Dr Karen Sanchez-Eppler

When in the 1840s Elizabeth Phelps Huntington wrote letters to her eleven children, many now living far from Hadley, she generally sent along a few pounds of butter—a taste of home for a son in Boston, and a bit of a cash crop.  The Porter Phelps Huntington family occupied the same Hadley house from the 1752 until 1968.

The house itself, now a museum, and the family papers provide an extraordinarily detailed and continuous record of life in the Connecticut river valley. As one project in the introductory American Studies course “Global Valley” students have been transcribing family letters and making them available on-line, offering fascinating access to the details of daily life and family dynamics in this place.

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