When John Partridge Allen died in 1843, appraisers reported that his 150 acres of farmland in Sturbridge, Massachusetts were "well divided into mowing, pasturing, tillage, and orcharding," and his buildings "large and in good repair, and well situated."¹ His fields and pastures are still clearly articulated by their boundary walls and gates, and his house and other major structures still stand, much as he left them, along-side of a now-sleepy road in the southeasterly part of town. While it is primarily John Allen's hand visible on the landscape, the history of the farmsite began before he lived there, and continued into the present century. This paper will follow that history, for the substantially intact site allows us a rare glimpse into the material world shared by the handful of nineteenth-century farm families who once lived there. It will also trace the occupants through their lifetimes to see how the farm fit into the fabric of their experiences.

The history of the farmsite must begin with the land itself. The small plot of land improved early in the nineteenth century with the house and barn that became John Allen's farm was once part of a 10,240-acre tract granted by the Massachusetts General Court to John Winthrop Junior in 1643.² The land was next owned, undivided, by Winthrop's two sons, and then by two grandchildren, John Winthrop and Ann Lechmere, who divided it. Initially Ann's brother claimed the title to the whole, but after a ten-year court battle (waged by her husband) Ann acquired one-third portion of the acreage which included the small parcel that would eventually become the John Allen homestead.³ Upon Ann's death her share of the Winthrop tract passed to her husband Thomas Lechmere, and when he died it became the property of their five children.⁴

In 1744 the Lechmere heirs had the land surveyed and divided into 100-acre lots which they put up for sale (see map 1). In 1755 Eli Town of Topsfield bought lot #2 and improved it with a farm—a house, barn, and cleared fields. By 1764 he also owned the adjoining lot #4, the future location of the Allen farm.⁵ When Eli Town died in 1800 all of this property was inherited by his only son Elijah who sold it, once the estate was settled the following year, to Sturbridge innkeeper and land speculator Henry Mellon.⁶

The land, by now a developed farmsite, then changed hands several times in quick succession. Perhaps because of over-speculation, Mellon sold it in 1803 at a loss of nearly $300 to a well-established farmer/blacksmith in the community, Comfort Freeman.⁷ Comfort, who bought it to provide land and a homeplace for one son (Pliny; the Eli Town farm buildings on lot #2) and acreage for another (Samuel; lot #4), retained title for three years. In 1806 when his health was fast-failing, he divided the farm roughly in half and conveyed title to them (see map 2). Son Pliny's portion of 112 acres 98 rods included the buildings he inhabited while his brother Samuel, whose family shared their father's home, received the balance, 100 acres 86 rods—which included the plot that would become the Allen farm.⁸In April of 1808 Samuel sold his portion of the Eli Town farm to his enterprising 33-year-old brother-in-law Chester Belknap.⁹

The fifth owner in eight years, this farmer/housewright and sawmill-owner bought the land that for decades had been part of a large farming operation with the intention of developing it for resale.¹⁰ Lying on both sides of an increasingly well-travelled roadway that led to Union, Connecticut and only about two miles south of Sturbridge's rapidly expanding commercial center village, proximate to a major waterway and mills, it was a good location for new settlement. He carved the parcel into small lots (see map 3). Belknap built the "Allen" farmplace—a house and barn—on on the east side of the road, which he sold in 1811 to a family new to town with the homelot of 48 acres 95 rods plus another disconnected lot (to the west of the Lechmere lands) of 14 acres 130 rods for $1100.¹¹ The house he built was a substantial two-story, one-room deep, center-chimney dwelling roughly 18.5 by 37.5 or about 1400 square feet with a back kitchen ell. Belknap next built a smaller gambrel-roofed house and barn on the west side of the roadway. This house was a single-story, one-room deep, center-chimney dwelling roughly 18 by 28 or about 600 square feet with a back kitchen ell.¹² After renting this property for three years he sold it to a cousin, along with 35 acres 27 rods of the land, for $840.¹³

