DEERFIELD — It’s a 200-year-old story, nearly $1 million and a decade in the making. It tells of a discovery and controversy involving Greenfield neighbors and a Deerfield couple whose explorations led the way for scientists today to understand how this region was formed in early times.
Now it’s being told, with help from an Ashfield woman who helped innovate with a young technology and a Turners Falls woman who stumbled on the story of dinosaur hunter Dexter Marsh, much as he accidentally discovered dino tracks in 1835 — what looked like turkey tracks buried beneath Bank Row.
Sarah Doyle had lived in Bernardston before moving to Cambridge around 1974. She was taking nighttime Harvard Extension history courses until someone directed her to classes in the history of science — a field the former textbook editor found “fabulous.”
When she needed to do a paper on “a revolution in science,” she began coming across the name of the late Amherst College President Edward Hitchcock. The largely self-taught 19th-century scientist from Deerfield collected rock specimens from throughout the Connecticut River Valley and eventually had named for him the glacial lake that scoured the valley in ancient times.
Why hadn’t she ever heard about this, Doyle wondered?
She enrolled in a Wellesley College program for older adults “when all of that stuff over hot-blooded, feathered, fast dinosaurs was in the news.” While researching the new twist in paleontology, Doyle again came across Hitchcock’s name. The scientist helped get Marsh’s discovery recognized and in the process became embroiled in a squabble over who got credit for the discovery.
“It just really intrigued me,” recalls Doyle, who now lives in Turners Falls. “So much of it hit on all those themes I’d looked at in those history of science courses:
“What makes a discovery a discovery? Why is scientific thinking different from any other thinking? Why give it special status?”
After moving back to the Pioneer Valley in 2004 for a fellowship at Mount Holyoke College, she began asking people who’d grown up in this area if they’d ever heard about the great dinosaur bruhaha.
“I thought, ‘How come this isn’t a big story?” recalls Doyle. “A surprising number of people had never heard about them, and the ones that had didn’t think there was anything special about it.”
But Tim Neumann, executive director at Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association in Deerfield, was all ears when she approached him in 2007.
Neumann was intrigued by the connection with Hitchcock, the son of a Deerfield hatter whose history he calls “one of the main stories of Franklin County.”
He called together more than a dozen professors from Amherst, Dartmouth College and elsewhere, along with experts from Trustees of Reservations, the Springfield Museum of Science and beyond to explore the possibilities. Then he began looking for grant money, just as the 2008 recession began hitting, recalls Doyle.
Beginning with a $20,000 tourism-focused grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, which drew on a year of Doyle’s volunteer work as well as notes she’d collected over 25 years of research, PVMA was able to win additional planning grants and ultimately won a $150,000 grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and then a brontosaurus-sized $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a website about the dinosaur fossils. Total funding, he says, was about $750,000, together with PVMA’s in-kind match worth roughly $250,000.
PVMA, a membership-based organization that has a nearly 150-year-old history of its own, was able to draw on the expertise of scholars who participate regularly in teacher workshops like its current “African Americans in the Making of Early New England.”
The organization, which runs the Memorial Hall museum that recently opened a new exhibit on Hitchcock and his wife, Orra, has succeeded over the years in winning multiple NEH grants, which Neumann says rarely go to museums of its size, with just a $1 million budget.
“We’re one of only two cultural institutions in the country under a $5 million budget to ever receive NEH funding of this size. It’s very competitive,” says Neumann.
Along with the dinosaurs statuary outside Memorial Hall, the long-term project also brought to life PVMA’s “Jurassic Road Show,” with Doyle and fossil aficionados bringing their pop-up tour of fossils over the past seven years to sites from the Turners Falls Discovery Center and Holyoke Children’s Museum to the Amherst Town Common and Springfield Science Museum, in some cases with actors portraying characters like Orra Hitchcock.
To build the “Impressions from a Lost World” website, launched a week ago, PVMA turned to Ashfield web designer Juliet Jacobson, whose other sites for the organization — on Deerfield’s 1704 raid, on Shays’ Rebellion, on the town’s 121-year-old arts and crafts movement, and a unique American Centuries historical site — attract 400,000 unique visitors a year, 10 times more than the seasonal Memorial Hall sees.
Jacobson, whom Neumann calls “the mother of the historic website,” created the pioneering “Do History” website for Harvard University in 1999 based on the 1990 Pulitzer Prize-winning “Midwife’s Tale.” It reproduces and builds on the 1,400-page diary of an 18th-century Maine midwife, with activities and presentations to teach visitors how to “read” past artifacts to create one’s own interpretation of history.
“You could recreate the world that this woman inhabited,” Jacobson says of the fully searchable site. “You could see patterns and draw conclusions. We were doing things that people hadn’t used the web to do, presenting primary source material in an interactive way so you didn’t have to go to museum or an archive to work with this stuff. It was sort of a new idea then. If you wanted to see a 300-year-old thing, you had to make an appointment with a historian and put on white cotton gloves.”
She says, “We were very curious: How can we give someone an in-home experience of handling a document from 300 or 400 years ago? You want to scan it as high quality as you can, so you can really see the thing. You want to visually preserve its ‘objectness,’ you want the transcription to match the handwriting, so you can go back and forth to get a sense of what you’re looking at. All of these were considerations things people hadn’t thought about before.”
Her DigitalGizmo web-design firm went on to create a “Girl on a Whaling Ship” site based on a 6-year-old Martha’s Vineyard girl’s journal of her three-year voyage beginning in 1868.
Jacobson hadn’t had any thought of working on computers when she earned her master of fine arts degree from Yale in 1986 or her studio-art degree from Wesleyan University before that. But she wound up working for a New York firm that designed museum exhibits, including touch-screen kiosks.
