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.

Mel Allen

Now editor at large, Mel Allen's first byline in Yankee appeared in 1977 and he joined the staff in 1979 as a senior editor. Eventually he became executive editor and led the staff as editor from 2006 to 2025. 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 storytelling 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 is author of Here in New England: Unforgettable Stories of People, Places, and Memories That Connect Us All (Earth Sky + Water LLC, 2025).

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