Out of the Attic: Inventing Antiques in Twentieth-Century New England

Chapter 4 - Highboys and High Culture: Adopting an American Aesthetic in Deerfield, Massachusetts

< 131 4 Highboys and High Culture Adopting an American Aesthetic in Deerfield, Massachusetts < In 1959 Henry Flynt, a New York lawyer and antique collector, wrote the editor of the Saturday Evening Post about an antique collecting and historic preservation project he was conducting in the small town of Deerfield, Massachusetts. “As a reader of your valued publication I deeply appreciate your stalwart efforts to stem the tide of softness in our national character and to bolster our citizen’s morale and your thinking along the lines of our American heritage. I therefore have the temerity to send you a few pages I have written about Deerfield, Massachusetts for I feel the story that this stark village carries forward the ideals you urge in your editorials.”1 The editor’s reply is not recorded, but Flynt’s letter points to the connection collectors forged between historic objects and American patriotism at mid-century, as the nation sought to define itself against a communist Other. The end of World War II and the coming 132 = C hapter 4 of the cold war signaled a period of renewed popularity in American antique collecting; antique prices rebounded from their depression-era lows and attendance at history museums soared. Just like the generation of collectors that preceded them, mid-century collectors used American antiques as evidence of the existence of a distinctly American artistic and cultural tradition. But for cold war collectors, antiques proved especially valuable in combating the communist critique of American capitalism. Few mid-century collectors were as articulate in their ability to join history , antiques, and cold war ideology as Henry N. Flynt. Henry and his wife, Helen, first became involved with Deerfield in 1936, when they enrolled their son in Deerfield Academy, a private school for boys. They began to buy property in the town in 1942. In 1945 they purchased and restored the Deerfield Inn, and two years later they tackled their first museum property, the Ashley House. Thus began a relationship with Deerfield’s history that lasted until Henry’s death in 1970. While the couple worked on a scale that George and Jessie Gardner would have found unimaginable—in addition to establishing a library and twelve museum properties, which they filled with antique furniture and decorative objects, the couple razed existing structures, moved additional historic buildings into town, and erected new buildings in period style—their work was similar to the Gardners’. The Flynts too would make their own restoration decisions, purchase antiques, and ponder issues of interior decor. And, like the Gardners, the Flynts would pay careful attention to the aesthetic standards of contemporary antique collecting. Neither Henry nor Helen knew much about aesthetic collecting practices when they began their work in Deerfield. Both Henry’s father and his uncle had been antique collectors, but Henry had deliberately distanced himself from the antique world as a young man, fearing that what he termed “Collectivitis,” an uncontrollable state of hyperacquisition , was a family disease. When Flynt finally gave in to his passion and began purchasing antiques for his Deerfield museums, he soon adopted the aesthetic standards promulgated by established American art museums and national publications such as Antiques. Buying antiques of aesthetic quality proved useful for Flynt. Not only did they buttress his anticommunist message with evidence of a free market society’s cultural and artistic worth, but they also helped him obtain national recognition—something to which Jessie Gardner could only aspire— for his project in Deerfield. Flynt did not begin with a blank slate. Deerfield’s residents, unlike < 133 Highboys and High Culture those of many other small New England towns, had a long history of cultivating their past. The town first earned fame for its role in Queen Anne’s War (1702–1713). On the night of February 29, 1704, a band of French soldiers and their Kanienkehaka Mohawk and Abenaki allies attacked and nearly destroyed the village. As Marla R. Miller and Anne Digan Lanning have noted, the so-called Deerfield massacre “provided New England colonists with a rallying image not unlike the Alamo, the Maine, or Pearl Harbor: the story of the surprise attack, the burning of the village, the murders of women and children, the forced march to Canada of 109 captives, and the failure and/or refusal of several captives to return was the stuff of which legends are made.”2 The attack placed Deerfield squarely in the national consciousness. Sites associated with the 1704 raid became early tourist destinations, connecting Deerfield to a network of American landmarks. But while the attack provided Americans with a dramatic origin myth, Deerfield residents shaped the past to their communal needs. Inspired by the attention generated by their history, they restored family homesteads, constructed memorials to their ancestors, built a museum out of household keepsakes , and developed a thriving trade in traditional crafts. Deerfield’s history provided a way to understand their community, face adversity, honor family ties, and even augment their income. Flynt’s arrival, therefore , marked a decided shift in the community’s relationship to its past. By focusing his collecting efforts on aesthetically accomplished antiques and by reaching out to a nationally based community of collectors and antique curators, Flynt undermined traditional patterns of valuing family stories and local heirlooms with a new emphasis on using Deerfield to define national values. Because Flynt not only collected antiques but also worked toward a larger restoration of the town, his work in Deerfield did more than simply create an alternative to earlier forms of history commemoration . It transformed the entire town and inscribed his vision of an aesthetically accomplished past on the landscape itself.3 The Past’s Past In 1955 Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr. described Deerfield as an “Extraordinary Village” and a “Natural Preservation.” “When you walk down old Deerfield 134 = C hapter 4 Street you do actually feel you are in the eighteenth century. . . . I did not feel that I was in an exhibit, that I was seeing a site. For old Deerfield is not [an exhibit] in the sense that Williamsburg or Dearborn or other restored or preserved ‘villages’ are. . . . Old Deerfield is a ‘natural’ preservation .” Vanderbilt went on to claim that “no historical society, no wealthy individual or organization assembled, restored, or preserved” the town.4 He could not have been further from the truth. Deerfield owed the retention of its stately colonial homes and elm-lined streets not to coincidence, but to the hard work and deliberate acts of many individuals who made conscious decisions about which monuments to erect, which artifacts to collect, and which buildings to restore. When Henry Flynt came to town in the 1930s, what he found was not a natural preservation, but the result of many years’ work preserving the past. If in fact Deerfield was exceptional, it was for the extent and early development of its citizens’ preservation efforts. In 1847, the Ensign John Sheldon House, commonly known as the Old Indian House because its front door retained hatchet marks made by Deerfield’s eighteenth-century attackers, became the site of one of the first preservation attempts in America. According to the preservation historian Charles Hosmer, the Old Indian House had become a popular destination for tourists seeking evidence of the 1704 raid.5 An article in the Gazette and Courier of nearby Greenfield reported that “the house has long attracted the attention of the antiquary, and at this time has become a relic of public interest, which few travellers omit to visit, on their passage through the village.”6 But despite the building’s landmark status, its owner, Henry Hoyt, put the building up for sale in 1847. Deerfield residents passed a resolution calling for the building’s preservation and appointed a five-member commission to publicize the cause. Although enthusiasm was high, money was scarce. Residents failed to collect $2,000 to buy the house on its lot, or even $150 to move the building. In 1848 the Old Indian House was demolished and Hoyt erected a new house on the property.7 Even though the preservation initiative failed, the Old Indian House remained an important community symbol. In the months before it was torn down, residents rushed to record its image. Paintings, such as the one made by George Washington Mark in 1848, provided a lasting link to the old house.8 Pieces of the building, the most famous of which was its hatchet-scarred door, also became celebrated relics. According to Hosmer, < 135 Highboys and High Culture members of the Hoyt family sold the door to D. D. Slade, a doctor and antique collector in Boston. In 1868, after years of trying, Deerfield residents bought back the door and returned it to the village (figure 18).9 The loss of the Old Indian House also sparked the construction of new links to the past. In 1869 a group of Deerfield residents erected a monument on the site where Eunice Williams, wife of the Reverend John Williams and a prisoner in the 1704 raid, was killed by her captors for failing to keep up on the forced march to Canada. More monuments followed, including one recognizing Deerfield residents who lost their lives in the 1704 raid, another dedicated to Samuel Allen, who “held his ground” during an Indian