Rest in Peace: Lament for the Holley-Williams House


The Salisbury Association has decided to put the Holley-Williams House on the market, to be sold to the highest private bidder who will agree to certain fairly stringent preservation restrictions. The museums on the site (which include the Salisbury Cannon Museum) will be closed.

The house itself was never architecturally striking, though its interiors were once featured in Architectural Digest; the extended Holley family that inhabited it from 1808 to 1971 was of only moderate distinction — no presidents, chief judges, cabinet secretaries or superwealthy among its members. But the house of the Holley family had a definite distinction. It was an original, a family home that had lasted into the present remarkably untouched in over 100 years, as unvarnished and authentic a place as could be, and it was for this quality that we celebrated the Holley-Williams House as a museum, and for which we must mourn its imminent transfer from the public into the private sphere.


u u u


In the mid-1990s, as I traveled around New England to the smaller towns and villages, researching and writing a book on that subject, I visited dozens of small towns in which a local historic house, owned by the town or a historical society or a civic association, was open to the public, a source of civic pride and a centerpoint for the area’s history. I also visited dozens of other, similar towns where the historic homes were either all in private hands, only available to be gazed at from the outside, or where the homes were still public but were open only a few hours a month, usually at inconvenient times.

The towns in the first category had a glow to them, a sense that in them history was cherished, nurtured, and was continually informing the present. Towns and villages in the second category had less of that zeal. In such second-category towns, a town hall or public library would feature a display of a few costumes or documents or objects, under glass, but the homes from which these treasures had come were shuttered or otherwise off-limits to the public. As a result, these villages lacked a focal point for their interests in history, and that lack seemed to engender a diminished sense of participation in the past.

The main value of the Holley-Williams House as a museum was its there-ness, its authenticity. Objects that visitors saw there had belonged to the family or to their neighbors, or were in other ways indigenous to the Lakeville-Salisbury area. The place was a time machine, and because of its authenticity, a rare one.

If you go to Sturbridge Village, which purports to be a time machine, you’ll feel the difference right away, for not a single object there is indigenous; all of them, including the buildings, came from somewhere else. Sturbridge has none of the casual, everyday aura of a lived-in space that is the glory of the Holley-Williams House.


u u u


On an equal level with the house’s there-ness was that it came to The Salisbury Association with a set of documents, 7,000 strong, that traced the home, the family and the area through 200 turbulent and placid years — documentation in such profusion as to make the heart of any professional historian beat faster, and which augmented the house’s authenticity and its importance to history.

In the Holley-Williams House Museum you could touch the past and be touched by the past.

You sat on the edge of a bed used by grandmother, mother, and daughter over 50 years; you handled seven generations of schoolbooks pored over by the children of the family; you read a letter on the desk on which it was composed; you sensed the pace and tenor of life in the candle-lit and gaslight eras. We who helped care for and show the house liked to boast that visitors from afar came away from a house tour charmed. Our chagrin was that our neighbors from the Northwest Corner took the place for granted and didn’t bother to visit it, despite our changing exhibits, lectures, musicales, play readings and assorted other interesting events.


u u u


The closing and sale of the Holley-Williams House was perhaps inevitable. It was a money pit, no question about that — as chair of the committee that oversaw the museum for several years, I fretted over those dismaying figures. So I understand the reasons for stopping the outflow of money on the house.

But I must point out that in the dozens of New England villages and small towns that I visited, not a single small-house museum turned a profit or came near breaking even with its cost of operation — and yet many of those house museums remained alive, kept vibrant and available to the public by civic pride and a willingness to construe history as a townwide resource.

I also must observe that the closing of the museum is more than a bit ironic, because it comes just as the Upper Housatonic Valley National Heritage Area has received its designation and is about to receive its funding. Having worked on the board of UHVNHA since the beginning, I know that the main reason for our having started down the long road to establishing the heritage area was to procure operating funds for the area’s small-house museums. This coming fall, some of that funding will become available to historical societies and other nonprofits (as matching funds for projects), but it will evidently be too late to help keep the Holley-Williams House going as a museum.

Its exhibits will be preserved, perhaps under glass, in another facility. But a valuable part of our past — the there-ness — will have vanished from our community’s public view.

 


Salisbury resident Tom Shachtman has written more than two dozen books and many television documentaries.

Latest News

South Kent School’s unofficial March reunion

Elmarko Jackson was named a 2023 McDonald’s All American in his senior year at South Kent School. He helped lead the Cardinals to a New England Prep School Athletic Conference (NEPSAC) AAA title victory and was recruited to play at the University of Kansas. This March he will play point guard for the Jayhawks when they enter the tournament as a No. 4 seed against (13) Samford University.

Riley Klein

SOUTH KENT — March Madness will feature seven former South Kent Cardinals who now play on Division 1 NCAA teams.

The top-tier high school basketball program will be well represented with graduates from each of the past three years heading to “The Big Dance.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Hotchkiss grads dancing with Yale

Nick Townsend helped Yale win the Ivy League.

Screenshot from ESPN+ Broadcast

LAKEVILLE — Yale University advanced to the NCAA men’s basketball tournament after a buzzer-beater win over Brown University in the Ivy League championship game Sunday, March 17.

On Yale’s roster this year are two graduates of The Hotchkiss School: Nick Townsend, class of ‘22, and Jack Molloy, class of ‘21. Townsend wears No. 42 and Molloy wears No. 33.

Keep ReadingShow less
Handbells of St. Andrew’s to ring out Easter morning

Anne Everett and Bonnie Rosborough wait their turn to sound notes as bell ringers practicing to take part in the Easter morning service at St. Andrew’s Church.

Kathryn Boughton

KENT—There will be a joyful noise in St. Andrew’s Church Easter morning when a set of handbells donated to the church some 40 years ago are used for the first time by a choir currently rehearsing with music director Susan Guse.

Guse said that the church got the valuable three-octave set when Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center closed in the late 1980s and the bells were donated to the church. “The center used the bells for music therapy for younger patients. Our priest then was chaplain there and when the center closed, he brought the bells here,” she explained.

Keep ReadingShow less
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Picasso’s American debut was a financial flop
Penguin Random House

‘Picasso’s War” by Foreign Affairs senior editor Hugh Eakin, who has written about the art world for publications like The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and The New York Times, is not about Pablo Picasso’s time in Nazi-occupied Paris and being harassed by the Gestapo, nor about his 1937 oil painting “Guernica,” in response to the aerial bombing of civilians in the Basque town during the Spanish Civil War.

Instead, the Penguin Random House book’s subtitle makes a clearer statement of intent: “How Modern Art Came To America.” This war was not between military forces but a cultural war combating America’s distaste for the emerging modernism that had flourished in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century.

Keep ReadingShow less