Institution

Ayer-Elliot Hall displays a broad range of artifacts from Haverhill's history, including, but not limited to: firearms, broadsides, tableware, fire safety equipment, dolls, toys, furniture, and other everyday items, primarily from the 18th and 19th centuries. Sitting atop the main display cases are numerous portraits of various prominent former Haverhillites. There are also several subjects that recieve a more signficant amount of focus in the exhibit space.<ul><li>Native American Life: In the Lands of Pentucket - features archaeological artifacts, educational dioramas, and contemporary portraits</li><li>Hannah Duston - features Duston's confession of faith (circa 1725), 17th and 18th century artifacts associated with Duston, and 19th and 20th century artifacts related to her legacy's remembrance</li><li>Queen Slipper City / History of Shoemaking - features examples of shoe components, finished shoes, and shoemaking equipment from both the cottage and factory industrial periods</li></ul>This exhibit space is open to the public during normal museum hours.

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Ayer-Elliot Hall was given to the Buttonwoods Museum in 1918 in memory Samuel Elliot, founder of one of Haverhill's first major shoe factories, and Sophia Ayer Elliot, a descendent of one of the first English settlers of Haverhill, by their daughters, Emma and Mary. The museum had been open for about 15 years at this time.

Today, Ayer-Elliot Hall serves as the permanent exhibit space for the museum. It showcases over 375 years of Haverhill history, from domestic objects, decorative arts, furnishings, and military artifacts, to shoes and other items from Haverhill's shoe industry, as well as archaeological artifacts from the Frederick A. Luce Collection which date back thousands of years.

Ayer-Elliot Hall

The Buttonwoods Museum showcases over 375 years of history and preserves a collection of property, artifacts, and landscape with historical significance to Greater Haverhill. Some of the collections on view include domestic objects, decorative arts, textiles, furnishings, military artifacts, shoes, archaeological artifacts of the Frederick A. Luce Collection, and the [Supreme Court Justice William H.] Moody Collection.The museum is anchored by three historic properties: the Duncan House, the John Ward House, and the Daniel Hunkins Shoe Shop.The Duncan House is the only one of these three properties still at its original location and was the first property to come into the care of the Haverhill Historical Society. The Duncans had been a prosperous merchant family when they built this fine example of a rural Federal-style mansion in 1814. This new structure replaced the Saltonstall Seat, home of the Saltonstall family since 1663, which had been abandoned during the American Revolution due to the Loyalist sympathies of Richard Saltonstall. Mary Duncan Harris donated the house in 1903 and the museum opened the following year in 1904.Named for Rev. John Ward, the first minister of Haverhill, the John Ward House was never actually occupied by him. However, it did stand on his property and was likely lived in by tenant farmers who worked his fields. The original structure was built around 1710, and a parlor was added about 1820, doubling the size of the home. Now furnished with reproduction tinware, cookware, redware, barrels, and textiles, the museum uses the John Ward House to teach early American life to school children, scouts, and other program visitors.Shoemaker and farmer Daniel A. Hunkins built the shoe shop in 1859. This style shop is called a “10-Footer,” and shoe shops similar to this one dotted the countryside of Haverhill, Bradford, and the rest of Essex County in the early 19th-century. Eventually, factories would replace this cottage industry, and Haverhill would gain the nickname "Queen Slipper City."​The Buttonwoods Museum is a designated Essex National Heritage Area Visitor Center offering information to residents and tourists about the city and the region beyond.

Established as the Haverhill Historical Society in 1897, the Buttonwoods Museum is today named for the buttonwood, or sycamore, trees planted on the property in the 1740s. The museum is situated on a hill overlooking the Merrimack River and is comprised of historic landscape, a riverside trail, and several historic structures: the 1710 John Ward House, the 1814 Duncan House, and the 1859 Daniel Hunkins Shoe Shop. The buildings are listed collectively on the National Register of Historic Places as the Haverhill Historical Society Historic District. In addition to the historic buildings and their contents, the museum holds a collection of Native American artifacts (the Frederick A. Luce Collection), the Moody Collection, and a large collection of shoes and shoemaking tools documenting Haverhill's long history of shoemaking that culminated in the city gaining the moniker of "Queen Slipper City" in the nineteenth century. 