attack in 1746, and still another commemorating the longest single-family holding of any estate in Franklin County.10 Visitors who came to Deerfield saw a landscape marked to solidify its ties to the past (figure 19). Deeply grounded in a sense of memory and commemoration , these places drew their meaning from their connection to specific individuals and from the nearby presence of descendents. Taken out of context, the stone markers would be nearly meaningless. It was their location in Deerfield that made them important. At the center of these commemorative endeavors was George Sheldon, a descendant of the original owner of the Old Indian House (figure 20). By the time of his death in 1916, at the age of ninety-eight, Sheldon had built many monuments, written a two-volume history of Deerfield, and established the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA), a museum of which Sheldon became both president and curator.11 In 1880 the PVMA acquired Memorial Hall, built in 1799 by Asher Benjamin and first occupied by Deerfield Academy. Sheldon soon filled the large three-story brick building with his collection, and he placed at its center the Old Indian House door. To enhance the museum, he created what is now commonly believed to be the first period-room installation in America, predating those constructed by antiquarian George Francis Dow at Salem’s Essex Institute. The rooms included a colonial kitchen, bedroom, and parlor.12 As an antique collector, Sheldon had little interest in the aesthetically based collecting that emerged at the turn of the century, and rarely participated in the developing market. Indeed, Sheldon’s period rooms had few aesthetic pretenses and bore very little resemblance to the ones that would be established years later in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Figure 18. The Old Indian House door, named for the hatchet scars left by French and Native American attackers during their 1704 raid on Deerfield, was displayed as a sacred relic in the town’s Memorial Hall Museum. Photograph courtesy of the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Memorial Hall Museum. Figure 19. Deerfield residents used stone markers to inscribe their history on the landscape. This marker commemorates the resistance mounted by Benoni Stebbins and his household against French and Native American attackers during the 1704 raid. Photograph by Samuel Chamberlain, courtesy of Historic Deerfield. Figure 20. Deerfield photographers Frances and Mary Allen took this picture of antiquarian George Sheldon in 1895 at Deerfield’s Memorial Hall Museum. Just visible at right is a Hadley chest. Photograph courtesy of Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Memorial Hall Museum. < 139 Highboys and High Culture “Not a single article is here preserved on account of its artistic qualities ,” Sheldon explained of his displays. “The collection is founded on purely historical lines and is the direct memorial of the inhabitants of this valley, old Indian and Puritan.”13 Rather than expensive furniture crafted for early American elites, everyday artifacts dominated Sheldon’s collection. His prized possessions included ceramics, paintings, local furniture, tools, textiles, and Indian arrows, usually obtained directly from local families without the aid of antique dealers. In keeping with the Victorian approach to museum building, he acquired large quantities of items. Of Sheldon’s collecting habits Timothy C. Newman, former executive director of the PVMA, has written, “If one pot was good, ten were better.”14 The colonial bedroom housed a jumble of furniture styles, and the kitchen was littered with more than eight hundred ceramic jugs, pewter plates, iron pots, and other utensils.15 The result was an image of colonial domesticity and abundance, but not one of artistic design. Sheldon’s understanding of antiques was deeply tied to his reverence for place and for the local associations it engendered. As Michael C. Batinski has argued, Sheldon rejected broad historical narratives in favor of small details and individual facts specific to local life. For this reason, Sheldon rarely referred to himself as a historian, preferring to call himself a “local historian” or “antiquarian.” In keeping with this local approach to the past, he embraced the study of genealogy, examining not only the history of his own family, but others in the area as well. The idea of family history thus became a natural tool for Sheldon to use in interpreting historic objects. In his accession records, he often included a detailed family history of the donor, as well as his or her story. “Bring in then those old mementoes before they are scattered and lost, and if you won’t write the old stories, come in and tell them to me,” he urged.16 Catalogs and guidebooks Sheldon compiled for the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association show clearly the kinds of artifacts he valued. Of the hundreds of items in Sheldon’s 1886 catalog, few would be attractive to decorative arts collectors, especially on the merit of Sheldon’s descriptions alone. Indeed, he defined most of the objects in terms of their associations . There was the “leather chair from the house at the Bars occupied by Samuel Allen who was killed by the Indians,” the “door posts” from the Old Indian House, and a wooden pail “in constant use for more than 70 years.” Even if the object was not tied to an incident or event, every 140 = C hapter 4 item in the collection was associated with its donor, faithfully listed in the catalog entry. Deerfield donors are listed by name alone; those from neighboring communities are distinguished by their town of residence. Town identity was very important to Sheldon’s collecting program. While almost all the artifacts in his collection were clearly connected to Deerfield or its local environs, Sheldon did accept objects from other states if they were donated by a local. Such was the case for Sheldon’s “corn crusher,” which W. O. Taylor of nearby Shelburne had brought from Fort Lincoln, Dakota.17 In this way, an association with a local resident could transform a random artifact into a valued treasure. Thanks in part to Sheldon, Deerfield ended the nineteenth century with a strong sense of its history and a material record of its past. But the town’s retention of its historic buildings was also a symptom of its declining economy. By the late nineteenth century, Deerfield had no industry and no connection to the railroad, and it was quickly losing its male population to more prosperous towns. As Miller and Lanning have written, Deerfield’s women recognized that continued development of the town’s historic assets could solve their economic problems.18 Between 1880 and 1920, these women embraced the craft revival that John Ruskin and William Morris began in Great Britain. Eileen Boris has argued that the handcraft movement in America represented the desire of white, Protestant elites for a preindustrial, preimmigration social order. Deerfield’s craft movement exhibited many of the same class distinctions found in more urban handcraft schools. Employing the language of uplift, elite women, often summer residents from places such as Boston and New York, formed the movement’s leadership. Joined by the matriarchs of old Deerfield families, these women found in craftwork a way to promote economic stability while reasserting their cultural authority. For the working classes, which included hard-up farming families from both old Anglo and new immigrant stock, crafting contributed important money to household income.19 Even though craftwork did not trade in historic objects themselves, the practice prefigured the antique market in the way it used history as a commodity. Using a guild system, craftworkers produced and sold artifacts that drew on both documented and fanciful images of old-time handiwork. Founded in 1896 by Ellen Miller and Margaret Whiting, the Society of Blue and White Needlework based its designs on embroidery < 141 Highboys and High Culture in the PVMA collection. The society dyed its own materials and marked each piece with its symbol—a flax wheel superimposed with the letter D.20 Raffia baskets had no precedent in Deerfield history, but members of the Pocumtuck Basket Makers made up for this lapse by invoking historic icons, such as the Old Indian House, in their designs.21 Local men also contributed, replicating small pieces of Connecticut Valley furniture, such as Hadley chests. Other craft societies produced historically inspired textiles using handlooms, natural dyes, and old-time knotting techniques.22 While Deerfield’s craftworkers did not commemorate local history with the concrete associations of Sheldon’s museum guidebook, a sense of place was integral to their trade. To this end, they cultivated the historic resources of old Deerfield. Restoring historic houses was especially popular . Since many of the movement’s leadership were women with attenuated ancestral connections to Deerfield, restoring historic houses not only provided them with fashionable summer residences, but also reaffirmed their family status and New England roots. At the same time, restored buildings supplied appropriate spaces for crafters to work and display their wares. Like most Colonial Revival restorations, these transformations were not intended to be historically accurate. Rather, they were romantic interpretations of the past. In 1890, C. Alice Baker, an educator, academy founder, and published antiquarian, restored the Frary House and opened it to the public as a type of common parlor for the promotion of an idealized Yankee past.23 The house included an