November 20, 2008 – Historic Buildings of Massachusetts

Sycamores (1788)

by Dan/November 20, 2008/Colonial, Houses, South Hadley

Colonel Benjamin Ruggles Woodbridge, of South Hadley, was a physician, merchant, entrepreneur and politician, who led a regiment at Bunker Hill and was a representative to the General Court. In 1788, Col. Woodbridge built his house on Woodbridge Street in South Hadley. After his death, in 1819, the house became the Woodbridge Scientific School for boys. It was later owned by the Montague family and was purchased, in 1900, by Rose Hollingsworth, who had the (recently restored) Water Tower on the property constructed. For much of the twentieth century, the house served as a dormitory for students at Mount Holyoke College. Having fallen into disrepair, in 1996 it was purchased by the Sycamores Committee of the South Hadley Historical Society, who are restoring the house to become a museum. In 2004, the 1733 Rawson House, home of South Hadley‘s first minister, Grindall Rawson, which originally stood on the Sycamores property, was donated to the Sycamore Committee. It was then moved to its current location, attached to Sycamore‘s rear ell.

Porter-Phelps-Huntington House (1752)

by Dan/November 20, 2008September 17, 2016/Colonial, Hadley, Houses

Built in 1752, the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House was the first to be constructed in Hadley outside the town’s fortified stockade, on land known as “Forty Acres and its Skirts,” which had earlier been farmed communally. The original owners were Moses Porter and his wife Elizabeth Pitkin Porter. Moses was killed in 1755 in the French and Indian War, at the “Bloody Morning Scout,” the first engagement of the Battle of Lake George. Elizabeth was left alone to raise their daughter, also named Elizabeth, who married Charles Phelps of Northampton in 1770. Phelps greatly expanded the family’s property and enlarged the house, although no significant structural changes have been made since 1799. Phelps was a lawyer as well as a farmer, supported the Revolutionary War and served as a representative to the General Court of Massachusetts. Charles and Elizabeth Phelps’ daughter, Elizabeth Phelps, married Dan Huntington in 1801. Huntington was a minister in Litchfield, CT and his growing family lived there for a time, before settling in the Hadley homestead in 1816. Their son, Frederic Dan Huntington, became a Unitarian minister, but later became an Episcopalian and the first Bishop of Central New York state. In 1855, Bishop Huntington inherited the house and used it as a summer home. The house continued to be owned by the family until a grandson of Bishop Huntington, Dr. James Huntington, who had studied the family’s history and first opened the house to the public in 1949, donated it the Porter-Phelps-Huntington Foundation in 1955. It has been open as a museum ever since.