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Susan B. Anthony's Birthday Marked by Open House at New MuseumBy Tammy Daniels
iBerkshires Staff
02:34AM / Monday, February 16, 2009
Men their rights and nothing more;
women their rights and nothing less.
ADAMS, Mass. — Bella Richardson got used to strangers knocking on the door of her unassuming white clapboard house on East Road over the years.
"They'd ask to come in and look around," she said Sunday, standing in what was once the front parlor of the 200-year-old home. "But it was privately owned and there wasn't anything here to show them. So they'd ask if they could take pictures of outside. ... I'd get cards and letters thanking me for letting them take pictures."
Soon, those who make the pilgrimage along that back road in Adams will be able to go inside and stand in the same spot as Richardson — the room where Adams' most famous daughter had likely been born exactly 189 years before.
Women's rights advocate Susan B. Anthony spent her earliest years in the home her father, Daniel Anthony, built to house his family and store. She was born in the south parlor, likely the first-floor room that now looks out on East Road.
Anthony might recognize the layout of the center hall Colonial but not much more. The building passed from the Anthony family years ago. Several attempts have been made to turn it into a museum, including a stint in the 1930s and '40s, when it was operated by a Quaker society (the Anthonys were Quakers).
Failure is impossible.
The latest effort is being undertaken by Carol Crossed of New York, who purchased the property in 2006. She and a group of dedicated volunteers have been working to bring the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace and Museum to life.
A couple hundred people packed into the small rooms of the four-bedroom home over several hours on Sunday to see how far the nonprofit group has come.
Crossed said it was hoped to open the museum on Sunday, Anthony's birthday, but the final phase of the project to restore the first floor as it was in Anthony's childhood still has months to go.
Holes were poked in the ceiling and wallpaper of 1970s vintage (with fondue pots) peeked through partially stripped walls and untrimmed windows looked out in the yard.
Crossed said 25 paint samples had been taken from the walls as part of the research to bring the house close to its original condition. That will include what Daniel Anthony may have sold in his store, like the whole cloth he manufactured, lime for outhouses, possibly crops from his garden and, at one point at least, whiskey, which landed him in trouble with his Quaker brethren.
A lot of effort is going into determining what the house originally looked like and how it was lived in by the Anthonys.
"We're letting this house tell us. We can't tell the house," said Crossed, who is shooting for a July opening. "We can't come in and assume things. We have to go very slowly and let it speak to us."
It won't be an exact restoration, said Lorraine Robinson, a member of the museum's board, because the house will have modern elements of electricity and central heating. But elements from Anthony's childhood era will be conspicuous, such as the 19th-century, wavy handmade glass panes restored in the six-over-six windows.
Still, the museum hopes to reinstall a hearth and oven, at which Anthony would help her mother, Lucy, bake a dozen loaves a day to feed the workers in her father's textile mill, the first to manufacture whole cloth. Daniel Anthony made the woolen cloth in a mill along Tophet Brook across East Road from the house and sold it — likely in bolts — along with the other products in the first-floor rooms.
The older I get, the greater power
I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball —
the further I am rolled the more I gain.
The family lived upstairs along with boarders, including a teacher who taught young Susan to read and write at age 3 in trade for room and board.
The four upstairs rooms have been converted into an office and rooms for a live-in caretaker. The upstairs renovations were part of the first two phases of the project over the past year that stabilized the house, replaced rotten sills and the roof and tore off an added closed-in porch off the kitchen entrance.
About $145,000 has been spent to date; Crossed estimated another $110,000 to complete the first floor. Lastly will be site development for a visitor's center and parking area. While there have been a number generous contributors, most of the fundraising has been in small amounts from many.
.jpg) Former occupant Bella Richardson recalled how people would stop and take pictures - and ask to come inside. Above, a shot of a picture-taker from the attic window.
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Compared with other museums, the 1,900 square-foot Anthony birthplace is modest in scale and cost. It seems appropriate since the Quakers valued plainness.