assembly hall where Miss Baker held dances in eighteenth-century dress. Around the same time, Annie Putnam of Boston restored the Barnard-Willard House and transformed “the little brown house on the Albany Road” into an art studio , complete with exposed beams and a large round-headed window.24 Coupled with Sheldon’s museum and monuments, the result of such an extensive program of restoration was a community tied to its past. Leaving the Local By preserving buildings, artifacts, and handicraft traditions, Sheldon and the Arts and Crafts community established a collection of historic resources grounded in local history and family stories. But it was a vision of the past that would not survive long into the twentieth century, as it 142 = C hapter 4 would soon be supplanted by a new concern for forging an aesthetically driven history based on the standards of a nationally based antique community . After Sheldon’s death in 1916 and the decline of the Arts and Crafts revival in the 1920s, Deerfield was without a historic leader. But that situation began to change in the 1940s, as Henry Flynt began to take an active interest in the town. Flynt fell in love with Deerfield’s past. “Charm, architecture, history, courage—these are what make Deerfield different,” he wrote in a statement prepared for visitors.25 Like Sheldon before him, Flynt cultivated Deerfield’s historic resources. Between the purchase of his first Deerfield property in 1942 and his death in 1970, Flynt restored or repaired dozens of the town’s homes. He established a series of historic house museums, took over the presidency of Sheldon’s Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, and built a library to service both organizations. But while Flynt saw his work as an effort to maintain rather than change Deerfield, his arrival was also part of a chain of events that transformed the village from an insular town that valued its old families and local traditions to a much more cosmopolitan community. Well before Flynt arrived on the local scene, Deerfield Academy had begun to become increasingly attached to a national network of elite private schools and their supporters. Founded in the 1790s, the school had long catered to the needs of local students, but under headmaster Frank Boyden it was transformed into a premier preparatory school that drew its students from across the nation. Boyden had come to Deerfield in 1902. A recent graduate of Amherst College, he assumed the position of headmaster with only fourteen boys and girls enrolled. Officially, the school included the public Dickinson High School and received substantial financial support from the town. The students came from nearby farms and often received time off during the harvest season.26 In the 1920s Boyden began to distance the academy from its local community , in part because of an anti-immigrant and ethnocentric impulse to maintain the school as a Yankee institution. As Brian Cooke has noted, Boyden feared Deerfield’s rising population of immigrant Polish farmers . Early in his career he decided that he “could not afford to become Principal of a school which would virtually be a Polish high school.”27 Determined to “maintain the school as an American institution,” Boyden turned to boarding students.28 As early as 1923, 80 out of 140 academy students were boarders. Their numbers included the sons of deans and < 143 Highboys and High Culture professors from top universities, including the University of California, Harvard, the College of the City of New York, and George Washington University. Boyden also separated Deerfield Academy from the public high school in 1923. To maintain financial solvency, he appealed to the headmasters of Exeter, Taft, and Andover, who raised money among their own alumni. Other contributors included the presidents of Cornell and Amherst, and Dean Henry Pennypacker, chairman of the Committee on Admissions at Harvard.29 Historic preservation offered another way to cement Deerfield’s Yankee appearance and advance the school’s expansion. In 1924 Boyden contacted William Sumner Appleton at the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities about financing preservation in the town. “Somehow there should be found some way of securing money to buy these old houses as they are thrown upon the market,” Boyden wrote, “as otherwise Deerfield will go, as Hadley and Hatfield have, into the hands of the Polish and other foreigners.”30 Purchasing buildings for academy use not only minimized demographic changes by taking individual buildings out of private hands, but also provided much-needed housing for students and faculty. In this way, promoting local history earned Boyden national prominence. Boyden found a sponsor for his preservation initiative in Henry Flynt (figure 21). Having grown up in Monson, Massachusetts, a small town on the Connecticut border, Flynt knew Deerfield. During the Arts and Crafts revival, he and his family were among the many tourists who rode the trolley into town to view the old houses and purchase handmade goods.31 But Flynt’s connection to Deerfield was not cemented until his ties with Monson were broken. As owners of the local granite-mining company and general store, Flynt’s parents donated their large Greek Revival house and nearby fields to Monson Academy. A few years later the Flynts returned to find the house replaced by new baseball fields, which, to make matters worse, were named after other donors.32 In Flynt, Boyden recognized both a “real New Englander” and someone with the financial means to back the academy’s expansion.33 Already a trustee of his alma mater, Williams College, Flynt became a Deerfield Academy trustee in 1940 and chairman of the board in 1943. He and his wife soon donated money for tennis and squash courts, assisted with building a new dining hall, and funded faculty vacations. Figure 21. Frank Boyden and Henry Flynt posed in the doorway of Deerfield’s Sheldon-Hawks House for this 1962 photograph. Photograph courtesy of Historic Deerfield. Highboys and High Culture Flynt’s wife, Helen, was a Cincinnati native with no personal connection to Deerfield or old New England, but her interest in the school soon made up for that. Indeed, it was Helen, a lover of sports, who donated the funds for the school’s tennis and squash courts as well as faculty vacations . Helen’s money also supported the couple’s restoration work. The daughter of Fred A. Geier, founder of the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company, Helen had the benefit of a family fortune, a Vassar education, and a cultured upbringing. Her parents owned two splendid Victorian homes, one of which was furnished with English antiques bought from the New York firm of Ginsburg & Levy. With style and money, Helen was the perfect partner for Henry and his preservation interests.34 Reluctant to become a collector, Flynt undertook his first restoration projects solely in the name of the academy. After refurbishing the eighteenth -century Manse as the headmaster’s house, the Flynts purchased the Manning House in 1942 and donated it to the academy as a dormitory . This was followed in 1944 by the purchase of the Rossiter House, and in 1945 the Deerfield Inn, Ashley property, and Allen House. In each case the academy profited. The Flynts rented the restored Rossiter House to the school, refurbished the inn to attract a more affluent class of students , prevented a liquor store owner from occupying the Allen House, moved one of the Ashley houses to the academy’s grounds, and installed a faculty apartment in the other. These purchases insured that the academy would have ample space to grow, freedom from intrusive neighbors, and a beautiful streetscape to welcome prospective students and their families. As the Flynts bought more properties, they became increasingly interested in antiques, historic architecture, and professional preservation methods. They hired local talent to research their properties, but unlike the Gardners, the Flynts had the money and connections to acquire furnishing and restoration advice from nationally known experts such as Joseph Downs, a former American Wing curator who in 1949 became curator of the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, and his Winterthur colleague Charles Montgomery.35 The Rossiter House provided one of the Flynts’ first opportunities to practice restoration. In the 1930s the house’s previous owners, Wynn and Sarah Rossiter, had restored the building to their own version of colonial by covering it in wooden shingles and paneling the dining room with knotty pine. Basing their restoration on a 1907 description of Deerfield’s home lots, <฀฀145 146 = C hapter 4 the Flynts removed the shingles, clapboarded the house, and painted it pink.36 Thus, what the academy received was not simply a dormitory, but a revised colonial aesthetic. The Ashley purchase was the Flynts’ first museum property. In 1869 the Ashley family moved the eighteenth-century home of their ancestor, the Reverend Jonathan Ashley, to the back lot and constructed a new house on the old foundation. The Flynts reversed this process. They moved the 1869 house to the academy where it became a dormitory. Then, after razing a nearby twentieth-century bungalow, they returned the Reverend Ashley’s house to the front lot and began the demanding job of reconstruction. After years of use as a barn, the house had lost clapboards , windows, doorways, interior molding, paneling, and partitions. Flynt approached the problem with the intention of creating an authentic restoration. He hired local women as researchers, interviewed Ashley family members, and even asked one of the