Pennacook History For thousands of years, the native Pennacook people inhabited the land of Pentucket, which includes Haverhill. “Pentucket” means “land of the winding river” in Algonquin, a language family that was spoken across southern New England. The Pennacook tribe lived in the area between present day Ipswich, Massachusetts—a place they called Agawam—and the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Essentially, they occupied the greater Merrimack River valley. The Pennacook built their lives along the Merrimack River. They used the river as their main highway, taking small boats up and down to trade with other settlements. They hunted in the forests and planted gardens, especially growing the Three Sisters: corn, beans, and squash. The Three Sisters were grown all across North America by Native peoples. The corn stalks grow tall, the beans wind their way up and around the corn, and the squash grows wide along the ground with large leaves that kill off weeds. European Settlement In 1640, when the first English settlers came up the Merrimack from Newbury, they likely stopped at or near a place that is now marked as “First Landing Park.” The first road they built was Mill Street, and in the early years they had houses for themselves but not yet a church building. Instead, they met under the old oak tree that up until April 2017 stood on the corner of the Buttonwoods Museum property, named the Worshipping Oak. Townsfolk were called to religious services there by the thumping of a great drum through the town. When the first church was built in 1645, it was built most likely on what is now Water Street. The Ward and Saltonstall Families Haverhill's first minister was named John Ward. He owned most of the land near here, but gave part of his land to the town when they set aside the burial ground (Pentucket Burial Ground). He gave another section of his land to his daughter, Elizabeth, upon her marriage to Nathaniel Saltonstall, including the property where the Buttonwoods Museum now stands.  Nathaniel Saltonstall came specifically to Haverhill to marry Elizabeth. He was Harvard educated and one of the most prominent men in this frontier town during the late 1600s and early 1700s. He served on the Governor's Council, was the head of the town militia, and served on the Court of Oyer and Terminer (Salem Witch Trials). He was the only one of the justices to recuse himself because of the injustice he saw in the trials. Elizabeth Ward Saltonstall, as the wife of Nathaniel Saltonstall and the daughter of John Ward, was considered a gentlewoman. However, she was still responsible for the burden of daily chores in a frontier town like Haverhill in the late 1600s. Letters between her and her daughter, also called Elizabeth, show her struggle with sending her daughter to Boston to be educated - and later to Sandwich to be married to a minister - with her own need for help at home. The Saltonstall house was the garrison for the area, meaning that in times of attacks, all of the neighbors would take up residence in her house. In letters to her daughter, she describes having a house of sixty people, lice, and "ould' Jersey" the cow. All those people meant plenty of women to help with the washing and cooking, but by fall, families went home to take care of their own harvests and preparations for winter, and she was left taking care of five militiamen by herself. One winter, her husband wrote to her from Boston, saying that she should come down and socialize with the other "pretty gentlewomen" there. She wrote back to the effect that she was still cleaning up after the mess his men had left, and he dropped the subject.

Acknowledging and studying the historic landscape of Haverhill is essential in providing context and a sense of place to the thousands of years of history that have occurred there. From millenia of native Pennacook inhabitation of the area to European settlement and the establishment of the town known today as Haverhill, the landscape is what it has all been built, torn down, and rebuilt upon.