She began her work for PVMA in 1999 with the “American Centuries” site. It includes more than 2,500 primary sources from Memorial Hall Museum’s collection, interpreting each artifact and document, with detailed viewing and “hands-on” activities especially for young visitors.
Her new “Impressions from a Lost World” site, with detailed stories about not only Edward and Orra Hitchcock and Dexter Marsh, but also of Mount Holyoke founder Mary Lyon, Emily Dickinson, Gill fossil quarrier Roswell Field and others.
Emphasizing “a very collaborative process” of historians, programmers, technicians, Jacobson says the new site tries to convey “how these discoveries were really affecting the common person’s world view and the culture of the time.”
“There’s a lot here,” she adds, contemplating the array of maps on the site that show fossil sites and other geologic elements that date back millions of years. “It’s also kind of cool to know that where you’re sitting now was under half a mile of ice at one point.”
The site, which features maps and documents, paintings by Hatfield artist Monica Vachula and videos like one showing why Hitchcock was convinced fossil tracks were those of birds, also describes how the characters’ 18th-century lives intersected, as well as overarching themes playing out in their stories.
For example, Hitchcock, who never graduated from college and never completed a formal course of science but was awarded an honorary degree from Yale, went on to teach chemistry and “natural theology” at Amherst College and then become its president at a time when professional pathways in science were not yet rigid and scientific pastimes were popular.
“This is a period when geology is becoming a science, so there are a lot of very fluid boundaries, and a lot of rules haven’t been decided yet,” says Doyle, who was intrigued enough by Marsh to pore through records of his estate in the Franklin County Registry of Probate. “Dexter Marsh was a really smart, motivated guy.”
But it was Deane — a college-educated physician — who wrote on Marsh’s behalf to the professors about the intriguing Bank Row tracks. “Was that because Deane kind of had a sense of entitlement and he kind of swooped in and took over, or was it because Marsh thought, ‘Nobody’s going to really pay attention to me, but they will pay attention to my neighbor?’”
Doyle admits she’s never been much of a scientist.
“It’s the history that got me. I find the hunt really fun and interesting, and history’s full of so many missing gaps. It’s a lot like science in that way: trying to find and interpret evidence all the time, in search of plausible explorations. I just love that.”
Much more than just an exploration of science, or even social history, the website and Memorial Hall exhibit also harken back to a time in the early 19th century when an emerging middle class in this young nation brought an “age of refinement,” with common folk seeking to elevate themselves through education.
“There was a harkening to the enlightenment that our country was formed on,” said Jacobson. “People took those things very seriously, where they felt like improving themselves was sort of their civic duty. They would go to lectures as a form of entertainment.”
Pointing back to this hard-to-imagine attitude in today’s “don’t confuse me with the facts” environment, the website includes a feature on topics debated by Deerfield’s Young Ladies Literary Society, such as (“Is the curiosity of the sexes equal?” “Are the heroic virtues commendable in females?”)
“Teenagers and young 20-somethings met weekly to discuss deep, profound questions,” Jacobson says. “The average person was pretty serious about being intellectual and bettering themselves.”
Among the other broad themes the PVMA presentations raise are the intersection of religion and science.
Hitchcock, who served as a minister in Conway, wrote in his “Religion of Geology,” that science “enables us more correctly to interpret some portions of the Bible; and then, when we have admitted the new interpretation, it brings a flood of light upon the plans and attributes of Jehovah.”
The connections of grand personalities at the time here is another theme that excites Doyle and Jacobson alike.
“Deerfield is a very unusual place because it’s been so enthralled in its own history for so many years that it’s collected and saved so much stuff,” Jacobson says. “You just start seeing all these connections: ‘Oh, Hoyt! He was the uncle of so and so. And, oh, here are the surveying tools of this guy who was the father of that guy’ … All the people who’ve inhabited this village since the 1690s, it’s all right there still, including their houses. It’s such a complete set of local history. You’ve got all the players, all their stuff: the journals, the furniture, the houses, And they’re all in the same geographical area, they all knew each other, they worked for each other, they worked with each other. It’s a really pretty unique opportunity.”
The confluence of characters extends even to those dinosaurs tracks, Doyle added. “You can walk down the street in Turners, and to a lot of places in the Valley, and they’re all right under us. I’ll bet a lot of old Turners Falls house foundations, probably, have slabs with footprints in them.”
The exhibit and website also point to another connection: Hitchcock’s marriage with the former Orra White, an accomplished artist whose nature-inspired work complemented his own scientific and theological writings.
All of the underlying connections, themes, characters and, oh yes, those dinosaurs, make for a host of fascinating stories, says Doyle.
“The history of geology’s really a lot of fun, and accessible,” she says. “You can look at a landscape and think, ‘How’d this happen?’”
Nowadays, she adds, “People learn from pop culture now more than anything else.”
Someone even broached the notion that the Flintstones could be a fun addition to the telling.
Fortunately, she says, PVMA stepped forward, and state and federal funders as well.
Without the imagination of the association’s Tim Neumann, Doyle adds, “I had no clue how to do it. My picture of it was kind of an academic paper that nobody would read. I think it would make a fabulous movie. It’s a great story.”
On the Web: bit.ly/2szgtys
PVMA: bit.ly/2tSBqIj
AMERICAN CENTURIES: bit.ly/1C2Y8WC
WHALING: bit.ly/2szmdbv
1704: bit.ly/2uUISjg
DO HISTORY: bit.ly/2oXposs
ARTS CRAFTS:
bit.ly/2tSEDYF