Category: Hadley

First Congregational Church of Hadley (1808)

by Dan//Churches, Federal, Hadley

hadley-congregational-church.jpg

The current meeting house of the First Congregational Church of Hadley, on Middle Street, was built in 1808. The congregation dates back to 1659. The original meeting house was not built right away: although the town had planned to construct it in 1661, work did not begin until 1663 and it took seven years to complete. “Probably during this time meetings were held in the home of some leading church member.” By 1713, “The little old first edifice was falling in pieces,” and the Town decided to build a new church, completed in 1714. This was later replaced by the current building at the same location.

Porter-Phelps-Huntington House (1752)

by Dan//Colonial, Hadley, Houses

porter_phelps_huntington-house.jpg

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.