academy teachers to excavate the original cellar hole. In addition, Flynt’s contractor, William Gass, searched within the house for evidence of its former appearance.37 In the end, Flynt lacked enough evidence to create an exact reproduction of the house as originally built, but his dedication demonstrated a deep interest in Deerfield history and its architectural heritage (figure 22). Flynt’s money and social standing connected him to a national network of authorities in collecting and preservation. In an oral interview conducted by Charles Hosmer, Flynt told the story of his reconstruction of the fireplaces in the Sheldon-Hawks house. The old fireplaces were important to Flynt’s vision for the house, but they and the central chimneystack had long since been removed. He set out to reconstruct the chimney, but without the benefit of extant examples he had a hard time deciding what the fireplace lintels should look like. “There was a great discussion whether the lintel should be a wooden lintel, sandstone lintel or a steel or iron one,” Flynt later recalled. “We couldn’t decide.” For guidance , Flynt turned first to his network of national antique experts and enlisted the advice of Vincent D. Andrus, curator of the American Wing. Andrus voted for sandstone, but before Flynt committed, he consulted with Helen. According to Flynt’s account of the story, Helen quickly put things in perspective. “Why don’t you fellows go over in Memorial Hall and look at the fireplace that Mr. Sheldon restored to exhibit kitchen utensils and you’ll find a wood lintel there with a great big sign on it in big < 147 Highboys and High Culture bold letters, ‘This was taken out of the Sheldon Hawks House after it had been there 125 years.’”38 Flynt’s telling of the story emphasizes his respect for Deerfield’s traditions and his appreciation of Sheldon’s preservation work. But the story also points to another fact in the Flynts’ preservation work: their readiness to consult with experts on the national scale. The Flynts saw their work as an act of preservation, but in truth their efforts brought great changes to town. Not only did they employ museum professionals to do the kind of restoration work once reserved for residents, but their purchases took many houses out of local control . A 1945 document shows that Flynt and Boyden together considered altering over sixty buildings on the town’s mile-long main thoroughfare, which was always known as “The Street.” Their plan included tearing down thirty houses and moving or remodeling many of the others. To accomplish these goals, the pair estimated that they would have to buy thirty-eight houses for an estimated $533,000.39 Flynt and Boyden never Figure 22. The Ashley House provided a gracious setting for this 1948 photograph of Henry and Helen Flynt. Photograph courtesy of Historic Deerfield. 148 = C hapter 4 completed this grand plan, but by 1969 Deerfield had changed from a village of local homeowners to a town dominated by museum and school interests. In 1969, the Academy, the Bement School, the Flynts, and the Heritage Foundation (an organization Flynt established for his museum properties) combined owned thirty-seven of the fifty-six houses along Deerfield’s main street.40 Flynt himself had some interest in twenty-six of these properties.41 As a result, Deerfield became more closely identified with its nationally based student body and its restored houses than its local families. Reinventing the Nation One of the most dramatic ways the Flynts changed Deerfield was through their reconfiguration of its symbolic value. While men like Sheldon had found meaning in honoring ancestors and preserving local stories, Henry Flynt discovered a political message in Deerfield’s restoration. Flynt understood Deerfield as not just a physical construct, but as an ideological construct, defining America as a nation through a representation of its past. In his essay “From Tomahawks and Arrows to Atomic Bombs,” written in 1969 for the Delaware Antiques Show Catalog, Flynt explained his motivations for investing in Deerfield in terms of its ideological impact: “It is with a firm belief that the future of America can be favorably influenced by a delineation of the daily lives of the people who made this Village that a resolute attempt has been made to preserve and restore their homes.”42 In another essay, titled “Deerfield, Massachusetts: Its Meaning,” he was more specific, urging readers to “reaffirm our sense of perspective” by emulating the rigorous lives, joyful worship, and dedication to education displayed by New England’s first European settlers.43 By reconstructing the culture and traditions of early America, Flynt’s Deerfield offered a model for contemporary American society. The cold war made Deerfield’s message all the more urgent. In 1967 Flynt told Yankee Magazine that “the more people in America who know the background of the country, the better off the country is. You won’t get a lot of isms and all kinds of fake notions going on if the American public knows its own history.”44 Flynt also believed that history would teach Americans how to face down Soviet aggression. In “From Tomahawks < 149 Highboys and High Culture and Arrows to Atomic Bombs,” he urged his readers to learn from the colonial past: “During these days of fears of atomic bombs it may be good to think of the American Indian Wars and the settlement of the New England village. Let us strengthen our determination, courage and spirits by recalling that our forebears did not give in because of swiftly soaring arrows and cruel tomahawks.”45 For Flynt, the cold war and the Indian Wars represented a pair of “red attacks.” By learning about one, Flynt believed, Americans could prevent the other. Flynt most strongly stated his anticommunist philosophy in the book he co-wrote with photographer Samuel Chamberlain, Frontier of Freedom: The Soul and Substance of an American Village, published in 1952. In truth, Chamberlain did most of the work—taking photographs, writing articles and captions, designing the layout, and adding pen-and-ink drawings. But Flynt reviewed every detail with such exacting standards that Chamberlain threatened to withdraw from the project.46 As a result, the finished work closely mirrored Flynt’s own ideas and values. Congratulating Chamberlain on the book’s introduction, Flynt wrote: “It is splendid and I wouldn’t even dot an ‘i’ or cross a ‘t’. Boy, if I can be associated with a book that has that as a Foreword I am ready to work for the U.S.A. and I think anybody that reads it should feel the same way.”47 In Frontier of Freedom, Flynt and Chamberlain reinterpreted the story of Deerfield’s massacre to send a message to contemporary Americans. Deerfield held strong in the face of Indian attack; contemporary Americans must hold strong against the new red threat. Chamberlain’s introduction makes the comparison between past and present explicit: “This village heard the beat of the tom-tom two-and-a-half centuries ago, and met the challenge as we are meeting it in Korea today, with the lives of brave young men and women.”48 Flynt was not alone in using history to combat communism. In the late 1940s, the National Archives and the Justice Department organized a mobile exhibit of American documents called the Freedom Train. The train visited 322 cities, and the exhibit, which included the Bill of Rights, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, was seen by more than 3.5 million people. Under the leadership of John D. Rockefeller III, Colonial Williamsburg was also actively promoting nationalism. Beginning during World War II, Rockefeller sponsored a series of patriotic radio programs, held tours for 150 = C hapter 4 military trainees, hosted foreign dignitaries, and organized a conference series on international affairs.49 Flynt appreciated narratives of American history that celebrated the nation’s democratic traditions. Indeed, before becoming an antique collector, Flynt built a collection of American manuscripts and historic documents—letters from Supreme Court justices, presidential autographs, and documents related to political history. But what defined Flynt’s work in Deerfield was his attention to issues of aesthetics . After a brief introduction offering historic Deerfield as a model for contemporary society, Frontier of Freedom was filled with images of stately houses, fine furniture, and beautiful tree-lined streets. In order to assure the inspirational value of these images, he fussed about photographic quality . In letters to Chamberlain and to the book’s publisher, Flynt pushed for additional close-ups and color photographs, despite the increased cost.50 He understood that Deerfield’s power was in its visual representation. More than anything else, elegant houses spoke to America’s cultural superiority and to the rewards of patriotism (figure 23). Figure 23. Samuel Chamberlain illustrated Frontier of Freedom with photographs of beautiful homes, like this image of the interior of the Allen House, the Flynts’ Deerfield residence. Photograph by Samuel Chamberlain for Frontier of Freedom, courtesy of Historic Deerfield. < 151 Highboys and High Culture Certainly the idea of using antiques as evidence of America’s cultural value was not new. As we have seen, turn-of-the-century antique collectors also valued their finds as evidence of the nation’s artistic accomplishment , but against the backdrop of communism’s implicit critique of America’s economic and social disparity, aesthetically accomplished antiques offered proof that wealth could produce a higher good. Elites had taste and the ability to create beauty. Interestingly, Flynt’s narratives