Harvard

By Michael Volmar

Located thirty miles west of Boston, the town of Harvard was incorporated in 1732. With vintage photographs, some of which date from the 1860s, Harvard reflects on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life, as well as the numerous political and spiritual philosophies that shaped the town. Shown are the Harvard Shaker community, the Alcotts' transcendentalist commune called Fruitlands, and Clara Endicott Sears, founder of Fruitlands Museums. Nostalgic scenes from the collection of local photographer William Wright capture an era of parades and picnics and community spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
• Release date: Jun 25, 2003
• ISBN: 9781439611913

Michael Volmar

Since 1995, Michael Volmar has been the curator at Fruitlands Museums, which supplied many of the photographs for Harvard. He began his career as an archaeologist studying Native American history. A member of the Massachusetts Archaeological Society and the American Anthropological Association, he coproduced the documentary Under Quabbin for PBS. His current research focuses on nineteenth-century life in Massachusetts and the history of the Harvard Shaker community.

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Museums.

INTRODUCTION

Harvard, Massachusetts, is located about 30 miles west of Boston. The bedrock geology of Harvard was formed through the collisions of continental masses after the breakup of Pangea over 200 million years ago, known as the Acadian orogeny. The view to the west of Harvard looks over former parts of the African and Scottish continental areas left behind and altered after those collisions.

More recently, during the last glacial period, the Wisconsin ice sheet covered this area with perhaps one-mile-thick ice. As the glacial ice receded north, glacial Lake Nashua formed, covering much of the valley west of Harvard. At its maximum extent, glacial Lake Nashua stretched south from Boylston, Massachusetts, and north to Nashua, New Hampshire. At least nine episodes of draining occurred during the existence of glacial Lake Nashua.

Native Americans occupied and colonized the region around 11,000 years ago. During protohistoric and historic times, these people referred to themselves as Nipmuc, or people of the fresh water. They were Algonkian people culturally connected to other groups in southern New England.

In 1653, English settled Lancaster, originally to exploit the sources of bog iron the colonists needed as well as to trade with the Native Americans. As the settlement grew, in 1670 a second division of lands in Lancaster was was laid out in what is now called Still River. By 1732, residents of Still River and lands to the east and north incorporated into the town of Harvard.

In early Harvard, all local matters came before town meeting, which was a joint meeting of the town and the congregation. Corporate control extended to settling neighbors’ disputes, reprimanding the religiously or civically errant, and ensuring the tranquility of domestic life. It was a homogenous community of Congregational farmers.

As early as 1740, the enthusiastic impulses of the Great Awakening rippled through Harvard’s Congregational Church. Also beginning in the mid-1740s, the French and Indian wars ended a prolonged era of peace and pierced the insularity of parochial Harvard. There were few Tories in Harvard when the Minutemen alarm came on April 19, 1775. After the Revolution, all of her citizens had encountered the outside world through the news and ideas that soldiers brought home. In the 1780s, the experience of nation building had conditioned even rural dwellers like those in Harvard to embrace a world beyond their borders. This exposure manifested itself by the 1790s in a decreased sense of unity and harmony.

During the course of the late 18th and 19th centuries, the town of Harvard and the surrounding area had its fair share of social experiments: Shadrack Ireland and his New Light Baptists, Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands utopia, the Harvard Shaker community, Shakerton and Tahanto single-tax enclaves, Millerites and Adventists of Lancaster, as well as the Paulist Catholic community in Still River.

The Shakers were the most controversial of the new sects. After early, violent resistance to their unorthodox lifestyle (the Shakers eschewed marriage and private ownership, vowing to live and work communistically) and manner of worship (uninhibited expression of the Spirit in dance, song, and visions), the town grudgingly accepted the growing Shaker community.

In the half-century before the Civil War, Harvard experienced the transition from traditional to modern lifeways. Market aspirations, increased mobility, better education, scientific experiment, technological innovation, and expanded print media combined to transform a traditional agrarian way of life into