The David Ruggles Center

In the early 1990s historians Paul Gaffney and Fran Krumpholz began to accumulate primary source material on these contemporaries of the other Massachusetts social experiments--Brook Farm, Hopedale and Fruitlands. They were fortunate to have an excellent local history as a basis for their work, Charles A. Sheffeld’s History of Florence (1894). Earlier local historians Lottie and Walter Corbin had added much to the record and academic historians Dorothy Porter and Sidney Kaplan pointed to the unique role African Americans played in this early history.

Then in 1995, using the newly rediscovered records of the NAEI, social historian Christopher Clark published the definitive history of this utopian community. The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association traced the geographic and philosophical paths the leaders took to the founding of the NAEI on April 8, 1842, and then followed the four-and-a-half years of the community to its apparent demise in November of 1846. He showed that the Community was, in a sense, transformed into a “neighborhood community” that held close many of the utopian ideals of brotherhood and human rights while allowing capital and entrepreneurs their more traditional roles as the engines of development.

In 1998, seventy-five letters were found among family artifacts in Brooklyn, Connecticut home of the Stetson family, members of the NAEI. James Stetson was the chief sales agent in Boston for the silk the NAEI produced. Between 1843 and 1847 he and his wife Dolly wrote back and forth sharing their concerns for their family, the Community and the Associationist and abolitionist movements. Christopher Clark edited the letters along with Kerry Buckley of Historic Northampton. Gaffney as well as Marjorie Senechal contributed essays on these letters that revealed so much about the inner workings of the NAEI. The book appeared as Letters from an American Utopia: The Stetson Family and the Northampton Association 1843-1847 (Universtity of Massachusetts Press, 2004).

Gaffney's article "Coloring Utopia: The African American presence in the Northampton Association of Education and Industry" laid the framework upon which much that we've learned since has been built. Unique among the other "utopian" communities, African Americans, both free born and former slaves, were admitted as voting members of the NAEI. David Ruggles was the first to be admitted. Sojourner Truth joined as well, living here fourteen years in all. Frederick Douglass was an occasional visitor.

The story of the African American presence in Florence has attracted the attention of the Massachusetts Historical Commission which has sponsored two successful applications to the National Register of Historic Places for Florence houses with Underground Railroad associations. The Ross Homestead is included as a site on the National Park Services Underground Railroad Network to Freedom.

We look forward to the upcoming biography of David Ruggles by Colgate Professor, Graham Russell Hodges, the working title of which is A Whole-Souled Man: David Ruggles and the Rise of Radical Black Abolitionism.

The David Ruggles Center will preserve in a single place as much of this research and documentation as we can. We will encourage contributions like those of Barbara Pelissier, president of the Westhampton Historical Society who has added so much to our knowledge of Sojourner Truth, Basil Dorsey, Henry Anthony and Ruggles himself from poring over microfilm at Forbes Library.

While we do not intend to collect original documents and artifacts we do plan to house a collection of copies of materials from many different sources so that scholars of all ages can readily find the material they need to expand upon our knowledge of this history.