Historic Landscape

This house is named in honor of the Reverend John Ward and stood on his farm land, though he did not live in it. Recent research dates the house to about 1710, while Ward died in 1693. Prior to that research, the house had been believed to be several decades older. This house would rather have been a tenant farm house for the people who worked the Ward family's land. The cemetery land on the opposite side of Ward Street from the house (Linwood Cemetery) was once the farmland of this property. The house was originally located at other end of the cemetery and was moved here in 1906. The original 1710 section of the house is just one room; the other half of the house was added about a hundred years later, around 1810. Sleeping quarters would be up in the loft space (now second story), unless it was too cold and then they would have brought their mattresses down to be closer to the hearth. The hearth is the focal point of the room and would have been a part of most household chores. It is where meals were cooked, water was heated for bathing or laundry, and the main source of heat and light. Much like modern cooking on a stove, hearth cooking is about temperature control. However, instead of turning the knobs on a stove to turn the heat up or down, this requires more work. First, they would light their main fire in the center. Then smaller mounds of coals could be pulled aside to create multiple cooking areas whose heat levels could be adjusted by adding or removing coals from the main fire. Hearth cooking methods included pots hanging from a crane directly over flames, dutch ovens covered with coals, frying pans on trivets over coals, and "tin kitchens" (reflective ovens with a spit to roast meat) placed facing the heat of the hearth. A beehive oven is located behind a small wooden door to the right of the hearth. A cook could light a fire inside the oven and watch the bricks change color, from Black to bright red to grey. At that point, they would scrape out the burning wood. Then, as the oven slowly cooled, they could put in a succession of breads, pies, biscuits, and finally a pot of baked beans that needed to cook low and slow. In the second room on the first story, the ceiling is higher, there are sliding shutters on the windows, and the walls are plastered. At this point, when the addition was built in 1810, the family was doing better financially. The sliding shutters were for temperature control; by opening the southern windows in the winter but keeping the others closed, they could let in light and keep in the heat. Conversely, during the summer, they would open the northern windows for light but keep the brightly lit windows closed to keep the heat of the sun out. The room is set up for the museum’s use today for programs rather than for historical accuracy. In addition to the farm chores outside and the food preparation and washing that took place in the kitchen, textile production through wool carding, washing, and spinning at a wheel would have also taken place in the home. Some families also had large weaving looms set up to weave the fabric of their clothes, bedding, and other needs. The rough fabric produced in colonial homes is sometimes referred to as "homespun" and it has a reputation for being not as fine or as well-made as commercially-produced fabrics imported from England in the 1700s.

The John Ward House is a historic tenant farm house from the early eighteenth century, located in front of what was once a family farm. It is named for the Reverend John Ward, the first minister of the town of Haverhill, on whose property the house originally stood. The home is furnished with reproduction and teaching collection artifacts that can be handled by visitors. The 19th-century hearth is fully functional and used for hearth cooking demonstrations.

John Ward House

Shoe production by English settlers began in Haverhill shortly after their arrival; in fact, it was a popular trade all over Essex County. Originally, farmers would make shoes in their homes on days they could not be out working in their fields, like in the winter or when it was too rainy. Their wives and daughters would do the finer stitching and binding at the end of the process. It was a family chore. Eventually, some farmers decided they could make a better living as a cordwainer, or shoemaker. In the 1700s, many of the shoes that were produced in Essex County were a sturdy type of shoe called a brogan. These brogans were then exported and sold to plantations in the southern colonies and the Caribbean for enslaved people to wear. As shoemaking blossomed into a cottage industry, “ten-footer” shoe shops began to pop up all over Essex County. This one is nine by sixteen feet and was built by Daniel Hunkins in the 1850s towards the end of the time period in which ten-footers were the primary location of shoemaking in Haverhill. Most ten-footers were built and used during the late-1700s through 1860. By 1860, the sewing and stitching machines had been invented that would change shoemaking along with many other industries. Within the small space of a ten-footer would be three or four men working. At the top of the hierarchy was the master cordwainer. He was the most experienced, he owned the shop, and he was the boss. Beneath him would be one or two journeymen, men in their twenties or early thirties who have completed their education but did not yet have enough experience or money to open their own shops. They worked for wages from the master cordwainer. Finally, at the bottom of the hierarchy was the apprentice. He was a boy between seven and twenty-one who sometimes lived with the master and his family and sometimes lived at home. He was not paid wages for his work, but part of his contract was that the master had to teach the apprentice the trade, including how to read, write, and do basic math. It was the trade school of the day. Child labor issues of the late-1800s came partially from the fact that children were being worked hard in factories without receiving an education or much training for future jobs. Cottage industry apprentices were at least given career training and a basic education. By the 1850s and 1860s, many shoemakers began to consolidate downtown in larger wooden buildings to share resources. The industry would come to define Haverhill and it gained the moniker of Queen Slipper City by the 1890s due to the fine quality of the ladies’ slip-on shoes produced here. Haverhill was the third largest producer of shoes in the country, after only Lynn and Brockton, Massachusetts. However, Haverhill's shoemaking days waned after World War II as the factories could not keep up with fast fashion’s rapid style changes each season. The last shoe factory in Haverhill, Allen Shoe, closed in 1991. Throughout Haverhill, statues of shoes (based on Haverhill-made shoes preserved in the Buttonwoods Museum collection) have been erected to remember this history.