"This is very sustainable, there's a simplicity about it," said Crossed. "So it's very exicting in that regard. We think it's very manageable ... Yet, the significance of this museum is so much greater than the simplicity."
Anthony left the Mother Town at age 6 when her family moved to western New York. She spent the rest of her life in Rochester and is buried there.
That didn't mean she forgot her hometown. Roy Thompson recalled his mother's story of her encounter with the well-known agitator as she knocked on doors along North Summer Street. It was likely around 1897, the last year Anthony was believed to visit Adams; Thompson's mother was no more than 4 herself.
"Her mother told her to stay away from her," Thompson said. "My grandmother said, 'Don't go near her, she's trouble.'"
The suffragette, abolitionist and temperance advocate ruffled more than a few feathers in her lifetime. But, while still connecting Anthony to her later life's work (Crossed has one of the largest collections of Anthony's newspaper The Revolution), the museum will concentrate on her childhood from 1820-1826, the Quaker values instilled in her and the entrepreneurial father who ensured his daughter's education in a time when domestic arts was considered more important for girls than reading and writing.
Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel,
and the same law of progress makes the woman of today
a different woman from her grandmother.
In fact, Daniel Anthony may have played an even more significant role in women's rights than educating a future revolutionary. His whole cloth mill released women from the loom and allowed them more time for recreational and social sewing experiments.
"That was the brith of the reform movement," said Crossed. "The men went to the bars to talk but the women found a social context for their sewing and their housekeeping experience and they started to talk and realized their experences were similar."
No doubt young Susan also enjoyed the forestland, meadows and brook at the old house, as generations of later children did.
Richardson and her family moved into the house in 1948, buying it from the last member of the Quaker society. She would raise her three sons there and spend more than three decades years in the house before selling it in the 1980s.
"The kids loved it," she said. "It was a great place to raise a family."
Florence Armstrong's grandparents Emma and Louis Briggs rented the home back in the 1920s. Armstrong had often heard from her father and aunt of their years there before moving to Florida Mountain.
"I just heard of all the wonderful memories, it was always 'it was the Susan B. house where we lived,'" she said. "They had such a good childhood."
Independence is happiness.
For Armstrong's granddaughter Samantha McVinney the house has a personal significance as part of her family history, the region's history and, most importantly, as Anthony's birthplace.
"If it wasn't for her, women probably wouldn't be free today," she said.
Quotes by Susan B. Anthony, 1820-1906
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I am outraged that the Adams Historical Society donated $10,000 of it's members donations to this politically biased endeavor! It is well known that the organization run by Carol Crossed has a clearly stated political agenda concerning Right To Life, and is attempting to purport that if Susan B. Anthony were alive today she would support this agenda. Anyone who understands Susan’s life and work knows well that this is not true This is little more than revisionist history!
January 15, 2007
Group mulling appropriate use for Anthony Birthplace
By: Ryan Hutton, North Adams Transcript
“Crossed bought the property at auction on Aug. 5 last year. She is a member of the board of directors for the New York chapter of Feminists For Life (FFL). According to its Web site, Feminists For Life is a pro-life, pro-woman, nonsectarian organization dedicated to finding solutions to the challenges faced by women. Crossed said she owns the building but FFL will manage it.”
"Susan B. Anthony was very concerned that women have all of their needs met when they were pregnant," Crossed said. "This option could help facilitate those needs."
“Crossed said FFL will be incorporating its own ideals into the use of the house, adding that many of its views are based off of Susan B. Anthony's own legacy. FFL particularly wants to stress Anthony's pro-life views which Crossed said have been left out of many studies on the woman's suffrage leader because they do not gel with the common feminist idea of a woman's right to chose.
"There's definitely going to be a pro-life aspect to this house," Crossed said. "It will be a minor part, a small part but it will not be excluded from what this house becomes."
The current board of the AHS has succeeded in politicizing an organization that has absolutely NO business getting involved in a political agenda, especially one that is currently so controversial! If the board was so interested in the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace, then they should have been more active and involved when the town had the opportunity to save it. It is now something quite different than just Susan’s birthplace. This group from Rochester may have pulled the wool over the AHS board’s eyes, but I doubt they will do the same to many of the long time AHS members and contributors.
