Rest in Peace: Lament for the Holley-Williams House

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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.

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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.

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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.