tended to downplay the existence of economic inequity in the past. In the narratives he constructed, Flynt gave the leading role in Deerfield’s history to well-to-do professional men and ignored the existence of individuals of lesser means. Few laborers, women, or slaves appear in any of Flynt’s written accounts of Deerfield’s history. Indeed, even though the town’s economy was predominantly agricultural in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Flynt rarely mentioned farmers. Jonathan Ashley the minister, Asa Stebbins the businessman and gristmill owner, Joseph Barnard the doctor, and Samuel Pierce the pewterer represent the type of men Flynt celebrated through his restorations and historical writings. By grouping together artisans, intellectuals, and businessmen, Flynt constructed what he saw as the colonial precedent to his own professional class. In addition to representing the achievements of their age, these individuals were of the class that owned the kind of expensive objects Flynt would celebrate as evidence of American cultural superiority. Purchasing a Past Flynt’s vision of Deerfield as an aesthetic antidote to communism influenced his approach to collecting. If elegant homes and fine antiques were the proof of America’s cultural superiority, then antiques represented a kind of aesthetic resource, a resource to cultivate by buying them. On its own, the town of Deerfield could certainly claim the presence of many antiques. Some were preserved in Sheldon’s museum; others remained in family hands. But as Flynt became more deeply involved with the world of antiques, his understanding of aesthetics changed. No longer would Deerfield’s local collections be enough. Rather, he would be influenced by the now entrenched aesthetic standards promulgated by the elite collecting community. Like many collectors before him, George and Jessie Gardner 152 = C hapter 4 included, Flynt would add to his existing collection, work to refine his aesthetic sensibilities, and purchase additional objects in an effort to produce a more aesthetically accomplished collection. Such actions might not have been necessary if Flynt had retained Deerfield’s local focus. But Flynt’s nationally based collecting community demanded it. Deerfield’s redevelopment meant that Flynt, after years of avoiding antique shops and auctions, would enter the market in full force. The market was not completely new to him; both his father and his uncle had been collectors. Both were particularly interested in antiques as expressions of Yankee ingenuity, and clocks were their specialty. Flynt’s father, George, left the restoration work to his brother, an avid tinkerer, but he knew the local market. A 1922 advertisement in Antiques notified readers that George C. Flynt had sold over one thousand chairs in the past year.51 His reputation was strong enough that when Henry Ford came to Monson in search of a stagecoach for Greenfield Village, Henry’s father brokered the deal. According to the younger Flynt, Ford had authorized his father to offer as much as $600 for the stagecoach. But knowing that farmers did not value such pieces and that $200 would be adequate payment , the elder Flynt proved himself a savvy consumer.52 When George Flynt died in 1929, the family collection was sold at auction.53 As he established his home with Helen, Henry turned first to European antiques. Like many of their class, the Flynts started to collect English antiques. Their interest in European decorative arts was serious enough that they built their new house in the English style as well. But English goods were of little use in their Deerfield projects. Their first opportunity came with the purchase of the Deerfield Inn during World War II. Unhappy with the inn’s furnishings, the Flynts decided to redecorate in a style in keeping with the town’s historic atmosphere. Helen was in charge of finding antiques, and she approached the task from the perspective not of quality, but quantity. “I went to Sloane’s in New York,” she remembered. “I wanted ten beds, ten dressers, etc.” The firm could not fill her order, but they did provide her with pine boards from which they fashioned dressers. Next, Helen went to an antique dealer in Greenwich, Connecticut. There she found many double beds, which she proceeded to have cut down to twin. Helen’s first attempts at antiquing demonstrated her ignorance of contemporary collecting practices. Even though her purchases were intended for practical furnishings rather than < 153 Highboys and High Culture components of a formal collection, her sins—fashioning new antiques from old wood and radically altering genuine stock—would have been seen as egregious by any serious collector. Looking back on her first foray into American antiques, Helen herself would denounce her actions as “silly.” As the Flynts became more serious about American antiques, they began to purchase simple pieces with connections to Deerfield and the Connecticut River Valley in an effort to maintain a sense of place. They frequented antique shops in nearby Northampton and relied on longtime Deerfield residents, such as Margaret Whiting, Margaret Harris Allen, and Mary Fuller and her daughter Elizabeth, for advice. The 1946 estate auction of Mrs. Susan Hawks, granddaughter of the historian George Sheldon, was an important purchasing event for the Flynts. They also acquired pieces from Louisa Billings’s estate, despite the fact that she saw the couple as outsiders and expressly forbade her heirs to sell to them. The Flynts were sometimes misled, however; for example, some of the pieces at the Hawks auction came from Mrs. Hawks’s antiques business rather than her ancestors.54 The Flynts’ early interest in buying locally showed a sensitivity to place and associations rarely celebrated in contemporary collecting circles, but local antique sources could only supply so many goods. To fill their newly acquired properties, they began to cultivate additional collecting sources and to buy from major dealers. But like many collectors, Flynt found it hard to stomach the cost of his purchases. Whether he worried that dealers were taking advantage of him or that his Deerfield projects would outpace his pocketbook, his anxieties manifested themselves in a propensity to haggle. Encouraged both by the one-on-one nature of the antique sale and the fluidity of prices, haggling has a long tradition in antiquing. Still, high-end dealers have often resisted the practice, which implicitly undermines their authority and the value of their wares. As Elizabeth Stillinger reports in her history of the Flynts’ work in Deerfield, Henry’s insistence on negotiating price could lead to conflict. After trying , and failing, to secure a discount from New York dealer Bernard Levy on several pieces of antique furniture, Flynt made one last attempt, subtracting fifty dollars from the combined purchase price on the grounds that it was easier to write the check if he simply rounded down. Fifty dollars was not a large amount, considering that Flynt was purchasing 154 = C hapter 4 an expensive Connecticut high chest, a Chippendale desk, and matching bookcase, but the act was a symbolic form of resistance to the dealer’s ability to set price. Levy refused to sell until Helen pressured Henry into paying the full amount. It was then that Levy made his own symbolic display. From the wall, he removed a mirror, valued at $850, and presented it as a gift to Helen. The message was clear: the dealer would control his own wares.55 Suspicious of dealers and always anxious to secure the best price, Flynt most often bought from John Kenneth Byard, who had been a fraternity brother during their years at Williams College.56 Originally from upstate New York, Byard attended Columbia Law School. In the 1930s he retired from his legal practice and purchased an old house, a mill, and several other structures along the Silvermine River in Norwalk, Connecticut. The area was home to a burgeoning art colony, and Byard saw the opportunity to build a small business. Dubbing the complex the Silvermine Tavern, he established a restaurant, an inn, and an antique gallery. With antiques only part of his business, and a second career at that, Byard lacked the expertise of longtime dealers such as Israel Sack or Jacob Margolis. Indeed, Byard’s records show that he rarely gave his customers a guarantee of authority based on his own word, preferring to rely on the knowledge of other dealers. Typical was a note added to a receipt for a pair of Sheraton mirrors sold to Helen Flynt in 1958, which offers as proof of their American origin the fact that the New York antique firm of Ginsburg & Levy had advertised them as such several years before.57 In other instances Byard could be even less assuring. In a notation on the receipt for an “Oak Brewster chair,” for which Henry Flynt paid $475 in 1958, Byard conceded that “some might consider the chair to be of foreign origin,” but nevertheless counseled Flynt that the chair could “just as well be considered a New England Brewster chair.”58 However dubious Flynt may have felt about his friend’s statements of authenticity, he had no cause for complaint about Byard’s pricing polices. Byard’s records show that he sometimes disclosed his purchase price to Flynt or passed on pieces at a fixed percentage. If Byard felt that an item was particularly important to Flynt’s collection, he might even sell it to him at cost.59 During the late 1950s Flynt bought antiques from Byard in great quantity. Purchases ranged from inexpensive objects—an iron hook priced at $27.50 or a $15 pair of candlesticks—to much more < 155 Highboys and High Culture serious