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, 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.

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.