A Special Year For Historic Deerfield

On May 4, 1948, Historic Deerfield's founders, Mr and Mrs Henry N. Flynt, opened the Parson Jonathan Ashley House to the public. Over the past fifty years 12 additional houses have been restored and furnished to display one of this country's finest collections of American decorative arts. In late September, a 27,000-square-foot Collections Study Center will be added to Historic Deerfield's public offerings with changing exhibitions and a Visible Storage Gallery featuring 3,500 of the museum's choicest antiques.

Greenwich, Conn. residents Helen and Henry Flynt came to Deerfield in 1936 when their son enrolled at Deerfield Academy. The school's legendary Headmaster, Frank L. Boyden, sensed the Flynt's interest in New England history and old villages and began to involve them in his plans to expand and strengthen the school. By 1948, Mr Boyden had indeed been persuasive! Henry Flynt was President of Deerfield Academy's Board of Trustees and he and Mrs Flynt had become involved in revitalizing the village's historical society, The Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association. Their interest in Deerfield was intense and, like the Rockefellers at Colonial Williamsburg, they saw the restoration and preservation of an historic community as an important legacy for all Americans.

But restoring old houses, much less an entire village, was not on the Flynt's minds when they came to Deerfield, although in 1945 they responded to the academy's need for a place to house and feed visiting parents by modernizing and refurbishing the 1884 Deerfield Inn. This was followed by the purchase and restoration of the 1730 Allen House which became their Deerfield residence. When Deerfield Academy made plans in 1946 to move a mid-Nineteenth Century house from the Ashley lot to use as a dormitory, the stage was set for the beginnings of Historic Deerfield.

In 1733, Yale-educated Jonathan Ashley, the second pastor to serve the Deerfield church, bought a house at the north end of the village to begin his ministry and his family. In the 1750s he modernized and improved the house and graced its facade with a stylish Connecticut Valley doorway. More than 125 years later, several generations of Ashleys had lived in the Parson's house and, to make way for a modern dwelling, the old building was moved to the back of the property. Parson Ashley's house became a tobacco sorting shed and was hardly recognizable as the home of one of Deerfield's most prominent citizens when Mr and Mrs Flynt first encountered it in the early 1940s.

The Flynts relied on the manuscript records preserved in the village's Memorial Hall Museum for a history of the house and its occupants and on the talents of local craftsmen for their ambitious project. After several years of research and restoration, visitors were invited to the Parson's House on May 4, 1948, to see its return to glory.

Today, the house remains much as the Flynts furnished it with an impressive collection of American furniture, English and Chinese ceramics, and prints and manuscripts befitting Parson Ashley's Tory leanings. Included in the 1948 restoration were several objects owned by Ashley family members, many of which remain on view today.

Writing in The New York Times on September 25, 1949, after a visit to the restored Ashley House, Sanka Knox said, "Historic Old Deerfield, Massachusetts is undergoing the same transformation that turned Williamsburg, Virginia into a Colonial landmark, the difference being solely in scale (as) Old Deerfield is a small village. With the aim of creating a living community that will recall the majesty of New England's frontier day, residents...are in the quiet process of restoring their village...to its original state."