Exploring the ideas of the 1770s: New Historic Deerfield exhibits shed light on divided town during American Revolution

Instead of stereotypical images of battle scenes or men peering over scrolls of documents with their white locks dangling from their wigs, the Historic Deerfield exhibits opening on April 18 — along with upcoming summer plays — focus on the often-overlooked daily lives of residents in the years leading up to the Battles of Lexington and Concord and revisit the questions and contradictions below the surface.

“What makes Deerfield different from all the other towns in Massachusetts who experienced the lead-up to the Revolution, is this town was composed of almost 50% Loyalists, or Tories … loyal to the Crown, and then the other 50% were Patriots or people who remained neutral,” explained Amanda Lange, director of the Curatorial Department and Curator of Historic Interiors at Historic Deerfield, as she set the scene for the exhibit she curated, “A Town Divided: Deerfield in the Age of Revolution.”

Lange noted the town was primarily split into two groups: the “River Gods” or “Mansion People” — aristocrats of the Connecticut River Valley who almost always became Loyalists — Patriots like the “rabble-rouser” Joseph Stebbins, who pressured neighbors to swear oaths of allegiance to the Continental Congress, the first independent government of the 13 colonies.

“This is a time period where the old norms were being challenged,” Lange said. “So you find somebody like the Reverend [Jonathan] Ashley, who had spent about 40 years here in Deerfield before the Revolution. He was the moral authority of the town, and people were like, ‘Yeah, not anymore.’”

According to Lange and Assistant Curator Isabella Galdone, Jonathan Ashley served as the reverend in Deerfield, settling there in 1732 in a home funded by the town. In the mid-1770s, as tensions between Loyalists and Patriots sharpened, Patriots locked Ashley out of his church, locals shoved him during a visit to preach in Greenfield and the town refused to pay for his firewood.

“He had a real fall from grace because of his political affiliations,” Galdone said.

While “A Town Divided” displays a Deerfield map marking Loyalist and Patriot homes alongside period objects — like Loyalist silver and Stebbins’ powder horn — visitors can also walk down Old Main Street to the Ashley House. There, they will find a recreation of a staple in the reverend’s daily routine: tea time.

Featuring handle-less cups modeled after Chinese imports and a “slop bowl” for tea dregs, the living room distills a specific moment from 1774 recorded in the diary of the reverend’s son, Elihu Ashley.

“All of these features are supposed to remind you of an English country house, because the Ashleys are trying to emulate the English landed gentry, and that becomes a bit of a problem in the 1770s, when all of a sudden, proximity to Englishness is a problem,” said Galdone, who designed the Ashley House display.

These shifting political tides also influenced fashion, a theme explored in Curator Lauren Whitley’s exhibit, “Dressing the Revolution: Fashion and Politics 1760-1789.”

Through ornate dresses imported from England, suits and shoes colonists sewed with hand-spun fabric, the exhibit opens the closets of Western Massachusetts residents at the time as tariffs and fresh Patriotic notions unfolded a movement towards “home-spun” fashion,” according to Whitley.

“Suddenly, there was this huge ideological turn where people started to look at these imports with hostile eyes … The symbolic meaning of British imports had changed,” Whitley said. “What I hope people are excited about, or interested in, or even surprised maybe is that fashion was really at the center of these debates — these cultural, social, political and economic debates.”

By capturing the lives of Deerfield locals during the first rumbles of the American Revolution, the exhibits grapple with the budding ideas of the era — and their inherent contradictions.

While the Declaration of Independence states that “all men are created equal,” enslaved people sued for their freedom in court “for that statement to be proven true in the legal system,” Lange noted.

Furthermore, while Patriots referred to taxes on British goods like tea as “slavery,” their own households often relied on the labor of enslaved people. In the home of Reverend Ashley, the former “moral authority,” enslaved individuals prepared tea in the back of the house before the Ashley women served it in the parlor, Galdone explained, pointing to a mock sugarloaf on the kitchen table.

“White men in town were calling in town for freedom, and what does that mean to those people who were apprentices?” Lange said. “Part of my story is talking about the promises of the Revolution.”

“We’re exploring the ideas that people were writing about during the 1770s — what is liberty? What is freedom?” said Interpretive Program Manager Claire Carlson, who collaborated with Plays in Place, an organization that creates “site-specific plays” to write “A Stake In the Ground: 1774.”

By mining the diaries and letters of 18th-century residents, Carlson and the playwrights crafted three plays featuring characters inspired by the actual words of the past. Visitors can catch these performances outside historical homes in Old Deerfield from July 10 through Aug. 16.

Carlson described the plays as more “accessible” than a dense textbook.

“People learn through stories, and the Plays in Place company really brings them to to life,” Carlson said.

For Carlson, the questions and ideas of the American Revolution linger in today’s conversations. One of the plays acts out a family argument across two generations: a mother and her 20-year-old Patriot son.

“It really humanizes the questions of what does it mean to be free or loyal,” Carlson said.