The Allen Sisters | Timeless New England
The Allen sisters, Frances and Mary, found uncommon beauty in the people and landscape of Deerfield, Massachusetts. For three decades, from the end of the 19th century into the early 1920s, the photographs made by two sisters, Frances Stebbins Allen and Mary Electa Allen, bathed the people and landscape in and around their home in Deerfield, […]
Little Puritan, above, shows a local child, 5-year-old Elizabeth Everett, portraying Eunice Williams in the Old Deerfield Pageant of 1911.
Photo Credit : Memorial Hall Museum, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield, Mass.The Allen sisters, Frances and Mary, found uncommon beauty in the people and landscape of Deerfield, Massachusetts.
Photo Credit : Memorial Hall Museum, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield, Mass.
For three decades, from the end of the 19th century into the early 1920s, the photographs made by two sisters, Frances Stebbins Allen and Mary Electa Allen, bathed the people and landscape in and around their home in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in a painterly, elegiac glow. They found beauty and even romance in reimagining the past; they rendered even cruel moments of history with tenderness. Little Puritan, above, shows a local child, 5-year-old Elizabeth Everett, portraying Eunice Williams in the Old Deerfield Pageant of 1911. Eunice Williams was 7 when she was captured on February 29, 1704, during the raid on Deerfield. On the northward trek, her mother was killed in front of her, and Eunice was raised as a member of the Mohawk tribe. Here through the eyes of the Allen sisters, the soft light belies no hint of the raid to come, no screams in the dark, only quiet assurance for a beautiful child that all would be well.
Photo Credit : Memorial Hall Museum, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield, Mass.
Photo Credit : Memorial Hall Museum, Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association, Deerfield, Mass.
Once the Allen sisters became famous, their work was displayed in prestigious galleries. But, in time, obscurity and indifference followed. When the Allens died within months of each other in 1941, the world paid little note. Many of their glass-plate negatives sat in boxes on a porch, as if ready for a Sunday yard sale. As Suzanne Lasher Flynt, curator of Deerfield’s Memorial Hall Museum, wrote in The Allen Sisters, “Other Allen sister negatives were not so fortunate; frugal Deerfielders scraped the emulsion off some of the plates to use them for window or greenhouse glass.” But enough survived. Enough. And visitors today can lose themselves in these images, on display in the one museum where, more than anywhere else, the Allens would have wanted them to be. deerfield-ma.org/about/memorial-hall-museum-and-library
Visit Memorial Hall Museum’s exhibition Children of Deerfield: Photographs by Frances and Mary Allen, opening June 1 and running through October 31, 2016.
Mel Allen
Mel Allen is the fifth editor of Yankee Magazine since its beginning in 1935. His first byline in Yankee appeared in 1977 and he joined the staff in 1979 as a senior editor. Eventually he became executive editor and in the summer of 2006 became editor. During his career he has edited and written for every section of the magazine, including home, food, and travel, while his pursuit of long form story telling has always been vital to his mission as well. He has raced a sled dog team, crawled into the dens of black bears, fished with the legendary Ted Williams, profiled astronaut Alan Shephard, and stood beneath a battleship before it was launched. He also once helped author Stephen King round up his pigs for market, but that story is for another day. Mel taught fourth grade in Maine for three years and believes that his education as a writer began when he had to hold the attention of 29 children through months of Maine winters. He learned you had to grab their attention and hold it. After 12 years teaching magazine writing at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, he now teaches in the MFA creative nonfiction program at Bay Path University in Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Like all editors, his greatest joy is finding new talent and bringing their work to light.
More by Mel Allen