The Museum Building in 1898 The Museum Building Today
The Museum in 1898 and today.

Welcome to the Ashfield Historical Society's website.

Coming soon: a new website!



Announcements

The museum will be open from 10 AM to noon every Saturday from May 27 to September 2, 2023.

Ashfield Community Band and Ice Cream Social

The Ashfield Community Band will be playing on Sunday, August 27, 2023 from 3 to 5 PM at the Plain School House.

Art in Ashfield: July 2023

The Ashfield Historical Society presents Ashfield artist Jim Murphy’s original oil painting “Night School,” which he gifted to AHS in honor of Grace and Don Lesure.




Ashfield Historical Playing Cards: 1720-1920

Play Cards!  Learn Ashfield History!
Ashfield Historical Playing Cards front of box
Click for more information and to order.



Historical monographs for sale at AHS

Freedom of religion and separation of church and state began in Ashfield in 1771 by an edict of George III. Peter Wiitanen has researched and written a preface, prologue, and epilogue to the copy he had obtained of an 1865 reprint of a tract Chileab Smith wrote in 1774. In this tract Chileab explains the action of the Baptists and his own personal exposure to “the rage of cruel men.” The tract was titled “An Answer to Many Slanderous Reports Cast on the Baptists at Ashfield.” These Baptists underwent many difficulties, beginning in 1765, due to the language regarding taxes in the Act of Incorporation of the Town of Ashfield. The preface of this monograph introduces the reasons behind this controversy. The prologue includes transcriptions of the Petitions and Acts as recorded in the Province Laws and Massachsetts Archives. You can read the Ashfield Law, or “An Act in Addition to an Act,” passed by the General Court in 1768. This Act “impowered our oppressors to gather money of us, or sell our lands for the payment of their minister, and the finishing of their meeting house.” You can read the Baptist petition to the Governor and General Court, for “Relief from their Distresses,” after their properties were auctioned by the Town in 1770. You can read the prejudicial, derogatory comments of the Ashfield Proprietors Committee to the Governor and General Court in March 1771, and the words of the Baptist petition to the King. In July 1771 George III “was pleased with the advice of his Privy Council to declare his Disallowance of the said Act.” In 1791 the Bill of Rights to the U.S. Constitution became law. The first amendment guaranteed freedom of religion and separation of church and state.

This monograph is available for $7 at the museum shop.



About Us

Ashfield is one of Massachusetts' Hill Towns, a number of small communities nestled in the rolling hills between the Connecticut River and the Berkshire Mountains. Despite its rural location, Ashfield has been at the center of many of the currents of American history since its incorporation in 1765, including the pietist movement of the late eighteenth century (the first Shaker meeting house was built here in 1789) to the abolition movement (the Free Soil party triumphed here in the 1850's), to the prohibition movement (the town eliminated the open bar at town meeting in 1848).

Since 1961, this history has been chronicled and preserved by the Ashfield Historical Society. The Society's museum, housed in a former store built in 1835, maintains a document archive — church and town meeting minutes, farmer's journals, personal letters etc. — that records the unique history of Ashfield. It also displays artifacts that give a glimpse of everyday life here over the last two and a half centuries: music books from the Congregationalist Church Singing School of 1799, A Peddler's Trunk peddler's trunks used by young men selling essential oils in the mid nineteenth-century,and the "thunderbolt log splitter," a black-powder-powered splitting wedge invented by two adventurous (if not reckless) residents in the 1930's. The front room of the museum replicates a nineteenth-century store, with period groceries and dry goods stocking the shelves. 19th century store Above the store is a recreated storekeeper's apartment, with furniture and appointments appropriate to about 1850. And the barn is full of unusual, often unique, artifacts of nineteenth-century farm life, such as the town's horse-drawn road roller, which was used to pack snow and make the roads passible before the advent of snowplows.

The museum also maintains a number of significant collections, Howes Brothers Photograph including the Howes Brothers Photographs, more than 23,000 glass plate negatives that form the most complete photographic record of turn-of-the-nineteenth-century New England. We also have a fine selection of the pottery produced in Ashfield in the mid nineteenth century (some of which also resides in the Smithsonian), and two more photograph collections.

So take a virtual tour of a small nineteenth-century New England town. Read the journals, view the photographs, peruse the newsletters, and take a look at items on display in the museum. Check back often as we will be updating this website regularly. And you are welcome to become a member, supporting our preservation work and receiving our newsletter.

Enjoy!



Our Mission

The Society's mission is to promote and carry on, through its museum and programs, educational, historical, literary, and artistic activities and research, particularly with regard to, but not limited to, the town of Ashfield, its people, its history and its surroundings; to collect, hold, preserve, exhibit, and interpret objects and records of historical value and interest to the town of Ashfield; to generate, compile and maintain an authoritative database of historical facts with sources which may be used to describe Ashfield's past; and to receive or acquire property, real or personal, or sell or dispose of the same solely for the benefit of the Ashfield Historical Society in carrying out the aforesaid purposes.


Last revised: August 24, 2022