Sources of the Past...

Some of the possibilities afforded by study of archival materials are suggested by a look into the case of the Phelpses, an 18th century family that lived in Hadley, at the center of the prosperous Connecticut River Valley.

In a farmhouse on River Road in Hadley, you can view remnants of the material lives of the Phelpses. Furniture and clothing, the oversize fireplace and cooking hearth in the kitchen, the long porch across the back overlooking the kitchen garden-all provide an image of a lost world. But these physical objects offer only a partial glimpse into how the people who lived here experienced their lives. The Phelpses of Hadley-and the world they lived in-truly come to life in boxes of letters and business records preserved in the special collections of Amherst College. These old papers also offer important perspective on questions surrounding the nature of work, family, gender, race, and community, issues that concern us even today.

A family of four, Elizabeth and Charles Phelps and their two children lived in the house and farmed its 500 acres in the late eighteenth century. Those four were only the beginning of the farm's real family, though. The farmhouse kitchen was always bustling with the labor of several women-Elizabeth, her mother, a slave, her daughters as they grew older, and equally important, a progression of women from the community who exchanged their labor for a place in the household or a portion of the farm's abundant produce. At mealtime during the farm's busy seasons, the long back porch, with its view of the Connecticut River, was lined with men and boys in work clothes, often six or 10 in addition to Charles and his son. "What a busy week we had last week -- about 15 men the whole time night & day," Elizabeth wrote to her then-married daughter in 1801. It was "...harvest day, & there are now in our stoops more than 20 eating supper...What a great bustle and toil it is." "[W]e are not much more than half Mand. in or out of doors," Charles wrote to Elizabeth when she was away attending the birth of a grandchild. "[O]ur family is reduced to six in Number..." [emphasis added](Correspondence of Elizabeth Porter Phelps to Elizabeth Whiting Phelps Huntington, July 5, 1801; and Correspondence of Charles Phelps Jr., to Elizabeth Porter Phelps, April 30, 1802; Porter, Phelps, Huntington Family Papers, 1698-1968, on deposit at Amherst College Archives).

The archives teach us that the Phelps family of the late 18th century differed in important ways from many families of today; certainly it differed from today's common image of a family. What Charles and Elizabeth called their "family" seems, in fact, to have been a mixed group of blood relatives and "strangers," co-workers gathered as a unit of economic production, not the nuclear family of blood relatives so commonly referenced today by those who speak of "family values."

The differences between then and now revealed by study of the archival record offer a fresh perspective on "family," but also on even larger social questions.

What did it mean, for example, to live in a community that understood cooperative labor as an enterprise that brought "strangers" together as "family?"

The structure of past lives, and the beliefs and daily activities of countless people like the Phelpses, are recorded in letters, diaries, and other papers gathered in archival collections in the Pioneer Valley. Participants in the great social movements of the 19th and 20th centuries, many of them graduates of the five colleges who went on to careers as diplomats or national politicians, others involved in medicine, education, business and industry, law, and other fields, left written records of their lives and worlds. Collected and cataloged by generations of archivists, and preserved in local archives, records of these people (and many others) are available to you as you pose your own questions of the past, and as you seek your own answers. Even more exciting, once you engage these records directly you may find that the voices that speak through them-these voices from the past-pose questions of their own, questions, perhaps, that are new.

Working in the archives is a process of exploration and discovery. It's fun to read other people's mail, to slip into past worlds through their words, and to use your imagination along with your notes, your knowledge of what others have discovered in other archives from your secondary-source reading, and your skills of historical analysis to recreate a piece of the past that perhaps no one else has seen since the authors of your sources lived it.

We end this section with a very incomplete list of some of the pieces of the past you can explore, drawing on resources preserved in the archives of the Pioneer Valley:

• If you have an interest in post-World War II Germany and the Marshall Plan and can read German, you could research German foreign policy of the period in pamphlets in the Eli Whitney Debevoise Papers at Amherst College Archives.
• If you are taking a course on the Civil War and need to write a research paper, how about considering New Englanders' views of the Civil War and their participation in it? There are: the Luther Clarke Howell Papers (Amherst College Archives); Civil War collections including correspondence, account books, and a couple diaries (W.E.B. DuBois Library); the Civil War Documents collection at Historic Northampton which includes 210 letter written by Charles Harvey Brewster while he served in the Massachusetts 10th Regiment; at Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library investigate letters written by George Austin Bell to his family in Conway during his war service are in Abell Family Collection.
• If you have an interest in foreign relations, you could examine the papers of Dwight W. Morrow at Amherst College to explore early twentieth-century relations with Mexico, to which he was ambassador, and write a paper on Mexican-American relations during the period.
• Family and gender relations in the 19th century are topics for which material abounds in local archives: there are family letters (collection name: Letters -- 19th Century) and diaries (in Miscellaneous Documents -- 19th Century) at Historic Northampton and the Porter, Phelps, Huntington Family papers at Amherst College; the Field Family Papers at the Jones Library, offer a look at 19th-century migration away from New England through the experiences of one family; and family papers are the main focus of the collection in the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library.
• Topics related to local industry and labor relations could be explored in the Pro-Brush Company Records at Historic Northampton, which chronicle the evolution of the manufacturing company in Florence from 1866 to 1974; or at the W.E.B. DuBois Library in the records of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers and the American Writing Paper Company.
• More than 200 18th-century sermons and notes by Jonathon Ashley in the Ashley Family Papers at the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association Library offer insight into the changing shape of New England Congregationalism in the 18th century.
• A collection of 17th- and 18th-century schoolbooks in the Clifton Johnson Collection at the Jones Library suggests a possible research paper on some aspect of childhood education in colonial America.
• Two obvious sources for research into 20th-century activism are the Julius Lester Collection of diaries, letters, manuscripts, news clippings, audiotapes, and other sources (Jones Library) and W.E.B. DuBois Papers (W.E.B. DuBois Library) . Many, many more good sources for this topic exist in other archives as well.
• Photographic collections at several archives could be used to supplement research on local topics or as sources for a research topic in their own right. (See the Jones Library and W.E.B. DuBois Library listing.)
• The Reconstruction Era in Mississippi is preserved in the writings of a Massachusetts woman who married the man who became Reconstruction governor of Mississippi. Blanche Butler Ames and her husband Adelbert Ames wrote letters to and received letters from their family back home on a regular basis. A substantial amount of correspondence discusses the political issues of governing a Reconstruction state, the Mississippi constitution, Ku Klux Klan investigations, as well as daily life in the late 19th-century South. Blanche Ames also kept a diary with a more personal record of her experiences in 1870 Mississippi.

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