One of the most prominent eras of Haverhill's and Essex County's history was the shoemaking boom of the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Begun in the eighteenth century, Haverhill's shoemaking industry grew to the point of becoming one of the most productive shoe manufacturing towns in the country. The Daniel Hunkins Shoe Shop is representative of the cottage industry period that preceded industial manufacturing in Haverhill. It was built by farmer and shoemaker Daniel Hunkins.

Daniel Hunkins Shoe Shop

Prior to the Duncans, the Saltonstall family lived at this site for generations, from the 1660s to the American Revolution. Local legend states that Richard Saltonstall, the head of the family at that time, was loyal to the Crown while most of the Haverhill residents were in support of the Revolution. They threatened to burn down the Saltonstall house with the family inside until a quick-thinking Richard sent money down to the tavern. The mob ate and drank and forgot about their destructive plans while the Saltonstalls were able to slip away. Similar stories are recorded from Greater Boston during the years leading up to the war. Following the American Revolution, this property sat vacant until it was purchased by the Duncan family in 1814. It is unclear whether anything remained of the Saltonstall Seat, as the Saltonstall's had called it, by that time, or whether it had been demolished years earlier. Regardless, the Duncans set about building a new structure at the site. The house was built to be a wedding present for Samual White Duncan and his bride, Mary White, from his father, James Duncan, Jr. It is built in a rural Federal style, meaning that it is symmetrical. There is a central hallway on the first and second floors and the same number of rooms on the left as the right and the front and the back. There are also an equal number of windows on either side of the front door. The Duncan family had made their money as merchants. They owned ships that traveled the world bringing goods from far away, such as Cantonware from China and Staffordshire ware from England, examples of which are displayed inside the house in the dining room. The Duncans owned flat-bottomed cargo boats, called gundalows, that traveled up the Merrimack River bringing goods offloaded from larger ships in the deeper ports of Newburyport and Salem. They also owned stagecoaches that traveled from Haverhill up to Londonderry, New Hampshire and dry-good stores located along the way. Samuel and Mary moved into the house shortly after their marriage in 1814. They never had any children and Samuel died from consumption fourteen years later. Mary never remarried and stayed in this house until her own death forty years later. She was not lonely in her widowhood, hosting many parties, holidays, and wedding celebrations for her nieces and nephews.  After Mary's death, because she had no children, the house went to her husband's brother James H. Duncan. James owned the Eagle House Hotel, started the prestigious Pentucket Club, and had been a Massachusetts Representative in Congress for two terms. He died a year after Mary and the house went to his children, who added the addition at the back of the house in the 1870s. One of James' children, Mary Duncan Harris, bequeathed the house to the Haverhill Historical Society. The family had called the home the Buttonwoods Estate after the sycamore—also known as buttonwood—trees planted on the front of the property by Haverhill's first Irish immigrant, Hugh Tallant, in the 1730s, while the site was still under the Saltonstall family's care. The Society was formed in 1897 and moved into the house in 1903, opening the Buttonwoods Museum there.

