Category Archives: History-Museums

Visiting Fruitlands for Museum Day

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The Smithsonian Institution once again sponsored Museum Day this September, and I went along for the ride.  Although I had been there before, and as a member of the Trustees of Reservations can visit the property at any time at no charge, I chose to visit Fruitlands Museum in Harvard,  On this, the last day of summer, we felt the chill of autumn, but the sun kept peeking through the clouds, and I think that most of us who were out and about today were struck by the beauty of the surroundings.  This is the view one sees upon arrival:

The museum consists of four buildings, and I visited each in turn.  First was the art museum:

I walked quickly through two of the exhibits, Inhabiting Folk Portraits: 12 Portraits with Candice Smith Corby, and A New View: Landscapes from the Permanent Collection, but spent more time in Leisure Pursuits: The Fashion and Culture of Recreation; the Trustees’ website explains

Visitors will see original antique and vintage dresses and personal accessories that were integrated into activities such as gardening, entertaining, fitness, water activities, equestrian pursuits, and travel at and to various properties.

Next I visited the Native American collection; this sculpture stands outside the building:

Before I continue, I should say a few words about the museum as a whole: it was founded by the visionary and hardworking Clara Endicott Sears (1863-1960), a New England author, preservationist, and philanthropist.  In 1910, she purchased a summer estate in Harvard, which included the farmhouse known as Fruitlands, the famous nineteenth communitarian experiment.  She restored the building, collected numerous materials, and opened the museum in 1914.  In subsequent years, she added to the property by incorporating Shaker collections, Native American collections, and American folk art and Hudson River School paintings.

The Native American Museum collection is not extensive, but the pieces were carefully chosen, and the curators present the displays from an anthropological perspective and from the point of view of the Native peoples, rather than from a colonialist viewpoint.  Here are my favorite pieces:

This is a bear claw necklace from one of the Plains tribes:

This piece is from the Pacific Northwest; it’s called Crooked Beak Cannibal Bird Headdress:

Outside the museum building is a replica of a longhouse as built by a Northeast Woodland tribe:

I went on to the Fruitlands Farmhouse itself.  The story of this failed experiment is well-known: for about seven months in 1843, Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane led a group of idealistic New Englanders in a life that was intended not to cause harm to others. Here in this valley near the Nashoba RIver, with a handful of other followers, they tried to live a self-sufficient life, eating their own produce and wearing homemade linen clothes.  The utopian experiment failed for a number of reasons: tension between the founders, lack of farming expertise, unrealistic expectations.  Basically, with their self-imposed restrictions (they did not use animals to plow the fields or animal manure for fertilizer), they could not grow enough food to feed themselves.

Like thousands of young girls all over the world, I loved Little Women and was excited to see the very attic where young Louisa May Alcott lived with her family.  The Museum has on display some of the objects that belonged to the Alcott family:

I was also fascinated by pencils manufactured by Henry David Thoreau’s company:

The Shaker Museum was the fourth building I visited:

It was the first Shaker museum to be established in this country and is home to the largest archive of Harvard Shaker documents in the world, housed in a historic building moved here from the Harvard Shaker community itself.  The Shakers were the most successful utopian community in America.  A religious sect founded in England in the eighteenth century, this group practiced a celibate and communal lifestyle, pacifism, and equality of the sexes.  Early in the nineteenth century in the US, there were over twenty established Shaker villages along the East Coast, from Maine to Florida.  In the period between 1820 and 1860, the Shakers thrived: communities expanded from New England to the Midwestern states of Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio.  Hard-working and innovative, Shakers became known for their furniture design and craftsmanship.  Here in Central Massachusetts, the Shirley Shakers specialized in the sale of seeds, while the Harvard Shakers specialized in herbs.

Perhaps our continuing fascination with the Shakers has something to do with their celibate lifestyle.  We wonder, “How did they survive?  Why would people join them?”  I think the answer lies in their ideals of radical egalitarianism, which in turn was based on their conception of God and their understanding of what God expected of believers.  In an era when there were no social services as we know them today, the Shakers took in social outcasts and treated them fairly.  They welcomed all, often taking in orphans and the homeless, and educating them for trades.  If you were willing to work, in a Shaker community you would be safe from starvation and abuse; you would have a roof over your head and food on the table.  With the acceleration of social change after the Civil War, these kinds of benefits began to be provided by local governments and charitable organizations, and the decline of the Shakers began and has not stopped.

Fruitlands Museum has also developed an extensive trail system on its 210 acres of forest, wetlands, and meadows.  The trail map I picked at up the information desk listed the Yellow Loop, White Loop, Blue Trail, Orange Loop, and the Red Loop.  I decided to try the Yellow Loop, which leads to the Willard Farm Site, which has a self-guided tour of a Yankee farm (c. 1750-1852) based on historical research and several archaeological digs.  I was impressed by the work carried out by the archaeologists — in the absence of extensive documentation we take for granted in this digital age, they had to pore over land records and examine soils in order to figure out how a farm family lived two hundreds years ago at this site.  It looks like woods now, as in the photo below, but this area used to be a thriving farm:

