Abby Epplett, Historian

For my final post on my adventure to the Berkshires in July 2023, I visited the tiny town of New Marlborough, MA to see a pair of churches, a historic inn, a town hall, and an unusual monument. New Marlborough Meeting House While this building was constructed by Henry Alexander Sykes in 1839, a version of New Marlborough Meeting House has stood on the site since the 1740s. The site has historically been a place for rebellion, as its congregants gathered to “record their opposition to certain acts of the British Parliament” on July 11, 1774 according to signage funded by the New Marlborough Bicentennial Commission in 1976. As for the current structure, its Neoclassical Greek Revival design has never undergone significant renovation due to lack of funding. Today, the building is managed by the New Marlborough Village Association . Elihu Burritt Monument This unusual monument features a pillar made of fieldstones embedded with a metal plaque and an iro...

Early today — Wednesday, March 22 — at 4:00 p.m., I attended the webinar “ Phillis Wheatley Peters in Material Memory ” hosted by the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, MA . This talk featured five speakers who each held a unique perspective on the life and work of Revolutionary War era African-American poet Phillis Wheatley Peters . The first presentation was given by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers , an English professor at the University of Oklahoma and author of The Age of Phillis , published by Wesleyan University Press in 2020 and long-listed for the 2020 National Book Award in Poetry . Jeffers described her first encounter with the works of Wheatley Peters while an English student at Talladega College , an HBCU in Alabama. In 2003, she read The Trials of Phillis Wheatley by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. When Jeffers became a Robert and Charlotte Baron Artist Fellow at the AAS in July 2009, she read the memoir of Margaretta Matilda Odell , a White woman and f...

On Thursday, March 16 at 7:00 p.m., I attended the third installment of the 2023 Parked at Home series hosted via Zoom by Blackstone River Valley National Historic Park (BRVNHP) . Park rangers Mark Mello of BRVNHP and Joshua Bell at Eisenhower National Historic Site discussed the role of the Blackstone River Valley in military productions from the Civil War to the present, along with the career of five-star general and 34 th United States President Dwight “Ike” David Eisenhower . Mello began the presentation with an overview of the United States presidents, forty-five men serving forty-six terms in office with the obligatory reminder that Grover Cleveland served as 22 nd and 24 th . He reminded the audience that twenty-one NPS sites preserve birthplaces, homes, and other important monuments to the presidents . The Blackstone River Valley has strong connections to 27 th president William Howard Taft , whose family lived in the area and whose ancestor, Lydia Chapin Taft ,...

“A History of Worcester in 10 Maps” was created in part of the Worcester Tercentennial, a celebration of the city’s 300 th anniversary . As noted in the Storymap , a popular interactive map viewer powered by ArcGIS , Worcester was founded in 1722 by English colonists and grew to become the second largest city in New England, after Boston. The visual history begins with an early woodcut map of New England from 1677, before the founding of the town, and ends with the current Geographic Information System (GIS) map created by the City of Worcester . Each segment contains a link back to the original source of the map. The sources are a fantastic collection of digital resources for Massachusetts artifacts and include: Massachusetts Historical Society Archives of the Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts CURIOSity Digital Collections at the Harvard Library Digital Commonwealth ...

On January 18 at 4:00 p.m., the American Antiquarian Society (AAS) in Worcester, Massachusetts presented “ Herald of Freedom : Perspectives from the Collection” via Zoom. The program centered around the rediscovery of two editions of Peter Humphries Clark’s paper Herald of Freedom , an abolitionist newspaper owned by an African American socialist, within the society’s collection back in June 2022 . Since then, the newspapers have been digitized and are on display through the AAS website . Embedded below is the issue from June 2, 1855 (Volume 1, Number 1). The talk began with a video from by Vincent Golden , the newspaper and periodicals curator at AAS, who described the discovery of the newspapers. Golden explained how libraries have backlogs of unprocessed material and are often not sure exists in the collection. He was searching through a backlog from before 2002 and found two issues of the rare newspaper. Research led Golden to the biography America’s First Bl...

October 14 was Day 2 of Historic New Summit 2022 held at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts. Like Day 1 of the event , the theme was “Recovering New England’s Voices”. According to Historic New England’s Carissa Demore, “We are all recording our memoirs on the places where we spend time,” and I am glad for the opportunity to record memories at the Summit. Below are highlights from the event. A Civic Gateway: Revisioning the Otis House Nader Tehrani of Boston-based architecture firm NADAAA presented innovative ideas for restoring and renovating Otis House, a museum and historic document collections space operated by Historic New England (HNE). The building is located between the main campus of Mass General Hospital and Government Center. Constructed as a private home in 1796 after a design created by Charles Bulfinch , the house is connected to row houses with floors at different levels from the original structure. Tehrani hopes to improve accessibility t...

October 13 was Day 1 of Historic New England Summit 2022 held at Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts. The theme for the conference is “Recovering New England’s Voices”, after HNE’s multi-phase initiative to research the histories of marginalized people and communities. In the words of Dr. Alissa Butler, Study Center Manager at HNE, the organization seeks to “shift and recenter the learning experience to cover all these incredible stories”. Below are highlights from the summit with links to learn more. There was so much great conversation, and I could not include it all! Forging a New Lens The first speaker in this section were Dr. Alissa Butler , whose quote appears in the opening paragraph. She described the process of hiring experts in Indigenous, Black, LGBTQ, and women’s history. Two of her stories were familiar to me, as I had visited the associated HNE houses in September (Those blog posts are coming soon!). The organization recenters...