Eleazer Partridge Jr. of Franklin, Massachusetts was the first owner of the "Allen" farm. The records suggest he purchased it as a strategy to maintain a competency in agriculture despite his limited resources. At twenty-nine he had already learned the difficulty of achieving the goal of competency or "comfortable subsistence" along the land-tight, and therefore more expensive, eastern seaboard where his family had lived for five generations. His father, Eleazer Partridge Sr., had scant resources with which to assist his eight children. Late in life, widower Eleazer Sr. deeded one undivided half of his small thirty-acre farm to his youngest son, and while an unmarried daughter continued to reside in the household all the others had to find new land upon reaching maturity or marrying.¹⁴

When Eleazer Jr. married Mary Fisher of Franklin in 1806, he obtained title to a 65-acre farm from her father for $1600. However, within two months he had sold it, in several parcels, and did not again own property until they moved to Sturbridge five years later—where he purchased a farm of comparable size for $500 less.¹⁵

It is not clear why Eleazer Partridge and his wife chose to move to Sturbridge when they decided to migrate westward, though historically there were strong connections between the region in Norfolk County from which they came and this town. In the early eighteenth century, in fact, settlers from Medfield—a town close to Franklin that was also carved from the Dedham land grant—were so thickly represented in this eastern Worcester County township that it was first named "New Medfield."¹⁶ Also, there were Partridge families in town who had much earlier left the eastern seaboard; they shared with Eleazer descent from the first settler from England, John Partridge.

The Partridges did not stay for long in their new home. In 1815, just four years after their arrival, they sold the property to John Partridge Allen for a profit of $150 and returned to Franklin with their two young daughters. Aside from a minor boundary adjustment made in 1813, Eleazer appears to have made little imprint on the landscape.

Eleazer Partridge remained in his hometown for the duration of his lifetime, but the records suggest he struggled to make a living at farming there. He relocated his family many times, alternately to owned or rented properties, and owned properties steadily diminished in size. When Eleazer died in 1850, he was a center village resident in Medway, no longer engaged in agriculture.¹⁷

The man to whom Eleazer sold the Sturbridge farm was his second-cousin-once-removed and also originally from Franklin.¹⁸ John Partridge Allen was forty-one when he purchased the place in 1815, married, with four children. Like his kinsman Eleazer, he sought security at farming in New England. It was a goal John Allen realized on the Sturbridge property, where he stayed for the remaining twenty-eight years of his life.

Before buying the Sturbridge farmsite, John Allen appears to have rented or lived with kin in several different locales. As a young adult, he remained on his father's large Franklin farm. John continued there for several years after his marriage in 1800 to Mehetable Wakefield, who may have been working as a hired girl in the household.¹⁹ He then removed with his family—which included daughter Abigail, born about the same time (if not before) they married, and twins Hiram and Elmira, born in 1803—to Woodstock, Connecticut, where some of his wife's relatives lived.²⁰ They were settled there before April of 1805, the time Mehetable's death was recorded by the town clerk. John Allen was made a freeman in 1806, though deed records indicate he rented rather than owned property (the common requisite for the status), and for the next two years served as tythingman.²¹ Sometime after 1808 he relocated, with his second wife and four children, to Charlton, Massachusetts, where one of his brothers resided. Deeds indicate that he rented, rather than owned, in this community as well. The family remained there until 1815, when John acquired the Sturbridge property.

It is possible that one of John Allen's better-established brothers loaned him all or part of the $1250 he paid for the farmsite in Sturbridge against the collateral of inheritance monies. His father, who died within months of the March 3 1815 deed-of-sale, owned a 306-acre farm in Franklin valued by appraisers at $12,500.²² After just debts were paid, John's one-seventh share in the estate equalled $1500, which he received through quitclaim deeds (from three brothers who wished to remain on the property) shortly after his father's death.²³ Because he had never before accumulated sufficient capital to purchase land, the relationship between the two events seems more than coincidence.

Over time John Partridge Allen expanded and improved the farm. Within a few years he increased the homestead to 84 acres and by 1830 owned nearly 70 acres of meadow and pasture in the more southerly part of town, making a farming operation of 150 acres.²⁴ Architectural evidence suggests that he constructed the present English barn, roughly 38 by 27 feet, on the site of the barn earlier built by Chester Belknap.²⁵ (See appended photocopies of this and all buildings, as well as of the site plan.) The tax list in 1831 indicates the presence of an outbuilding. Still located today on a slope between the house and barn, it was a woodshed designed to shelter swine below. The 1838 tax list notes a second outbuilding, which is a three-level pighouse/granary also still visible on the landscape.

