th century, were local doctors struggling to make ends meet?

Waitstill notes that a neighbor died unexpectedly while he was off chasing his patient. Did the family bear Waitstill any ill will because he wasn’t there to help? Was it supposed to be his repsonsibility?

What is amazing about the trip he recounts (assuming Waitstill’s birth date of 1771 and letter date of 1843 are both correct), is that the doctor giving chase day and night on his trusty steed is not a scrappy 30- or 40-something, but a 72-year-old! What does that tell us about his physical, mental – and economic – condition?

He does tell sister Mary that “we are at present enjoying comfortable health,” but he also describes selling the farm (at less than its value), and makes a plea for a loan from “some of my Brothers or friends…” Waitstill says he could pay it back the following summer, though, since he has “about 20 to 30 acres of wheat on the ground & extremely good for the season.” And perhaps if money was not scarce, he wouldn’t have ridden day and night to chase down his fee! He tells us he received $10 for his traveling expenses, but he never says what he was owed.

We don't learn much about sister Mary here, but sometime soon I'll post pictures of a few of her belongings that we hold in the Hatfield Historical Museum -- which give us clues.

If you have letters from Hatfield’s past that you’re willing to share or donate, we’d like to see them. They are the best connection we have to the real people who lived here before us, and they help us see what life was really like.

*Ralmon  Jon Black is also an adopted Hatfield native son, as the eighth great-grandson of notable Hatfield residents Benjamin and Martha (Leonard) Wait. But those Waits are a story for another day!

I’m guessing you have a few old family photos with no names written on the back and no one left to identify them, whether in your family’s stash of photos or in your museum’s Collection. Or maybe you have a lot. That would be true for me on both counts. But help is on the way.

Last Thursday I participated in the last of a five-class webinar called “Caring for Photographs,” hosted by Heritage Preservation (along with AASLH, IMLS and Learning Times). It was presented by Debra Hess Norris, chair of the Art Conservation Department at the University of Delaware, and a professor of Photograph Conservation. It was a great course, with all manner of practical advice about caring for and identifying old photos and negatives. If you’re interested, you will soon be able to watch any of the five sessions online and/or access the many wonderful links and resources for each one, just by going to the “Connecting to Collections” website and clicking on one of the webinar recordings.

That same evening I also started reading the book Family Photo Detective by Maureen A. Taylor, published in February, and immediately got pulled in. All I want to do now is read it!

And so it was, armed with my newfound knowledge from the webinar and a few chapters into the book, last Saturday at the Hatfield Historical Museum I was able to do some detective work of my own.

For our in-progress inventory of the Collection, we hoped to determine the age of this framed image of the Hatfield Congregational Church (built in 1849 and still serving its congregation!) and the old Town Hall next to it. (Click the image below for a larger picture.)

A note written on the back of the frame says the Town Hall burned in 1928, so I know it’s before that. But the first thing that strikes me about the photograph is that there is no clock on the tower above the bell. Since our inventory is currently working on paper-based artifacts, the church files are mostly organized and I’m able to pull out the folder of historical booklets from the Congregational Church. In the Manual of the Congregational Church, Hatfield, Mass., dated June 1918, I discover that the clock was installed in 1891, so I know it’s before that.

There is also a stamp on the back of the frame giving the photographer’s name, and the words  “Artist” and “Ambrotype.” (Again, click the image below for a larger picture.)

From my webinar course and Maureen Taylor’s book, I’ve learned that ambrotypes (positive images on a sheet of glass) were produced between 1852/54 and 1880, so now I’ve narrowed the field to a span of less than 30 years. As I continue looking in the same Manual, I come upon the following:

“For many years an old elm, the largest tree in Hatfield, stood directly in front of the present church edifice and the tree remained standing in all its kingly beauty up to the year 1868.”

Great! That narrows it down to 1852-1868. Next I turn to the Internet to try to discover when S. Bigelow plied his trade. I don’t find much. What I do find is a blog post by “Sarah Beth” about a carte de visite by S. Bigelow, located in Collinsville, CT, and her research puts him there sometime between 1861 and 1869.

Ambrotypes and carte de visites  (small photo portraits mounted on cards) were popular during the same time, so it doesn’t help narrow my search, but perhaps S. Bigelow was not doing enough business to pay rent for his “Photographic Rooms” over Polk’s drug store (see blog post above), and he hit the road, coming north through Hatfield. Do we have other ambrotypes or carte de visites in our collection by this photographer?

From the Family Photo Detective and the Internet, I learn that the U.S. government levied tax revenue stamps on all photographs from August 1864 to August 1866 to help pay for the war, and since there is no tax stamp, it was probably not taken and purchased during this time.

I could surmise further that since the church made several improvements in 1867, they might have been more inclined to record a picture of the church at that time. According to the booklet titled Two hundred fiftieth anniversary, Hatfield Church, 1920, printed by Press of Gazette Printing Company, a vestry was added to church in 1867, “at which time the organ loft was built and the present organ put in place.”

So that’s where I’ve stopped – at least for now. What I know for sure is that this ambrotype of the Hatfield church and town hall was made by S. Bigelow between 1852 and 1868.  Though I’m still left with a 16-year window, I have to say I feel pretty satisfied, considering I now know the image is at least 145 years old!

If anyone out there has any additional info on S. Bigelow, ambrotype artist in the Connecticut River Valley in the 1860s, please let me know, and I’ll post any updates.