acquisitions, such as a $6,000 pie-crust table or a seventeenthcentury New England chest on which Flynt spent almost $4,000.60 As a result of the pair’s close relationship, Byard had a significant influence on the process of history making in Deerfield. In many ways, the dealer’s stock became the foundation for Deerfield’s historic furnishings. Flynt did not limit himself to Byard’s wares, however, nor did he limit his collecting adventures to American soil. Like the Gardners, Helen and Henry used their European vacations as an opportunity to increase their collection. Many of the antiques they acquired abroad were costumes, bought in Paris or London and earmarked for Helen’s emerging textile museum.61 Henry used travel to locate American silver. His search led to the purchase of a large collection that had originally belonged to Lionel Crichton of London and was owned by his son-in-law Victor Watson. Watson insisted on selling the collection as a whole, and Flynt agreed. The purchase, ninety-two pieces in all, greatly enlarged not only Flynt’s personal collection but also the amount of silver in Deerfield. Indeed, with the Flynts as active collectors, Deerfield was becoming more than a quaint old town; it was becoming a major repository for high-end antiques. For the Flynts, collecting during a period that valued the most aesthetically accomplished artifacts, this kind of aggressive acquisition was natural. But as an approach to preserving the past, it deviated from the traditions of Deerfield. Sheldon had ransacked local attics; the Flynts ransacked the world. An Education in Taste Flynt’s willingness to supplement Deerfield’s historic resources with purchased antiques was also tied to his increasing concern for aesthetic quality. As the Flynts progressed in their Deerfield project, they became accepted members of an elite collecting community made up of nationally known curators, dealers, and collectors. Among their many friends were curators Charles Montgomery and Joseph Downs, Metropolitan Museum of Art director Francis Taylor, Yale University silver expert John Marshall Phillips, and the editor of Antiques, Alice Winchester.62 The Flynts also began to socialize with other collectors. They attended parties at the home of the fashionable collector Katherine Prentice Murphy, who inscribed 156 = C hapter 4 her vision of eighteenth-century high style in period rooms all over the East; rubbed shoulders with folk art collector and preservationist Nina Fletcher Little, whose home, Cogswell’s Grant, is now a museum property owned by Historic New England; frequented the collections of Shelburne Museum founder Electra Havemeyer Webb; and attended antique forums with the Texas oil heiress and patron of the arts Ima Hogg. According to Winchester, many of these collectors held social gatherings where they entertained among their prized possessions.63 Such experiences initiated the Flynts into the world of high-style, contemporary collecting. One of the most important acquaintances the Flynts made was Henry Francis du Pont. As a collector, du Pont sought the most beautifully proportioned , elaborately decorated, and finely crafted items, but only to the extent that they would harmonize with his other possessions.64 Du Pont regularly refused artifacts because they were the wrong color, the wrong size, or the wrong quality in comparison to other items in his periodroom settings.65 Typical was his reply to dealer Isabella Barclay’s offer to sell him an antique stool: “I’m sorry to say that the stool entirely dwarfs my coiffeuse and therefore I am returning it to you very reluctantly. It is most trying, as it is a lovely piece.”66 The Flynts’ 1946 visit to du Pont’s house at Winterthur was a revelation in the refinement that could be achieved with American antiques. Thanking du Pont for his hospitality, Flynt wrote: “You personify in this home the art of gracious living and graceful thinking. What a tonic it is to see a place like yours! . . . Our humble little effort to preserve old Deerfield, Massachusetts has taken on renewed zeal because of our trip to Winterthur.”67 According to Deerfield curator Philip Zea, the Flynts apparently mimicked du Pont’s designs by adapting his famous Port Royal parlor to their own Allen House. Both rooms employed twin settees flanking the fireplace, brilliant yellow silk upholstery, and paired tall chests.68 Antique dealers also proved to be an important source of aesthetic education. To Mrs. Frank Thomas, a dealer in Oriental rugs, Flynt wrote: “What an education you have provided for us along a line in which our knowledge is so meager. . . . Our taste has been educated by your taste, your splendid descriptions and gracious courtesy so now we want only the best.”69 While Henry claimed that he did not have the funds equal to his desire, the Flynts nevertheless began replacing their simple hooked rugs with much more refined and elegant Orientals. < 157 Highboys and High Culture A comparison between the 1952 and 1970 editions of Frontier of Freedom reveals that the Flynts had refined their aesthetic sensibility. While the newer edition included the Flynts’ most recent purchases, such as the opulent Dwight House, the most striking thing about the book is the number of photographs retaken to reflect slight changes in decor. For example, both editions include a picture of the front hall of the Ashley House. Both show the same scene: a staircase on the left, a tall clock, and a table against the wall flanked by two chairs. Closer inspection, however, reveals a small but significant change: The two vase-backed chairs with Spanish feet have been replaced with more elegant serpentine types. The text has also has been modified to reflect Flynt’s increasing connoisseurship and his interest in a national audience. Rather than simply stating that the clock comes from Connecticut, the 1970 edition points out that it resembles the much-sought-after Newport type. Likewise, the new text fails to mention the print of Massachusetts governor Jonathan Belcher, who helped orchestrate the Native American peace conference held in Deerfield in 1735. A similar transformation can be observed in the Allen House, the Flynts’ private residence in Deerfield. Photographs taken from almost identical angles reveal crewelwork curtains replaced by yellow damask, hooked rugs by Orientals, and simple vase-back chairs by ornate Chippendales. Many of the missing pieces can be found in photos of the second floor, which, according to the book, are deliberately furnished in a “less sophisticated style.” Such changes demonstrate that Flynt was responding to aesthetic standards of the age. As the museum’s self-proclaimed curator, Flynt was careful to justify his elaborate furnishings with documentary and material evidence. In a 1952 letter to Deerfield resident Elizabeth Boyden, Flynt defended his decorative choices: “It is sometimes difficult for people to appreciate that the residents of this village in those far off days had the splendid examples of furniture, fabrics, china, glass, portraits, prints and other items, now on display there. . . . Inventories, accounts, and letters and other data of the Deerfield people of the eighteenth century and actual pieces of furniture, spreads, china, glass and fragments of material handed down from generation to generation of its loyal residents established the basis of the collection now available to the public and proved beyond the peradventure of the doubt, that the eighteenth century was one of culture, refinement, and taste.”70 158 = C hapter 4 Since Flynt based his furnishings on documented examples, his errors were in the form of quantity more often than quality. To produce period rooms with an atmosphere of comfort and style, Flynt filled his houses to the point of excess. For example, the Reverend Jonathan Ashley likely owned a tall chest, but three was out of the question. Indeed, one of the main tasks of contemporary curators at Deerfield has been to scale back Flynt’s elaborate rooms. Curators of the Wells-Thorn House now interpret a once opulently furnished room with only three pieces of furniture , no curtains, and no rug.71 For Flynt, the excess had an important function. It allowed him to depict the past as a period that contemporary visitors would see as cultured and refined. Like the Gardners, the Flynts had difficulty separating taste from authenticity. They believed that if a piece looked right in its surroundings , then in fact it must be accurate. Helen especially believed that she had an innate knowledge of colonial style: “I can see right away at the outset whether I like it or I don’t like it, whether it’s right or it’s wrong, whether it’s pleasing, whether it’s accurate or whether it’s not accurate. I have an eye.”72 The Flynts also believed that they knew what colonial residents would have wanted. In informal notes to his guide staff, Henry explained that he had decided to limit the use of eighteenth-century Italian raw silk in the Ashley House to the parlor because he believed that “no gay colors should unduly distract the parson from his conscientious duty in the preparation of his Sunday sermons.”73 Taste was also something that Flynt sought in his contractor, William E. Gass. Although Gass lacked formal training in architectural history or design, he had grown up in the construction business, learning as he worked on surviving local examples of colonial architecture, studied preservation jobs, and assisted his father with a replica of the Old Indian House. But this kind of experience had limits, and Gass often built according to his own tastes and mistaken ideas about colonial buildings . For