Precedence for the first added structure existed on the Franklin family homeplace: an 1816 deed from two of John's brothers to another stipulated that rights in the homestead included "a privilege . . . for the purpose of building a woodhouse and hog pen and improving the same."²⁶ The second very efficient structure showed his awareness of progressive agricultural practices. Located near the southeast corner of the dwellinghouse on ground with a fairly steep slope, it incorporated grain storage on the uppermost level, an enclosed well and a set kettle for preparing the pigs' food at ground level, and housing for swine below.²⁷ Built-in feeding chutes allowed the transfer of food from the kettle to the pens.

John Allen made improvements and alterations to the dwellinghouse as well, creating much of its present appearance. Within a few years of taking occupancy he removed the cross-gable-roofed back ell built by Chester Belknap and replaced it with a larger shed addition that extends nearly the length of the house.²⁸ He cut a doorway to the new garret space in the south chamber, a room which was either completed or remodelled at the same time, for its woodwork matches that in the new kitchen. John also added a closet in the garret space of the north chamber. During his tenure, the original 12 over 8 windows were replaced with smaller windows that are 6 over 6.²⁹ At some point John Allen plastered the ceiling of the lean-to kitchen, though the sooty timbers of its frame and gritty bottoms of garret floorboards indicate many years had lapsed before he did so. Most probably it was John who altered the main garret stairway from ladder-like steepness to a more usable incline, and put up the simple board partition at one end of that unfinished upper space.

Like many of his neighbors, John Partridge Allen farmed with an eye on the marketplace. Each year he was taxed for a horse, a team of oxen, three-to-six cows as well as young cattle, several swine. In the 1830s and early 1840s he kept a dozen or more sheep, very probably to sell wool—like many of his neighbors—to nearby textile mills. In addition, his probate records indicate the women in the household spun and wove textiles for family use and possibly for sale.³⁰ The high value of one hog in his probate, $16, as well as the architectural evidence of careful attention paid to the care of swine, strongly suggests he was breeding swine and marketing both livestock and pork. Lastly, the annual dairy yield from three-to-six cows was well in excess of what his family could consume, which meant the family produced a surplus of butter and cheese for sale.³¹

In addition to farming, it appears John Allen sometimes participated in the town's flourishing shoemaking business for extra income. Sketchy and incomplete account records suggest he bottomed shoes for the the tanning firm of Abner, Henry, and Liberty Allen—possibly working in his neighbor Pliny Freeman's shop building which had been fitted for shoemaking in 1836, as none of John Allen's outbuildings as they now stand had adequate windows for lighting.³²

Probate records attest that John Partridge Allen achieved a comfortable living in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. At his death in 1843 appraisers valued his real estate—his "well-divided" acreage and "well-situated" buildings—at $1827, and his personal property was judged worth $548.37.³³ Listed in the inventory were ample furnishings for his by-now small household: four bedsteads with beds and bedding, two dozen chairs, four tables, two lightstands, two chests with drawers, a six-board chest, and two looking glasses. He owned an abundance of agricultural and household implements as well as a sizeable amount of provisions in storage.

Though John Allen had maintained a competency during his lifetime, all of this property was sold at auction when he died after suffering a stroke in 1843. Once his personal property had been auctioned, the administrator (his son-in-law Hollis Metcalf) calculated a "deficiency" of $342.50 to meet debts against the estate, which totalled in all $837.91. Hollis therefore petitioned for, and was granted, the right to sell the whole of the real estate. Thus the farm that John Allen had succeeded in expanding and improving during his lifetime was divided and sold off.

Because there are no personal papers available, it is impossible to know for certain the dynamics within the family that would explain why this happened. However, there are pieces of information in John Allen's probate and in other public records that suggest changes in family composition as well his surviving son's choice of profession affected this outcome. When John married for a second time in October of 1807 it was, like the first time, by necessity; Betsey Ide gave birth six months later to a son whom they named Willard. This second union, it appears, proved to be an unhappy one; its later demise eventually shifted all female farm and household responsibilities into the category of paid work.