Think how fun it will be to do this for the rest of our Collection! We need more volunteers! (Or more hours in our inventory grant.) For now, I’m looking forward to reading Chapter 11 in the Family Photo Detectiveon on photograph albums, as we have at least several albums we think are from the late 1800s  – with none of the photos ID-ed. But that is work and a post for another day.

Last Saturday’s museum work day turned up another hidden artifact. Museum volunteer Wayne Schlegel was the one who’d found it a few weeks before, tucked inside the account book of Albert Webber of Hatfield, showing Albert’s work hours, activities and employers from 1877 to 1890. I was entering the book into the museum database (we’ve started a computerized inventory of the whole Collection, funded by a Community Preservation Grant, so we can find every artifact and have a record of what it looks like), when I noticed the two loose items Wayne had noted – a recipe scrap and a stock certificate. The stock was for a single share of The Hatfield Co-operative Creamery Company, at a cost of $25 a share.

A creamery? I didn’t know Hatfield had a creamery. The embossed company stamp notes the company was established in 1880, and the share is dated and signed on Aug. 25, 1880. A little Internet searching turned up a record that said the company was no longer operating as of March 1892. But what of the time in between?

As always, Wells’ A History of Hatfield in Three Parts (1670-1910), easily searched on Google Books, comes through. According to Wells (p. 236), “In 1878 a creamery was established which did a prosperous business for about eight years. It was in the house now owned and occupied by George Saffer. The managers were Webster A. Pease, John W. Jackson, and Nathaniel T. Abels, in that order. Jonathan D. Porter was president of the company and Joseph S. Wells, secretary.” And there’s Porter and Wells on the certificate – though I couldn’t quite decipher Porter. (I wonder if Treasurer Wells was related to one of the book's authors?)

While I might have expected to find mention in that Bible of Hatfield history, I didn’t expect to find anything in the Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics of Nebraska, put out by the Nebraska Dept. of Labor. According to their 1896 report, under the heading of “Co-operative Creameries," there were 10 “co-operative” creameries doing business in Massachusetts in 1886, Hatfield being one of them, with shares worth $60 (a nice jump over the $25 share value at the company’s start six years before).

“The great reason for starting a creamery,” the NE Dept. of Labor explained, “was to furnish a steady market to the farmers for their milk,” but they note that the institution, understandably, was not welcomed by all the milkmen.

The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 85, 1900, (p. 542) does more than just mention Hatfield’s creamery; it credits it with the first creamery in New England in 1879, and with the help of Henry E. Alvord, chief of the Dairy Division of the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, with getting cooperative dairying started in New England!

“It [the Hatfield Co-operative Creamery Co.] became operative the following year, and was swift to demonstrate its fitness to be recognized as a pioneer in an important field of economic endeavor.”

Just another example of how a quiet, unobtrusive artifact can lead us down the path of history -- opening doors, raising questions, broadening what we know and care about.

If you find any paperwork or other artifacts relating to the Hatfield Co-operative Creamery  that you don’t know what to do with, think of us! Like, I’m wondering what happened to the company stamp? And did they have their own printed bottles?

What I realized last week was that the more you know about something, the more interesting it becomes. Pretty obvious, I know, but let me give you an example as it relates to museums and artifacts.

Last Wednesday I wrote up an accession sheet and scanned the title and signature pages of an old algebra book (at right) donated this past summer by the Whately Historical Society. They donated it to the Hatfield Historical Museum because the name written on the first blank page was “Hattie A. Sanderson” (that’s what it looked like), followed by “Smith Academy, Hatfield, Mass., 1873.” The book was published in 1872, with a worn, but nice-looking leather cover, and has some equations in pencil scribbled on the inside back cover. The book is letterpress printed – meaning it was set with moveable type and leaves an impression on the page where the inked metal letters struck the paper. If you look closely (click on the image), you can see the imprint from the other side of the page -- which is pretty cool!

Then Thursday in the museum I came across a Smith Academy Bulletin from 1873, in which they list student academic honors – both overall and in subjects such as Latin, Greek, Geography, Book-keeping, Algebra and more. And there, under Honorable Mentions, was Mattie (it wasn’t Hattie) A. Sanderson, of Whately. Another Bulletin, from 1875, showed that Mattie had moved up academically to the Roll of Honor, and was listed as a top student in Rhetoric.

With just these added bits of information that give some context to her life, I found myself thinking about her in a different light and picturing a high school student not unlike my own son (who’s now a freshman at Smith Academy). But it also left me asking questions.

Did Whately have its own high school? Why did her parents send her to school in Hatfield? How did she get to school? Did it still cost money to attend Smith Academy at that time, and if so, what did it say about her parents’ economic status and what they felt about the importance of education?

Oh, and it gets more interesting. Tucked inside the pages of this 140-year-old math textbook, I found three small trading cards, each a montage of 20 tiny photos – actresses or pin-up girls. One of the cards was stamped on the back with “James A. Bardwell, No. Hatfield, Mass.,” so presumably these cards belonged to young Bardwell and made studying algebraic equations a little more palatable!

 The more connections you can make about something, the more interesting it becomes. We have done this often in the Polish Immigration exhibit and Hatfield’s Buried Colonial Village exhibit, but I’d like to expand it to the whole museum. Of course, that takes time, space, and knowing what you have so you can start connecting the dots. Another reason why doing an full inventory of one’s collection is so important!