example, he favored unpainted wood paneling, large kitchen fireplaces, and slate roofs—all inappropriate for the period. Many of Deerfield’s famous doors are Gass’s loose interpretations of Connecticut Valley doorways; some residents called them “Bill Gass originals.”74 Gass’s sense of style made him a popular restoration carpenter. Commenting on his work at the Old Indian House, Jennie Maria Arms Sheldon, second wife of George Sheldon, wrote: “The replica . . . is a < 159 Highboys and High Culture remarkably accurate reproduction. Mr. Gass, the father, has not the historic instinct but his son, William Gass, Jr., has it to an unusual degree.”75 Flynt agreed: “[Gass has] the sense of proportion, the feeling for the lines and things like that.”76 Flynt trusted Gass to such a degree that he used him on nearly every restoration project in Deerfield, despite frequent conflicts over money.77 In fact, Flynt often encouraged Gass to exercise his sense of style. In a 1947 letter, Flynt suggested that Gass use Samuel Chamberlain’s book New England Doorways as inspiration for his work on the Allen House.78 Likewise, when Deerfield Academy hired the Platt architectural firm to build new dormitories for the school, Flynt paid Gass to go over the plans and make them fit in with the village architecture. The process elevated Gass’s sense of colonial style over the Platt brothers’ book knowledge of historic architecture.79 The Flynts did not completely abandon family histories or craft traditions in the move to emphasize Deerfield’s aesthetic qualities. In a 1956 review of the museum’s curatorial practices, J. T. Wiggin reported that the Heritage Foundation fell somewhere between art and history museums. “The historic houses maintained by the Heritage Foundation tend toward the latter [art museums] although they actually stand at the meeting point . . . where the tendency towards thorough-going connoisseurship is tempered by a historical perspective.”80 Indeed, Henry Flynt created a number of historical vignettes designed to illustrate work in early America. For example, the Sheldon-Hawks House included a sewing room in which a costumed mannequin sat surrounded by needleworking tools.81 Likewise, the Wilson-Dickinson print shop included a working reproduction printing press, while the Parker and Russell silver shop juxtaposed a display area with a metalworking bench, forge, and bellows.82 Such illustrations of craft processes provided a historical context for Flynt’s aesthetic displays and allowed him to maintain the tradition of local stories. Flynt also emulated Deerfield’s tradition of celebrating family history, and even created a place for his own ancestral heritage, by moving the Dwight-Barnard House to Deerfield from nearby Springfield in 1950. While the house had no history within the village, its former occupants had genealogical ties not only to the Williamses of Deerfield, but to the Flynts as well. An undated history of the house attributed to Helen and Henry Flynt explains that “the present owner of the house, Henry Flynt, 160 = C hapter 4 is distantly related by marriage to Josiah Dwight through Anna Flynt for he is descended from one John Flynt, a brother of Anna.”83 With his own family connection established, Flynt set out to give the house a Deerfield pedigree, enlisting the aid of Deerfield resident Elizabeth Fuller, whose mother descended from the Williamses, a family of Deerfield doctors. Fuller loaned medical equipment, family portraits, and furnishings for the house.84 In return, Flynt dedicated one room as a memorial to Fuller’s mother and published a genealogy of the Dwight family detailing their connections to the Williamses.85 Flynt also emphasized the aesthetic qualities of the Dwight-Barnard house. One of the final houses he restored, Dwight-Barnard was also one of the most elaborate.86 The elegant south parlor included a bombe chest, Chippendale chairs, and a gold camelback sofa. Ernest LoNano, Henry Francis du Pont’s favorite upholsterer, furnished the room’s elaborately valenced silk curtains.87 According to Peter Spang, the Flynts’ first curator, even the decision to move the house was based on aesthetic considerations.88 Indeed, Flynt considered salvaging only the building’s elaborately paneled second floor and using it to construct period rooms. In this way, even Flynt’s interest in local history and family connections was colored by his desire to create refined and elegant interiors. The Flynts’ ever-increasing appreciation of fine, high-style antiques provoked them to contest the standards and taste of Deerfield’s earlier preservationists. Most notable was their reinterpretation of the Frary House, which was at the center of Deerfield’s Arts and Crafts revival. C. Alice Baker had bequeathed the restored house and its contents to the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association with the stipulation that the building be kept “intact and unaltered with the furnishings as typical of the Colonial period.”89 By the late 1940s Henry Flynt was president of both the PVMA and his own Heritage Foundation, and he began to see the Frary House’s furnishings as “creating a very bad impression.” Flynt, a lawyer himself, had Baker’s will reinterpreted using the argument that her furnishings were not authentic and thus violated the spirit of her wishes.90 In truth, Flynt’s redecoration of the Frary House was simply the replacement of one age’s aesthetic with that of another. For the refurbishing of the tavern room, Flynt accepted a sizable gift of almost seventyfive pieces from John Kenneth Byard, ranging from pottery mugs and < 161 Highboys and High Culture wooden candle stands to eighteenth-century oil paintings and a New England corner cupboard.91 Flynt noted that “Mr. and Mrs. Byard, realizing that some of the rooms in the Frary House have architectural charm but lack both the tasteful touch and the ring of the spirit of the Colonial Days which Miss Baker . . . spoke of in her will, decided to furnish the room on the south side between the old tap room and the dining room.” While the Flynts considered these furnishings “tasteful,” contemporary curators have discovered that many were fakes.92 The Flynts took total control of Frary House in the late 1960s when the PVMA, desperate for funds to repair Memorial Hall, sold it to the Heritage Foundation. Cultural Arbitrator In many ways, Flynt’s redecoration of the Frary House represented the pinnacle of his power as Deerfield’s cultural steward. With the Frary House, he did not just add to the town’s historic resources, but literally transformed them to conform to his aesthetically driven expectations . Flynt’s aesthetic vision served him well in support of his cold war agenda, but the maintenance of that vision, and particularly its application to the village of Deerfield as a whole, proved problematic. For while Flynt ostensibly saw his work as important for a broad American public, allowing Deerfield to become a tourist destination threatened to undermine its quiet beauty. From the beginning, Flynt thought of his work as educational, and the proximity of Deerfield Academy provided him with a ready audience for his ideologically charged history. As one of his prime reasons for restoring Deerfield, he often cited his desire to “impress the boys who go to school there with the heritage of America, the story of Deerfield and its massacre, the courage of our ancestors, [and] their appreciation of the finer things in life.”93 He was particularly fond of the academy’s motto, “Be Worthy of Your Heritage.” In keeping with this education mission, Flynt also opened his museum to college students. In 1953, he organized a conference of New England college art departments to encourage them to use Deerfield as a laboratory for their classes.94 He instituted a summer fellowship, limited to men, to introduce undergraduates to work in the museum and decorative arts field. Under the sponsorship of a 162 = C hapter 4 Massachusetts woman, three spots were reserved for West Coast boys, on the provision that they see America on the way.95 Extending his educational mission to a wider public proved difficult, however. As part of his pursuit of a refined aesthetic environment, Flynt was determined that Deerfield would retain the appearance of a pastoral New England community. While he himself had done much to restore buildings, and even had the town’s telephone lines buried underground, much of the town’s charm lay in its quiet streets, unsullied by crowds or excessive traffic. The historic tourism boom of the 1950s threatened Flynt’s ability to protect Deerfield from such ugliness. The outdoor museum visitation statistics for 1957 show that tourism to Old Sturbridge Village increased by 17.06 percent, to Mystic Seaport by 17 percent, and to the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, New York, by between 20 and 30 percent from the previous year’s figures.96 Flynt admired these places for their ability to introduce a large number of people to American history, but he did not want that many visitors in Deerfield.97 Annoyed when his own attendance jumped 25 percent, he wrote, “This may sound snobbish but we are not equipped to run a ‘Freedom Land’ and don’t care to.”98 In order to control the types of visitors who came to Deerfield, he closely regulated press coverage.99 Before his restorations were complete, he denied reporters access on the grounds that the “wrong impression will be obtained” and that he did not “wish to have our efforts get off on the wrong foot as to authenticity.”100 In response to Life’s request to do an article on Deerfield, he cited the risk it posed to Deerfield’s