The Ashfield Historical Society Museum

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, 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. 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, 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.