In the 1870s, the largest palm leaf hat factory in the world, which produced hundreds of thousands of hats each year, was based in Amherst. A new history exhibit is celebrating Amherst’s connections to millinery (hatmaking) in venues around the town.
Ancestral Bridges, a nonprofit and archive celebrating Black and Afro-Indigenous history in western Massachusetts, is hosting the exhibit “Hats: A Celebration of History and Culture Through the Art of Millinery in Amherst” through Sunday, Jan. 4. The exhibit showcases more than a dozen hats in 10 venues in Amherst, including Amherst Cinema, the Emily Dickinson Museum, Mead Art Museum, and The Drake.
“We’re not only, through this exhibit, uplifting the stories that [the hats] represent, but also the downtown area in general,” said Anika Lopes, founder and executive director of Ancestral Bridges.
Lopes first conceptualized the exhibit in 2023, but it got underway after she won a Public Art for Spatial Justice Grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts in early 2024. With “Hats,” Lopes wanted to shed light on the impact that millinery has had on the town, in various capacities. Millinery, she said, is not only important to Amherst’s history, but it’s also “a universal connector”: “You will find no culture around the globe that’s not somehow connected by millinery, whether that’s style, fashion, function, religion, and all sorts of other purposes.”
One of its connections to Amherst is through the Hills Co. Hat Factory, which was the largest palm leaf hat factory in the country by the early 1870s. In 1877, it reportedly shipped 13,000 hats to New York in one week.
Each of the hats on display in the exhibit is thematically paired with a location. The hat at Amherst College’s Frost Library, for example, is a redesign of an Eton hat that freshmen students at the school had to wear until the 1960s. The fedora shown at The Drake will highlight the jazz history of Amherst by way of musician Gilbert “Gil” Roberts, who worked as a custodian at Amherst College despite a career that involved playing banjo with Louis Armstrong’s band, accompanying Josephine Baker at the Folies Bergère in Paris, and performing for King Fuad I of Egypt.
The hat that will go on display at the Emily Dickinson Museum is still partly a secret, but it will have something of a modern vibe – “Emily 2027,” Lopes said.
A Panama straw hat at Ancestral Bridges spotlights Henry Jackson, a Black man who owned a trucking business and played a key role in expanding the town’s palm leaf hat business by bringing dried palm leaves from Palmer to Amherst to be processed, then delivering the finished hats back to depots to be sold.
Jackson is also one of Lopes’ ancestors. Lopes grew up in Amherst, then moved away as a a teenager and moved back in 2020, but her ancestors were among the first Black families to settle the town. With the exhibit, she wants to showcase “a history of those who were not brought forward, front and center, in the story of Amherst, and really walking through spaces that we were not necessarily featured and welcomed in.”
Lopes is a milliner, too – in fact, she made all the hats in this exhibition herself, by hand. She was originally interested in sculpture, but a required college internship as a student at Parsons School of Design in New York City led her to the Garment District, where she discovered Horace Weeks, one of the first Black men in that area to own a hat factory. In his factory, “I was just fascinated,” Lopes said. “I felt like I walked back in time.”
Through her work with Weeks, Lopes developed a passion for millinery and took over the factory in 2003. As the business grew, Lopes’ hats went to “basically all over the world” – including to rapper Usher, who wore one of her hats on the show “Total Request Live” (“TRL”) around the time his album “Confessions” was released.
From there, Lopes’ hats began to make more appearances in the entertainment world. In 2011, she was introduced to Mona May, the costume designer best known for her work on the movie “Clueless,” who she called “one of the most vibrant personalities I’ve ever met” and “someone who has really been a big supporter of opening doors and windows within the film industry.”
In fact, Lopes will be bringing May to Amherst as part of this exhibition: at Amherst Cinema on Monday, Nov. 10, at 7 p.m., May will present a talk, hosted by Lopes, on the iconic fashions of “Clueless,” followed by a screening of the movie at 8 p.m. The movie, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s novel “Emma,” celebrates its 30th anniversary this year.
A normal tour circuit for May, Lopes said, might include big entertainment cities like Los Angeles, New York City, and Miami.
“Instead,” she said, “it’s gonna be L.A., New York, and Amherst!”
Tickets to the Amherst Cinema event are $18.50 for adults and $16.75 for seniors (65 and up) and students.
For more information about Ancestral Bridges and “Hats: A Celebration of History and Culture Through the Art of Millinery in Amherst,” visit ancestral-bridges.org.
Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.