small-town character: “We are a humble community carrying on a way of life based on a history of which we are proud and are anxious to be worthy of our heritage, undisturbed by ‘trippers,’ curiosity seekers, or others who we fear your article will inevitably bring.”101 Similarly, Flynt refused the local tourism office’s offer to include Deerfield in its press releases and films.102 He summed up his attitude to the press in a letter to Samuel Chamberlain: “Magazines have endeavored to get in and take pictures and write articles but so far we have warded them off.”103 Flynt’s success in discouraging daytrippers caused a writer for Yankee Magazine to remark that “old Deerfield is remarkably free from the grosser aspects of commercialism.”104 With hardly any press coverage and only a simple directional arrow indicating museum’s location from the main highway, tourists had difficulty finding it.105 < 163 Highboys and High Culture Having given up trying to educate a broader public, Flynt cultivated an audience that shared both his class position and his aesthetic appreciation of antiques. Beginning in the 1950s, he began a forum for “invited guests” each spring and fall. The guest list, limited to between thirtyfive and forty, included prominent figures in the antiques field, such as Katherine Prentice Murphy and Rhode Island collector Ralph Carpenter. The events resembled a grand house party. The Flynts served cocktails in the silver vault, Hall Tavern, and their own Allen House. Special events included candlelight tours and street rides in carts pulled by oxen When Flynt did write articles about his restored village, he courted publications with a more elite audience. The year 1950 was a turning point. Having assembled a significant portion of the collection, he began seeking appropriate venues to display his accomplishment. In addition to starting the book project with Samuel Chamberlain, Flynt develop a relationship with Antiques editor Alice Winchester, who featured his collection in many articles.106 He also published in magazines that targeted elite collectors, such as the Connecticut Antiquarian and Art in America.107 On the rare occasions that publications with larger audiences did cover Deerfield, Flynt did everything he could to control its image. Authors and editors were routinely taken to task for what he considered slipshod coverage. The Christian Science Monitor received an eight-point letter listing inaccuracies ranging from incorrect impressions created by their descriptions to spelling and grammar mistakes.108 Likewise, Flynt chastised the New York Herald Tribune for a lack of “accuracy and completeness ” in its coverage of Deerfield in an article on preservation work in New England.109 Not surprisingly, Flynt was most concerned with Deerfield’s visual image. He critiqued photographers at such reputable magazines as Antiques and Life over dull silver, late afternoon lighting, and smudged lampposts.110 But even more, Flynt hated pictures that deviated from the refined and elegant image he favored. Flynt hotly contested photos taken for American Heritage: “Your photographer tried to impress me with his international reputation in the museum world. All that was beside the point. He apparently carries on his independent ways in other places where he has visited. . . . The pictures I saw are not representative of Deerfield; furthermore, they look as though a country auction was being held. You must appreciate that we are the ones responsible for what the 164 = C hapter 4 present and future image of Deerfield should be, not Mr. Newman.”111 Having carefully constructed Deerfield’s visual image through his restorations and refurnishings, Flynt was not about to let a photographer suggest a different interpretation. Ugliness threatened in other areas as well. In the 1950s several companies began to market Deerfield-inspired home furnishings. Both B. Altman & Co. of New York and Sprague & Carleton of Keene, New Hampshire, offered furniture inspired by colonial Deerfield.112 Sprague & Carleton’s “Deerfield” furnishings were part of a larger campaign connecting their products to various New England towns famous for their colonial heritage. By appropriating the “ingenuity of our early craftsmen,” Sprague & Carleton hoped to suggest quality, durability, and timeless style.113 Likewise, Fieldcrest created a “Deerfield” bedspread advertised to capture the “spirit and charm of early America.”114 Even Ivory soap got into the act in 1961 with a proposal for a television commercial shot on location in Deerfield’s Ashley House. With the tagline that Ivory “treats nice things as if they had to last forever,” the commercial not only suggested that Deerfield’s historic textiles could be safely washed in Ivory soap, but also that the soap itself would make heirlooms out of everyday sheets and curtains.115 In many ways, the use of Deerfield and Deerfield antiques to sell modern goods signaled an acceptance of the past as a model for both aesthetic quality and consumer culture. But while Flynt’s cold-war patriotism implicitly celebrated the free market economy that produced mass-market goods, Deerfield’s association with mainstream suppliers threatened its ability to symbolize the nation’s artistic achievement by eroding its aesthetic quality. Not surprisingly, Flynt fought Deerfield’s connection to such commercial goods. In a letter to Sprague & Carleton, he wrote, “I’ve looked these pictures over and can’t seem to find where the inspiration for them can be said to have come from Deerfield.”116 He was correct that the furniture had little resemblance to examples at Deerfield. Rather than reproducing historic pieces, Sprague & Carleton used symbols of colonial style: splayed-leg tables, corner cupboards, turned legs, and scalloped boards. Retailers had many reasons to avoid reproductions; as we have seen, colonial production methods were unsuited for modern factories. Even Fieldcrest’s Deerfield bedspread was not made on a jacquard loom, but screen-printed for mass production. But by basing < 165 Highboys and High Culture the value of antiques on issues of originality, workmanship, and design, Flynt denied middle-class Americans the ability to embrace colonial styles. Most mass-marketed goods could not live up to the exacting standards he required. While their symbolic use of colonial design elements provided purchasers with a link to the past, it was not the aesthetically refined past he envisioned. Yet Flynt himself promoted commercialized reproductions of Deerfield antiques, as long as they lived up to his aesthetic standards. In the late 1950s he formed a partnership with the interior-decorating firm Scalamandre to sell expensive replicas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wallpaper and fabrics adapted from patterns shown at Deerfield.117 After Flynt’s death, Heritage Foundation officials extended their commercial ventures, marketing reproductions of Deerfield furniture. The twenty-five-piece collection differed from earlier commercial offerings in both price and meticulous attention to detail. The Mary Hoyt Williams chest, for example, was copied from a museum chest right down to the solid brass pulls. According to a press release, “the wood was planed, the drawers joined, dovetails made, and the finish applied by hand, as in the original piece.”118 The fact that Flynt encouraged the construction of these commercial products shows that his concern was not commodification. What was at issue was Flynt’s own interpretation of aesthetic quality. A Town with a New Past When it came time to name the foundation that Flynt established to maintain his museum, he did not select “Historic Deerfield,” as it is called today, but rather chose the name “Heritage Foundation.” Former Deerfield Academy teacher Richard Hatch, a friend of Flynt’s, liked the name specifically for its patriotic implications. Hatch wrote: “My reaction so far to the name Heritage Foundation is that it is excellent. It strikes me that to call it either the Deerfield or New England Heritage Foundation would be wrong for, although it preserves a priceless heritage that is local in flavor, the great value of the enterprise, as I see it, is that . . . [it] symbolizes . . . a spirit and integrity that are the heritage of all Americans.”119 The name is indeed an apt sobriquet for the historic preservation and antique collecting project Henry and Helen Flynt brought to Deerfield, 166 = C hapter 4 not only because it placed the town’s history in the service of a national cause, but also because it symbolized the couple’s deep involvement in shaping the representation of the little community’s history. Indeed, the name Heritage Foundation was also intended as an allusion to Henry and Helen Flynt’s initials—H. F.120 Through their museum village and support for the academy, Henry and Helen Flynt made great changes in Deerfield.121 No longer dominated by privately owned homes and rural farms, Deerfield had become a museum and academy village catering to an elite, and nationally based, community. History had also changed. Inspired by wealthy American collectors such as Henry Francis du Pont, Flynt transformed Deerfield’s historic houses into carefully crafted aesthetic environments. While nineteenth -century collectors such as George Sheldon had favored mementos of family and community life, Flynt prized ornate textiles and elegant furniture as symbols of American cultural superiority. The changes Flynt implemented represented not only a new chapter in Deerfield’s historic commemoration, but also the influence of aesthetically driven standards of antique collecting on New England’s history. ...