By the time of his death, John Allen had accumulated significant monetary obligations to women who had assisted him on the farm. The administrator's accounts indicate that 9% ($75.47) of monies paid out covered burial, legal and miscellaneous expenses while another 6% ($48.89) represented payments on outstanding notes, and a very modest 3% ($26.69) were settlements on book and store accounts. Money due to male farm laborers accounted for 9% ($75.21) of the total figure; the balance, $611.65 or 73%, was owed for female labour.

Household composition was altered in the early 1820s when two of John and Mehetable's children moved out of the family. Public records inform us that their eldest daughter Abigail married Hollis Metcalf in 1822 and settled in the eastern Massachusetts town of Bellingham, though she may well have left home earlier to live with relatives in the neighboring town of Franklin.³⁴ Tax records indicate that after reaching majority in 1824, their son Hiram departed town as well. Later census records indicate he eventually made his home in Cumberland, Rhode Island, where he married, had a family, and established a successful medical practice.³⁵ Had Hiram elected to farm, the outcome of John Allen's story would possibly have been different.

The next change occurred sometime before 1830. The census taker for that year reported only his 27-year-old daughter Elmira and a young male laborer with John on the homestead. Neither Betsey nor son Willard were included. Willard may well have left home when reaching majority age the year previous. While it is impossible to know from available sources precisely when he departed Sturbridge, where he went or why, probate records indicate Willard's death preceded that of his father. As for Betsey Allen, had the farm been her usual residence in 1830, she would have been recorded as part of the family even if she were not present at the time of enumeration. Though her name does not appear anywhere on the 1830 Massachusetts manuscript census schedules, indicating she either lived with another family or was out of state, in 1840 she was listed on the population manuscript census schedule alone as head of her own household in the community. The pieces of recorded demographic evidence that suggest Betsey had left her husband were reinforced in probate records: when John Allen died in 1843 she relinquished her right of dower in the estate to the administrator for a lump sum of only $200, substantially less than her legal entitlement.³⁶

It appears that John and Mehetable's daughter Elmira assumed the women's burden of farmwork for her father after Betsey's departure. She was at most twenty-seven at the time and the records very strongly suggest that at some point during the thirteen or more years that she held this responsibility, Elmira and her father reached a financial agreement wherein she would be compensated for her labour. After his decease, she submitted to the administrator a claim, which was honored, for $521.09.³⁷ Once the estate was settled, Elmira departed Sturbridge and joined her brother in Cumberland, Rhode Island. On the 1850 census she was listed, with a husband who worked as a druggist and Irish domestic, in a dwelling house shared with Hiram's family.

The balance of monies for women's labor were owed by John Partridge Allen's estate to widow Lucretia Vinton. Because the administrator simply noted that he paid her "for labour as per bill" there is no way to know what she did in the household. It seems plausible to think that she may have been responsible for the textile production, which probate records inform us continued until John's death, while Elmira concentrated on dairying and daily work routines. If Widow Vinton worked as a domestic, which seems unlikely as the phrase "as per bill" suggests she submitted an itemized list of completed tasks, the money she was owed would represent nearly a year-and-a-half of service. The large amount of her total claim indicates that Lucretia Vinton significantly contributed in some way to the household economy.³⁸

Certainly, much remains unknown about John Allen's life story; however, his enduring imprint on the landscape is very clear. One can visit his farmsite today and see the large two-story dwellinghouse reshaped by him in the early nineteenth century with a large back shed addition. The barn he built soon after buying the farm still stands to the northeast of the house, and in front of it a little closer to the house is the woodshed he erected in 1831. The very impressive pighouse/granary he added seven years later remains intact. While later owners added a chicken coop to the property, barely noticeable on lowland behind the pighouse/granary, and altered the woodshed to accommodate a garage, the visible landscape is essentially what John Allen created. It is a valuable text for understanding the material world of one nineteenth-century Massachusetts farming operation.

When the farm was auctioned off in April of 1844, a Southbridge factory operative named Sullivan Spencer proved the highest bidder for the homeplace and two other parcels. In all, he acquired roughly seventy acres for $1345.25.³⁹ He was 37 at the time, married and with three children. Aside from a single mortgage investment, which he sold at a profit seven days prior to the public sale of John Allen's estate, he had never before owned land.⁴⁰ He stayed settled on the farm for twenty-four years.