Anyone who cherishes a woman’s right to determine her own reproductive choices should be outraged by the AHS Board’s and numerous other local banks and business involvement in this “project”.
| | from: non-revisionist | on: 02-16-2009 12:00AM
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As a feminist who deeply cares about women and the children in their wombs, I am proud of the early suffergists and their stands. They knew before modern scientific ultrasounds and biology (which explains in any high school or college text that human life begins at conception) that abortion was "child murder".
The early feminists cared about women and their children and would never have inflicted a choice so deeply degrading to women.
Modern feminists and those who truly care about all human life are looking for better solutions than death which includes legal abortion, unjust wars and the death penalty.
| | from: Kathy Peters | on: 02-16-2009 12:00AM
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Tammy,
Thank you so much for the wonderfully written article, pictures and recording of the proclamation from Governor Deval Patrick.
Susan B. Anthony may have lived in other places but she was born in only one, the Anthony homestead at 67 East Road, Adams, MA, built by her father Daniel. I am so happy that so many people realize what a treasure this house is to our community and American history.
| | from: Lorraine Robinson | on: 02-17-2009 12:00AM
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The Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum is a 501(c) charitable corporation whose mission is to preserve the birthplace and publicize the legacy of Adams most famous native son/daughter, and her birthplace is the most significant historic resource in Town. It would have been remiss of the Adams Historical Society NOT to support the work of the Museum.
As arguably the foremost social reformer in 19th century America, Susan B. Anthony was involved in a number of causes, including the expansion of suffrage rights, the abolition of slavery, greater educational and career opportunities for women, the temperance movement and, yes, even opposition to abortion.
The mission of the Museum is to highlight ALL of these aspects of Susan B. Anthony's career, rather than having her portrayed (as has commonly been done) a "one note Jane" by confining its attention exclusively to her involvement in the struggle for women's suffrage.
True, opposition to abortion was only a minor part of Susan's "career" as a social reformer, but it was a real part nevertheless, as can be plainly seen by anyone who takes the time to read what she wrote on the subject in her newspaper, The Revolution. | | from: What's the Problem? | on: 02-17-2009 12:00AM
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As the president of Feminists Choosing Life of New York (not a state chapter of Feminists for Life of America), I assure nay sayers that it is not our intention to revise history. On the contrary, the SBABM will exhibit early anti-abortion documents that have often been swept under the rug by pro-choice historians who find early suffrage perspectives on abortion counter to their own agendas. So, in actuality, the musuem will clafify history, not revise it. It is not pure fantasty that SBA and other early suffragettes considered abortion to be the ultimate exploitation of women. It is cold, hard documentable fact.
However, SBA's anti-abortion attitude is not the primary focus of the museum, only an important aspect. The museum will also exhibit early textiles in honor of Daniel Anthony's mill which not only employed women but freed their time to persue community activism for the first time. These components and others give an essential overview into understanding SBA and the early women's movement.
The generous AHS grant is in support of the long overdue development of this important Adams landmark, not a political statement in support of pro-life.
Kelly Vincent-Brunacini, Pres. FCLNY | | from: Kelly Brunacini | on: 02-17-2009 12:00AM
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Right, so you think that anyone in their right mind would believe that a woman who fought her entire life for woman's rights would have been against the right of women to make decisions about their own bodies. You believe that Susan B. Anthony would have supported the government being the one to control a woman's body! You're nuts!!
You folks are no better than those who would deny the Holocaust!
| | from: non-revisionist | on: 02-21-2009 12:00AM
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i really enjoy hearing
about my family that lived in the house. and thanks to susan b. we have the rights that we do today. | | from: sam | on: 02-27-2009 12:00AM
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Above, a portrait of the elderly Anthony is juxtaposed against a crib signifying her birth. Left, Anthony (Lucy Czaja) greets a visitor at the Anthony Birthplace open house on Sunday. Below, Florence Armstrong and granddaughter Samantha McVinney had family members who once lived in the house.