Lucy Stone Birthday Celebration in West Brookfield

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Two hundred years ago on August 13th, pioneering human rights activist Lucy Stone was born in West Brookfield.  As legend has it, at her birth her mother exclaimed sadly, “I’m sorry it’s a girl; a woman’s lot is so hard.”  Fortunately for us, Lucy Stone grew up determined not to let her gender stop her from living her best life.  As a young girl, she studied, taught, and helped with the farm.  Against her father’s wishes, she was determined to attend college, and after much hardship and agitation caused by her perception of unequal treatment of males and females, graduated from Oberlin College in 1847.  Shortly thereafter, she was hired as a paid lecturer by the New England Anti-Slavery Society, a cause for which her support never wavered.  In 1855, Lucy married Henry Blackwell at her home on Coy’s Hill; theirs was an unconventional wedding and marriage, in that she kept her own name and continued to work, even after the birth of her only child, her daughter Alice.  In Dorchester, where she lived until she died in 1893, Lucy published the Woman’s Journal, a well-respected publication which promoted women’s suffrage but also welcomed diverse viewpoints.

At the urging of Scottish radio producer Moira Hickey, the Town of West Brookfield decided to celebrate this anniversary in style.  The West Brookfield Historical Commission and the Community, with the support of the Trustees of Reservations, presented five events on Saturday and Sunday of this weekend.  Yesterday morning, the Quaboag Historical Society provided a tour to the Lucy Stone Home Site and to Rock House Reservation.  From 2 to 4 pm, a Suffragist Tea was held in the Town Hall.  In the evening, the Old Sturbridge Village Singers performed a concert of period songs.  This afternoon, a one-woman show by History at Play took place at the Congregational Church, followed by a concert by a violin-piano duo.  In the evening, a round-table panel discussion in the Great Hall was moderated by WBUR radio host Deborah Becker.  In addition, students at the West Brookfield Elementary School created artwork, birthday cards, and “Lucy Stones” which were displayed in the Town Hall.  The Merriam-Gilbert Library sponsored art and poetry contests and special displays to honor her memory; the Worcester Art and Frame Gallery teamed up with the Historical Commission to present “We Love Lucy,” an exhibit with work from six local artists inspired by Lucy Stone.

I was thrilled to attend three of the five scheduled events.  Yesterday evening, the Old Sturbridge Village Singers, an 11 member choir, performed a repertoire of pieces that would have been familiar to Lucy Stone and her family (Old Sturbridge Village is supposed to be a reconstruction of a typical New England village around 1830).  Insofar as each piece was introduced in its historical and artistic context, I learned a lot about music in the early nineteenth century.  For example, in the early days of colonial America, four-part harmony was unknown; instead a technique called “lining out” enabled a leader to teach the melody to congregations.  At church services, the congregation would have both a tune book with the music and a hymnal with the words.  Starting in the mid-1700s and continuing through the 1800s, singing masters would travel from town to town and stay for short stints, often during the winter months, in order to train pupils to sing in church choirs.  By the mid-19th century, secular music was also included in the singing schools, and choral music was performed at almost every civic event.  Both patriotic and religious pieces were performed at concerts held to celebrate Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July, the two major holidays celebrated in America at that time.

This afternoon, I attended Judith Kalaora’s bravura performance of “I Now Pronounce You Lucy Stone.”  A professionally trained actress, educator, and historian, Ms Kalaora made me believe I was listening to Lucy Stone herself; it was a compelling and inspiring portrait of this fierce and uncompromising woman, who was devoted to her family and also to larger political causes like abolition and suffrage.  Following the play, Samantha Gillogly on violin and Virginia Bailey on piano gave a recital of pieces written by nineteenth century woman composers.  I did not realize there were women composers at all, some of whom, against all odds, even enjoyed commercial success.  Ms Gillogly did a lot of research to prepare the program, which featured compositions by Marion Dix Sullivan, Amy Beach, Augusta Browne, Clelia Solito, and more.  Who knows these names?  I did not know any of these women, with one exception:  because I grew up in Hawaii, I was quite familiar with Queen Lili’uokalani, the last Hawaiian monarch who also wrote over 150 songs and chants, almost all of them in Hawaiian, many of which are still sung today.

Held in the Great Hall, the Round-Table Panel focused on the question “Lucy Stone: Where do we go from here?”  Moderated by WBUR senior correspondent and host Deborah Becker, seven prominent local women, Dr Vivian Acosta, Dr Linda Jean Carpenter, Dr Regina Edmonds, State Senator Anne Gobi, historian Joelle Million, musician Samantha Gillogly, and actress Judith Kalaora, responded to questions from the moderator and shared their personal experiences and thoughts on the status of women today.  I believe the panelists all agreed that Lucy Stone’s work more than a century ago bore fruit for future generations, but there is still more that must be done.  One of the more interesting questions was, “What two things would Lucy Stone campaign on today?”  Senator Gobi thought it would be race and gender inequality.

As I understand it, the decorations for the celebration were carefully chosen.  The women dressed in period costume wore sashes of purple, gold, and white:  purple represented loyalty and steadfastness, white signified purity, and gold symbolized light and life as well as the torch that was carried for women’s suffrage.  The weekend reminded me again that we should all be mindful of our legacies.  Shouldn’t we all try to “Make the world better”?  I’m glad I was part of this celebration, which involved so many in the town as well as descendants of the Stone and Blackwell families.  Many thanks to Richard Rossman, Chairman of the West Brookfield Historical Commission and to Dan Hamilton, West Brookfield Historical Commission Event Coordinator, for all their hard work in planning this bicentennial weekend.