Sullivan Spencer's fairly sketchily recorded family history in New England is strikingly different from those of the two previous owners. There is no published history or genealogy to suggest when the family first came over from Ireland or where they first settled. Sullivan's grandfather brought his family to Sturbridge sometime before 1775, the year he purchased a forty-one acre farm in the part of town later set off as Southbridge.⁴¹ He kept the property until 1797, when illness forced him to sell it and move into a son's family where he died a year later.⁴²

Sullivan Spencer's father never owned any real estate. He worked in manufacturing and the family, which included three sons and nine daughters, probably boarded in millhousing. Sullivan's eldest brother seems to have left town at an early age. The other eventually acquired a 19-acre "farm" with money he earned labouring for others. Sullivan himself worked in factories, moving about so frequently that vital records conflict as to his actual place of residence when he married Sophronia Larned in 1839.

After purchasing the "Allen" farm at auction, Sullivan Spencer shifted in public records from "manufacturer" to "farmer," the goal of many New Englanders at the time. Perhaps to ensure that he would continue in agriculture, Sullivan appears to have managed the farm conservatively. The farm size remained the same until 1859 when he bought 25 acres in the southwesterly part of town, land he kept for only three years.⁴³ Sullivan's fairly even annual tax assessments, from $1000 in 1844 to $1350 when he bought the lot, suggest he did not make significant improvements or alterations to the property. He generally kept a modest amount of livestock; one horse, two-to-four cows plus a couple of young cattle, one swine, occasionally a sheep or two. When he owned the additional acreage, he kept oxen as well. Agricultural census records for 1850 and 1860 indicate Sullivan Spencer produced a modest amount of a variety of commodities, with an emphasis on the root crop of potatoes and a degree of specialization, particularly in the earlier census year, in the marketable products of butter and cheese.⁴⁴

Events of the 1860s disrupted the family, possibly causing Sullivan to sell the farm at the end of the decade. When the census was taken in 1860, his family included his wife Sophronia and himself with their three sons ages 20, 17, and 7. The elder two enlisted in the Union Army at the outbreak of the Civil War. While both came home from battle, it is not clear when they returned or whether they sustained injuries. In late March of 1868 Sullivan Spencer sold the farm to Southbridge storekeepers Hansen & Hyde for $1500 and the family moved away. That he sold it to businessmen who could pay him in cash suggests a need for closure in his departure, but what the connection might be between the war and his actions must remain conjecture. It seems clear, however, that he left Sturbridge (and Massachusetts) knowing he had achieved the goal he shared with many; he had succeeded for a while at farming in New England.⁴⁵

Hansen and Hyde sold the "Allen" farm, less seventeen acres that lay on the west side of the road (which they conveyed separately), to Irish-born Patrick Kelly in early April of 1868 for $1350.⁴⁶ He was 46, married with three sons. Census records indicate Patrick's wife Mary was also born in Ireland, while their three children were born in Connecticut. Some months after Patrick bought the farm, another Irishman, Edward Doherty, purchased the adjacent farmsite developed by Chester Belknap early in the century on Eli Town's eighteenth-century fields. Edward's wife Bridget was also born in Ireland and their children in Connecticut. While it must remain conjecture, perhaps the two families journeyed together. In order to acquire the farm, Patrick Kelly gave a mortgage for $650, which he eventually paid off. He remained on the farm for the duration of his life; the "Allen" homestead, no longer a working farm, is still owned by the Kelly family today.

APPENDIX: MAP I

APPENDIX: MAP 2

APPENDIX: MAP 3

West facade of the John Allen

house. (entranceway and chimney

are later alterations)

North facade of the John Allen

house. (break in roofline marks

where the later shed addition

the original house)

East facade of the John Allen

house. (entranceway is a later

addition)

West facade of John Allen's barn.

South facade of John Allen's

barn.

South facade of John Allen's

woodhouse, added to the farm in

1831. (garage a twentieth century

alteration!)

North and West facades of John

Allen's pighouse/granary, built

in 1838.