On my trip to Peaked Mountain last week, I noticed the Keep Homestead Museum at 35 Ely Road and made a note to myself to look it up on the web. I quickly discovered that an Open House is scheduled on the first Sunday of each month, Apr through Dec. So this afternoon I made another trek to Monson, and am I glad I did. What a fabulous place this is!
In 1988, when the last owner, Myra Keep Lovell Moulton, died childless, she deeded the property, its contents, and an endowment fund to the Town of Monson, with the stipulation that the home should be open to the public for at least one day and that it should be named the Keep Homestead Museum. The Town agreed to the terms and ownership was transferred to the municipality in 1990.
Mrs. Myra Lovell Moulton was a descendant of John and Sarah Keep, who first settled in the Springfield area in 1660. Family and local history were important to Myra, and many of the artifacts in the Homestead reflect this interest, particularly the extensive and detailed genealogy of the New World Keeps. The Homestead itself, pictured below, was built in the 1850s; the first Keep to live in it was Lamira Keep and her husband, followed by Lamira’s nephew Edward Keep, Edward’s son Charles, and finally Charles’ daughter Myra and her husband.
Like Mrs. Means, of whom I wrote recently, Myra Keep was a talented and accomplished person. Born in 1899, in an era with restricted professional opportunities for women, she became a teacher and served for many years in the Monson school system. She also excelled in many types of embroidery and worked in other artistic media, such as oil, watercolor, and ceramics. Examples of her craftsmanship grace almost every room in the house.
Myra was also a collector, of such items as seashells and rocks, but most importantly, of buttons. Her button collection is considered one of the largest and most diverse in the Northeast and includes a number of rare pieces. There are mosaic buttons, buttons from the Art Nouveau era, Gibson Girl buttons, Gay Nineties buttons, as well as Opera buttons, Storybook buttons and buttons of historical significance such as Military, Political, and Colonial buttons. Not all of them are on display in the Homestead, but I viewed many hundreds, some with a magnifying glass.
Maybe I have a pragmatic temperament (“Stamps are for mailing letters, and coins are for vending machines”), but I am simply not a collector, of anything, and indeed, I often feel a strong aversion to having a lot of “stuff.” But I must confess, seeing this button collection lured me into a vague longing: “Gee, I wish I owned exquisite and fascinating things like these.” Oh no! I think it’s best that I admire other people’s stuff and enforce the ban on having lots of stuff in my house.
The Keep Homestead Museum property includes two miles of walking trails, so after I completed my tour of the house, I sampled some of the refreshments and then headed into the woods. The day was cloudy and parts of the trails were muddy and wet, but I met no one on the paths until I had almost returned to the parking area, and I enjoyed the solitude on the Christmas Fern Trail, the Butternut Trail and the Sphagnum Moss Trail. The center thumbnail below is a photo of Indian Pipes, Monotropa uniflora, a species listed twice in my Field Guide, because this guide is keyed by color, and as you can see, these flowers are distinctly pink, unlike the pure white ones I photographed at Peaked Mountain. The right thumbnail is a not very clear photo of, you guessed it, moss in the genus Sphagnum.
