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FALL STUDY TOUR 2007
THE CONNECTICUT RIVER VALLEY OF MASSACHUSETTS
AMHERST, HOLYOKE, NORTHAMPTON and SPRINGFIELD AND THE SURROUNDING COUNTRYSIDE
October 5 through 8, 2007.

The brochure.
Click here for the official brochure.

The abundant cultural riches of the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts will be explored in a four-day (Friday evening through Monday) visit over the long Columbus Day weekend. Several related focuses will be brought together: art, literature, higher education, political and social reform, and industrial development.

Springfield, the host city, was once one of the most prosperous areas of New England. Its many industries – which once included the nation’s largest facility producing arms for the U.S. military – fueled an explosion of architecture, art, and culture. The study trip will include architectural walking tours of buildings by such luminaries as H. H. Richardson and Peabody & Stearns, visits to restored houses in historic districts and the city’s several museums, and receptions in private homes. The four Springfield Museums house nationally renowned collections; especially noteworthy are the exhibitions at the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum (long-term and changing exhibitions on local history); the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts (home of Erastus Salisbury Field’s monumental masterpiece The Historical Monument of the American Republic (1867-1888) as well as a fine collection of Hudson River School paintings and other nineteenth-century works); and the George W. V. Smith Art Museum, whose diverse holdings include a gallery of nineteenth- century American– as well as the nation’s finest collection of cloisonné. Bob McCarroll, a longtime preservationist, is helping to coordinate the Springfield events.

For many decades a major manufacturing center, with water-powered factories churning out a variety of goods, most notably paper products, Holyoke is centered around a remarkable and elaborate purpose-built canal system. Around the manufacturing center, workers‚ housing was erected and, usually farther afield, the grand homes of the companies‚ managers and owners. We will begin will begin at Wistariahurst (1874, with additions), once the home of William Skinner, a prominent silk manufacturer, and his family. To help us understand the

remarkable history of Holyoke and to realize its preservation potential, Jill Hodnicki, former head of the Holyoke Historical Commission, will lead us on a driving tour, with appropriate stops, of key sites in the area, including Holyoke City Hall, the Holyoke Dam and associated power plant and will deliver explanatory commentary. Lunch will be provided at the imposing and stately Holyoke Canoe Club (1903), a remarkable survival from an earlier, grander era.

Northampton, home of Smith College, is for the most part a preservation triumph. Our walking tour will begin at the headquarters of Historic Northampton, a leader in improvement efforts. After introductory remarks, we will visit the Shepherd House (1796), whose interior furnishings, many of them Victorian, represent a century and a half of continuous occupation by the same world-traveling family.

We will then head to downtown Northampton, whose Main Street is lined with Victorian- and Edwardian-era buildings, including the Richardsonian Hampshire County Courthouse (1886) and battlemented Gothic Revival Northampton City Hall (William Fenno Pratt, 1850). We will continue past the Unitarian Church (1904) and Memorial Hall (1872) to the recently restored Academy of Music (1891) and the Forbes Library (1894). Next are the notable buildings on the campus of Smith College, including Peabody & Stearns’s majestic College Hall (1874), and the Smith College arboretum, near placid Paradise Pond. We will then stroll down Elm Street, lined with houses in a veritable encyclopedia of Victorian styles, and end at the Smith College Art Museum for a brief visit, with special emphasis on its nineteenth-century collections, both European and American. Plenty of time will be left for participants to enjoy on their own Northampton’s dozens of excellent restaurants and shopping opportunities.

Amherst, a quintessential college town, boasts three institutions of higher learning: Amherst College, Hampshire College, and the University of Massachusetts. One of Amherst’s most illustrious residents was the poet Emily Dickinson, and we will tour The Homestead, her family home, as well as The Evergreens (W. F. Pratt, 1856), the house next door built for her brother and his family. By special arrangement, participants will enjoy dinner in one of the town’s august Victorian mansions, the Italianate Hills House (W. F. Pratt, 1864). The distinguished guest speaker will be Polly Longsworth, author of books on Emily Dickinson and her family including The World of Emily Dickinson and Austin and Mabel: the Amherst Affair and Love Letters of Austin Dickinson and Mabel Loomis Todd, who will speak on "Emily Dickinson’s Amherst."

The final day will be spent touring the surrounding hills, also full of cultural riches. A highlight will be the climb – in vans – of Mount Holyoke, the peak for which the nearby college is named; on the top is what remains of the Summit House hotel, which was immensely popular with tourists in the mid-nineteenth century; Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow (1836, Metropolitan Museum) was painted from sketches done on the mountain. Massachusetts was a cradle of progressive social and political ferment in the nineteenth century, and the group will visit the village of Florence, where the Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community of Garrisonian abolitionists, had its headquarters; Sojourner Truth lived here during the 1840s and 1850s, as did other luminaries of the movement. We will stop briefly in Haydenville to admire the former Hayden Brass Works (Clarence Luce, 1875), remarkably preserved through adaptive reuse, and two almost identical Greek Revival mansions (attributed to Ithiel Town). The imposing William Cullen Bryant Homestead, in the hills of Cummington, was the boyhood home of nineteenth-century poet and editor William Cullen Bryant and later converted by him into a summer home; it is reached by a drive up an allée of ancient sugar maples and commands a view over almost a thousand acres of forest and farmland.