Abstract
This chapter elaborates and focuses on a specific site and family as a case study for understanding the manifestations of New England Improvement. I return to the E.H. and Anna Williams’ house in Deerfield, MA, described in the prologue to locate the Williamses in the time, place, and social reality of early nineteenth century New England. I situate the Williamses in relation to the political–economic structure of the Connecticut River Valley and trace the family’s connections with agriculture, economy, and power in colonial New England. I begin exploring the way in which Improvement was an organizing spatial principle at the house by examining the interior architecture and materiality of the Williams’ house. I show how the things in the Williams’ house, as visible in the Probate inventory, manifested a dialectic of visibility and invisibility, drawing social distances between work and leisure.
What seems to have been important to the eighteenth-century middle classes (but not at all to the labouring classes) was not privacy in the sense of absolute seclusion, but control over the presentation of the self.
—The Archaeology of Improvement, Sarah Tarlow (2007, p. 177)
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Lewis, Q.P. (2016). The Ebenezer Hinsdale and Anna Williams’ House: Materializing the Improver. In: An Archaeology of Improvement in Rural Massachusetts. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22105-2_6
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