The Duncan House is the only historic building at Buttonwoods Museum at its original location. It was built by the Duncan family in the early-19th century and was lived in by several generations of the family. It is now owned by the Haverhill Historical Society, acts as the home of the Buttonwoods Museum, and houses and displays a variety of artifacts, including portraits associated with Bradford Academy and an exhibit focusing on William H. Moody. This entry serves to elaborate on the history of the house itself, before it became a museum.

Duncan House

Two of the portraits depict Ann Hasseltine Judson and Harriet Atwood Newell, the first female American missionaries to travel abroad. They both attended Bradford Academy, married ministers, and within a month set sail for India. When they arrived, the British East India Company—which had control of Calcutta at the time—would not let them stay as missionaries were bad for business. It is here that their paths diverged. The Newells decided to go instead to the Isle of France, now Mauritius; however along the way, Harriet became very ill. She gave birth to a daughter onboard the ship who only lived five days and was buried at sea. When they arrived on the Isle of France it was too late. She passed away from consumption and is buried on the island. She had been keeping a diary since she was thirteen, mostly filled with passages of faith and Christian struggles. Her husband wrote an epilogue and sent the diary to a friend in publishing in the United States. The diary went through multiple editions and was a best seller in the nineteenth century, inspiring many other women to become missionaries. Meanwhile, the Judsons went on to Burma where they opened a church in Rangoon, adopted a pair of abandoned girls, had a couple children of their own, and translated the Bible into Burmese. The Judson Bible is still the copy used by Burmese Christians today. Ann's husband, Adoniram, befriended the king before the war between Britain and Burma which caused him to be suspected of espionage. He was imprisoned and Anne and the children lived in a shack outside the prison to be close to him. After a year, he was released, and as they were moving back to Rangoon, Anne suddenly fell ill and died. She had been abroad for about ten years at that point. Another portrait is of Benjamin Greenleaf, an administrator at Bradford Academy and author of a math textbook that was once the most used in the country. Abigail Carlton Hasseltine, a student at Bradford who went on to be a teacher in Byfield and Beverly before coming back as an administrator at the academy, is pictured in another portrait. In a time when the argument was to educate women so they could raise sons to be good citizens in the young republic, Abigail advocated for women’s education for the sake of women’s education.Under her leadership as President of Bradford, she transitioned the school from being a coeducational institition to a women's only school in 1836. She was much beloved by her students who raised the money to erect a monument for her in Elmwood Cemetery after her death.

After Bradford College's closure in 2000, much of the college's instiuttional archive and collection was transferred to the Haverhill Historical Society. Many of the portaits that the college maintained of significant personages from the school's history are now on display along the staircase and upper floor hallway of the Duncan House. Several of the portraits will be highlighted in this entry.

Bradford Academy Portrait Gallery

Moody was born in Newbury, Massachusetts and attended Phillips Academy in Andover where he played baseball. He then went to Harvard and became a lawyer, setting up his practice in Haverhill and working his way up to City Solicitor. Moody was the Essex County District Attorney when he was asked to assist in the prosecution of Lizzie Borden for murder of her father and stepmother. He went on to become the last Republican to represent Haverhill's district in the House of Representatives. Moody was later appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt as Secretary of the Navy, Attorney General, and finally to the Supreme Court where he was a trust-buster. The exhibit includes his Klipper desk from the House, which has a call button used to alert an aid. Most of the furniture in the room came from his house in Haverhill, which still stands and is in private ownership.

This exhibit is located in a front room on the top floor of the Duncan House. It is focused on the life and political and judicial career of William H. Moody. Uniquely, Moody served in all three branches of the federal government in the early 20th century. He also participated in the infamous trial of Lizzie Borden.

Buttonwoods Museum

Ayer-Elliot Hall

Introduction

Images

Backstory and Context

Additional Information